What single factor most contributed to the decline of Wow PVP?

[MightyMooz]

In my opinion I feel that the game PvP wise is broken, Blizzard has mentioned previously that the game will never be based around PvP. My only concerns to that statement are; when does a certain class need the current utilities for any given PvE scenario? I started back in the BC days when laziness+ WoW did not equal gain.. You had 1hr long AV's that were EPIC, heck you would log out in a BG for dinner and when you logged back in that same AV was taking place with Horde or Alliance turtling at the end Boss. They never had "time limits" on a battleground, reinforcements never stacked as fast as they do now, the honor cap was 75k and gear would cost upwards of 4k to 15k, please don't quote me on that, my memory of BC is growing feint. The game took skill rather than just rolling an OP class. My first level 70 character was a night elf druid bear, and I tell yah, you were never able to use bark skin like you can now days, it would bring you out of bear into physical form. Rogues needed reagents for Vanish, they also needed to level poisons and buy the materials needed to make each poison.

The fact you spent a majority of your time in a capital city was not to stand in front of the honor vendor or justice vendor while you pug Dungeon finder until you get capped or able to buy that piece of PvP gear, but simply for the fact that you needed to look for groups, you needed to look for a tank, healer and dps and then you had to walk your lazy ass to the meeting stone to summon, because flying was not an option and you were lucky if you had 100% mount by the level 60 bracket. Farming for professions alone was enough to put someone in cardiac arrest, you could farm items for hours and be lucky if you developed a stack of Primal "X"

The fact that skills are becoming baseline for certain classes and specs has tarnished the reputation of "WoW PvP" what ever happened to drain mana, you viper sting? Why can't a Destruction Warlock have corruption? What about eye's of the beast when a hunter would control his pet? What happened to level as a cloth wearer resulting in teeth cringing? All in all this is just a "few" of my reason why this game is at a downward spiral.

[Golden]

Personally, I would really like to see them merge random BGs and rated BGs back together again. Ratings solve a lot of problems even for PUGs.

The community would probably filter out as follows:
Bots & AFKers = 0-1200 rating.
PUG players = 1200-1700 rating.
Pre-mades = 1700-2300 rating.

This would solve a lot of problems for average players who only do random BGs...and then quit once they get all their honor gear. Most people won't go through the effort of spending many hours each week forming oQueue groups just to progress further.

The more people you can get interested in PvP, the more time Blizz will likely spend on PvP.

[Kickbuttmario]

Or you can probably accept that time is what caused wow to lose all those subs?? Seriously, people claim its all sort of reasons but I think not the guys at Blizzard can even explain why they lost so much subs. Come on, the product cycle? People possibly just losing interest? Found better games? Soul searching?? Time does all those things. My brother and I were addicted as fuck during 2008 during the Sunwell patch and we would play the game non-stop during the summer and during school. 2 months ago I tried to get back into the game but failed horribly cause I found Gw2 to be superior. I found exercising and watching comedies to be more enjoyable.

As for the video, seriously the guy is talking about sub first and later I will provide all the reasoning. Such BS.

[Luxeley]

Funny how with so many people having "the solution to making a constantly great game" - there really is no great game coming out that takes all this good advice and crushes WoW

Excellent point. And, not only do I still play WOW, I make videos about the game. You can't possibly be more accurate - "no crushes Wow." Warhammer didn't, Rift didn't, SWTOR didn't and GW2 didn't. And months before each of the aforementioned games came out, thousands of people stood on slippery soap boxes and preached about the beginning of the end of Wow. I do believe, each game, snatched away a very very small amount of subs from WOW. The problem is, Wow stood anywhere between 9-12 million upon the release of each of those games. Three more MMO's with potential rest of the horizon and the soap box process is starting all over again. The difference is, Wow possesses roughly 7.5 subs, losing 1-2 million subs is a bigger deal now than it was 2 years ago. And, I don't see anything compelling or exciting coming out of Blizzard going forward. The sauce is, what happens at Blizzcon, do they come up a flash of brilliance or utter stupidity. We'll know in roughly 2 months.

[Deleted]

Gonna give my opinions here.

