The State of PvP: Unavailable Rewards, Mass Reports, Boosting, Exploits & Bugs

[Lumy]

The State of PvP: Unavailable Rewards, Mass Reports, Boosting, Exploits & Bugs
PvP in The War Within has been received positively by the community; however, there appear to be several unresolved issues. In this post, we highlight unobtainable rewards, exploits, and other player concerns affecting the PvP experience.


Unavailable Rewards
Solo Shuffle Medic: The War Within and Battleground Blitz Medic: The War Within were introduced in this expansion to encourage healers to queue for solo PvP modes. Both achievements are currently marked unobtainable, which is likely an oversight from when all Feats of Strength for Season 1 were flagged the same way. As a result, the associated toy pennants are also unavailable at the moment.

These achievements can be tracked with the following script:

/run C_ContentTracking.ToggleTracking(2,40792,2)
/run C_ContentTracking.ToggleTracking(2,40795,2)

Name	Reward
Solo Shuffle Medic: The War Within Win 100 Solo Shuffle rounds as a Healer at or above Rival I during The War Within.	Reward: Unbound Legend's Pennant
Battleground Blitz Medic: The War Within Win 50 Battleground Blitz matches as a Healer at or above Rival I during The War Within.	Reward: Unbound Strategist's Pennant

Addon Exploit: Mass Reports
A modified version of Easy Report is being used to mass-report players, with PvP and Mythic+ streamers being the primary targets. This modified addon bypasses the target frame requirements, allowing users to report any player without even targeting them directly.

Penalties include a 7-day silence and potentially harsher automated account actions, as reported by Nnoggie.

Rated Blitz Boosting
Ever felt stomped in Battleground Blitz? Boosting is now rampant, with bad actors wintrading or selling carries even at 2400+ rating for the Strategist: The War Within Season 2 achievement and the Prized Legend's Pennant toy reward. These paid services are actively advertised through trade chat in-game and on various Discord marketplaces.

Toy Exploit: Firim's Specimen Container
The toy Firim's Specimen Container can currently be used to block access to vehicle building NPCs in battlegrounds.

Workaround:

• Bind Interact With Target to any key
• Type /target Goblin Mechanic or /target Gnomish Engineer
• Press the key to interact with the NPC and start building vehicles

Battlegrounds Issues
Battlegrounds could use a balance pass, especially with the gear power spike in Season 2.

General issues include:

• Alterac Valley: The Alterac Blitz is far too easy to achieve with just one or two tanks, since the boss council damage hasn't been adjusted with the new season.
• Isle of Conquest: Glaive Throwers are too fragile; a 200% health increase would help prevent them from being instantly deleted.
• Wintergrasp: Losing teams on offense can get camped at the graveyard (aka "hostaged") for over 15 minutes if snowballed. This is not a great experience, especially in a battleground where snowballing gets out of control very easily.
• Ashran: Tanks can stealth past the enemy players and NPCs and solo enemy bosses (Volrath/Tremblade) with minimal risk.

While these could be addressed with tuning, other issues may need more specific changes.

Wintergrasp Inner Wall Bypass
Demolishers can be used by the attacking team to destroy the Fortress Door without breaking through the inner wall. The gallery below shows the attackers winning despite the inner wall remaining intact.

Ashran Stealth Cheese
Showcasing the strategy mentioned above, I snuck past the enemy team and NPCs with Potion of the Hushed Zephyr and soloed the boss. While a simple balance change can stop individual players from pulling this off, premade groups (usually five druids and/or rogues) can abuse perma-stealth from the start of the battlegrounds to the finish.

Defending players risk getting flagged AFK if they stay in base to guard, or even get reported by their own teammates. A system warning like "Grand Marshal Tremblade is under attack" could help mitigate this.

Alterac Valley Fire Bug
Rextroy highlighted a bug in Alterac Valley where players get one-shotted by standing in certain fire spots.

