Why does a majority of the WoW population avoid pvp?

[Queen of Hamsters]

I don't like the attitudes of PVPers. 9 times out of 10, massive asshats I've encountered in-game have been involved in casual PVP. And casual PVP is where I'd land.

Going to make an effort for the Vicious saddles, but with an organized team. Can't wait for the new experiences tbf.

[Zenfoldor]

I don't like the idea of relearning how to pvp. There is too much to know. To pvp properly you need to know the current patches iteration of each class and spec and how to properly combat them. You also need to know how to do your job properly and pvp in groups. They could fix most of my problems with pvp by doing the following:

1. Providing an in game tutorial vs each class, for my class. This tutorial would be a minor undertaking and would need to be updated about twice every retuning. Are there tutorials online? Link to them. Don't make me to research outside of the game to stay current.
2. Provide a real incentive to PVP, not a purse. Something huge but not mandatory for throughput. Something obtainable.

A perfect example of this is Symphony of the Night. In the library, you could purchase tutorials for each boss and watch a highly skilled developer fight the boss using all possible techniques to dispatch it. It was all done within the game's interface and it is very possible to do in WoW. Such a tutorial would also reveal which classes you shouldn't fight. An infographic that links to the tutorial with classes that dominate you 1v1 would also be ideal.

I figure a single moron into pvp could put this tutorial together in about a week, and drop it in game. Imagine the dungeon journal but for pvp. The reward could be the ability to be invulnerable in world pvp, or to have power over others in non-instanced. You just need a big carrot to get people started, then if pvp is any good they will stay.

[oplawlz]

Arenas killed wow pvp for me. Before they had to try to balance for that hot garbage I had a lot of fun in bgs, although admittedly ability pruning would have killed it for me anyway, had they still done it in an arena-less reality.

[mmowin]

This. My experiences with pvp are mostly limited to being stunlocked by someone in stealth and then having to watch my char being murdered without being able to do shit.

Galathir, that description was epic. I actually LOL'd at that. Yeah I can see how that would be infuriating.

[Lochton]

I PvP, PvE and RP - I like them all, really.

[Deleted]

I dislike it, because crowd controls are not rare but very common. I want to play, not watch my char shaking her head or running in fear. I also dislike the cowards running away, you should get punished for running away, not rewarded by hots ticking and "out of range bug", due to latency. If you turn your back to an enemy you should be dead. Lately I feel quite ok in the open world, I never attack people as a first aggressor, but when people attack me I can kill them or escape pretty easily. As long as it's not a group attacking. In BGs and arenas my char feels so much less powerful, due to bad stat templates in pvp and also the forced itemleveldownscale. There is no sense of character progress at all.

Remove all CC from PvP, add taking damage to your back makes an immense dmg multiplier, last but not least remove pvp templates and itemlevelcap and it should be fun.

[Cynep]

People largely don't play the game to get the message that they suck.

Hey Osmeric, I saw this thought in like several dozen posts by you, and since we're discussing PvP right now, I'm going to disagree this time. "you suck" message is linked to low self esteem of the sucking person. In PvP we all have winrates somewhere around 50%, and losing half the time doesn't mean you suck. I actually have a friend with ~46% winrates in two different games, that's a bit low to be honest. But he's a confident fella in real life, he's just having fun, and it doesn't even occur to him at all that "he sucks". Not all people have low self esteem.

[Varitok]

World PvP became like a huge decrease of fun to me. So much so that I switched servers. World PvP is just ganking really and instanced PvP is a terrible time for alliance 90% of the time, I wanna enjoy it but Its just not that great.

[yetgdhfgh]

I started out on a PVP server and i hated it! It was just a contstant gankfeast the moment i started till the moment blizz offered a free server change back before cata which i bit there hand off to get onto a PVE server and i have never looked back.

If i want to PVP i will go and do a BG thank you very much not be jumped by gank squads or Rogues who always gets the firsts shots in.

[Deleted]

WoW pvp is like eating soup with a fork. You are never really satied, you are never really satisfied.


The massive amounts of CC, stuns, silences, roots makes the experience very jerky. Its never fun to not be able to play a game.

If you pick up FIFA and get trashed 9-0, you at least got to play, you got to control characters on the screen. If you shit up CSGO, at least you got to run around and shoot. If you play Mario Kart online, and you are dead last, at least you got to drive a cart around and throw bananas. WoW is not like that. Also those other games last x amount of time, before the matches are done. In WoW if you fuck up, the game is over, back to loading screen, queue up again, wait for match to start etc.


Playing WoW arena, is like if you played Super Mario Bros. and someone took your controller from you every 10 seconds, or if you played Pokemon who would freeze up for 2-3 turns randomly. To avoid this, and to get to play, you have to pillar hump or turn the tables on the enemy, essentially you are playing to just play the game. Its fundamentally not fun.


