I posted a Survey a while back on the reddit pvp forum and got some interesting results so I thought I would share here. I cannot post links so I will just list the stats in text form (lines separate different questions):
53.7% of players are “mostly content with pvp” compared to 46% who are not.
95.9% of players do not think the devs communicate enough regarding PvP compared to 4% who do.
42% of players think that addressing queue times is the most important issue the devs should focus on.
26% of players think that revamping rewards (i.e. mogs and mounts) is the most important followed by 22% of players who think that pushing titles and rank fairly across seasons is the most important.
Regarding proposed solutions: 27.6% of players think that adding healer incentives for shuffle would be the most impactful change
16.2% of players think that a recolored glad mount for shuffle and blitz would be the most impactful
In the optional open ended responses (~300 of them), I ran a word cloud analysis, and sentiment and word category analysis, and ran it through chatgpt-4o’s LLM to conduct a summary of responses that normalized each response by word length and word choice. This basically calculates the most common words and phrases used to generate an accurate summary of customer sentiment. Here is the output:
A majority of players feel discouraged by developer neglect and lack of rewards and motivation to play. The three top proposed solutions to WoW PvP were: adding more rewards, inflating MMR, and adding healer incentives. A smaller but significant group of players called for reducing button bloat.
27.6% of players are squarely wrong, and I’m not surprised at all this percentage is so high given how often I see people saying “hurr give healers more gold in their boxes xddd”
just make the game fun to play bruh
artificial rewards and “merged 3s” is not the way, making the game actually fun is
I do think rewards would be good, but not in the way most people propose here. I for one think the current ranking system is whack as Hel (the norse one, dont ban me), and that moving to a bronze/silver/plat/gold/diamond/etc would be better (no numbers).
I’ll dare go one step further:
5v5 and Blitz is what the game should move towards, and is the only way to have merged queues while also reducing DPS queues across the board
The old ranking system based on the leaderboard position will solve all the problems. The titles for a fixed rating do not have flexibility depending on the number of players.
Tbf, not directly what you said, but SoloQ would’ve been a lot better. Quick games, low toxicity, no artificial dampeners… etc. Would’ve made the gamemode fun.
this. the game isn’t fun. none of this junk matters if the game is fun and rewarding to play.
i dont care about rewards at all as long as when I lose rating I can readily see what in my gameplay is an issue. not getting gibbed by uncounterable insta dmg or chaotic solo lobby on repeat or never ending raid boss wizard damp game waddling around the map or sitting 10 micro cc’s.
Like literally just make the gameplay fun and none of this other junk matters. when I go play cs or league and get cooked I see that there’s things to fix and my progress is measurable in both rating and gameplay. in wow you can be at 2300 mmr and get gibbed by an ele back pedaling because the whole round is fundamentally pve.
healer incentive, rewards, inflation, button bloat, none of this actually matters whatsoever. insane.
These go hand in hand. Not sure how people want them to fix queues without adding healer bots or redesigning healers. Rewards on the other hand can drive people to do content. Which in turn helps with queue times.
You say this like it’s a checkbox in a configuration screen they forgot to click.
Healers are fun to play when you keep people from dying. If healers were perfectly balanced and had big strong fun heals, games would never end.
They literally add dampening, burst and cc so games will end. Too much dampening, your heals are weak and feel terrible. Too much burst you can’t save someone and feels terrible. Too much cc and obviously feels very terrible.
There is no way to balance this in a way that makes it fun for your average player. There is only ways to balance it so it doesn’t feel quite as irritating for someone who already loves healing anyway.
Sounds like we’re right when we say giving everyone a gladiator mount in unchained did significant damage to the game.
Every complaint now is gimme more free CR.
Also being able to soloq into the regular ladder sounds awful. I’m guessing people that ask for that haven’t seen the wall of assa/aff between 2100-2300?
Ye, It sort of formed this perception, as well as crimson shuffle, that every season that isn’t as easy is broken and not worth playing. Had a similar thing in keys where they had a freebie season then a non freebie season and naturally everybody hit a wall sooner and quit.
Making it work against all odds for yet another season.
this is part of why I think 5v5 is lowkey a good idea for PVP
old 5v5 was a meme fustercluck, but current number tuning, queue times and lack of new players could make this work together if the game was more geared towards 5v5 instead of 3v3
if there were 3 DPS instead of 2, I don’t think dampening would be necessary at all. We’d actually have room to slow down the game to make it even more appealing for newer players. Sweats will sweat anyways
How can they even really address this? I agree queue times can be rough, but no matter what they do there will still be 2 healers for every 4 dps, and with healer being a less represented role in general (throughout the games history and really in most games) the queue times won’t really change too much no matter what they do.
Another part of that is what spec you queue on. Queue on a spec that is popular/meta and your queue times will be long since the game tries not to pair you with the same spec. If you play an off meta or unpopular spec your queue times will be faster.
I guess better healer balancing overall, if all healers were on the level of hpal right now we’d probably see faster queues, the fact only 2-3 healers are very good while the rest are meh is not great. Same for dps I mean its rogue/fury/aff/bm hunter right now so if we actually got frequent tuning that could have already been adjusted though obviously getting healers to queue is the way to lower queues. Also fixing the 3-3 shuffle healer mmr problem would be nice.
Its crazy that they just stop balancing 2 months out from the next patch lol. They should be doing tuning every week as needed until the next patch is out, even if its only PvP that needs adjustments. This is why we need an actual PvP dev team of like 5 people or something.
Had a similar thing in keys where they had a freebie season then a non freebie season and naturally everybody hit a wall sooner and quit.