This past season was an inexcusable disgrace that needs to never be replicated again. We’ve had 4 balance patches this entire season, and half of them were in the first couple weeks of the season. The last real pvp patch notes we got were in early October. There was 0 care in regards to pvp this season and I’d be embarrassed if I worked for blizzard. Pvp has way too large of a community for them to just completely ignore it.
Now what do I think the developers need to do? It’s really simple, we need consistent patch notes regarding pvp and communication for the reasoning behind them along with the potential for them to hotfix blatantly overpowered specs “ie this seasons mm hunter”. It doesn’t even need to be as frequent as something like league where they have patch notes bi-weekly. Just once a month, on a set day release patch notes. If they believe the current meta is in a healthy state, then still release a statement explaining that they believe the current meta is balanced. They just need to provide us some consistent form of communication where we aren’t in situations similar to this season where we just feel abandoned. They need to at least put in the bare minimum amount of effort to maintain our pvp community.
So what should we do now? Well blizzard has definitely shown that they will give in to player feedback when community uproar is too large for them. Like what they did with the previous seasons glad mount redesign. So we need to do just that, we need to make sure they know that there are problems and that the people are upset! Spread it as far and wide as you can, and hopefully they will finally put in the effort to finally care about pvp!
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Your articulation is off the charts right now.
Yep the lack of tuning and stale meta are the biggest killers for me. I don’t care what specs are OP, it sucks fighting the same 3 comps over and over the entire season.
Like what if some triple dps comp was good, shook up the meta, gets nerfed, something new pops up, etc etc
Comp variety is essential imo
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It’s just so strange to me that specs just never feel play tested and random percentages are thrown on top of things as almost a bandaid to keep people quiet.
I know for a fact we don’t have true PvP devs and that’s a huge issue because it means the community will always be the last thing on the agenda. If they have time they will look into it and appease it. It’s just sad how they view their game. Purely financial transaction, it’s been this way for a LONG time too.
We need the streamers and YouTube content creators to actually speak up. There isn’t enough of us and this game mode isn’t the pinnacle of their game for the simple pissy customer to drive real change. They have gotten into this exhausted state of mind where when WoW PvP is bad they go to another game rather than speaking up about the problems. It wasn’t always like this either. I think this comes from years of attempting to solve the issue and be a voice but just not being heard.
You are right that the community was able to somewhat twist their arm, and I’m amazed that even happened with the glad mount— I think that also derived from more than just the PvP community having an opinion on the laziness of the company.
We’re in 2025 where most games that are successful can achieve great things because of the ear to the community and constant altering to the current state. Blizzard is a billion dollar company and have perfected WoW. If they wanted to change, they would. They have the resources and understanding, but there has to be a reason to.
I’ve said this before: Blizzard was really pushing for WoW PvP to be a part of the MLG; because of uphill battle picking up the game and understanding what was happening in the matches it just ended up failing and they stopped pushing the ticket. That was the moment the company really started to lack the want to enhance the state of the game and continue to improve. That’s why everything is still archaic. That’s why it took so many years to develop a solo q function. Even with the additions it all feels like it’s half-baked anyways.
We would need more help than just the WoW arena forums. This would take a movement from the whole community and those of us that have the platform to be louder than others.
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I don’t know how the feedback is handled or read but it really needs to be disseminated to the devs. There’s already a plethora of oversights happening on beta that is making it look really lame on launch.
I think we all agree zero communication sucks but it’s been like this for as long as I remember. Even when Holinka was around there’d be almost nothing but at least we’d usually get a dev interview or 2 at the start of new xpacs. I’ve given up hope on it ever changing.
Man we were way too hard on Holinka and Ghostcrawler back in the day. Atleast they tried. It was more than this.
I just always noticed their class bias
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That doesn’t change regardless however like the ret player op said whenever enough flaming pitchforks were raised on a single clear issue blizzard acted and there’s enough pvpers if we can agree assemble and attack we have limitless powers.
My flaming pitchfork is raised with my brethren 
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Weird thing to randomly add in tbh…
Fwiw SL to modern day has been the first time they’ve had a dedicated PvP team afaik
They’ve always had devs that had PvP responsibilities as well as at one point an “esports team” but this last set of 3 expansions we have had a genuine PvP team with an actual long time PvP player/competitor in a solid dev position above QA (where they’ve always gone to die in the past)
It seems to me like they’ve moved that team away from PvP the same way they moved the esports team away at the end of legion
We’ve been getting far more reliable and consistent changes the past 12 seasons and I fear we’ll probably go back to a wod system going forward
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Ultimately PVP has always been a secondary experience. If you try to take PVP in this game seriously I’m sorry but that’s on you. Fool me once etc..
From imba classic rogue dominance to TBC warrior druid being 2/3rd of the glad bracket to beast/spell cleave 1 shots of wotlk all the way to now, PVP has always been a second class experience in this game. It’s there, but it has never been “balanced”.
A game that has perhaps millions of spell combinations with thousands of possible arena comps, builds, stat prios, etc, is just fundamentally too much variation to be a serious esport. It’s a nonlinear optimization problem from hell, and Blizzard realizes it.
I’m sorry, but that’s not an excuse. There is a large player base based around PvP, it should receive the dev attention it deserves. It is honestly pathetic the way they’ve treated pvp this last season and they deserve major criticism for it. They’ve proven that they are more than capable of creating a balanced pvp environment in the prior seasons this expansion and the majority of dragonflight. There is no excuse for them anymore for the current state of the game.
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This is a company ethos issue. They have made it clear they don’t want to talk to customers and when they do, it’s in a heavily filtered format. A decade back, even if they weren’t responding, they at least were making changes consistently enough. That we now go months without the most obvious things being addressed says enough.
I don’t get it. Rampant cheating. Trash ladder. Unfortunate.
Idk, seems like they do talk to top end pve players about upcoming raid tiers, and actually somewhat take their input. They just don’t seem to want to do the same for pvp because for whatever reason half the devs seems to hate it and it’s community.
Iirc they talk to echo and liquid a tiny bit for mythic raid stuff. They talk to smexxin don’t they that would be somewhat of an equivalent.
What incentive does Blizz have to give PvP anymore attn than making sure the vendors and instances work?
lmao i’d be willing to bet 3 ppl get fired if anyone mentions something like pouring dev time into PvP especially with an expac around the corner, which they start working on like the tail end of 2nd seasons probably.
A large amount of people pay them money to play it? What more of an incentive do they need?
Well, that’s what I mean by a heavily filtered format. They don’t interact with your average customers and have conversations. It’s weird to me. Makes for a toxic gaming environment. There should be an outlet for customers to just talk to them.