The state it’s in is probably what it will be for a while and will only get worse. The people have spoken, and solo Q brackets are resoundingly more popular than premade. Whatever you think of that is fine, but participation says it all. It doesn’t help that WoW is in a unique category where the average gamer is in their 30s - job/family/other responsibilities. People just wanna game, not do some meet and greet roulette with a band of nerds online to potentially get some rating.
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Unless… Crazy idea here… Blizzard put some effort into improving it?
I realistically only game with friends. My friends stopped playing retail early on hence I’ve barely played. Solo que isn’t the savior you think it is. Most other PvP games put duo/party que against solo ques as it’s way better for the health of the entire game.
Still wow insists on doing it’s own thing at the detriment of the game itself.
Most other PvP games are not comp based which is why it works.
They absolutely are.
People get rewards and quit because it’s not fun… that’s the whole point. Making it even harder to get the rewards when it’s already not fun will just make it worse.
Reality is people don’t know what they want but they blame blizzard for literally everything. Take Plunderstorm for example. First go around people were complaining it took way too long to get the rewards and they weren’t having fun grinding them. This time around, people are complaining that they got all the rewards too fast so it’s boring. If the point is to play for fun, why are these people complaining they got all the rewards already?
Telling you, people have no idea what they’re talking about and blizzard is damned if they do and damned if they don’t.
The main problem is rewards being tied to specific ratings instead of being % based. Depending on inflation/deflation, participation, where in the season you are etc, achieving a particular rating can either be way too hard or a way too easy than is intended. That is a major problem particularly moreso when it is too hard. Once the player base realizes that we’re in say week 8 of the season and only 6 players have 2400, and .5% is at 2100+, it starts to create a negative feedback loop, that only exacerbates the problem further. (people decide to quit until later in season → ratings further stagnate —> getting X rating becomes even harder —> repeat).
The second issue is the break points being too spread out (2100-2400) for example. When players have been struggling for weeks just to barely scrape out 2100, most are going to understandably feel like 2400 is just completely hopeless. The solution to this is just to add more “worthwhile” reward break points throughout the ladder. In the above example, they might not be willing to push 2400, but would they have tried for 2200 if there were an award there? I think so!
The third issue is just offering more “worthwhile” rewards, especially at the lower end of the ladder. Getting your “elite braces” is a crap reward. So is the tabard and pennant, lets be honest. Good rewards WILL get people to queue.
Participation rewards also need to be updated and improved, and these should be updated and reset each season. Winning 400 arena games still awards tabard of brute force? Isn’t that like 10 years old??
Additionally, an updated LFG as everyone already knows, is a must. Not much more to say here, but it’s absolutely embarrassing that it hasn’t had an update at this point. People have provided tons of great ideas for how it could be improved.
Not sure what all this talk about rewards being easier vs harder is about, I don’t think that’s the problem most people are really complaining about.
Why not though? Again you look at other games and there are no rewards mid season really… You play because they have an intrinsic motivation. Wow is set up terribly for intrinsic motivation unfortunately.
I 100% agree with this. However I don’t think just injecting MMR is the answer though because as people have told you, people will play get their rewards and quit. We need a complete revamp like the one I listed above.
How do you see this working? If you go by your point about early vs late season, then people get the rewards at a much lower rating in the beginning of the season… or you make everyone wait til the end of the season to get rewards… then it’s essentially no different than now… meaning people will be waiting til the end to push… only it would be for their rewards, not their rating. You’d still have the mid season slump.
There could be incentive here, but depending on what you have in mind, could be good or bad. I like the idea of giving people more reason to play that isn’t just throwing rating at them to feel good.
That’s unpossible.
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Lower hanging fruit item they could try would be to borrow what they did to solo shuffle and make gladiator and R1 spec specific. This would have the added benefit of discouraging strict meta-gaming.
Of course, they should exclude tanks from this equation.
When conquest gets uncapped you unlock all the % based rewards. Generally 8-10 weeks in which was about the same for wrath/cata/mop and wod just with a better system.
This is such a boring and lame excuse. Of course there will always be people that complain. But blizzard is not listening to the majority of the player base and there are lots of people leaving and not coming back.
Bad balance, running into no life multi glads at low raiting, rampant pay to win, there are lots of reasons the games not fun.
Oh I 100% agree on a complete revamp, but that won’t happen because pvp isn’t pulling in players. We need to hold blizzards hand and teach them to walk so that they can run.
What is gatekeeping in WoW though it’s always used but what actually is it.
I just see it as a buzz word for the people that suck so you leave their lfg group after 1 game and make up some excuse
It’s because this game is very old and the players who have been around for a long time have a huge advantage in skill and networking. Newer players need to feel like they have a chance to the highest rewards and this is a large reason why newer players love solo modes so much. That reason being they don’t have to go against AWC teams at 2400, or booster teams that plague 3v3.
Zoning in and seeing Balance/Rdruid/X 
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To your first point, and as someone already suggested, I would have a sort of “pre-season”. For the first 4-6 weeks, players would jockey for position for when the rewards are “turned on” so to speak. From that point on, rewards could be given (to those who earn them within the % cutoff) based on the live ladder, or they could be given upon reset each week. As for your point about people getting a reward at a lower rating…that wouldn’t matter. Whether it was earned at 2400 rating or 2k rating, top 3% is top 3% and difficulty would be relatively the same throughout the season regardless of the rating it took to obtain top 3%.
I do think the above would lead to some people hitting their goals sooner, but that is why I think there should be many rewards in small increments (top 10%, top 6%, top 4% etc) all the way up the ladder. This would encourage people to continue to push to the next reward which wouldn’t feel too out of reach. The best of the best players would still go straight to the top which is why I think Rank 1 could still be kept as an end of season reward only. Most of those players tend to play through most of the season anyways.
Regarding your last point, I’m not sure I follow. I don’t see how adding more reward points throughout the ladder is throwing rating at them. Everything would still have to be earned.
Dont forget the bm+pres and disc/feral/mage from EU!
Maybe blizz should cancel the awc and put what little money is there into hiring two pvp devs. Make the game fun and ppl will play
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