Thinking about pausing my sub until War Within comes out due to (seemingly) no rated BGB (RBGB) until then. We’ll see.
Given that there’s an expansion coming, I wanted to pipe in with some thoughts too. I’ll keep it bulleted for your reading enjoyment.
Solo-Queue Rated BGs (RBGB)
- Okay I know this is coming but it can’t come soon enough. I’ve long been an advocate of it (Community Thoughts About Solo-Queue Rated PVP Content?). Here are some small modifications I think would be good for the current system:
- I don’t even play 2s or 3s anymore, but I think queueing should be expanded to allow groups of 2-3 players to queue together (one must be healer – the change here is that you also allow groups of 3), as well as solo-queue. The nice thing here is that established 3v3 groups can play together, and even queue up to rated BGBs while they wait for their 3v3 queues to pop. This allows for groups of size 1-3 have two rated options regardless of team size: running solo? queue solo shuffle + RBGB, running as a duo? queue 2s + RBGB, running as a trio? queue 3s + RBGB.
- Effectively, this should reduce the “splitting the PVP community” problem. Would be nice if this could be expanded to allow for DPS-only 2s teams as well, but on the fence about this due to there already being issues with queue times. Hopefully some of the below helps alleviate that.
Account-Wide Spec-Based (not Role-Based) Rewards/Achievements for (at least Solo-Queue) PVP
- Encourages players to play specs that are otherwise underpowered in PVP
- Gives a better signal to devs as to which specs are fun to play as opposed to simply specs that are powerful
- As an example, would an Ele Shaman that’s found reasonable rating dare to dip their toes into rated content as Enh? Not based on the representation disparity for 1800+ players (assuming disparity is due to difference in spec-strength, leading to an expected loss of rating if the player goes Enh). But with spec-based rankings and achievements there’s no reason not to try both.
- Account-Wide rankings for PVP such that for each spec that you play on an account, you can only have one of them (your highest) apparent on the leaderboards. So that there’s not 20 Enh Shamans of all the same player/account filling up the leaderboards and taking up all the rewards slots.
PVP Cancelled/Priority Queue System Revamp
- It’s insufficient to be put back in the queue with priority when you get a cancelled (by others) queue. The reason is because the top of the queue is filled with players that are AFK because they’ve been waiting a long time, and thus are likely to miss their queue too (I talk about this here: BG Queueing System Needs Revamp - Tired of Cancelled Queues).
- Put players into special queue/tier that only includes players that hit “Join” but did not successfully Join a BG, when group-formation fails. These players will near-assuredly not be AFK when their queue pops again, and thus will be significantly more likely to join a fully-formed game (instead of the endless join/cancel cycle).
War-Banded PVP Queueing
This is how it would work:
- You log into a specific character to enter the world
- You open your revamped PVP queue tab where you’re given a list of your characters on your account with checkboxes for each of their possible specs
- You enter the PVP queue on ALL of the checked characters+specs
- You joined the instanced PVP game as the checked character+spec that got in and upon completing the game go back into the world as the character you logged in as (from #1)
- You get account-wide “high priority” queue tokens/currency for completing a RBGB game as a healer where you have a non-trivial contribution to the game, that you can redeem when you queue up as DPS to go through queue faster.
- Low stack limit for this token. Monitor for abuse (are players trying to afk or have minimal activity in the game as a healer just to accumulate tokens?) and/or explore other options to resolve (e.g. only provide these tokens for games won, or games above a rating threshold) or incentivize healing if necessary.
Addressing AddOns in PVP
- There have been suggestions to remove them. The problem is that this is a damned-if-you-do/damned-if-you-don’t issue without other changes. The game is less accessible to new players because of the requirement to have addons. The game is also less accessible to players if addons are not available to them because who the heck knows what’s going on in the game?
- There needs to be a way for a player to learn the game, within the game, if we are to ever reduce our dependence on addons in PVP. This means something like Details built-in, with something like a capture of the abilities your opponents used in the previous game alongside how their talent builds have modified the base abilities. Ideally this would include a little animation pop up showing how this ability looks in-game when the opponent activates it. But I know that’s too much to ask for, because we don’t even have…
Good PVP Tooltips
- This should not be shown based on a % chance of activation if you hit a specific target dummy. Just make it a toggle in your spellbook – PVE tooltips shown or PVP?
- It should show the end-result of all the PVP modifiers, and all the talents that effect the ability (and inclusive of their PVP modifiers). Duh.
That’s all. Bye bye for now.