1. E-Sports. Most serious PvPers are extremely competive, something WoW doesn't has anymore. Why play a game where all you get is a title and most often a rather dull looking mount for being a top player? When you can jump straight over to League of Legends or DOTA2 and participate in big ass tournaments with huge cash prizes if you become good enough? Blizzard do one tourney a year(sometimes) with a good prize, but that aint enough to keep an competive scene alive. Hell, blizzard didn't exactly really support the Bleached Bones tourney outside of a retweet on Twitter, not even mentioning it on the website or a small announcement on the Launcher.

Most high rated players doesn't care about the ladder anymore since they know they are good enough to easily take glad/r1 every season if they'd like. WoW PvP was on it's top when it MLG under it's belt, when they dropped WoW pvp has been on a steadily decline.

2. Crowd Control. The INSANE amount of CC in the game, I wont go into detail since it has already been brought up alot in this thread.

3. Lack of Rewards. Dont get me wrong, I like that they removed the Elite gear since honestly, PvP shouldn't be who brought the best gear, it should be about skill. How ever WoW is a RPG(lol) and one of the main focuses is character progression. Adding different rating rewards such as transmog gear, pets etc would maybe boost the participation in PvP.

4. Nothing for Casual PvPers. Not every players wanna go after rating, outside of random bgs and world pvp there is nothing that a casual pvper can do. Random BG's is a complete botfest and any new player entering one will most likely ignore pvp since bgs leave a sour aftertaste in your mouth. Adding skirmishes or SoloQ for non rated arena would add a bit more to do. This isnt just for casuals, since sometimes you log on and feel like playing arena but no friends online to play with. They have focused to much on the "competive scene" and left the non competive in the mud. The same mistake GW2 is currently doing now when they wanna try out E-Sport.

5. Class Balance. You can say that MoP is the most balanced expansion yet since most classes have a specc that can pretty much global you. What I dislike the most is the "rollercoaster" so to speak, they nerf the OP classes(except hunters) so hard they become total shit, while overbuffing the underpowered class so they become godlike. Every patch they "fix" one problem while adding 10 more.

6. The Learning Curve. You can say that WoW has become so easy and blabla, while it's totally false, atleast in PvP. The amount of stuff you need to know in order to play relatively good is alot. Everything from macros, how to react when enemy pop swifty etcetc. I will take League of Legends as a example, that game got a smooth learning curve, it took me 1 match after the tutorial to understand the basics. WoW and LoL is two completely different games, but one of the reason LoL is so popular is because how easy it is to learn.

7. Ignoring issues & pvp feedback. I mean.. REALLY Blizzard? A good example is Hunters, 5.2 Hunters was alot more easily managed compared to 5.3 Hunters. They did so many "nerfs" in 5.3 but no, it ended up making them worse. I wont go into 5.0 Hunters lol. The amount of time we have to wait to see any actual fixes is absurd. Waiting for a major patch for balance fixes is just stupid. I dont know why they dont just do hotfixes once every 1-2 weeks to slightly buff or nerf under/overperforming classes.

I believe how ever class balance is one of the major issues, it's a pain in the ass to meet PHP or Jungle in 3v3 due to the amount of high mongoloid damage and instant CC, unless you have lock or a shaman on your team that can protect the healer with grounding or imp dispell you're pretty much doomed. I dont know why Blizzard is so stubborn when it comes to make spells behave differently in PvP. Would make the game alot easier to balance.

[Luxeley]

7. Ignoring issues & pvp feedback. I mean.. REALLY Blizzard? A good example is Hunters, 5.2 Hunters was alot more easily managed compared to 5.3 Hunters. They did so many "nerfs" in 5.3 but no, it ended up making them worse. I wont go into 5.0 Hunters lol. The amount of time we have to wait to see any actual fixes is absurd. Waiting for a major patch for balance fixes is just stupid. I dont know why they dont just do hotfixes once every 1-2 weeks to slightly buff or nerf under/overperforming classes.

I believe how ever class balance is one of the major issues, it's a pain in the ass to meet PHP or Jungle in 3v3 due to the amount of high mongoloid damage and instant CC, unless you have lock or a shaman on your team that can protect the healer with grounding or imp dispell you're pretty much doomed. I dont know why Blizzard is so stubborn when it comes to make spells behave differently in PvP. Would make the game alot easier to balance.

You brought up a lot of intelligent and interesting points. The point about Blizzard ignoring PVP feedback is the best of them all and deserves attention. At the start of MOP Hunters, Warriors and Warlocks happened to be incredibly OP. The fact not one but 3 classes went live being so far ahead of the others was extremely poor game design. My theory on this is a bit controversial but nonetheless something worth considering. Over the years, I believe the PTR went from being an objective medium to preview new content and evolved into a means of trumpeting your own class and a way of getting ahead of the pack. Did Blizzard really ignore feedback on the said 3 classes or did they listen to ppl trumpeting change for their own class?

