I did some arena back in TBC and although I don’t remember my rating, I remember getting challenger every season and one or two seasons I got a different rank like rival.
In wrath I had the achievement for over 2200 in 3’s and 5’s and on arena junkies I was one of the top rated mages on my server. I remember it being difficult to gain points at a certain point because everyone we were fighting had their top tier arena weapons. Once we finally got the arena rating that unlocked our highest tier weapons it got easier because we were equally geared to everyone else and we climbed a couple hundred more points. I think the highest rating I ever hit was around 2350.
I quit in early cata and I came back for legion and played for about 2 months and quit again and decided I don’t like modern WoW. I came back for classic and for tbc. I’ve been doing some arena again but I’m getting smashed at significantly lower ratings. In TBC this time around, I don’t expect to ever hit 1850 rating based on how much harder it is to win games. 2k rating for me is completely out of the question.
Are only the best PvPers doing arena now? Could my skills regress that much in 10 years? What the heck is going on?
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TBCC has only 160k active players logged on ironforge. We can still be super generous and say there is 500k people playing. Compared with TBC which had over 8 million users.
Do the math.
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Add to that Retail WoW & SoM will and do constantly take players away… TBCC takes their players too tho.
There’s no casual arena playerbase for arena TBC this time around. The population are people who specifically play this game for arena - so you’re going to face people who played arena on private servers, people from retail who are bored of retail arena, etc.
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There is a huge barrier to entry for TBC arena with honor grind, arena pt grind, lvling engi for the belt, getting the chicken.
Oh and don’t forget people willing to respec to a proper build every time they want to queue some games
The rating requirements etc made all the casuals pretty much quit, so you only really play against tryhards
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only 30k people have an arena rating, ~10% of the playerbase plays arena
dead system
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Yeah, the honor grind is now a lot worse with the changes to AV being live at the start of TBC classic. It wasn’t until late in TBC that the lieutenants and such were removed. Before they were removed, AV was an easy 1500-2000 honor whenever it was the featured BG of the weekend.
Also, in the original TBC, the first two seasons had no rating requirements whatsoever on any loot. With honor flowing from AV and getting a solid 350 points a week for just losing with a fresh 5v5 team that started at a 1500 rating, PvP was the path of least resistence to good gear.
Fast forward to TBC classic and neither the honor nor the arena points come as easy and the points you do get aren’t that helpful to people who primarily focus on PvE since you can’t buy current weapons without a rating. Couple that with PvE being much more accessible itself due to player improvement and now you have an arena system the provides basically no reward to people who might otherwise PvP casually. The bottom dropped out. The teams people used to beat to get to a 2k rating no longer exist.
The proper thing to do would have been to probably replace the weapon with something like the helm in terms of rating requirement. The shoulders and helm really bring the look together, so casual PvPers may not obtain the cool asthetic, but they could at least get the one piece of gear that helps them even in PvE (weapons).
If they made that change for S3, I guarantee arena participation would skyrocket. BT/MH quality weapons guaranteed for doing arena for 30-45 minutes a week for 6-7 weeks?
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Are you saying TBC of today is a dead game compared to how it originally was?
In TBCC weapons are very important… The rating helps keep those in the hands of dedicated pvpers and not PvErs looking to score EZ loots.
This is a really important topic and the answers to it are pretty much the same answers I’ve been giving to what’s wrong with the rollout of TBCC.
No casual base as others have alluded to, this has a lot to do with the fact they only marketed the game to the existing WoW playerbase on social media and elsewhere. They need a modern campaign to push it out and sell it on it’s features, don’t even bother mentioning that it’s a 15 year old game to people who don’t know, that part is unnecessary because it’s still the best MMO.
Not enough paladins and shamans due to problems communicating the expectations about the leveling experience that come along with the implications of a paid level boost, which doesn’t help with comp balance and diversity depending on your class / faction combo.
They’re also strapping the modern MMR system on which has some odd consequences for climbing rating. The ladders in general are just very different. You don’t have split battlegroups, but your starting rating is also lower. I’m not sure if there’s more or less people overall on US ladder active in TBCC as compared to say, BG9 or any single highly populated BG before, but that would have implications.
I’m a 2650 Gladiator (wrath, cata, wod) whose pretty much on my game and even though I haven’t had a ton of time to farm arenas especially with T5 raids, I probably don’t expect to surpass 2200 by very much this season- the meaning of numbers really changes based upon a given season and how long it has been running though.
There weren’t a ton of casuals to begin with. The fact they took forever to fix BG queues was probably a lot more impactful, I know it was for my friends at least. There were harsh rating reqs. on the best gear in S4 and pretty much all of Wrath yet those were highly popular.
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As other’s have stated: There are no casuals playing arena.
This is partly because the game is old and because blizzard did everything they could to make arena as unappealing as possible with some of the changes they made.
Arena could have been amazing once again if blizzard had the capacity to realize the casual player base is essential for the overall experience. Sadly, they’re so unaware that they’re more concerned about players getting easy PVE upgrades from arena than anything else.
Blizzard lost thousands of subscribers by making arena too hard core. Honor should have been easier to farm. NO rating requirements on gear. No starting at zero points for arena teams.
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I really think this one is overstated, during S1 the honor gear was competitive, they just needed to make sure people could actually get it. Everyone doesn’t need to be in full glad gear for there to be a thriving ladder, PvP just needs to be fun and engaging at multiple levels.
I haven’t looked at the S1 gear now that we’re in S2 but I’m pretty sure shoulders / weapons reqs. were removed or at least reduced??
Missing 1-2 pieces of gear is not going to keep you from competing though, that’s min/max stuff at that point which you can sub PvE or other pieces for.
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Although only a partial reason, I would have to say the average skill of players across the board is much higher than in the past.
The arena player base was small even in retail TBC. It has basically always been.
Excuse my ignorance—but which chicken are you talking about? Just want clarification
Skull of impending doom I believe. Causes you to take damage so you’re immune to cc for a short duration. Can help against mage/rogue etc but will take up an offhand slot. Also causes addons to show a chicken and I think you flap your arms or something
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I got the blue set from reputation and the staff from Kara and we were hard stuck 1500-1600 for a week or so and then something clicked then we shot up to 2k.
I was 2450 something in wrath but still had to sit and grind out games and watch videos for stats. I recommend finding a partner who just wants to spam games and not worry about your win/loss until you feel you’re comfortable. Good luck
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Okay—I was thinking about either the Battle Chicken or the Poultryizer. Thanks for the clarification 
I think he is saying that the pool is much smaller and it results in less people getting what they want out of arena and the cycle of less and less people Qing continues because its a grind to get higher raiting for the rewards against the same half dozen teams.
Tbh in my experience when our team Qs we are lucky to see more than 2-3 other teams in our “bracket” so to speak in 3v3.
Wait for WOTLK/S5 like everyone else.
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