Why hasn't Blizzard abandoned arenas?

[Darksoldierr]

3v3 and 5v5 is fun, but I don't see why Blizzard haven't abandoned 2v2 because of the imbalance that occur in it.

They dosen't support or reward it neither, so then why remove? 2v2 is still active bracket, and fun with your friend, even if unbalanced as hell.

Also, the moment they balance based on RBGs, that is the moment Moonkin, DK grip, Frost Mage is nerfed to the ground. Which i dont se happening, at all.

[TheGravemind]

Because Arenas are one of the most fun things to do in the game. They're also challenging.
Random BG's are mostly run by bots and people who, well, suck.

this

RBGs/Arena are the only things I do in the game.

[Deleted]

They dosen't support or reward it neither, so then why remove? 2v2 is still active bracket, and fun with your friend, even if unbalanced as hell.

Also, the moment they balance based on RBGs, that is the moment Moonkin, DK grip, Frost Mage is nerfed to the ground. Which i dont se happening, at all.

Well, they sort of do, you can get Conquest points really quick in 2v2 with very little time and less effort.

[GrieverXIII]

cause they need to fire kalgan first. then they can delete arenas.


oh yea, then undo every pve nerf since day 1.

Sometime i wish i was a moron, life seems so simple for you guys.

Infracted.

[Golden]

Random BGs are the most fun for me as well. If they lowered the conquest point cap, I wonder how many people would even participate in arena or rbgs. Most I know just do them to cap points.

[Lumast]

Random BGs are the most fun for me as well. If they lowered the conquest point cap, I wonder how many people would even participate in arena or rbgs. Most I know just do them to cap points.

Everyone I know plays tons of arena every week because it's the only place that takes any semblance of skill anymore. Just because you enjoy playing with mouth breathers doesn't mean blizzard should respect your opinion.

[Senathor]

because 3v3 is the only bracket that has any, ANY bearing of skill involved.

Don't be biased to a point where you completely neglect everything else, nobody will take you seriously as it's ridiculous.

---------- Post added 2013-05-02 at 05:41 PM ----------

3v3 and 5v5 is fun, but I don't see why Blizzard haven't abandoned 2v2 because of the imbalance that occur in it.

Why remove something that does not hurt anyone? I don't get your logic.

---------- Post added 2013-05-02 at 05:45 PM ----------

Whole lot of people in this thread that don't understand pvp at all. You have fun when you play with 9 random people that are awful?

Occasionally, you're forced to perform better which will ultimately lead to that player improving. Obviously it will eventually get annoying... However in rated PvP that's definitely not the case, but in random BG's that's something you just sign up for when you queue. I mean I rather be in a normal team than in a pre-made becuase graveyard camping is probably the most boring thing in this game.

---------- Post added 2013-05-02 at 05:49 PM ----------

Random BGs are the most fun for me as well. If they lowered the conquest point cap, I wonder how many people would even participate in arena or rbgs. Most I know just do them to cap points.

I really don't think that's true. I think it's a stereotypical assumption based on the few high rated arena players constantly mentioning this on forums but especially on streams. Most people play it for T2 which is usually 2200 any other season and titles. It's something different but it can be really fun. Not specifically saying that you made such an assumption as you said that your opinion was based on most of the people you know, but I'm talking RBG's in general.

---------- Post added 2013-05-02 at 05:54 PM ----------

So? Very few people give a rat's ass about "skill" - they just want to have fun. And currently, PvP isn't particularly fun, and the disconnect between what PvP is balanced around and how it's typically played is a major contributing factor to that.

Quite honestly the state of PvP isn't as tremendously obnoxious as everyone makes it seem to be. Sure it's unblanaced, but every season has it's major flaws. I think the fact that the game is unbalanced is used as an excuse for most low rated players to not play and improve. I mean a good plyer is 2400+ in my opinion. I don't play 3's currently but I can't say that the game is unbalanced and use it as a legit excuse for me not being high rated. I can understand when gladiators complain, but the rest is usually just people being bad and not realizing it.

---------- Post added 2013-05-02 at 05:55 PM ----------

Sometime i wish i was a moron, life seems so simple for you guys.

Don't fall for a troll and see yourself live long enough to become one as well.

[Deleted]

Don't be biased to a point where you completely neglect everything else, nobody will take you seriously as it's ridiculous.

---------- Post added 2013-05-02 at 05:41 PM ----------



Why remove something that does not hurt anyone? I don't get your logic.[COLOR="red"]

Why keep something imbalanced?

