The game has always been, and always will be balanced around PvE.
From early wow, content design has always had more people required for PvE compared to PvP, with the exception being AV ties.
The number of content added also is a huge disparity, with multiple raids and dungeons added per each expansion, while there has barely been any BGs or Arenas added. From what i’ve seen, most people buy expansions for new raids/dungeons, and to defeat the Big Bad of the expansion and advance the story, not because they added some new BG or PvP feature.
You can complain all you want, but you cant ignore the history of what has happened. As a business, Blizzard has always catered to the majority, which has been PvE. The adventure of defeating legendary enemies, exploring distant lands, and making friends along the way. This has always been what the game developers and designers strive towards. The only expansion that pushed player battle was BFA, which historically, did not do too well.
You may be lucky to get a seasonal PvP thing or spin off like plunderstorm, but trying to force a different structure when the one they has currently works is unnecessary and would require spending a bunch of money to change it, which does not sound like a smart business decision.
It was. Early Cosmic kind of tedious with 90% of games being frost/destro/hpriest and eternal was dead because wotlk but other than that was an alright time.
Especially after the dead pit of despair that was the real bad expac (bfa).
Not really true, in mop pvp was massive. That was the big boom for the pvp wow twitch streamers. They even implemented pvp to timeless isles. Then in wod they made ashran shouting out a ton of the big pvp content creators. Then in legion they added the honor level system and pvp talents allowing them to balance pvp separately from pve. The problem is none of these things targets the core problem with wow pvp which is accessibility. Having to go through all the effort of levelling then gearing before you can actually play the game is too much of a chore for most people. Especially since you aren’t even participating in the content your interested in, in order to get to those things. At least in games like league you play the actual game you want to play while leveling up your account to access ranked.
If they either had a streamline way for pvpers to level up by playing pvp it would make it a low more accessible for people.
Also even if wow had a “pvp mode” that gave you a max level char with full gear insta there’s the whole ui/keybind/addon issue before the finding teammate aspect and it’s just…not something that can really work like other pvp games.
Okay so like leveling is insane fast and gearing is insanely fast but neither are really the issue as we can see right now. Like, maybe it helps or maybe it’s even detrimental because you just run into the above boosted char syndrome of people having easily setup and obtainable chars instead of a meaningful or enjoyable thing to work on
Sure and average players in like league just play norms and aram. Those average players would be able to q things like skirms and bg’s.
So the ui thing is kinda annoying, but honestly if they put in the effort to implement this system I’m sure they’d build in something like gladius or sarena into the game. And you really only need that to play the game. Things were different back then but I got r1 only using gladius. You don’t need a million different addons and weak auras to play the game.
As for the teammates problem, they have solo shuffle and bg blitz. You aren’t required to have teammates to play the game anymore, it’s still an option but not required.
The problem with levelling though is that you aren’t even playing the game you want to play. If you installed wow solely to pvp, it’s weird that you have to do all this non pvp stuff just to be able to play the game.
Every game has boosters, using them as an excuse to prevent progress isn’t a viable reason. If there are more players you will be less likely to run into a booster. And for solo modes it’s a lot harder to boost since you need to actually account share to do it. Also as you said it’s really fast and easy to gear and level, there’s already practically 0 barrier to entry for boosters.
I think what gets lost in all of this is PvP requires a certain level of playing ability and toon. One cannot just start PvP with a low level toon and not expect to get wiped just logging in.
PvE at least allows for toon growth, PvP doesn’t.
Why PvP if you know your going to get wiped just for showing up?
the issue isn’t barriers to entry, as those have never been easier, it’s the game. like m+ design is the direction they’ve gone and it’s made pvp gameplay boring when you’re lucky and masochistic when you’re not. 80% of the match might as well be against an enemy npc. that combined with 8 different version of the same game / mode.
you can download league and play draft. and everyone is playing draft because there’s no other ranked mode to play. the game is balanced and gameplay is designed around pvp solely because pvp is the entire game.
i still like this game because it’s unique. 3v3 arena mmo is cool and it’s fun and they capitalized on that for a while, but they seem to have a different vision now for the gameplay imo.
This has literally always been the biggest problem. Just to play pvp you need to buy the xpac and sub. Then level and gear a character all before you can play the game you want to play. And even with that you can only play 1 class, you get to see 1 aspect of the game. If you want to try something else you have to do all of that again. That is an insane barrier to entry. Most people won’t even consider trying to play the game having to do all that before hand.
Dude, everything is falling apart because Blizz is making a session game out of MMO and here is the result, it’s not interesting. But we all see how people are interested in classics.
That’s why WoW isn’t a PvP game. PvP is a mini game and it will never be competitive. The best we can get are balance changes a few times a season + seasonal mogs and mounts. People need to face this reality and stop coming up with wacky ideas.
They should cater directly to the PvP crowd they already have and this is actually an important rule in business, take care of your current customers.
Catering to anyone else, or advertising to new people is pointless.
Sure but they’ve failed to do that for the last 4 expansions or so, so why would they do that now? This entire conversation is in a fairy land where blizzard actually gives a crap about pvp in any way. So if we’re in fairy land might as well dream big. Also these changes would improve things for the current crowd aswell. So it’s killing two birds with one stone.
I mean compared to league and Fortnite where they have like million dollar rewards for tournaments. Which is what people seem to constantly compare WoW to. Like people think that making WoW free will attract those players, but it won’t. They’re completely different games and WoW isn’t a game you can jump into and start raiding, or PvPing. It’s a completely different target audience and different type of competition that can never be the same.
They’ve made gearing easier, which is a change PvP people wanted. Whether, or not they haven’t been listening isn’t my point. My point is that if we want to see PvP prosper they need to listen to what the players want and are having fun/are happy. Because what this does is not only retain your current player base, but will pull in like minded people through word of mouth.
But you’re right, Blizzard is greedy and they’ve been screwing us over by not listening.
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We shouldn’t be asking, how do we get new players without making dramatic changes that current PvP players will hate. We must ask, how do we improve WoW so current players are happy?
Nobody new has started playing this game in like 20 years. It’s all the same 30+ year old dudes who have been playing since 2004 and some of their wives they got hooked. Retail pvp is not fun. Every class has all the same abilities and mechanics. Classic pvp was great because of the variance and teamwork. The reward structure was so simple but still good.
Early Cosmic kind of tedious with 90% of games being frost/destro/hpriest and eternal was dead because wotlk but other than that was an alright time.