They need more mechanics than people just doing their PvE rotations on each other, but abundance of CC is not the answer.

[Dug]

WoW before anything else is about it's PvE and the game is designed primarily with that goal. PvP has always been the side show for those that are interested in it. For me though I do enjoy PvP but I only dabble in it casually. The hardcore stuff takes up time I'd rather use playing proper PvP games

[Pebrocks The Warlock]

Why is it not fun for you, my dude? I really wanna know.

Everyone else in the thread answered for me, cheers.

[TheVaryag]

Call me ignorant I guess, but i've read that only about 5-10% of players participate in pvp like arena / battlegrounds etc. I've always been curious about this. Do WoW players just hate PVP in general or do they get more joy out of slaying dragons instead? Someone help me out here. btw I participate in both pve and pvp. I like both aspects of the game a lot.

Did you try PvP In legion? It's horrificly bad, and not all people want to be competative In general so PvPing isn't for everyone, just like raiding Isn't.

But now more than ever, PvPing Is broken as shite and uninteresting In Legion. PvP brawls? Who cares, you add snow to an old battleground with less vision and call It content? Comeone Blizz.

PvPing In Legion is broken due to a few simple reasons:

1. No Guaranteed high end gear, very random, too much RNG, loot crate based gear drops for PvP gear, and even then PvE gear Is way more superior

2. Artifact Power grind - If you don't grind, you'll fall behind and be weaker objectively so. So you have to do 75 % PvE in order to be strong enough to play PvP and stand a chance

3. Getting gear from PvE - as mentioned above, you -have- to grind PvE to get better gear, you spam-run world quests and Mythic + In order to get better gear which Is horrificly bad. Kind of the same point as the 1st one, but oh well.

4. Loosing gives you nothing - this time around, If you loose In a BG you get literally nothing, your time has been wasted, no crate box, not even pity honour, and thats the least you got back then, at least -some- honour. Only if you win do you get a good amount of honor and then a loot crate box that will have worse gear than the one you grinded In Mythic + anyway.

And that's off the top of my head, PvPing Is horrificly broken In legion and I don't blame anyone for not wanting to participate, and only the true fanboys, competative and competionist people are ontop of It.

[Whitehatter]

no wow of version hutt-ball..... yet :P lol

[Deleted]

This. My experiences with pvp are mostly limited to being stunlocked by someone in stealth and then having to watch my char being murdered without being able to do shit.

PvE is fair. It's designed to be fair. In PvP you deal with other humans. Humans are unfair scumbags.

Pretty much this. Especially undergeared, being farmed constantly, corpse running, corpse waiting for respawn timer. Waiting game pvp is.
Plus, namecalling, swearing makes it totally repulsive to me.

[Sam the Wiser]

PvP, is just getting worse and worse each expansion. Legion finally broke me and I don't even try anymore.

[Deleted]

I don't personally massively enjoy PvP in terms of the battlegrounds, but I do enjoy aspects of the world pvp.

The idea I conjure up of me crossing the path of someone from the horde and triumphing is a great feeling.

That being said, 90% of the time I am stunlocked into submission or 5 other horde come screaming in on mounts and then I have to rez behind a rock and run like hell.

But that 10%!...

[derpkitteh]

idk. but i have noticed that pvp and higher tier pve tend to be where the muck collects in wow's community, the kind of people that are usually just intolerable. maybe that has something to do with it.

[Teaon]

world pvp yield no benefit, other than time waste

[Zuben]

I don't PvP in WoW, because

1) It feels like a tacked-on feature, with class design being forced to accommodate two different gameplay types, PvE and PvP, the former being priority. There are lots of games out there that are all about PvP, like HotS and Overwatch. Years in the past I found some enjoyment out of WoW PvP, because I didn't play other PvP games at the time.
2) It has an enhancement element to it (gear). I hate enhancements in my PvP. Take HotS, you only have the abilities and talents of a hero to work with, so it's up to your knowledge and skill to how effective that hero is. At the start of a match, an enemy Illidan is exactly as powerful as your Illidan. I heard it's not as bad in WoW these days, but it's still there to some degree.
3) It doesn't further the lore. The most compelling lore events happen in a raid, while a battleground match is a random skirmish.

Point 2 would be fixed for me if PvP gear was turned into cosmetic gear and every player would have set stats to work with, putting everyone at the same level with only knowledge and skill determining who's better. So, no more progression in PvP, just non-combat rewards like cosmetic gear, mounts, titles etc. A ranking system to honor the best players of their respective battlegroup.

This would actually make PvP rather charming for me, though Point 1 still weights heavily on it. Perhaps it's best if Blizzard caters to current PvP players rather than changes things too much to accommodate non-PvP players.