In the past years I have played a lot of games through all genres and it’s just insane how fluent and unique WoW PvP just is. Even during it’s worst state ever I find myself playing the game regulary and basically only for the PvP.
The classes, customizations, unique skills, engine and gameplay in this game is something no other MMO offers and especially no other MMORPG will ever get close to.
Just how WoW mechanically plays as huge RPG world is a reasoning what improves PvP even more if the focus was made on purely MMO balancing.
I hate the fact they are not paying attention to a possible huge gold ship. I am in the humble opinion that WoW has the chance to be the among the best PvP game worldwide, if actual development time and attention with pure heart pvp developers is put into it.
I also believe if this game was made with PvP in mind it would have greater success than it ever had before especially in modern gaming. But this is just a small side note and not the actual point of the thread it’s just my useless opinion.
I have the feeling they know that there is no other similar PvP game and are trying to milk PvP players for the last of their money.
Even if PvP is right now just trash many players are still around just for the simple reason of addiction. And players who loved PvP back in the day know the true potential of godlike PvP in WoW.
But these are just some minds of a zoomer wow pvp lover.
I’d love to read some other real opinions on this subject of my theory and hopefully something different other than PvP is a mini game (which is not true anyway)
I think they pretty much gave up on PvP after they sent out the survey to figure out why people would play other pure PvP games (including Overwatch), but wouldn’t PvP in WoW.
It’s just fundamentally not a PvP game. There are too many other objectives that people want to get done before they start on PvP. Except for the PvP diehards, of course.
No. PvP has always been and will likely remain a side-game to the WoW experience.
You talk of, ‘but what if PvP were the focus.’ What does that mean? Gear for progression is now locked behind Arena/WPvP/BGs? Entire expansions just for PvP content? Forced PvP participation?
There WAS a game out there that did PvP harder than WoW ever dared: Shadowbane. It died, because raw PvP can’t carry MMOs like WoW.
No. But actual focus on PvP bascially publishing the same amount of content like for PvE.
So it would mean you have 2 big steps you can do in WoW after leveling to max, bascially play PvP with the aspect of the MMORPG element or just play PvE as before.
Blizzard has the technology to create complete different balance pattern for each of their playable current content. You can see it whenever they hotfix just spells for PvP Combat.
Shadowbane is not WoW though.
I am purely talking about WoW itself being a great chance of being a great PvP game in modern times. Just because how WoW plays and which skills are needed to compete compared to all other current games around.
PVP took a big hit when arenas came out and died for good when they tried to ‘balance’ them in Wrath. Ever since then it’s been a joke that’s slowly eroded what little fun or prestige there is in it with script kiddies, rampant hacking, botting, PVP gearing situation and so on. I don’t know why anyone even does it anymore or how they like it but it’s not what it used to be.
Nah this is just a biased comment that you hate PvP by nature. I don’t even go to try to go much further into this as I explained my stance already in my last sentence of my main post to that.
The problem with basing progression of any kind around PvP is that an enemy player is something that’s almost impossible to figure out and balance upgrade schedules around. In PvE, you generally have a predictable power curve that the devs have in mind to design content around to balance and eventually confront PvE players with. If you can clear Heroics and have demonstrated both solid gear acquisition as well as good teamwork, you’re probably ready for Raiding.
In PvP, it’s so unpredictable as to be insanity. You have no idea if the level 19 you’re going up against is a similarly-geared 19 with roughly your skill, or they’re some super-twink with BiSfL gear ready to annihilate all comers in their brackets, or they’re some PvP god that’s doing an alt run and just wants to crater some newbie.
PvP also is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy of progression failure. You need to know what you’re doing in PvP to PvP and have PvP gear to start PvPing… Which you’d only get by PvPing before you started PvPing. Which… Is insanity. Unlike a raid or dungeon, whose difficulty remains static, PvP only ramps up in difficulty as more and more of the playerbase understands what to do in various scenarios, the metas shift due to balance, and gear finds its way into the right hands.
That instability is why PvP is a nightmare to plan for as far as progression, and honestly it’s a wise call to not stake heavy systems in it.
EDIT: Shamefully corrected a rogue ‘their’ to ‘they’re’.
I agree it’s unique that one player can stay alive for 2 minutes against 5 other players…
But I wouldn’t say that’s anything to brag about. PVP game design in WoW is atrocious and they should go back to how it was in Classic/BC where your setup and counters to a certain class matter most. Not who has the better system on top of system on top of system items.
In Classic when I was ranking, I could kill a Grand Marshal as a Rank 9 if I set it up right. That would be like trying to kill a DH in 475 gear as a Mage in 450 gear now. Absolutely no shot.
The fluidity of WoW’s engine is what always gives it the potential to be the best PvP game out there.
Tons of other MMO’s have tried - and have had better systems catered around making PvP appealing - but I’ve played basically all of them, and their engines quite honestly suck. Clunky, laggy, poorly optimised, input delays, awkward animations, they all suffer from a mix of these to some degree.
