Ultimately the things that have been causing PvP players to quit for years and years are as follows.
FOR CONTEXT - imagine you’re paying the same price as everyone else but the content you like is handled as follows below.
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Same Reasons Others Quit - Poor Gear Acquisition Systems from Xpac to Xpac, Convoluted Borrowed Power Systems, Content Droughts, and Lack of Bang for your Buck in todays economy, Poor Narrative Choices effect everyone - cut content in WOD, Hastily Swapping from War Narrative to Lets burn down N’Zoth in a single patch as a little N’Zoth head inside N’Zoths head. SHADOWLANDS, I’d wager a lot of the PvP players we lost did more than just PvP (like me) and they left for the same reasons a lot of our friends did.
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Poor Class Balance - Blizz has never really been able to keep themselves from allowing a couple classes to either 1shot, overpower entirely, our outperform others in a small group or arena setting. It sometimes takes Blizz 3+ Weeks to catch on to a single class that’s actually 1shotting people or tripling DPS in area or other content. This is likely due to a refusal to allocate resources to monitor these kinds of things or funding to actually fix them.
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Lack of Innovation - No new Battlegrounds for years, with BFA and DF you’d think we’d have seen a Naval or Aerial themed BG at some point, should have been common sense, but it’s evident they aren’t interested enough in growing this “End Game Pillar”. Nothing new or exciting since Seething Shore in BFA (which c’mon now.) except for BG Blitz and Solo Shuffle which they haven’t been bothered to work out all the kinks. Players were really excited for Solo Shuffle but for the longest time Blizz refused to address it’s early onset issues like people leaving and or going afk, the mmr issues and Que Times, to the point where players begged and plead for months then just quit. Now that they’ve tweaked things a little it’s just too little too late.
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Lack of Incentives - Some people will say the incentive to PvP is PvP itself and for me that’s enough and obviously for others just about everyone still playing it that’s enough but for the thousands of other players who had no new BGs, issues with Que times, Issues with mmr and watched for weeks on end or expansions on end as PvP was dominated by untuned classes there were simply not enough incentives to stick around through that level of neglect, obviously or they’d still be here.
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Premades in Casual entry level Epic Bgs - See this Forum Post titled Pre-made Epic Battle Grounds Need to Stop + Buffs and Revamps (Community Council Requested)
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Chromie Time - World PvP is a different beast but if you’ve ever leveled through chromie time with WM on you’ll know the odds of encountering another player are slim to none, not just because there are no leveling victims to gank but mainly due to sharding issues that go along with Chromie time that Blizz has never cared to work out.
*Warmode - to a much lesser extent effected the PvP scene but allowing people to opt out was a smart and healthy move it just came at the start of WoWs massive player count decline in BFA which has been steadily dropping ever since.
I could go ON AND ON but this was a death due to years and years of neglect, we’re still hanging on against all odds, but to what avail?