"The Casual Pvpers"

PVP Battlegrounds
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I was genuinely hoping to PvP again in Shadowlands, especially with shadow priests being fixed up so well. It’s a shame that the casual PvPers who previously were the life of the random BG’s no longer seem to matter.

I’ll admit, I’ve thrown down with some rank-geared players and it was a blast, but it was more than just a ‘challenge’, as I rarely won since I had absolutely no shot at beating them when they were around my level.

I feel as though as the years go on, casual players in both PvE and PvP alike are considered unimportant and not worth the attention paid to and are simply being drown out. I’m an adult and I play this game casually, and have over the past 15+ years off and on as many players have of course, I know there are many others like me who prefer the more relaxed gameplay (casual), where maybe you queue up for battlegrounds and have your fun, or you join for World PvP, you join random pugs and do LFR and you tend to raid Normals and maybe even some Heroic but don’t ever go as far as Mythic raids, you stick to the smaller things that seem low end to everyone else, and hell you may do mythics but opt for more casual PvP, and vise versa with PvE. At the end of the day, this is the gameplay we enjoy, casual gameplay. What did we do to deserve being rooted out of something we’ve loved to do for so long, random battlegrounds. I mean sure, nothing is stopping us from joining random battlegrounds, right? We can just, queue up and PvP right? Nothing is stopping us from getting into random ranked battlegrounds or arena matches, right? Wrong actually… Casuals like to play against other casuals, you replace the other casuals with hardcore PvPers and those with a severe gear advantage, and it results in the casuals leaving altogether, there’s no longer a point in doing it, and the casuals don’t care for doing hardcore ranked content, it would be like asking those who do/enjoy ranked matches to do achievement, collection grinding or some other task that they couldn’t stand to do, which in turn would result in them not doing it at all, sound familiar? It should. Rated BG’s were BARREN.

I just wanted to share my perspective and it may not be the best, but for those that took the time to read it, I sincerely appreciate it, I know I’m not alone on this, and I just wish there was a solution for this that didn’t involve crippling a part of the game for casual players alike.

43 Likes
2

I agree. Casual PvP and PvE should be supported fully by Blizzard and given the same level of acknowledgment and a decent path to success as more hardcore content.

Blizzard keeps wracking their brains over how to keep players subbed with all these addictive systems so that there is content to sustain the game even when players are burnt out from pushing rating or doing raid progression. Honestly, the answer is right there in front of them and has been since the beginning.

I play rated pvp myself, and when I’m bored from queuing and just want to chill, I do random BGs, duel and look for world PvP. The less engaging these “casual” aspects of PvP are, the more bored I am when I’m not queuing arenas.

When I was still new to the game, LFR, casual WPvP and BGs were what got me hyped up to start improving and reach new levels of gameplay. Without casual progression, I would have had to either go straight into rated pvp and progression raiding with no in between. How would I learn? How would I get comfortable with the game?

It saddens me that casual pvp has been overlooked to this extent. There is something special about being part of a small pocket community on a certain shard and seeing the same faces every day as you engage in world pvp combat, or using random BGs to gradually grind point by point of conquest to get a partial conquest set in MoP, or doing dailies and LFD to grind Valor points to get some Heroic level gear pieces.

The removal of the conquest/valour point system, sharding, the power of Mythic+ items etc gradually eroded away these aspects of the game

I knew I wasn’t as good as truly hardcore players back then, but at least I could, little by little, obtain the gear and confidence to give it a try. There isn’t anything like that now. It’s either go do the high end content or relegate yourself to being a second class player.

31 Likes
3

That was absolutely spot on, I genuinely missed valor points and conquest points, even when it was a slower grind for casuals it was absolutely worth it, it felt like even if I had to work for it very slowly, I could do it at all without it running me off of the game, I felt far more inclined to get my other characters geared with the valor point system as well as pvp with them, both felt incredibly rewarding.

I feel like, if this is the path for WoW then I will never get a chance to enjoy casual pvp again, and neither will many other casual players and even hardcore ones like you who do appreciate the casual gameplay that is in there.

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4

It appears devs are still convinced that they can change the playerbase from the one they have into a hardcore playerbase they think they deserve. These social engineering experiments have failed repeatedly. Shadowlands is the expansion they will prove that if they just try harder casuals will step up their game and become hardcore elites with none leaving.

