Yes, since Arenas/SS suck and Rated BGs take forever to form and one loss to fall apart.
Though it’s more about BG Blitz now, since, using the current buzzphrase, it “respects players’ time”, by giving conquest on a loss if your team did not get stomped.
Strand was completely fine, and I miss it.
If vehicles are the issue, they should have deleted WG and IoC too.
And a whole lot of RNG on nodes which no one likes in PvP, which is a skill-based mode.
I’m fine with SS, but I can see why people hate it.
The problem wasn’t the vehicles, the problem was that the game was heavily biased towards that first round, generally in favor of defense. Defenders just needed to destroy a couple demolishers and that’d typically secure the game for them. Zerg one half of the map to destroy two demo’s, then relieve the turret holdouts and zerg the other two and you basically win every time. Unless the zerg ball is incompetent they will always be able to knock out the demolishers. And OTOH if you just made clever use of movement speed buffs, assault could knock out gates before the defenders even had the opportunity to reach them.
That, and it was incredibly easy to plant / troll on that map. One or two d-cks get on the assault team, board the vehicles and immediately run them into the water and you’re screwed.
This all leads to a situation where games tend to snowball in about 2 or 3 minutes with very little room in between. SOTA was almost always a blowout.
When Blizzard re-did the BG queues SotA was the odd man out since it was neither a 10 man, nor a 40 man instance and on top of that it was far and away the least popular BG in the game.
Just to reiterate on one point here also. My post is trying to shine light on the fact that Blizzard won’t even hotfix the brawl. If that is the kind of quality control we are going to get, it might be a waste of time to even start providing feedback on how to address much more complex problems that plague arena.
How is this any different from pretty much always losing WG if you don’t win the first combat around the northeast workshop?
Also, it could be rebalanced/reworked (like how they just butchered Deepwind Gorge into a faux Arathi) and “clever tactics” should be usable there (for a time, as a rogue, I could SStep to turrets and invade all zones before anyone else).
They just decided to abandon it, pretty much like the rest of WoD.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Arathi Basin allows for upheavals and last-minute turn arounds. Because SOTA is heavily tied to the use of vehicles, when those vehicles are destroyed you have a very binary result from it.
And people are still willing to play AB. People were blacklisting SOTA, specifically, not AB.
My dear fellow, in an expansion about dragons and reviving flight, the best we got was some flying islands…
No flying continent (they really dropped the ball there what with all the adjacent hype from Zelda: TotK), no wind interaction, nothing other than dragongliding, which is mainly popular for its speed.
Planning is under the direction of people who have never done PvP in this game, purely PvE-ers. They don’t understand it, and don’t want to know, because they think somebody who knows nothing about it can come up with fresh, new ideas that someone with knowledge and experience would overlook.
Seriously, they’re just going to muck this up like they did with Wintergrasp.
Removal of black listing is causing people to leave more because they are tired of seeing the same BGs again and again (eg silvershare mines/Temple kotmogu in randoms, epics IoC).
