This game is highly inaccessible and badly designed

PVP Arenas
1

(warranted rant)

I’ve had a couple friends just completely quit despite having intentions to play PvP. Personally, I’m a casual PvE player, but I was practicing PvP on the side to play with them. And just as we were gaining some traction in terms of learning, they lost motivation for obvious reasons.

I agree with the general sentiment that WoW is an MMO so there must be a chase for itemization, even in PvP. The problem is, this game’s PvP is probably the worst ____fest (fill in the blanks) I have ever played.

My buddies took the time to level their character only to end up getting stomped by 226 ilvl people in literally 1100 rating. Sure, I’ve seen this said many times, “1100 get gud, if you cant get past 1100 then u r scrub”. What CR would you expect a BRAND NEW PLAYER to be?

Sure, there are smurfs in other games, but at least the smurfs in other games have no advantage other than superior skill. These matches literally last 5 seconds. There is no opportunity to learn, no opportunity to counter play, no nothing. When you are a new player in other games, at least (even against smurfs) you have a chance to observe and learn. In this game, absolutely none of that.

It boggles my mind how this game is as popular as it is. It is a testament to blizzards fall from grace, and evidence of incompetence and convolution from a design perspective. It’s like walking into the most expensive house on the planet but when you walk in, the owners havnt done the dishes or laundry for 15 years.

That being said, for the short time I played PvP, I enjoyed the matches that were at an even playing field. I enjoyed playing Frost DK and Ele Shammy. There is potential to WoW’s pvp, but it is unfortunately tied into a mess of a game/expansion. I want to give WoW PvP one last shot in 9.1, and decide wether to quit wow for good or continue playing.

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I always tell my RL friends not to start playing again until a new patch when there’s catchup and stuff

just not worth the time for them or me to play with them

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If you find yourself to be losing so quickly and decisively, it could indicate that you’re playing at a higher rating than you ought to be.

The rating system is susceptible to this via strings of good luck, rng, etc. If you run into a string of comps you directly countered, your rating will go up very high very quickly. When you stop queueing into those comps, well, we have what your friends are experiencing.

In conclusion, the system isn’t perfect, you’re right. But there’s no such thing as a perfect system, and I think this one works pretty well.

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I’ve been around since launch in 2004. I liked what Shadowlands was in theory, and I think this expansion certainly comes with some good changes (vendors!). But I personally feel this is the worst PvP season I’ve ever seen.

I can understand how for a new player these 1 shot classes make it tough to learn. There really isn’t much room for what you should’ve done differently when you don’t have the time during an arena to learn what the mistake even was to begin with.

That being said, I think it’s also frustrating for experienced players to lose to the same said cheese strats. So… if there is very little casual content, PvEers are probably largely done with content, and PvP went from chess to a first person shooter… Yeah… I think the mass exodus is justified. Couple that with the exodus within the company, and I think the writing is on the wall here.

I myself am experiencing difficulty with friends leaving, so don’t feel alone there. Even as someone willing to play through this every single day and learn and push, I can’t find a consistent teammate with similar ambitions, let alone two. The only ones I did find to push ended up un-subbing within a week or two. I often find myself spending upwards of an hour in Oribos perusing LFG for roughly 15 minutes of gameplay (as an affliction lock, results may vary). This is even with 2k cr and xp. I even am willing to stoop lower than my own rating so long as the person plays consistently and wants to push. I take pride in never being toxic. And I tell myself… don’t give up. You’ll find a team. But it’s also been 6 months and I’m right back at square one.

At some point you have to ask yourself… is this worth spending my time doing? Which leads to less time playing. So… is this worth $15/month?

I remember when new games would come out and they’d refer to them as “the WoW killer”. We’d all just kinda chuckle and say “yeah right”. I feel as if the base now is thinking “Please God” when we hear the same phrase. The reason I think this game finds so much success is because nobody has done better yet. I believe it’s a matter of time, but I suppose it always was.

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I like your analogy and I agree. I’ve only ever played wow for the PVP, mostly arena, and I think what’s going on right now is the current developer team leadership undervalues PVP. This game has been great in the past but blizzard has this trend of disregarding successful iterations and trying to reinvent the wheel instead of retaining what works (has worked).

Also if you’ll recall, when they initially announced the PVP vendors for shadowlands, the gear was even worse than it is now (poorly itemized/lower ilvl). The PVP vendors with their current offerings (as they are now) were a last minute add-on in response to massive community feedback. Obviously it was an afterthought.

Blizzard is a multi-billion dollar corporation with an extremely loyal and vocal pvp following. They have the resources and the knowledge to keep PVP fresh, balanced, and accessible to new and long-time players alike. Currently it is anything but.

Personally I’d like to see honor and conquest costs cut in half or have a system implemented to transfer honor to alts. I also think the gear disparity from honor gear to max level conquest gear should be about half of what it is now. A PVP stat like resilience could be reinstated to keep conquest gear lower item level than raid gear, thus not trivializing raids by making conquest gear too easily attainable. I think one of the most important changes they could implement, aside from solo queue, would be a system to keep people in their skill brackets. The rank one multi-glads farming newbs all day is so cringe. And finally, more frequent PVP specific balance patches. Increase sustain damage and decrease cooldown damage, simple.

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THIS SO MUCH

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They need like… Arena vs. Bots thing.

Like target dummies next to the normal pve target dummies that interact with arena 1-3 macros.

It’s so hard to get used to using 1-3 macros when all other game modes dont require them. Then you suddenly need them in the hardest game mode.

Just the dummies would be amazing. You could put a tiny little pillar in between them and make them cast something, (something that does nothing,) and then you’d be able to tell when you’re lining a cast… and have things to kick.