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5

I find its just too much commitment, people who are single, dont have kids, or who have a simple 6h per day job or just school, they dont get it.
You cant do rated pvp when you have a 2 year old running around the house destroying things every 5min, you have to be able to just afk out of a bg or logout from questing.
A career where a job just comes in at short notice at 5pm, and runs until 10pm at night…youll never be able to hold to a raid schedule (LFR doesnt require a schedule).
The most annoying thing about this patch is the influx of undergeared noobs at the end of the xpack, then for example frostmourne premades usually just slaughter the team and make the games pointless. How long will these blow-ins last? Half way through the xpack, the thrill seeking crowd will likely have unsubbed again, and then it will go back to casuals vs premades like it was half way through BFA.
So long as its possible to get an ok ilevel (eg at end of BFA im 118, and i make it work), then im satisfied.

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6

I see the core of the problem being the deeply ingrained, and deeply flawed, ideology that some things are forever out of reach from casual players unless they commit themselves to the more hardcore content, and that this is a good thing. It’s just not.

I firmly believe that everyone who pays for the game should have access to the top level items, eventually.

The advantage from playing the hardcore game modes should not come in the form of an absolute higher player power cap, but as speed to reaching that cap.

Give casual players a way to grind out points to buy the best stuff, or even tokens to roll for the best stuff, and the casuals will happily grind their hearts out to get that stuff eventually.

And yeah yeah, it’s an MMO it’s supposed to be a social game and social organization of activities is supposed to be part of that. Blah blah.

The fatal flaw in that argument is that this game is full of jerks, and having to navigate around the varied jerkiness of countless jerks is not fun or compelling entertainment. It’s tiresome at best, abusive at worst. and as much as some folks have some rose tinted nostalgia for some mythical good old days of ‘awesome community’, those days, which existed for only a few anyway, are not coming back, and it’s time to let go of the outdated paradigm.

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I kept getting silenced recently, and people probably thought I was one of those jerks that you refer to, but honestly i was just becoming poisoned by their jerkiness, and then I was getting punished for it (by what seemed to just be an automated algorithm mind you) and so i just left every chat channel except guild and whisper, and im the only person in my guild now that my dad died, and my RL friend left to join a raiding guild.

So long story short, I understand perfectly what you mean about “jerkiness of countless jerks”.

5 Likes
8

Agree with everything you said in your post but this right here is a big. A good portion of my friends fall into this category and they just quit playing in BfA and likely will in SL too. I love arena, been doing it for years but I totally get how the casuals feel in this regard.

Also much love for the random BGs, I enjoy unwinding in them after a queue session, and when the competition is good and not just a steamroll I have even more fun.

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9

^ This.
Steamroll wins arent all that much better for me these days than steam roll losses…i find myself cursing and whinging about them both.

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Even as a pretty committed arena player, I love it more than anything when a random BG is close. I don’t get people who just wanna stomp people, it’s not fun at all.

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Yolo RBG’s are exactly the same … ppl afk after 1 cap :joy:

Don’t worry, you will be fine .

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That’s because if you really go to the roots of the the motivation here, a solid good competitive arena player should not want to be able to toast and farm everyone that isn’t doing rated content.

They think outside of the box that not everyone enjoys X, and despite that they will still be behind on the cutting edge stuff, they will still be able to at least be competitive. (And that would be OK.)

Let’s be honest a decked out 475 toon in BFA would pretty much destroy “most” 460s in the world or BGs with notable spec based exceptions.

If the gear variance would be that much more; it would be pointless so will have to see how it goes. Adapt or get destroyed. Haha.

Silly, but a potential reality.

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This. I don’t need a gear advantage to beat the average BG player or casual, but that being said they should absolutely NOT lose because of something as ignorant as gear. People justify it with “WELL IT WAS THIS WAY IN TBC AND WRATH1111” Ya but the thing with this argument is there was nothing else to play back in 2006-2009ish and MMOs were much more popular back then.

It’s just a dumb archaic system that needs to go imo. Forcing people to do content they don’t wanna do in order to do the things they want to do is how people quit. All of my casual friends know I’m an avid arena player and I do sympathize with them a lot. They don’t like being punching bags and I totally get it. I didn’t have fun being a punching bag way back when I wasn’t overly good at the game in TBC either.

Here’s hoping for you guys, I’m pulling for you but expecting the worst.