[worsthitmanNa]

You brought up a lot of intelligent and interesting points. The point about Blizzard ignoring PVP feedback is the best of them all and deserves attention. At the start of MOP Hunters, Warriors and Warlocks happened to be incredibly OP. The fact not one but 3 classes went live being so far ahead of the others was extremely poor game design. My theory on this is a bit controversial but nonetheless something worth considering. Over the years, I believe the PTR went from being an objective medium to preview new content and evolved into a means of trumpeting your own class and a way of getting ahead of the pack. Did Blizzard really ignore feedback on the said 3 classes or did they listen to ppl trumpeting change for their own class?

They went live like that because of pve. All of those classes were underperforming in raids. Hunters were ahead in pvp because of a bug which happens and blizzard fixed it. Stampede did retarded damage in arena because of a bug. Blizzard wondered why their weren't any complaints in the pve crowd. It was a bug and with the coding that goes into an mmo it happens. Taste for blood on the other hand should have never gone live and the same goes for the rng elemental shaman gibs.

[Durandro]

So why did Wow go from knocking on the front door of 12 million subs to 7 million subs in a 2 year span? Where did the game begin to lose integrity and quality and spark a very slow yet steady nosedive?

Gunna give you a hint: those losses were likely not PvP players for the most part (unless every single Chinese player PvP's - and that's highly doubtful, even if true it wouldn't effect anyone else in the slightest). If it was PvP related the game would have died within a year, because frankly WoW's PvP is an afterthought and not especially well implimented due to refusal to seperate mechanics properly.

But yeah, the core of PvP was never very good. The fact it got a more structured format just showed up those imbalances even more. Back when Tarren Mill was a near constant battleground no-one really knew how imbalanced it was due to uneven numbers of players, uneven levels, uneven gear, and the fact no-one had statistics to look.

Its a side show, one that needs HUGE amounts of attention if its ever going to be taken seriously by more people. True balance via seperation of PvE and PvP mechanics, more ACTIVE mitigation, less burst, less cc, more mobility, more teamwork combos (i.e. a character does more damage to stunned targets but has no personal stuns, for example). PvP needs to be about skill and class knowledge, not about gear and having the most overpowered class or team combo.

Otherwise it gets a resounding 'meh' from me and is an occasional passtime when not raiding or leveling.

- - - Updated - - -

1. E-Sports.

2. Crowd Control.

3. Lack of Rewards.

4. Nothing for Casual PvPers.

5. Class Balance.

6. The Learning Curve.

7. Ignoring issues & pvp feedback.

1/ Agreed, the game just isn't balanced around being competitive. Or even especially well balanced. When you get two average players its not a big deal, but when you get people who are good at the game then you'll see the same few classes over and over again. Its dull!

2/ Its stupid, I agree. There should be DR for all CC combined, so you can't just be CC'ed by two different spells over and over again. Being stunned to much should make you immune/resistant to Poly and Fear, for example. Having more CC breaks would also be an answer, but overcomplicates the situation.

3/ Not sure what else they can add, other then transmog gear. But then it would need to look good, otherwise who would bother?

4/ I think the game is a bit more friendly to casual PvP'ers these days. Still a grind, but at least they have catchup now. Really want that for PvE Valour.

5/ Related to 1/ but yes, class balance is a joke. The fact Blizzard can seperate mechanics (i.e. Chaos Bolt, even if its a very hamfisted fix) yet won't for the most part just hurts.

6/ PvP Proving Grounds might be a good solution. But simulating PvP situations in a PvE enviroment is tricky. Look at Faction Champions in ToC - it didn't take long to break down that they are actually threat-driven at their core still, they just focus on low health targets instead of high threat. But its a possibility. Either that or have 'Newbie Battlegrounds' with ilevel caps, and maybe PvP tooltips added to spells to teach new players.

7/ This is partially due to Blizzard's stubborness with PvE and PvP keeping the same mechanics. Nerf/buff one thing and you unbalance the other. I don't want to feel underpowered in raids (Destro being pretty much annihilated due to PvP - where they still actually aren't THAT good) because of PvP, or vice versa.

