Classic PVP has died with these changes. If this system isn’t reverted, the next fresh is dead on arrival for any PVP oriented players.
Here’s why:
No competition. There is no “bracket 1”. There is just 1 set amount of honor you need, that anyone casual can hit.
It disincentivizes grouping and premades. Solo AV afk gameplay is close enough to premade stomping. Nobody will look for groups and instead will AFK watching movies in AV.
It’s a bad system. Nobody wants “Free rank 14”. It feels good to earn it and work for it. In these Classic Era games, there are at most 10 players per team actually playing the game. The other 30? AFK bots inputted by a third party OR blizzard. There just actual AFK bots chilling, soaking up honor.
Fresh needs to only release WSG/AB. Av shouldn’t be added until at the earliest Phase 4 (zg patch).
That’s all, please revert the changes and share this with your friends. Make Vanilla Great Again – not worse.
If blizzard can keep the current ranking system but make WSG/AB more popular, then I will be onboard.
But my main problem with the old pvp system is you can’t take a single break until you get to the top. Not a single break. You will lose real life relationships from it.
The big issue with the new system is that it does very little to reward good play.
The old system rewarded players by:
Time available
Skill
Ability to make friends and groups
The new system with AV meta, rewards players equally whether they are playing top tier or just afk getting carried. Sure there are little ways to avoid bad players, disc AV premades, etc. but overall whether you are playing really well or complete trash - the system is giving you more or less the same reward.
Perhaps ppl will get gear and start queueing WSG more, and we can get real games going over the next month and the AV and ranking hype wear off.
But it is also possible that ranking just become a grind of just carrying trashcans and at that point the good players will find somewhere else to play, because it isn’t fun to see people make the same bad decisions game after game after game.
Edit: perhaps the best solution is to remove the 5-man queue cap in AV. Let us queue with people that actually play the game and think.
Having available time does not equal skill.
And for most HWL’s, Available time is the only factor that matters.
I agree fully that AV is trash and the system with how honor is awarded in this BG needs to change.
WSG and AB should also be incentivized somehow. Perhaps a buff to the amount of honor from turning in the marks from those BG’s since they generally take longer to win, and reward less bonus honor than AV.
TBH the only thing that i dont agree with coming from a lot of these posts it the problem with AV rats. They existed long before the PVP changes and they will exist long after. I grinded out AV exalted on two characters in the months before the PVP update and every game was full of rats mostly AFK for the free AV exalted gear.
And as someone already mentioned
the cap is more than fine. especially since R14 takes 3 straight weeks of honor capping at around 40-50hrs per week. For most people thats still unobtainable.
Idk where you are playing, but very few premade will invite bad players into their groups.
You break cc, don’t understand game, don’t consume, etc. you won’t be running with decent premades so you will have much less HPH than the players in those groups. Which means that you will have to play FAR more hours than them to be able to get honor for top brackets.
Maybe if you are a bot or paying ppl to play your acc 24/7 sure you could rank to 14 in the old system. But your average bad player would not do that, and would not be invited to premades, so they can never rank past like 12 if the environment was competitive.
Skill mattered because 1) it defined who would play with you and 2) if you are better you will have a higher win % and thus higher HPH naturally.
I’m not swayed by this to be honest. The only thing about Classic PVP that isn’t pretty casual is the time commitment needed to rank past about R11.
People already did this and have been for 19 years. Going clear back to Vanilla it was common knowledge that many R14s were AFK a lot of the time, being played by another person or a botting software. The title lost respect as the game moved on because this was so common, fair or unfair it has always had that stigma.
I agree with you on this. If you want to earn it though, maybe the entire thing needs to be replaced with a rated system which would take care of points 1 & 2. R12 and beyond should probably require winning more games than you lose against other good teams if you want it to be meaningful.
When AV comes it should be the original version of it. People may not have been around or just don’t remember, but AV in the original form was much better for PVP because the objectives couldn’t be zerged and players had to fight over getting the things down/captured. If they put in some kind of anti-AFK feature that might help too.
hard disagree on every level, huge step in the right direction, I wish they would bring out eots but until they do AV is my fav. It’s still not as good as the retail system but a step in the right direction for sure
Hopefully there’ll be some balance in the future but if not, something has got to change.
This AV-only meta is obviously an indication of a massive failure in the system (given how PVP-averse the “PVP” community is).
Raise the cap, boost AV NPCs, nerf AV honor, boost honor of other bgs, or the mark turn-ins, idk but this system is absolutely terrible for anyone that actually enjoys PVP.
As I said, I no longer have the time to do it (until now). The new pvp changes mean I can do one week on, one week camping or whatever with family, then another week pvping, etc.
Although I had a different solution years ago for this that didn’t involve a complete pvp overhaul. My idea was that rank decay should only happen if you got 15HK’s, because you participated in pvp that week. That would’ve allowed us to keep the old pvp system, but still allow for taking breaks to balance a video game with real life.
There was 0 WSGs and 0 ABs for the last 2 days when I’m online, and like 16 AVs. It’s making me not even want to play in all honesty. It’s going to make me raid log on ERA. Which is sad. I raid log on wotlk to come play era, but I’m losing the drive to play it when it’s just AV 24/7. So unbelievably boring.