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No worries. I might actually do some arenas this time we shall see.

The irony of it all is I don’t want “easy free gear” and I don’t think I would deserve the best gear unless I do that harder rated, expected content like a lot of posters seem to include in that argument.

I am used to doing well being at some gear disadvantages. But don’t make it pointless for some as I can probably stomach doing some rated but there are a lot of folks that simply don’t want to deal with that environment…

Oh well nice discussion and thanks for being open minded…

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15

Ideally there would be no gear gaps in PvP, as I fully believe no matter what form of PvP content you do, you should have access to BiS gear. PvP =/= PvE so people need to stop with the mindset that gear gaps need to be a thing in something that’s supposed to be competitive.

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16

I was honestly okay with the gear being a thing back when I pvped hard in Cataclysm, but only because it felt like something to work for, to earn… like an incentive to push through being pummeled and steamrolled a lot. When I fought other players the times I had the most fun weren’t when I was steamrolling others nor when I was getting splatted, it was the moments where I threw down with someone else and we’d fight for a while, even had a moment where in Tol barad we had to go our seperate ways because we were equal, neither of us would die!

I watched a youtubers video about how this was all going to work in Shadowlands, and when he got to the point where he talked about how the ranked players and only them will have a major incentive to join random battlegrounds, their face lit up, their followers were celebrating and my stomach dropped. This really will be the death of casual pvp for random battle grounds, as they will be flooded with overgeared players looking for an easy faceroll.

I feel like the only thing that could save the casual random battlegrounds from becoming ‘elite’ exclusive, would be to put everyone at an equal level as if they were all the same item level, same versatility, and even then I have no idea what that could potentially do, but as it stands, it looks like what is going to happen, would be the same thing that would happen if you were to put a bunch of wolves in the same room with some deer. What part about this was ever a good idea, why was it even decided to be a thing.

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If casuals from both factions queue up they’ll meet each other, you cabbage. And if a pug or a bunch of friends that plays well together adds each other on Bnet and queues for a yolo RBG one day instead of queueing for an unranked, eventually they’ll meet another group of yolo RBGers and eventually they’ll win.

Casuals can’t ALWAYS lose man. It’s a good thing for the game if people are incentivised to visit content that they outgear and outskill to pick up some item or currency - you only have to look at Classic and Molten Core to see warriors run Molten Core even when Naxx is up, for example.

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When you literally are thrown into a bg full of a few casuals and a ton of gladiators on far higher tiered gear scaling, there is no competition. The only person I could see defending this is someone who enjoys steamrolling other players rather than a more fair fight, and that’s not even saying the casuals shouldn’t have to earn their gear, they should and that could be at a slower rate like it used to be at some point, that was perfectly fine. You missed the point while calling me a cabbage, the reality is, prior to all of this, pvp was mostly casual geared players and a few arena geared players, now it’s going to be majority arena geared players and a tiny amount of casuals with a massive gear gap at that, it’s like putting a few t1 players into a battleground, and t3, how is that pvp, it’s a steamroll-fest regardless of whether you could justify how they worked for their gear or not, the bottom line ends up being exactly like when these hardcore pvpers had to do PVE in order to get their gear, why do something you despise, if it’s going to run you off of the game completely. This isn’t incentivising anything, it’s forcing players to do something they DON’T want to do, which will then in return run them away from pvp entirely, or the game.

As for the casual rbg groups, it really is a nice thought! But sadly, no one who is casual will do that, that is the entire point of being a casual pvper, you join to relax and do some pvp, you aren’t having to plan some form of a group and then plan the date or anything like that, and on top of that, people have been casually pvping like this for over a decade, why should it suddenly be different to appease the arena / rbg players, with no solution for those who have already been doing it, been enjoying it, why is it that casuals are treated like they need to be rooted out. What did the casuals do to deserve the same treatment the arena/rbg players had to deal with just recently, running them out of rbgs entirely.

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19

People who were continuing to farm old raids aren’t doing it at the expense of other players who exist only to be their victims and maybe once in a blue moon win one when they happen to run into a group even worse than them.

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Even that is wrong as I’ve posted many times. You could beat arena gear players in green gear in S1 TBC. You could kill S2/S3 arena gear players in S1 gear. Similar for WoTLK and Cataclysm.

The power gap wasn’t that bad to deal with back then. Comparisons to early expansions are irrelevant.

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