I mean they’re there, but not many and theyre waay down at like 1200. Back in cata up to 1600 was all backpedaling clickers with no idea how to play. Not saying i want more teams that i can steamroll (although i wouldn’t complain), but i think the influx of new pvp players is good for pvp and the ladder since those players eventually turn into mid tier players.
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There is no incentive to do rated stuff now. You get nothing of any value and its not worth dealing with the whiny spoiled raging children that cant handle 1 loss.
Risk/reward ya know?
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Not enough people queing at any rating level.
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TBH I had no issues stomping my way through placement games with 10-0 on my mains this season, but the matchmaking was kind of terrible because it gave me 1300-1800 players when we were starting at 2k mmr from last season. It’s gotta be discouraging for the average player just trying to get some practice in and start the season but queuing into multi Glad / R1 players on the regular.
Even at 2k+ CR this season in 2s and 3s I haven’t experience very many players that aren’t previous Glad / R1 xp when I queue. The casual players just aren’t participating right now and that’s a big issue for all ends of the ladder, both low and high
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Fought Fuse on my Warlock when I was 1700 trying to learn Demo. My random Disc priest partner was mad we lost and dropped group right after. Fought Pikaboo on my 1800 Ret. Just got done fighting an ilvl 440 Arms War on his S7 Glad mount on my 1700 WW alt. Everything seems fine.
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its wild, I think it has something to do with the lfg community. When Im playing alts with my rl friends we are literally stuck at 1400 rated, 0 xp lfg healers rage and dip after 1 game, and it takes a while to find one.
Also even at 1500 rating Im facing people that know exactly what they are doing. In wrath/cata I could get 1800 with ease 1v2 vs backpedallers, and I was much worse back then. Game is ded and it shows
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Every time I fight pikaboo I just imagine he’s living up to his character name: “Suprise mother f*#+~r!” and then I’m dead.
You gotta remember everyone has access to streaming, YouTube, and icy veins now to figure out how to do their rotations, what cooldowns to use, talent choices, and how to CC properly.
The gaming industry has also advanced quite a bit so people are used to binding abilities and utilizing addons that didn’t used to exist pre-Cata/MoP/WoD etc.
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Truu, the general skill level has gone up so much + its easier to be effective now because of BFA class design
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Yeah simplified classes is also a HUGE factor.
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I think back then 1500 was like the starting point pretty much. Even when we had teams, they’d start at 1500 rating and seeing people below, close to 1400 rating was even rare.
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That’s true but most wins would only give you 6-9 points each, maybe 10 if you beat a much higher rated team. Even worse at very high rating you would get 1-3 points for a win, and -20+ for a loss.
It took a lot longer to actually gain to 1800+, especially since dampening did not exist and matches could go on indefinitely.
yea, some of my mythic raider friends are making a genuine effort to get into arena atm, and I can only imagine their pain, they play disc priest healer and they ask me what to do vs melee cleaves and it was 15/18 games for them last night.
Must be incredibly discouraging to go vs something with such a low skill floor that facerolls them doing nothing skillful. Theyre raiders so ask how they lose when they do the most damage. This is all for zero rewards. I think most sane people would just give up at this point.
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Yeah I agree. Part of learning arena though is that max damage isn’t important if you never learn your win condition or how to CC/Kick a healer, swapping to another target and not blasting into defensives, etc. Some comps like TSG / Turbo / TWD their win condition is just maximum dps until cooldowns or mana is gone.
Other comps like Jungle/Cupid/RMX play to CC and do insane dps when the healer is CC’d.
The hardest part about arena is first learning your class, and then learning everyone else’s too 
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Sounds more like a matter of counter comp rng
Faced a warlock in 3s last night at 1600 MMR who had upwards of 375k health, genuinely don’t understand how you can even get that high
The playerbase has just gotten better at the game over the years as a whole. Combined with they raised the skill floor and lowered the skill ceiling.
Resources and macros are also common place now a days. At almost any time of the day I can go watch a tourney level healer, but back in cata you pretty much had to pay for skill capped.
Back then also if u knew about macros that was an ez 2k at least, but now everyone has the macros and such.
This is one of the main things wrong, The ammount of multi glads/rank 1s and their alts that are in the lower brackets, prevent anyone from climbing or even getting a foot into rated pvp. back in wrath and mop id que into some big names and have fun facing them an accept my loss or celebrate my victory and try to learn what to do to make things go better next time. but in bfa there are so many multi glads an rank 1s stuck in the lower bracket because there is just no1 to climb off, not to mention the skill cap between a rank 1 and a average player is pretty low now, considering class balance is at an all time low. i cant tell the difference in a dk/dh/rogue/war/mage/lock/ww on whose a god tier player and who is just some guy pressing W and pve rotationing on you using his cooldowns whenever they are up.
4 Likes
Relying on lfg sub 2.1k feels pretty awful. Generally only see people wanting “meta comps” which is whatever. Or there is some belief of false superiority after every loss, where it’s some how everyone else’s fault.
Tl;dr low rated folks are meta slaves that don’t think they deserve their rating and get all pissed off.
2 Likes
They are still in the game . But they are now playing at 2200. Those low skilled noobs spend time grinding gear, gear=rating now.