I’ve been leveling in skims and bgs. There are no 1-3 macros in bgs so it’s hard to establish the habit of using the buttons in arena instead of tab targeting or clicking like in bgs.

I think I’ve managed to use step kick @ arena target like 1 time since I started leveling.

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Just thought I’d add my support and two cents. I’ve been playing almost continuously since Wrath and, I have to say, this is the worst PvP has ever been. Ever. Both at max level and in low level battlegrounds. Even Cataclysm paladins didn’t make the game as un-fun as does the garbage going on in random bgs right now: getting one or two shot by people in raid gear and gladiator gear, getting crushed even before the game begins by getting matched against a premade, not being able to participate in low level battlegrounds because of all the twinks… if the game is supposed to be fun, it is currently failing.

I play WoW just to queue random battlegrounds. I have never and will never be interested in joining a PvP guild/community, because I quite simply don’t want to have to commit to a game that should by rights be fun rather than a chore. And that should be fine. Random BGs exist because random matchups have the greatest chance of being fair outside of gear and skill algorithms for every player. But right now, with the complete lack of moderation for exploitative behavior like twinking and grouping, there is no way to even EXPECT a given match to fair.

Personally, my suggested solutions are simple: separate group queues from solo queues, and return to a WoD style PvP gearing system.

Back in WoD, gear was normalized, with non-pvp gear defaulting to the lowest tier, honor gear defaulting to a middle tier, and conquest gear defaulting to the highest tier. Furthermore, via Ashran, all players, soloers and otherwise, were able to easily grind out a set of honor gear by farming artifact fragments. It was easy to get competitive, because even though honor gear was of a lower tier than conquest gear, the difference was about 15 item levels, and you were more or less guaranteed to have a few sets of conquest gear, with a full set completely doable over time without ever having to set foot in a rated match.

WoD had its problems, but PvP was never better, and it has never reached that level of fun since. The hyper-elite folks can still duke it out for top.5%, but the rest of us should be able to know that, whenever we lose, it is a matter of skill and not a matter of being outgeared. Please, please bring back WoD style PvP.

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Pvp templates were the best feature ever added to this game. They need to come back.

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It’s really weird to me seeing ppl post “this is the worst pvp season”

Like I can understand gear behind rating being bad, but this isn’t the first time it’s been this way.

And One Shotting has ALWAYS been a thing especially when it comes to paladins and shaman esepcially, like a lot of stuff isn’t new whatsoever.

What I do feel, anecdotally, is that player expectations as a whole have changed. The vast majority of ppl still playing have been playing from the jump or around then.

People forget all the stupid stuff in the past but subconsciously we’re prob all sick of the dumb stuff especially now that folks are older and if you’re not a boomer you see everything on streams nowadays so you kinda get some standard set for you.

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tin foil hat theory here:

its a marketing strategy to keep it like this. think about it, the most entertaining clips that clutter up your youtube feeds like an std are from ret paladins, fire mages, sub rogues etc. (the bursty classes). And when someone who isn’t familiar with the current state of affairs watches these people masterfully crap on everyone and kill the in two globals, while appearing to have the time of their lives, it makes the game look much more fun and modern than other footage probably would. Granted, most of these streamers are very charismatic and entertaining, but they have the talent to make the gameplay “look fun” to the uninitiated.

then the poor consumer buys the game, slog thru the gear/level/rep/torghast grind, get addicted, realize they’ve been had, but now they’re in too deep to quit, and they open the forums to vent

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Why not just make a fun game instead

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Thanks for being so positive. I’m sure your teammates that are learning are appreciative.

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“This is the worst pvp season” has been used since season 1 of tbc until now.

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I no longer can recommend this game to my IRL friends that I game with but don’t play WoW. Even when the game is enjoyable, at 55 just to get started, it’s a tough sale in the age of Fortnite, WZ, Apex etc. but now if I convinced one of them to get started in WoW I would legit feel like I scammed them

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How’s that going for them? :stuck_out_tongue:
Are you two still speaking? :stuck_out_tongue:

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I was looking up a bug on the internet and came across a similar problem by other players. I then click on the forums and I saw a ton of blues interacting with other people. I thought “huh, must be very recent. This never happens” except I realized that these posts had been open for a couple weeks. Not too long, not too recent. I then realized I had the forums open on another tab, I realized that the same information I saw of there was different on the one I orginally had opened. Turns out that those were the EU forums. Give us EU Blizzard plz

TL;DR:

The dreams we have of Blues interacting with players are in EU. Give us an EU version of Blizz devs

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^ This.

:T

That’s one of the main reasons why I dislike the current PvP system.

Even your own friends are incentivized to not play with you if you’re worse than them or if you’re on a new toon, because they need to protect their ratings so they can get better gear.

I’m praying that Diablo 2: Resurrected will be just as amazing as the original.

:pray:

Speaking for myself, after so many expansions, I expect Blizzard would be able to continually improve the PvP experience. Instead, each expansion feels like Blizzard is dealing with PvP development and PvP balance issues for the very first time. It’s inconceivable.

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they don’t believe they can
bobby kotick overpays behavioral scientists to mathematically prove that players are stupid animals and pleasing “us” is never going to be possible, so they settle for the most risk-averse crap they can think of to try and reduce unsubscription numbers as much as possible for as long as possible until the design teams that still make good pieces of wow(art, raid design, some of the quests, music, some of the abilities) finish the next patch or next xpac that will bring back scads of people for novelty or nostalgia or both

there is no cure btw

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Having to spend literal days of “work” in order to get enough gear to make a video game fun / fair, is the most backwards logic ever and no idea why Blizzard continues to lean even more into it with every expansion pack.

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