[Azaile-]

The introduction of the Arena.

[Deleted]

For me arena

[Deleted]

Class homogenization destroyed PvP.

[Malgru]

Devs. theres a reason AT has so many players.

[Deleted]

Why even mentioning Swifty macros? It's called CD stacking, it existed in games long before WoW. You guys are very silly.

[Fiberwire]

IMO, the downfall of WoW pvp is simple. the dumb down tactics blizzard is trying to induce to make the game more "accessible" to everyone. Now, from a business stand point this is a great idea, but really is hurting the game with the changes to resil and stats. Pvp isn't for everyone. thats something that people need to realize.

[Elsif]

The addition of Resil, and their resulting inability and/or unwillingness to separate PvP class mechanics from PvE class mechanic.

[GrieverXIII]

I'd say when the high end scene stopped playing the game for fun and started nickle and diming it with Glad/2400/2200 boosts and streaming.

[Kreeshak]

While I don't believe it was the most contributing factor, but Esports factor was one.

In season 1 some of the people we were raiding with in Vanilla achieved rank 1, but didn't get an invite to the regional tournaments. It was some legal policy with their nationality that Blizzard didn't care to resolve in any way. None of them sticked for season 2. While the example might be extreme I guess more people felt like Blizzard was ruining the Esports factor over and over.

[JimPaladin]

I missed this thread, and while all the *~Juicy~* discussion is already over, I'll contribute because I am smarter and better than everyone else:

The absolute biggest factor that ruined PvP (as well as has hurt the game in general) is two big, fat, shit-eating words: STAT INFLATION

Almost everything wrong with PvP is traced directly back to the stats becoming grossly over-inflated. Heals being too powerful, nukes being too powerful, CC being rampant, big changes like "The Crowd Chose You" and the heal debuff. There's almost not a single problem PvP has that ISN'T because of stat inflation (outside your typical, everyday terrible balancing choices, of course)

It's been like this since WotLK. That's when healers started getting FAR too powerful and when Resilience began to block a little -too- much damage, not to mention the stat inflation of gear in general meant that PvP started to become more and more gear-based rather than, well, you know SKILL-based. I remember back in Vanilla, when a level 55 could beat a level 60 (and I understand this isn't the strongest of examples because vanilla had it's fair share of terrible PvP problems, but bear with me), because a 5 level difference didn't mean 70k health and 2k attack power or whatever it's become in MoP.

I was HUGE on Arenas and PvPing in TBC, and to me, TBC had it down perfect. Fights were short, healers were niche and could only burst heal you up once before OOMing and having to either kite away to drink or just die, and while the burst was high, it was all about controlling your opponent and countering whatever strategy/abilities they were trying to use.

That's not to say TBC was perfect or anything, but it had it down as good as WoW could possibly be. People whining and saying "ohhhh but MAGES could sometimes two-shot some classes if they got lucky!!!!" are just tools who probably didn't even play during TBC, let alone PvP in it, and just read about the fabled mage two-shot on some backwater forum somewhere (probably this one!) and then began cavorting around all over the place, spewing their baseless critiques of a PvP system they were never apart of; but I digress.

TBC introduced lots of stuff like Diminishing Returns (even if stuff like double/triple blind comps existed for awhile before Blind got slapped on DR, too) and Resilience, and these were good, NATURAL changes that helped the game's PvP go into a legitimate direction that made sense.

These days Blizzard is just flailing around, realizing "Holy shit we fucked up!" and is desperately trying to correct their mistakes by implementing all these weird things like the Battle Fatigue and Crowd buffs/debuffs that don't really fix the real problem- nor do they even remedy the symptoms very much.

When I hit 80 in WotLK, I couldn't wait to try out the PvP. I dueled some Moonkin who looked like he had also just hit 80, and we began dueling. I was (of course) urinating all over his poor, under-aged face and beating him- until he typhooned me and then ran off in travel form to heal himself.

I thought "haha, yeah, go for it." and slowly walked up to him, thinking he wouldn't heal for much.

Then I noticed he went from literally 6% health to 73% in a couple of seconds. As a Moonkin. And still had a lot of mana to spare.

I couldn't believe it. And then I got to see the state PvP was in at higher gear levels and I was literally floored by what I saw. I still, to this fucking day, can't wrap my head around just how the game went from Point A to Point B so fucking fast. It was just 10 levels, what the hell happened?