[Vampiroth]

Arena's are one of the best parts of the game. Balancing the game around random bg's is a terrible idea. PVP should be balanced around 3v3 arena seeing as that is the only competitive Esport that wow has. You don't see RBG's at blizzcon do you?

[Lumast]

Why keep something imbalanced?

So let's remove random BGs.

[Senathor]

Why keep something imbalanced?

Why don't we remove the entire game in that case?

[Yvaelle]

Balancing around 1v1 is obviously foolish, some classes which aren't as good in 1v1 situations are significantly better when combined with teammates - they gain peels or heals or dispels or the like. Warriors by themselves are susceptible to roots (historically, not as much currently) - but Warrior+Healer (particularly Paladins for Freedom) removes the disadvantage of Warriors in a solo environment. Shadowpriests and Affliction Locks historically are vulnerable to being sat on - they rely on a lot of channeling and casting, and thus suffer from knockbacks and kicks and stuns in a way others don't (while stunned, a Ret or DK or Warriors attacks come off cooldown, a Rogue or Feral regenerates energy - once the stun ends they get to spam their best attacks, not true for dot classes). So you can't balance immobile casters around 1v1, because when they have peels (and can freecast) they suddenly become a very different creature.

Even balancing around 2v2 is ineffective, just as some classes aren't great in solo environments, some classes don't fully meet their potential until they have more than themselves and a single ally to play with. Holy Priests are terrible in 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 - but in 5v5 and 10v10 they suddenly aren't so bad. The reason is that Circle of Healing and Divine Hymn hit 5 targets - if you are solo - this means that the core spell of your spec has only 20% effectiveness (1/5 targets available), in 2v2 it is only 40% effective, in 3v3 it is only 60% effective - and only even that if everyone is taking damage simultaneously. In 5v5 and 10v10, CoH and DH are 100% effective - there are 5+ targets, there is lots of damage going out - and the specs core spell actually does what it was designed to do.

In 3v3 some classes seem much better than others, Shadow is great in 3v3 because it scales particularly well to that bracket - but in 5v5 and 10v10 Shadow representation declines quite rapidly. For example this is because in a 1v1 scenario, Vampiric Embrace heals the Spriest for 50% of all the damage they deal (100% if glyphed), in 2v2 it heals for 25% (50% if glyphed), in 3v3 it heals for 16.5% (33% glyphed), but in 5v5 it heals for just 10% (20% if glyphed), and in 10v10 it heals for only 5% (10% if glyphed). In the first three smaller brackets, that represents a significant heal and a useful survival cooldown - in the subsequent two larger brackets it's hardly noticeable. Not to say that these individual abilities solely decide what bracket each spec will be effective in, but they demonstrate how because abilities have different effectiveness in different brackets - abilities impact scalability.

5v5 and 10v10 (RBGs) are just as dependent on team composition as the lower brackets. Take Shadow vs. Boomkins for a moment. In 2v2, Silence is a 5 second duration, 45 second cooldown single target silence spell - it silences 50% of the enemy team in 2v2. Solar Beam is an 8 second duration 60 second cooldown multi-target silence, that can potentially silence 100% of the enemy team: but often 2v2 has at least one enemy who doesn't care about silences (warriors, hunters, rogues, etc). In 10v10, Silence has the same duration and cooldown of course, but now it only silences 10% of the enemy team (1/10 targets). But, when a boomkin is combined with a DK's Gorefiend's Grasp - Solar Beam can pretty consistently silence 100% of the enemy team: ten times the effectiveness of Shadow's Silence. Boomkins aren't good in 2v2's, but they are mandatory for 10v10 - the more opponents available, the stronger boomkin abilities become - while Shadow is the opposite - strongest in smaller brackets, but weaker the more opponents that are present.

I can't think of a way to balance all abilities across all classes so that some handful of abilities do not continue to be exceptional for a particular number of allies / opponents. We talked in the Enh Sham thread about this a bit as well - Enh survivability is strongest in 1v1, 2v2, and 3v3 scenarios - but in 3v3 where I generally dislike killing Enh shamans - in 5v5 or 10v10 they'd be near the top of my list for kill targets. That's because when you are fighting many opponents, a near-immunity cooldown is way better than a % damage reduction cooldown, while in smaller brackets the opposite is often true (because % reduction cooldowns always have far better uptime ratios than immunity cooldowns).