Quick Conquest Cap and Honor Farm
Players are avoiding traditional PvP gearing by forming 40-player raids and farming War Supply Chests in the Khaz Algar zones. The process is streamlined by Rdy's Crate Tracker, an addon that tracks chest spawn timers and shard changes across zones.

War Supply Chests spawn roughly every 15 minutes and drop:

• 150 Honor
• 60 Conquest
• 50 Bloody Tokens
• Chance for Khaz Algar recipes
• Chance for Vicious Bloodstone

[SinR]

While its cool to shine light on these, doubtful Blizzard will do anything about it.

PVP is an afterthought in Blizzard's mind.

[Railander]

man i wish blizzard put in even 10% of the effort in pvp they do in pve.
they truly don't play their own game. some of these things like the IoC vehicle imbalance has been like this for several expansions, hangar is the best base because you don't have a stupid car with barely more HP than a player that can't be healed so there's nothing you can do to defend against it.

[Ambersulfr]

WoW is aware of all of these problems. At this time, I do not expect any fix to be forthcoming for any of them. Best to proceed as if these "features" will remain in the game long-term until WoW announces otherwise.

[Ereb]

This is kinda hilarious. And here my dumbass was thinking about trying to get back into pvp

[Donovan1986333]

The issues:

MMR Disparity in Solo Shuffle:
The matchmaking rating system in Solo Shuffle continues to be imbalanced, particularly for healers. It's common for healers to go 3-3 and lose MMR, or go 4-2 and gain minimal to no points, while a 2-4 can result in significant rating loss. This creates a frustrating experience, especially when compared to DPS players who often achieve similar ratings in far fewer games. Despite repeated community feedback requesting adjustments—such as making 3-3 a break-even result—there has been no meaningful change. As a result, many healers are leaving the bracket, which in turn increases queue times for DPS players, compounding the issue.
Mass Reporting Abuse:
Mass reporting has become a widespread problem in both Solo Shuffle and Blitz. Players often collude to mass report someone they feel is underperforming or not following their lead, regardless of actual misconduct. These mass reports frequently result in automatic penalties, including temporary or permanent bans, as shown by streamers like Payo who were affected despite no rule violations. Staysafe showed on stream 2 years ago that his stream could report him and almost immediately his chat was turned off and he was logged out with a suspension. There's documented evidence of third-party Discord communities offering mass report services in exchange for gold or real-world money, complete with scripts and macros that automate the process. Even if the add-on talked about in this article is fixed, the script to automatically. make the menu pop up to report people will exist, all you do is fill the name / server in. It's been repeatedly reported on the forums and it's never been addressed.
Lack of Customer Support:
With Blizzard significantly reducing its customer support presence, overturning wrongful suspensions or bans has become extremely difficult. Appeals often take weeks and many go unanswered, leaving affected players in limbo.
Lack of PvP Testing and Oversight:
PvP systems receive minimal testing prior to patches, often leading to bugs and balance issues on live servers. For example, PvP gear for the most recent patch was only added to the PTR the day before the patch went live. This lack of preparation allows exploits and imbalances to go unchecked for extended periods.
Silence from Blizzard on PvP Feedback:
The PvP community has made countless constructive posts on the forums regarding improvements to Arena, Shuffle, and PvP design. Topics like MMR adjustments, reward structure, and gameplay balance are regularly discussed by high-rated players, yet Blizzard has not responded to community posts on these subjects in over a year. The lack of communication has left players feeling ignored and undervalued.

The state of Arena appears neglected, with issues ranging from MMR imbalance and mass reporting abuse to a lack of customer support and testing. Without meaningful engagement or updates from Blizzard, frustration in the PvP community continues to grow. Addressing these concerns transparently and directly would go a long way in restoring trust and improving the PvP experience. Many of us grew up playing this game and want to see it succeed so watching toxic systems hurt the game mode stings.