Part of the reason WotLK PvP was so messed up was because of the horribly over penetrated talent trees. Sinking 71 points into a tree meant to only hold 51 was -not- a good idea and it made "hybridding" a serious issue.

"Bu-But Jimpaladin!!!! Hybridding is COOOLLLL!!!!"



While I am not one for 'hybridding', myself, I have no real problem with it- but it has to be done CORRECTLY. And in WoW's instance- it has to be done INTENTIONALLY. The thing about WotLK was that people were never SUPPOSED to specc that far into another talent tree. This wasn't -nearly- so bad in TBC (though it was kind of an issue) because with only 10 more points, you couldn't really specc too deep into a separate tree, but once WotLK hit you finally had enough points to start getting the powerful mid-tree skills of another tree. It was fucked up.

This as fixed in Cataclysm (and then grilled to death in MoP), but the stat inflation only got considerably worse.

As it stands today, we're literally wearing a Vanilla player for our bracers. Well geared tanks are pushing like 750k+ health without buffs and we're not even to the last raid of the expansion, yet. (Compared to Cata's 200kish tank health, and that was also an insane leap from WotLK's health pools).

I thought we wouldn't be breaching 1 million health until next expansion, but at this rate, we'll end the next expansion with healthpools possibly pushing like 20 million and shit.

What the fuck is wrong with Blizzard?

I mean, yeah sure, there's -talk- of potential "item squishing" and by GOD would I love to see it, but until it actually happens, all it is is talk; and based on how they just keep producing content that gives us higher and higher stats- it doesn't seem like they have any real intentions with it and it's just wishful "if we could!" thinking.

They can throw up their hands and say "We finally get it! We finally understand!" all they want, and try to retro-format PvP with all these weird changes that don't really fix anything- but it's far too late. Anything short of a complete numerical re-calculation of massive proportions is going to be able to fix what's happened with the game, either 'squishing' the stats down (the best choice) or at least re-scaling everything so it makes better sense, and isn't just mindless stat increases with absolutely no thought or concern as to how it's going to actually- oh, I dunno- effect the fucking game.

Personally I hold no faith for Blizzard to undertake such a task, and I- like many others (Blizzard themselves included), am content to just let PvP be a piece of dead content only meant to be done as a recreational side once in awhile in random BG queues. It's too bad the game has come to this, and it's so bad that even PvE is being heavily effected by the rampant stat increases (just look at all the stupid things they have to do for tanks in order to make sure they can hold aggro against the fucked up levels of DPS going out)- but, what can you do?

So, yeah. PvP died with WotLK and each expansion since has only buried it further and further underneath a mountain of numbers.

And we all know how two-shots in classic/BC (or 100% 0 stunlocks in LK) was the prime of PvP

Spoken like a true Wrath of the Lich King player.

Why does he make a video for wow players and talk like everyone watching is retarded?

You answered your own question.

[Deleted]

Ghostcrawler:

"Resilience will fix it" + Ruining the game while every fanboys and devs belivied in that statement= facepalm.

Ghostcrawler having no clue that warriors would become so OP in the start of MOP and apoligized for being a worthless dev = facepalm.

65% base resi for everyone = facepalm.

Pvp quests in isle of thunder being pvp unfriendly because of way too many mobs with antipvp abilities, boss near overpowered guards, neutral zones and phasing = facepalm.

No bugs fixed such as aoe fearing inside the boss in IoQ or LH makes you stuck = facepalm.

CD-stacking = facepalm.

Ghostcrawler * everything up and later admits its a mistake = facepalm.

Thinking they can bring back vanilla pvp while CRZ, flying mounts and 1.5 sec mounts are there = facepalm.

Dismounting being a rare drop with a 15 min CD = facepalm.

Ghostcrawler said he wanted less CC before MOP and gave the game more CC = facepalm.


You know whats so funny? People are making pvp threads in the general forum to make people actually read it. And moving away the thread to the pvp forum is the same as trashing the thread.

It was fun reading the threads in the start of Pandaria tho. Every thread that told Blizzard to fire themselves got high ratings. To quote Satanix from the forums: "Blizzard, mop pvp is a complete failure." And every bad words he said. Fanboys came and dare to tell him hes wrong, and he sacrificed his ability to post on the forums by really telling what kind of things the fanboys are.

[Ceethemage]

Personally I don't enjoy pvp on my mage the only time I really PvP is on my paladin.