…is because easy and easily available stuff is worthless. Kids today can’t hangle the word “no”, so all Blizzard was doing the past years was cater to a “loser” culture with welfare and participation prizes. Greens are more rare than epics now. The welfare “loser” community can’t handle PvPers having epics because of a skill they will never have, so Blizzard had to hand everyone epics.
And since you can’t make PvP easy, it will be hard regardless, because there is always another player on the other side, they had to burry it, try to put PvP achievements in nothingness and copy the sense of achievement to PvE, so dragonslayers feel they “Won” something.
But none of this matters, because “honor” is not just a game currency among the PvP community. We get our thrill from winning, even if Blizzard does not honor us as they should.
…Is because they are releasing 50 versions of the game selling nostalgia. There is also way too many pvp brackets that split the playerbase.
They just spam release low quality buggy content without balancing it since most of the playerbase is 50 y/o+ mount farming casuals that they can keep on milking forever and PvP players will always complain but will keep playing.
The notalgia exists not because of the old stuff, it exists because of the things that never get old, like feeling that you have a chance to get something that is rare, or to find something rare. I remember when a person in epics was something not very common. When you got an epic yourself, it was a blast. Now people just vendor epics.
Retail, as a game, is better, in every aspect, but everything in it does not mean anything anymore.
I remember when buying epic riding was an event. Wow would be 100 times bigger had Blizzard not embraced the “loser” culture.
You see that mentality in PvP also, gosh forbid a warrior makes a wrong decision and now can’t connect his attacks.
Ion also said something along these lines recently when talking about wcf and the playerbase split.
I’ll look for the interview but it was something to the effect of,
“We do a poor job with the retail leveling experience where we rush players straight to the end with content that’s patronizingly easy with no actual thread of danger, so they’re quickly unprepared to handle the game at large that they’re thrust into”.
declined because WoD was planned as a yearly xpac release to increase revenue and instead everyone bailed cuz no content
then that gave corp activision the power to take over design directions and put gold on the cash shop to make up the lost revenue
everything after WoD became increasingly focused on increasing grind/metrics without increasing content and the addition of ugly unimmersive systems
it also coincided with some crazy bad pvp gearing systems that chased everyone out of pvp because it wasn’t an eventual fair playing field on power for everyone and they kept tying in pve grinds to your pvp power
legion was an utter collapse in pvp participation compared to the peaks of WoD which actually had solid pvp participation as a ratio of its active playerbase
this continued until the wow playerbase was dropping off a cliff after 1st tier and they started backing off some of the systems and grind for dragonflight through now
it’s super easy to explain and it is 100% self inflicted by wow design decisions chasing more gold buys on the cash shop, which is now the number one revenue source by far
now we have this whole trying to serve all players as an effort to retain, solo, M+, raiders - but pvp has barely changed except they promised to add a renown ladder which will literally be the first value add to pvp in a decade?
bliz devs get bonuses based on metrics, and pve is where they get easy metrics - they kept trying blunt force grind increases on pvp but they all failed miserably so nobody on the bliz team likes pvp cuz no bonuses
Probably a million reasons why it’s declined. The most honest and simple answer though is the player base has simply aged out and the new product isn’t attracting new players, and if anything, is alienating the remaining players. A good chunk of my friends now have kids. They didn’t back in wrath… just sayin.
The game lost the passionate people at the helm. The people that actually cared about the product. This company set the standard for customer care in this space and then completely gutted it. The amount of communication they had with the player base was incredible. Having an actual mod chat with you or even hop in game to fix something… All of that made the game great.
All the other stuff is just fluff imo. The fluff matters, but the core of what keeps players around, customers, is the ethos and culture and honestly, that culture isn’t something a lot of us are attracted to. Sure, I still play some, but not like I used to. If they really want to take the war out of warcraft, then they might as well throw it in the bin.
Beyond that, the genre as a whole probably needs to be rethought. I have a lot of friends who just enjoy the console experience because it’s not a constant race. If I could say anything about current WoW is how it invalidates effort so quickly. We can’t even enjoy our gear in the same tier before it’s already useless. You can spend all season building a set, only for them to make gear free in the last month of any tier. To top it off, the gear you worked for isn’t even good starter gear in the next season. Insult to injury at this point. So why put in the effort?
They really need to rethink this. The core aspects of this game are what need to be addressed.
To me nothing really seems to matter, as already discussed, you get gear or a title and get to show it off until season reset, but even then, show it off to who?
Not that I have ever got a glad Drake, but I am glad that still exists as a carrot to chase, that’s one thing people still recognise.
Why WoW Retail declined = Blizzard (and overlords) like money more than quality game production
Why WoW Retail PvP declined = Ion is a lifetime 1400 wall licker and he hates that almost anyone the wanders into PvP by accident is already better than he is
Person that brought atrifacts in legion, who butchered the class design, from xpac to xpac, who wasted resources on gimmics like Warfronts, Void visions, Choregast, Maw.
Who promised never add “borrowed powers” but added them in this xpac, like an drug addict who can’t have an xpac without them.
Gamedirector who brought us Shadowlands, Cringeflight, the boredom within and MIDnight.
Ion is like that chick in Major League (89) that is always trying to get the Cleveland Indians to lose so she can move them to another city. Except this isn’t baseball it’s PvP and unlike the movies Rachel ‘Ion’ Phelps is winning in their villianous schemes.
I personally can’t fathom how he stayed a game director who failed to organize team during covid, released Shadowlands, dropped sub count by 70%… what kind of skills he posses to keep his job I don’t freaking know.
Game director is the first person who must answer for issues of the game, first to get punished.
If he is only a coach then he should get the fel out the his position.
If people enjoyed long grinds mmo’s wouldn’t of died as a genre. The ‘winners’ your referring to would commonly take time off from work or ghost their family. No thank you.
And Classic/TBC/Wrath had better player retention than all tictoc xpacs of the last five years.
All of them created more memorable moments than any Midnight, TWW, Dragonslop or Shadowlands has ever created.
People don’t remember how they got to dragonisles, but they sure remember opening of dark portal, or first ship that took them to northrend.
yep, most don’t seem to get this. Things only have value if not everyone has them or can easily obtain them. This literally applies to everything in life lol.
This is the wow pvp playerbase at large:
E.g., “whaaaaah it’s so hard to get the elite set/enchant/glad/etc.” > blizzard juices inflation to sooth childish egos > “yay particiation went up because all of the rewards are participation trophies, I’m so good at the game” > no reward left that requires skill or that you can show off = eventually no one really cares to improve because there isn’t anything to strive for and then population starts dying off.