TL;DR - You have to pick a balance point, 10v10 and 5v5 is no better than 3v3 or 2v2 or 1v1. Blizzard chose 3v3, and given it's halfway through the list - I think it's the right choice. If we balanced around 10v10, what went on in 1v1 scenarios would be wildly unbalanced - far worse than it is (and remember 1v1 doesn't just mean duels, most organic pvp is often 1v1 or 2v2 or the like). If anything, balancing around 1v1 would make more sense - and then nerfing any abilities that scaled too well in other brackets (not that I'm advocating that).

[KBWarriors]

The number of Hardcore PvPers and PvErs in general is going down in the game. 25 raiding guilds are disappearing.. some converting to 10 man and others quitting the game completely. A lot of PvP guilds are starting to disappear as well. When I was playing on Illidan, it was tough to find a RBG group or a pure PvP guild that was still active.

The problem is: Blizzard is taking out any sense of immersion or difficulty left in the game and people enjoy it that way. The game has become a World of Purples experience and that's all anyone cares about. I stopped playing recently but might return depending on how the expansion turns out.

I'm not sure what Blizzard bases their numbers off of anymore. Part of me says they have meaningful data behind all the class changes and the other part of me says they're pulling random numbers out of their ass. The whole list of 5.3 PvP changes perplexes me...

And if it's true that healers are hard to kill (which they are) then in 5.3 in Arenas, they'll be even worse. Just wait until they switch to their 496 PvE healing gear with 65% base resilience and their spell power goes WAY up from where it was due to PvP gear restraining it. I know I lost a ton of Spell Power on my characters when they got PvP geared but with 65% base resilience and the hard hitting nerf to PvP power, what the hell is the point of the PvP gear anymore?

[Deleted]

So let's remove random BGs.

In 2v2 arena, the settings are completely different since it only allows 2 players. So your statement there is completely invalid. Not to mention the subject of this thread is 'arenas'.

---------- Post added 2013-05-03 at 01:19 AM ----------

Why don't we remove the entire game in that case?

In what way is the entire game in every aspect imbalanced? Please enlighten me But you may want to stay on topic, since we are talking about arenas and drawing a line like your doing now and simply saying everything is imbalanced with no actual facts to back that up is pointless.

[Naughtt]

Balance around 1v1 and the rest falls in to place. This balance has to be ALL classes against ALL classes. In a protracted fight of equal skilled opponents DPS should be able to wear down a healers mana and CD's. There is nothing more frustrating than bad RBG. Arena's are easy to setup, easy to comunicate and easy to keep doing. It's still really hard to get 2.2k rating where as RBG is much easier and derpy.

[Deleted]

Arena is a huge part of the game, especially 3v3 i personally think most people only do RBG is for the increased cap where as the main community of PVP only really enjoy 3v3 (2v2) occasionally random BG's are just for gearing and having fun and well ...random as in its title blizzard needs to concentrate on arena more and keep balancing are 3v3 people who dont like that , PVE'rs stick to what you know best ! keyboard turning and such .

[Manabomb]

So?



No, it doesn't. I mean, sure, it has tournaments, but the community isn't huge - especially not compared to the many, many more people who don't give a crap about "competitive PvP" (fucking lol) and just queue for a few BGs between raids or to have a little fun. There's no point in balancing the game around a comparative handful of (extremely vocal) players when the majority of the playerbase plays a gamemode that's at best tangentially related to it.



... Because PvP is designed and balanced around arenas. Which is the point of the thread.

By your logic, pvp should be removed from the game because the majority don't care or dislike pvp and would see it removed because it effects pve and other aspects in the game in both negative and positive ways that effect how the -majority- of the players play.

This game should not be balanced around the idiots, bots and noobs that run rampant in the random bgs simply because they are the majority. This is not how pvp currently works, has ever worked or should ever work. Pvp should be balanced around the bleeding edge of competition and the ability to work together to overcome the enemy team in whatever objective. This game additionally should not be balanced around the ridiculousness of aoe spam fests that are rated battle grounds. To be fair, in my own opinion, I don't think rated battlegrounds should have been implemented in the first place due to the very obvious and prominent difference in requirement for balancing that arena's and rated battle grounds have. There needs to be a focus on bleeding edge "endgame" pvp competition and the pvp game needs to be balanced around that. Otherwise there will never be any sort of balance between rated battlegrounds and arenas.

[PizzaSHARK]

Arena's are one of the best parts of the game. Balancing the game around random bg's is a terrible idea. PVP should be balanced around 3v3 arena seeing as that is the only competitive Esport that wow has. You don't see RBG's at blizzcon do you?

Rated, not random.

