What really killed World PvP?

[Nerovar]

It was probably in Legion when they dispersed all the max level people into every different part of the new continent with World Quests. Having one max level outdoor zone works wonders for world PvP. I remember always seeing tons of horde and alliance killing each other in Tanaan jungle, often chasing each other into the enemy hub.
Generally, world PvP occurs when lots of people get funneled into a zone with limited ressources. However, if everyone is busy doing all kinds of other stuff all around KT + Zandalar, there's simply going to be less people in one place at a time. The game is simply too busy at the moment.

Often times we would do world PvP when we already had our conquest cap and there was "nothing to do". For example, back in MoP a hunter friend of mine and me would wait on the other side of the Ordos bridge with mass grip and explosive trap and send entire groups flying to their deaths. Of course we only did that because we had already completed our share of content for the week. Not being busy in a game like WoW can be a good thing because it allows the player to make up his own ways of playing without having the fear of missing out on gear etc.

[Loveliest]

Rewards and structure.
BGs assure a sort of balance (at least number-wise, level-wise and trying to do it gear-wise).
People still do "world pvp" for the rewards if they're worth it, but in an imbalanced stated (number-wise most of the cases).

I don't think there's a way to "fix" this. On EU it seems Alliance doesn't participate unless they have the clear number advantage to the point they invite so many people the server lags out. And Horde, while sometimes more reckless, has a lot of people who are in warmode for... something, but not pvp. When they get attacked, if you help them, they try to run off instead of fighting. So that's that.

But I have one question - why? Why do you want it "back"? What specific part of world pvp is fun? And don't tell me it's the "danger", cause that's not it. I mean I have warmode on ALL the time, but that's because I'm neigh immortal and if I get attack by an unfair number of people, I bubble hearth or run off a cliff with my glider. Most people don't attack me with my 600K+ health and if I do get in a fight I can keep a lot of them occupied and drag the bounty on forever. The fun is there because I'm "winning", I know I can't lose. But that's not the case for most people, most get killed if there's no healer to back them up. So... why?

[ipoststuff]

I think BFA had the most world PvP since the very beginning of wow. Flying ofc reduced the world PvP since 8.2. And faction balance in the beginning of BFA was quite bad. You need 3 things to make world PvP happen.

1) Incentive
2) Faction Balance (to a degree)
3) No Flying

[erifwodahs]

nothing killed it, have you been to nazja? weekly pvp quests? people who want to world pvp can literally jump realms until they find someone to fight and it is ez af. World pvp is not dead. It's like saying reading books is dead.

[vsb]

I wanted world PvP. I got Classic. Not once I was killed in a fair fight. It was always when I'm fighting with mobs or when my enemy is significantly higher level and class. There's no point in this world PvP. You have no chance to defend. And I'll never fight first because I don't want to upset person that plays other character.

World PvP has no place in WoW in its simplistic incarnation.

[The Butt Witch]

Pvp in general is to be taken with a grain of salt. There are very very few people who make a career out of pvp and nothing else, they are very...special people.
Pvp is something you do on a side. You get geared from pve, and then use that gear to crush your opponents for a few hours.

Considering the above, it stands to no surprise that pvp is "dead". It's not dead, it's just that the vast majority of people are playing pvp as the side activity it was always intended to be, and not all people engage in it at the same time.

Besides, there are plenty of areas in the game that attract world pvp-ers. There is always action in Darkshire or Hellfire Peninsula. I enjoy crushing Hordes who gank lowbies there.

[Ange]

I wanted world PvP. I got Classic. Not once I was killed in a fair fight. It was always when I'm fighting with mobs or when my enemy is significantly higher level and class. There's no point in this world PvP. You have no chance to defend. And I'll never fight first because I don't want to upset person that plays other character.

World PvP has no place in WoW in its simplistic incarnation.

I play this game since the beginning, started on a PVP-SERVER with the intent to have to deal with WPVP.

No claims without proof, so here you go:


And I never ever saw nor heared someone else seeing fair WPVP moments. Outside of dueling and BG's there is nothing in WPVP what would even come close in a fair fight.

The current mix with PVE rewards is horrible with the faction balance we got. That the band-aid "Call to Arms" failed and was not even carried over with the last ilvl raise is just a sign that its a failed experiment.

I just hope that shadowlands keeps the PVE benefits to forced WPVP to negligible amounts.

[GeorgeDb]

1v1 and small skirmishes between 4-6 people are still happening all the time. Massive scale world PvP is dead and for a good reason. Check vanilla raid vs raid pvp is like a bunch of people charging throwing 80xsappers and aoeing people down...

[Deferionus]

The same thing that is killing / altering the MMO genre: an aging player base increasingly focused on efficiency. This is especially true as Blizzard designs the game more and more as a "you have X to do in Y time span."

People today log in and do their daily / weekly stuff and then work for an amount of time on a goal and then log off. Gone are the days of the MMORPG player bases being 15-25 year olds who had classes and played video games obscene amounts of hours otherwise. You have players now that have families and responsibilities.

In order to make world pvp happen there needs to be a generous reward structure to make it worthwhile to do where the time spent doing it is justified in the eyes of people who have limited time.

Edit: Blizzard has somewhat tried to accomplish this with war mode and the quests associated with it, but I will say even though I love world PvP I have turned it off and left it off due to the imbalance it has.

[Kralljin]

World PvP is not a mode that should really flourish to be honest.

It's an inheritely imbalanced mode and people are more than willing to only engage in it if they can take maximum advantage of this imbalance.
If you put rewards behind it, you just ask for people to create gank squads that hunt down lone enemy people and avoid any "real" confrontation, they're not looking for a fight, they just want to gank people.

Which quite honestly doesn't feel like World PvP anymore, it just feels like farming the enemy faction.

It's okay that it exists, but it's also obvious that by putting actual incentive behind it, you'll be dropping an oil barrel into a already heated situation.

It was okay in classic because it was a simple way to have people fight over certain things, whether you fought over a herb / ore, or some named spawn, that's where it just naturally happened without any massive incentive or possible organization behind it.

But there, killing an enemy actually felt like you got an advantage out of it, if i kill an Alliance dude that's killing my quest mobs, he's dead for the next 2-5 minutes depending on the location and i got some free space for that time.
In BfA, the next GY is right around the corner and he's back before you even healed yourself to full HP.