If you’re looking at it PURELY from a gold farm vantage point, then sure… but these players were already stacking bgs and now their being rewarded because of it. Given that these are selling for 7-8k atm, that’s like getting 1,000g per win for free.
Regardless, probably should have any incentives for the cheating premades, but it is nice to have a little gold to earn for the pvp players. >.<
What games, though? MMORPGs like WoW - which are primarily PVE, or games that literally gravitate around their PVP such that they have the numbers for matchmaking in unrated modes? You need to be mindful of what you’re comparing.
That never stopped people before - and it’s been like that for a very long time, mind you.
Do you think that it was any different when I first started out? PVP was incredibly difficult, and - originally, way back in the day - I was terrible at it (I was terrible and under-geared). I was basically a free kill. It took years for me to improve, seeing as I started out as a keyboard-turning clicker. I was farmed for years. Let that sink in.
My improvement started the moment I resolutely decided to work at “Getting good.” Nowadays, people lose a single game and quit.
One sincerely wonders how much of the “New player” or “Tourist” problem stems from all the pandering to the “Participation trophy” crowd, who seem more inclined to cry for handicaps than to commit themselves to an effort for personal growth.
The difference is that these days the average skill level of the WoW player base is much, much higher than it was in 2004.
Back in vanilla you’d run into keyboard turners in PvP all the time. There was also a much larger focus on world PvP which is inherently unfair and chaotic. In World PvP your faction members playing poorly was not a detriment because they weren’t taking up a slot on a 10v10 team like in battlegrounds.
If everyone is bad, then a new player is going to also run into other equally bad people all the time.
Basically since everyone sucked at PvP, new players were not at as much of a disadvantage.
Now days the average skill level of WoW players is much higher, and the requirements are as well. You need addons and a lot more knowledge about other classes to do well in PvP now.
It used to be for example as a mage you’d need to know that paladins can bubble, rogues can vanish out of frost nova, and not to poly druids. But now? You need to learn the offensives and defenses of every class and spec, track the cooldowns of every player in arena or battlegrounds, have addons to track battleground objectives so you can actually know if you’re winning or how long until that base is capped. Addons to track DR. And since everyone is expected to play at that level, a lot of toxicity will be thrown at any player who doesn’t play well enough.
WoW’s PvP is competing with other PvP games though, for retail at least. With almost no world PvP happening, all that’s left are battlegrounds and arena.
When you have games like Marvel Rivals, Overwatch 2, Heroes of the Storm. Even League of Legends, Counterstrike, and so so many other games that just let you log right in and start fighting people, it’s harder for new players to justify logging into WoW and doing all the work required just to function in PvP.
This is different for Classic of course where world PvP offers a truly unique experience that you don’t find in many other games, but retail is almost all instanced PvP.
Let me put it another way:
If someone is deciding what to play for their 2 hours of free time on the weekend, what are they more likely to choose?
Game A: Requires them to go to external sites to download addons, spend time setting up their UI to be functional, track DR, track timers and objectives. Look up YouTube videos on how to play the maps. Jump into their first few matches and get one shot by players with better gear, lose matches vs a premade, get yelled at by their team for not having honor gear, get yelled at for not doing terms that you have no idea what they mean “fc, spinning the flag, etc”, and having to slug through a dozen or so matches until you actually start to get enough honor gear to be able to actually have an impact on a match, only to realize you still suck because you need to learn not only your own class, but every other class in the game as well to have a fighting chance.
Game B: Requires you to do some basic hot key setup, and then jump right into a match fighting other noobs who suck just as bad as you. Pick up a gun or whatever and shoot people. And actually feel like you’re making an impact on the game.
People have limited time to play games. Most people only play a few hours of games a week. You or I are the exceptions. We are the hardcore players, the ones posting on forums and watching YouTube videos and looking stuff up on Wowhead. But not most players.
It isn’t an issue of laziness. It’s just that if someone only has a few hours to play games in a week, they’d rather spend it playing something that is fun from the start, rather than play something that only gets fun after 20 hours.
WoW retail instanced PvP is the latter. It’s just not going to be fun for most people unless they dedicate considerable time to it. And for most people, they aren’t going to play a game mode they don’t enjoy for a month when they could play literally anything else and start enjoying it right away.
And yes, we need those casual players in WoW PvP if we want WoW PvP to be healthy and continue to be developed.
We haven’t had an actual new epic battleground in 15 years. We get a new normal battleground only every other expansion. They haven’t added much for world PvP lately either. And a big part of this is because WoW PvP, for retail at least, is such a small part of the game. If someone wants to do PvP there’s just so many other games that do PvP better and retail WoW doesn’t offer an experience that is unique enough to offset the work that is required to get into it.
Thanks ChatGPT.
No problem.
I think the issue is bad blizz design, yet again.
Rather than keep Vicious Bloodstones (presumably) through the entire xpac, they should have introduced new stones for each new season.
Good News is finally money and players are dropping in wow, when that happens people in suits get yelled at, and Devs get to fixing things. hopefully lol.