As people above have said, it’s a niche part of the game that encourages hard-core play. If you try to get into it? You’ll die, and die, and die for ages before you begin to improve. And the rewards for doing so are minimal. You’ve failed, so don’t tend to get transmogs or better loot. Versus PvE where even LFG and world quests will see you steadily improving.
Worse, the gear needed is on its own separate track - meaning when you hit 70 and want to do it, you’re going to be at a disadvantage until you’ve been farmed enough to get a set that gives you some survivability.
It’s kind of a wonder PvP is played as much as it is tbh.
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if i wanna pvp ill play a pvp game, mmo pvp just never really been my cup of tea.
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Because I don’t have a good friend that is into PVP or is dedicated to it. That and, it isn’t my number 1 priority
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Because the people in pvp are even more elitist and aggro than the m+ crowd. If you mess up at all you are likely to get kicked without warning and blacklisted. And the good teams are already made and don’t want anyone else or new competition. If you don’t have 2400+ rating from some past season you may as well forget about ranked pvp
Oh and only cookie cutter FOTM specs are allowed, if you don’t fall into that it’s over before it even started
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I do pvp every now and then but it isn’t my favorite. The biggest reason I don’t is because there are other games I enjoy better for pvp. I enjoy the structure of MOBAs much more where it isn’t just TDM that wins the game but a set determined victory point. I know WoW’s BGs aren’t all TDMs but they’re all just hold points and different flavors of CTF. Epic BGs are even worse and just races to see who can beat a PVE boss.
Second biggest reason, is the gameplay loop isn’t fun and too focused on healers. Healers swing things far too much. In a BG, if a team doesn’t have a healer they tend to get rolled and with the way random matchmaking works, sometimes you just end up on those teams. In arena healers basically force the game into long drawn out snooze fests of trying to chain CC the healer long enough to burst down the weakest member and then win the game from there.
The issue with gearing and rewards as others have already brought up doesn’t help either.
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I did a fair amount of PvP in vanilla/TBC/Wrath but that was only because there was nothing else to do at max level for the most part. When I wasn’t doing dungeons I was usually just standing around a capital city or something so I’d just queue up for BGs or go do Wintergrasp. Nowadays the bar has been raised so high now and there is a bunch of other stuff to do in game that I wouldn’t even bother trying to get started.
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Pvp is boring and im not a competitive person. I just want to play an RPG with friends. I don’t care about my honor rating or collecting mounts.
The barrier to entry is just too high and not fun. I want to do RBG’s so I look for a group. Every group is glad lead link xp. Ok so I start my own group and get facerolled by players in full conquest. Why go through the trouble when I can just jump in a +10 and have a blast within 30 minutes.
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Because it’s not balanced the way PVP is in competitive games. You don’t start a game of CSGO with an ak because you have more hours in an aim train server. You don’t get a divine at the start of a DOTA game because you killed 400 creeps last game. Everyone starts the game at the same level. You don’t get an ATV and jetpack in soccer because the team’s owner bought a bunch of soccer tokens and went to the market and bought them. You get a piece of standard equipment like shoes, shirt and short and then the rest is on you. You can’t put like springs or rockets in your shoes and just have and crazy advantage. People naturally look at being able to buy power with real money in the game as naturally unfair. So the inherent value of the competition is massively diminished. That’s why people are against doping. You can buy gold then buy gear, there’s no competition there. The entire purpose of competition is so see who is the best under the same circumstances. If you take away the same circumstances there is no point. When people get 1 shot by someone the same level, they are right to say that is unfair because the game implies the system they are using is there to see who is the best.
PVE is a different game entirely.
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In the recent survey they did PVP was second only to M+
Lotsa people pvp.
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Because the balance is insanely awful, and if you want to compete you have to have a ton of add-ons which turns people away. Plus the toxicity of the wow community peaks harder than the forums / mythic plus community when it comes to the pvp playerbase. Plus Blizzard doesn’t care and haven’t added a battleground since 2018 while the current battlegrounds are suffering from lack of polish / balance.