Additionally, who cares about eSports in WoW? It's an RPG; an RPG will always inherently be less balanced and less demanding on player skill than other options. If you want to flex your e-peen and talk about skill, go play a game like Brood War, Quake, or Street Fighter. The point is that random BGs - the type of gameplay that the vast majority of players experience, and the ONLY type for many of those - are exceptionally frustrating due to 3v3 arena design and balance decisions not scaling well to the 10v10 or 15v15 format. Designing and balancing around rated BGs would eliminate a considerable portion of this frustration simply because the only meaningful difference between a random BG and a rated BG is teamwork and coordination.

TL;DR - You have to pick a balance point, 10v10 and 5v5 is no better than 3v3 or 2v2 or 1v1. Blizzard chose 3v3, and given it's halfway through the list - I think it's the right choice. If we balanced around 10v10, what went on in 1v1 scenarios would be wildly unbalanced - far worse than it is (and remember 1v1 doesn't just mean duels, most organic pvp is often 1v1 or 2v2 or the like). If anything, balancing around 1v1 would make more sense - and then nerfing any abilities that scaled too well in other brackets (not that I'm advocating that).

Who cares about 1v1 scenarios, or other random world PvP? Those situations have always been determined by numbers more than anything else - class balance is irrelevant when you're outnumbered five to one. So why would you even use it as a design goal? Hell, I've played on PvP servers the entire time I've played WoW and even in no-flying zones, people generally just ignore each other unless a quest requires them to fight. I see people on both sides doing the PvP Isle dailies and people just ride on by and maybe wave at them. Who knows why? I know I don't pick fights because when I play WoW, I have a limited amount of time to do what I want to do and I don't feel like having 15 minutes of that time squandered by some asshole with a need to show me how man-tough he is.

And the issue with a game like WoW is that design choices made for a duels-in-a-box environment like arena simply don't scale very well at all to RBGs. Melee and ranged classes are equally effective in arenas, where maps are small and there are many LOS objects for melee to use to avoid getting stuck in the open, but this doesn't apply to BGs on the whole - maps are enormous, and while there may be some LOS objects around key objectives, the majority of the map is wide open, which is why ranged classes dominate while melee classes are weaker to some degree.

Additionally, dying in arena is extremely bad - you only get one life, so if you die, that can easily mean game over if your surviving teammates can't very quickly kill an enemy player to compensate. In RBGs, it's not quite as bad - dying is still a bad thing, and it can still mean a lost game, but the impact is ultimately lessened.

Moreover, because you have larger teams, classes do not need to be (and I hate this word) homogenized. You don't need every class to have self-heals, or a disable, or an interrupt, or whatever; you can build a team to cover any weaknesses a teammate might have, while the enemy team can build a team to try and take advantage of any weakness. Essentially you can look back at vanilla, before arena ever became a thing, as a broad-strokes idea of how that works; people still played BGs competitively for rewards, and even though not every class had an interrupt, a disable, self-healing, etc, it still worked. It can still work again, but it would require a shift away from arena and a shift towards rated BGs as the sole design goal.

The entire point is that, of all players who engage in PvP at all (which is already a small number and has been getting smaller over time; 5.3 may slow the bleed but I don't expect it will stop it entirely), random Battlegrounds are almost always the first and largest amount of PvP they do. Because of the design focus on arena, this results in an exceptionally frustrating experience on top of the required gear grind (which is thankfully being lessened with 5.3), resulting in a LOT of players giving it a try, going "Wow this isn't fun at all," and never touching it again.

Since Blizzard is still investing resources into balancing and designing PvP, this is bad - it means there's an entire section of the game they're working on that many players won't play because it simply isn't fun. That's bad for business. From a purely financial standpoint, it makes sense to design and balance around the playstyle the most players engage in, and particularly the playstyle the "casual" (another word I hate) audience prefers, since they make up the lion's share of the playerbase.

Balancing around random BGs would be stupid. But you can balance around rated BGs, and it results in an almost direct translation to random BGs because - again - the major difference between a random BG and a rated BG is just teamwork and coordination, not an entirely different gameplay style.

[Hand Banana]

The better question is why hasnt blizzard abandoned rbgs? Seriously, I dont know a single person who actually ENJOYS rbgs, or enjoys them as much as arenas at least. Most people just see them as a gear requirement. Alot of people enjoy random bgs because its alot more easygoing and theres less pressure to be good and balance isnt such a big deal, but if you want to be competitive then arenas is where its at; rbgs dont make you feel accomplished at all tbh.

[Aquamonkey]

Is Blizzard still trying to make arenas an esport?