Would like to address this directly because it’s obvious this season participation is pretty down. Saying a season or PvP is dead is thrown around a lot but there is no denying participation could actually be at an all time low, except for maybe S4 of Shadowlands. Hard to know though because this is all gauged off rated PvP and we don’t have hard numbers or know how active non rated PvP is. But from my experience queues times are up in BGs.
Balancing is happening more often but it still hasn’t been perfect. Funny enough the biggest issues have come off reworks like Ret and a completely new spec with Aug Evoker.
Gearing is 100% better and what we (I) wanted. There could be a little more catch up later in the season for conquest level gear for alts but overall it’s good. But there are a lot of things that still need to be done to make PVP more active and to get more players doing it. I would actually say other than the beginning S1 RSS participation has continued to get worse, which yes it is normal for participation to go down from the start of an expac, but it has gotten worse that it has been in a while and definitely worse than S2 of Slands. Still a lot to be done, and reaction time to a lot of things still hasn’t been great.
We are almost to the 10.2 patch of the expansion and we still haven’t gotten a PvP dev interview since the day DF was announced and while all kinds of great content is being added every patch, there is nothing or no indication for PvP YET. I say yet because I know something is happening, just not sure what or what purpose it will serve yet.