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What I’ve always wondered is how that subclass breaks down.
What percentages do primarily rated stuff versus random stuff?
Doesnt matter. PVP is number 2
This is an mmorpg mate. Character progression exists. Time investment matters.
I understand that many people want to fotm reroll with impunity and claim pvp should only be about “skill.” The sheer number of backpedaling ret pallies in S1 is more than enough evidence.
Of coarse when it’s PvP it’s time investment matters but when it’s pve it’s challenge matters.
Other MMOs have done similar and with much more success than WoW. GW2 is far more PVP focused than most MMOs out on the market, and their approach to having a dedicated segregated set of PVP equipment, sigils, enchants, and talents has made for a lower barrier of entry, and as a result, PVP is one of, if not THE MOST, active part of the game’s community.
Character progression doesn’t need to be isolated solely to gear progression.
For the most part, the WoW demo is working class adults. So 8 hours a day, this game tends to be slower than the other 16.
But in the “busy” 16 hours … you can find “on average” about 30 M+ groups, for any one dungeon, at any given time. That’s 1,200 players AT ANY GIVEN TIME across all 8 dungeons. M+ groups don’t take that long to form, 5-10mins on average.
1,200 players EVERY 5 mins. Give or take.
Meanwhile… it easily takes more than 30 mins for do a solo shuffle. And that’s the game AUTOMATING the group process. M+ is orders of magnitude slower by comparison because it’s people looking at stats before accepting a player.
It’s not a direct apples-to-apples comparison, but if you don’t call that “PvP is popular!” stat into question, I don’t know what to tell you. It’s obviously not true, and/or, the stats that make it true are ridiculously misleading.
You might get me to agree that PvP has a niche audience that NEVER WAVERS. Maybe PvE players are more likely to dip-out on content they don’t like. But PvP in this game is its weakest link… BY FAR. It’s silly to suggest otherwise.
Think of the HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS of hours that are spent developing any part of the PvE experience. Would you now care to tell us when the last time a new BG was put in the game??
This is a PvE game. To say PvP is an afterthought is a dramatic understatement. And there are too many reasons to illustrate why. But it can all be summed up in: it’s a terrible, wretched experience.
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based on my old thread about this whole thing… here is what i think the reasons are:
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Barrier of entry: pvp is simply hard for most people, its frustrating, and people may not like to admit to themselves but they enjoy what is either easy or what they can suceed.
Challenges are fun when you can suceed on them, when you are just frustating yourself over and over you simply quit, thats how most players are.
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its not simply go play pvp, there is many things you need to prepare yourself until you can play it… you need the gear, buy enchants, prepare the macros, download the addons, prepare your UI, watch meta builds and how to play them and so on.
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pvp does not get much content and apparently people really do not like how we did not got a new bg for a long time, and arena is not as popular since people prefer either bgs or open world pvp.
And yet, rbg is dead and open world pvp as it is can get ruined quite easily since this is not phase 2 classic, this is simply… i got numeric advantage or gear adantage or surprise advantage and therefore i win, so it stops being fun quite quickly.
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elitism… how do you get accepted and invited to groups in pugs? you have achievment of ten years ago of prestige of how good of a pvp veteran you are, you are a past dueslist/gladiator with huge mmr experience and gametime.
So basically, if you are bad or new to the thing people won’t have the patience to deal with you beucase they want to win… its similar to the M+ problem, however m+ its far easier to get around it, there is many ways you can deal with it.
As for pvp? nope, this is what you get… and having friends to play pvp ranked constantly is also not easy, and take venruki for example he got a lot of glad friends and they rarely want to play so… yeah, its a problem even with a rank 1 level player.
its no wonder solo shuffle its extremely more popular than the other modes, because you don’t have to deal with many of the problems… but then people get frustrated because dps queues takes forever because there is not enough healers.
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WoW PvP hasn’t been good or fun since like MoP.
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like someone posted above , pvp should be determined by skill not gear, pvp gear should always be equal , really nice looking cosmetics is what should be rewarded.