SW:TOR, Guild Wars 2, Black Desert Online, FFXIV, ArcheAge, tons of smaller-name MMOs, all of their engines suck for PvP compared to WoW’s.
Which is why it’s such a shame they don’t have a full-time dedicated team to making this game as amazing for PvP as it could be… and used to be.
The enemy players are either good or not and that is the same concept every other game usually uses to balance PvP around. But mostly they either balance of the middlepack of the players when they have to balance heros/chars/whatever.
Class balance in WoW allows for outplaying by tactical thinking and awareness skill rather than for example aiming in FPS. This is why I also truly talk only about WoW because it being just such an unique game with an already offer to play PvP.
Yes but that is how PvP works in every other games sometimes you play against “smurfs” but most of the time it can’t be avoided.
Another Point is that PvP Gear should be not differ too much for everyone.
How you play your actual class how you pick talents and how you approach against enemy players is what should matter.
This has rarely to do with RPG the actual RPG point lies behind the rewards and customizations you get by being good in PvP or rewards you get by improving yourself and showing them off with your fictional character in the world.
For PvP right now you need to understand game sense as how your class works against other classes what your win conditions are how you lose against it etc.
There is always room to improve and this is just basically how PvP works compared to PvE you learn from the mistakes by hand of other players
I agree. WoW PvP is truly unique. However it’s never been the main selling point of the game, only a nice touch on top of all of the other things to do in WoW.
However, I still think Blizzard did a much better job in BC - WoD with their approach to PvP and we saw that through participation. I used to always remember all the RBG guilds during cata and MoP, the people who would always duel outside of main cities, the constant stream of people looking for arena partners, and the formation of PvP only guilds. It was really cool and we have sadly lost that over time.
I think there’s not much Blizzard needs to do to be honest, since the PvP crowd seems like a pretty low maintenance bunch as long as they can acquire good gear through PvP. I think until Blizzard fixes the gear progression in PvP and gives more incentives for things like RBGs then the participation will continue to be low.
There’s not much they did back in the day to make PvP great either. We just got an arena every once and a while, sometimes a new BG, and PvP gear.
That’s not really at all unique. Again, Shadowbane did PvP FAR better across all levels than WoW ever did from my experience, and I’m one of them Vanilla grognards from the long-long ago. 5 R2s (essentially, level 20s) could bring down an R7 if the R2s coordinated and knew what they were doing. In WoW’s engine, the 20s get cratered in one or two GCDs because of level-based scaling. There’s a reason most leveling characters in War Mode are reduced to crying for help in LocalDefense because even a modestly-geared 120 is a literal god against anything 119 and below.
Also, WoW is awful as a ‘twitch’ style game, and will never beat games like Overwatch or CS:GO as far as raw competitiveness because while the engine IS fast for an MMO, it’s still an MMO, with all of the pitfalls and nonense being an MMO carries (janky hitboxes for locationals, server lag, gear disparity).
OK, but you’re not addressing a critical point, which is in other games, ‘smurfs’ don’t ruin your progression (well, maybe for ladder-obsessed weirdos, but wouldn’t they be the Arena tryhards that scream over discord the moment they get CC’d). In WoW, you still have to level, gather gear, and build up. Smurfs can and do shatter that kind of gameplay because they’re a literal brick wall you can’t get past progression-wise.
The problem is you may not realize you’re making mistakes, and why would an opponent tell you anything? In PvE, you can generally get a sense of if you’re playing poorly in a particular role. If you’re DPS, it’s ‘hey this thing’s not dying as fast as I thought it would’. If Tank, it’s ‘whoa, I took a LOT of damage/died there. Why?’ If Healer, it’s ‘Yikes, the tank got low/died.’
In PvP, it’s ‘I got deleted. Huh.’ And that’s not counting the one-in-a-thousand outplays that just defy explanation.
In the end, maybe the solution is to just make ANOTHER server or spinoff of WoW: Master of the Arena, and just focus on delivering WoW-style PvP in that space. That way you get around non-BiS gear, leveling, the whole PvE shebang.
Couldn’t agree more here. The game’s fluidity, feel, and performance is a huge factor as to what used to make WoW PvP so much better than all other MMOs.
Even when I log into ESO now to just play Cyrodiil or BGs every one in a while, the movement, pace, flow, and character feel is just nowhere in the realm of WoW’s.
I do agree. There are several expansions where I was not interested in PVE at all (TBC, MOP, WOD) where all I did was pvp in random bg’s. That is at least one sub that kept going through those expansions thanks to PVP.
WoW has gotten PVP right quite a few times actually. But Legion and BFA were by far the worst expansions for it imo. And like you said it is more neglect than anything else.
I do wish WoW PVP was not a game where you could kill people in seconds, and have endless loss of character abilities ruin your day, but overall it still can be a lot of fun if done correctly.