[Googles]

Like others have said, PvP is sadly an afterthought. It's unfortunate that WoW PvP is probably the most fun competitive game out there but from a business standpoint it doesn't serve Blizzard much by pooling resources into it. They pool just enough to keep it alive and it's justified because only a small minority of the playerbase participates in PvP and an even smaller percentage actually takes the mode seriously.

[Ardourdan]

I mean its a good start to acknowledge the problems with PvP but to say that its been largely positive for players is not aligned with the chat and forum posts I've seen... a lot of the qq I've read has been a shared sense that blizzard has abandoned end game pvp...

[Randall51]

Please link the addon so we can get this stupid Report System fixed

[kranur]

That's what happens when 0 fucks given for a long time.

[Sanguinerd]

Now if they'd simply perma ban every. single. account. that participated in this bullshit the game would be a lot better.

[Bats]

It's crazy how many problems there are. Watching Raiku stream shuffles right now and he's got a rank 1 win traders in his lobby. Holy priest plays like a god with this hunter, then against him he doesn't use major CDs, MCs the hunter if he's about to die so his team can't land a kill. Being so obvious even while on a stream in front of a bunch of people but it doesn't matter. Blizzard doesn't care enough to allocated enough resources for PvP, it's been on an even bigger decline ever since SL started

[Brazel MMO]

Shooting over the inner wall isn't new though.
I agree with snowballing though - they need to shorten wg by 4-6 mins when attackers destroy all towers and are holding all nodes. It's not fun for anyone

[Daedius]

I've given up trying to get War Supply drops...

How War Mode works is complete bullshit, it defaults you to a shard related to your realm or list of connected realms. And if you're on one that's completely lopsided you're pretty much screwed over in the ratio of Horde and Alliance.

My default shard literally has me stuck in a situation of ALWAYS being outnumbered by at least 10:1 even at 3am ...



Literally EVERY Supply Drop is like this, that's 17:1 in that image!!

War Mode needs to be completely independent of realms ffs.

[Mendzia]

These are not issues guys.
Good thing is that you can buy another 5 recolored Cloud Serpent mounts for $$ and hamster wheel ingame "content".

[Schwert]

For years the game had a focus on Horde vs Alliance, and at the start, PvP was a huge part of it all. It didn't start out as an afterthought; they split Horde and Alliance for a reason, and wPvP was massive out the gate. And now we're here because they refused to give it any actual attention, when PvP modes generally just need accessible grindy rewards, a bit of moderation, and the occasional event.

Absolutely pathetic on Blizzard's part.

I've lost hope that their revamps to seasonal rewards has anything to do with PVP, and if it does, it's just telling people who put up with this through the years their efforts were wasted and they just slap everything on a vendor you can AFK for.

[Haldus]

Players are avoiding traditional PvP gearing by forming 40-player raids and farming War Supply Chests in the Khaz Algar zones.

Nothing wrong with this one.

[Shadowroxxor]

An MMO-C post that is critical of Microsoft Activision Blizzard and puts the spotlight on some long standing issues? Is this a slightly out of season April fool's joke?

[pinkz]

high level players party syncing into low level BGs is back. these players come in with full use of tool kits, abilities and talents along with improper scaling by blizzard that player in a level 10-19 leveling xp on BG have no chance or counter against. abilities that 10-19 players do not have.

a paladin on a high level mount talent that damages rides thru players a wiping half or more of a team, having wake of ashes etc, priest launching a entropic rift one shoting 5+, abilities of immunity or trigger next x# of abilities instant, a 80 evoker that drops near whole team in one ability that a evoker in a low bracket could not do.

players that enter leveling BGs tend to do so, because they are new to WOW, and curiosity then end up in a severe experience getting one shot, no chancem just like when blizzard had twinks in the BGs, but it is actually worse

[turq8672]

You can farm war chests in older zones (i was in Zuldazar grabbing a few) They give old gear, but still honor and 60 conquest