I believe Stoopz is wrong. Don’t get me wrong. He puts out great content, and he is responsible for many of the PvP improvements we’ve seen, but he is viewing the solution through the eyes of somebody who has already broken down to the barriers, and gotten past the intimidation of becoming a highly ranked PvP player. The majority of people haven’t breached those barriers, and this system is going to make it even harder for them to do so.
Making people participate in ranked content is fine (in fact it’s really good). It encourages people to step into ranked content, and it could help reduce the intimidation factor. Unfortunately, trying to incorporate a PvE-style progression system into PvP is going to make the the experience very uncomfortable as people will consistently face off against much better geared players. This will occur at much lower ranks than 2200 now, and the gear discrepancy will by much higher than it has ever been in past.
On top of that, this problem will quickly trickle down into unranked content too. Now that people get better gear at lower rankings, and they are encouraged (through the honor upgrade system) to enter regular BGs, players in unranked content will find themselves faced off against others who are much more heavily geared than them. In fact, since they already have established partners, they will probably not solo queue into regular BGs. Unranked and lower ranked players are going to be eaten alive in regular BGs.
Blizzard is trying to implement a progression PvE gearing system for PvP. This works in PvE because we can choose content suitable to our gear. There is a natural difficulty progression that matches the gearing progression.
Quests->Dungeons->Heroics->M+=Raids
As people gear up, they progress to more difficult content. If you’re more casual, you might stop at Normal or Heroic Dungeons. If you’re more serious, you might push into high Mythics or Mythic raiding. The point is that people can find success at their chosen difficulty level.
With the new PvP system, that isn’t an option. When you hop into BGs or WPvP as an unranked player, you’re going to be outgeared - often by a lot. It will be similar to hopping into an Heroic raid without progressing through Normal raids first. It might be possible to win, but it’s not going to be a pleasant experience. Most people will spend more time watching their rez timer than participating in PvP. The rest of the time, they will be reading nasty messages by people who outgear them by 20+ item levels.
No. PvP is not fixed. It might be fixed for Stoopz and other similar players, but it’s broken for the majority of players. Until this last video, I agreed with most of his content too. I think he’s misguided here. Of course he thinks I’m misguided too.
Time will tell. I hope he’s right, and I’m wrong. I’m going to double down on my efforts to participate in ranked PvP in SL just because I’m stubborn and the system pisses me off. I don’t think that’s how most casual PvP players will react though. Most people will feel like a target dummy the moment they step into BGs, and they won’t know how to progress because the Arena barriers to entry are so high.
If people are faced with a game that doesn’t provide a reasonably obtainable path to success, they’re probably going to quit. Telling them to “rank or die” is not the solution no matter how many times you repeat it.