Here are some things that could be done to improve overall PVP quality of life for everyone, casual and ranker, Horde and Alliance:
Do something about afk’ers, bots, and leeches.
This is probably the biggest problem I see, and while it’s more an issue in AV, it has ramifications elsewhere. The flavors of these vary greatly, whether it’s people who just sit in the cave and soak bonus honor, to people who just follow or sit near enough to the team fight to leech HKs. These things are getting rampant, and it’s a problem both for the players in a BG, as well as for people trying to rank who are forced to outdo bots that run almost 24 hours a day.
Separate AV into 51-59 and 60.
This would enable the regular players who want to level and quest to do so with other players that want to level and quest. I would recommend a lower honor gain for bonus objectives, if only to ensure that 59 twink didn’t somehow become the meta to outpace level 60 rankers. I think we’d also see lots more 51-59s playing if they had their own bracket, and the 60s wouldn’t be upset at lowbies slowing them down.
Release AB early, and give us Battleground weekends.
Simply put, more variety in PVP will improve things, because right now it’s either AV where Alliance largely get farmed (not fun) and Horde have insane queue times (can’t play), while WSG is just a premade-fest. Having Battleground Weekends would also help in that all the ranking players would go to that BG, and people who want to play more casually could focus on the others.
None of these fixes would require anything that is counter to the spirit of Classic, nor risk causing other major problems in the way that many suggestions I’ve seen have.
The single best thing they could do, which would basically solve all of the problems with BG PvP, is to implement an ELO type ranking system instead of this volume based system we have now. It would make botting and AFK honor farming disappear overnight. If you bot or AFK in a BG, your team is more likely to lose (especially in WSG) so botters and AFKs would really only go down in rank, not up. If matchmaking is done properly, people would only join a BG with an average rank within a few ranks of their current rank, so casuals would play casuals and the sweaties would play other sweaties - which is how they would gain the most rank anyway.
The big hangup to implementing a ELO type system is world PvP, but that could be handled. The math exists to figure out probabilities of 4v2, and 6v1, etc.
It would even fix the vast majority of problems with open world PvP. Lvl 60 rogue ganks a lvl 52 at a FP? Extremely minimal rank gain with a (extremely minor) chance of a big loss of rank. Skill would actually be the factor determining how well someone ranks.
BG weekends are a trap.
It brings out PVE players who can’t PVP.
It forces rankers do swap to that bg to premade and ruins everyones fun.
AV queues would get worse without lowbies in the brackets.
AFKs, Bots, Leeches are something blizzard themselves have to fix by improving detection to mobile devices on people who remote desktop and run the bot on their phone to avoid detection. If they disable the ability to remote desktop, problem solved.
I can definitely get behind this. Also get rid of the rep gear from the PvP faction venders. Make PvP be purely about PvP, instead of something PvE players feel pressured into doing to get that BIS off-hand.
Ahh, the “make muh PvP about the puuuuurreeeeee Peee Vee Peee EXPURIOUNC” popped up early in this thread.
Please realize that if you remove the incentive to play an activity in a game where every activity benefits you, then you will remove 90% of the players.
Enjoy your six hour queues.
Every time a change has been made to WoW to bring PvP closer to this “idea” (just PvP for fun, NOTHING ELSE!") it CRATERS participation.
Last time they made a major push like this (Legion), it cut PvP participation by almost NINETY PERCENT.
Enjoy that.
You cant remove rewards.
Honestly, the Honor-as-a-currency system introduced in TBC (and carried through to WoD) was the best, but im 100% against implementing it on Classic.
If you dont like Classic, dont play CLassic. It is what it is. If you dont enjoy it, thats cool… it isn’t for everyone. Maybe it isnt for you.
Since I still have 0 HKs, 0 Honor, and am Rank 0 since the start of Classic, I’m gonna say that is not really my problem. I don’t want my BIS for PvE to be locked behind an exalted rep in a BG.
Not really, but hey, thought id throw you a little bone.
This isn’t Refail. You cant excell at any one part of the game without participating in the whole of the game.
If you dont like that, then Classic may not be for you.
Most PvPers dont like the fact that they have to raid for the best PvP gear, either, but they do.
So, suck it up, buttercup. This is Classic, which is as close to Vanilla as it gets, and you cant do PvP in the top 1% without doing PvE, and you cant do PvE posting top 1% parses without doing PvP. And you cant do either without farming (either for the gold to buy consumables or the mats to make them).
If thats not your bag, then maybe Classic isn’t for you.