Originally Posted by
Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
PvP is an intrinsic part of World of Warcraft. Just the fact that players have to choose one of two factions that are at war with one another is proof enough of that.
Nevertheless, if you follow WoW since the very beginning, you can see the evolution that PvP went through until now.
Initially, there wasn’t even any instanced PvP content at all. Battlegrounds were introduced a few months after the game was launched and Arenas only came with the first expansion.
Meanwhile you had a lot of PvE content being pushed out, new raids, new dungeons, new items, new quests… but this is beside the point, it’s not fair to compare the amount of PvE to PvP content, they’re two completely different beasts.
PvE players will never be happy if we let content stagnate, that’s just the nature of PvE Content. It needs constant and regular updates. Players also expect to progress, and it’s even more complex than that, because they also expect content to remain challenging. (Players’ experience rises, and the new content’s difficulty has to match it)
PvP players on the other hand are much more likely to be happy with less content updates and less changes, as they tend to focus on balance and gameplay mechanics.
With this in mind and given that there are many more players interested on the PvE than the on the PvP side of WoW, I think it comes as no surprise that PvE uses a lot more resources than PvP does.
Things can get even more complicated when you start to look at what drives players and what their motivations are, for example, item upgrades and character power progression are concepts that pose a challenge to PvP balance, but whether you like it or not, it became one of the main drives for a lot of PvP players, so PvE and PvP are actually tangled with each other on many aspects.
You can try to make a distinction and say that those are actually “PvE players” that enjoy PvP as a way to progress their characters, but does that really matter? Maybe it does, but the fact is, there are more players interested into PvP than the “hardcore” PvP crowd.
WoW is a game where PvE and PvP are supposed to be mixed, the open world is the best example of that, it’s neither exclusively PvE nor PvP, it’s both at the same time. That was the essence of PvP in WoW, to let players fight each other whenever they go face to face in the open world, and ideally that should feel seamless. I know it’s not really seamless at the moment (especially with the controversy about world-PvP), but maybe we can do something about that in the future.
The topic being discussed is a very hard problem to solve and I really appreciate your thoughts on it, I know how frustrating it can be when certain things occasionally affect PvP. I’ve always been into both arenas and raiding, and I try my best to have an unbiased view on the subject, I think a lot of you do too, and we just have to realize that there is no easy and perfect solution for this, what you can expect though is that we will do our very best (and your feedback really helps) to make both PvE and PvP coexist "peacefully" at the same time in the same game.