When did epic bgs turn into steaming piles of crap?

[Huntermyth]

Imho the best "epic bg" was the first Alterac Valley.

It literally lasted for days and many people played it because it was a truly epic and ludicrous event.

My friends and i did not even know what rewards you get from doing AV, we just loved playing it endlessly.

Today PvP is only about "resource grind per hour" for some E-rank, and perhaps some pvp gear that you can use in a raid.

this, many times this.

first time i saw, remind you, just SAW vanndar was after a good week of the release of av back in the day.

[SinR]

*Cocks gun*

Always has been

[Flaks]

The underlying reason of "there aren't enough pvp players" is complete doohickey and a bad cycle of blizzard's own creation.

There will be plenty of pvp players if they actually addressed these issues. The fact that the population is diminished is as a direct result of blizzard's neglect.

It's as simple as blizzard just doesn't care. Their corporate overlords tell them to work on the next big name, crowd drawing, big ticket item and then let it rot so they can do the next one.

[Puri]

Imho the best "epic bg" was the first Alterac Valley.

It literally lasted for days and many people played it because it was a truly epic and ludicrous event.

My friends and i did not even know what rewards you get from doing AV, we just loved playing it endlessly.

Today PvP is only about "resource grind per hour" for some E-rank, and perhaps some pvp gear that you can use in a raid.

Yeah well, I agree with everything you said.

But it's not an issue of the bg, it's an issue of the playerbase. When AV opened in classic it was a pure "ignore the other faction", never defend as the faction with the instant invite and just rush the faction bosses, although they had virtually all the possibilities and rewards as the players 20 years ago.

[Osmeric]

The underlying reason of "there aren't enough pvp players" is complete doohickey and a bad cycle of blizzard's own creation.

There will be plenty of pvp players if they actually addressed these issues. The fact that the population is diminished is as a direct result of blizzard's neglect.

It's as simple as blizzard just doesn't care. Their corporate overlords tell them to work on the next big name, crowd drawing, big ticket item and then let it rot so they can do the next one.

The problem, I think, it that Blizzard has tried to adapt a PvE-centric reward scheme to PvP.

In PvE, it makes some sense to give better rewards to higher performance, at least up to a point.

But in PvP, the bad players are delivering more value to Blizzard than the good ones are. Sheep getting killed by the wolves are entertainment sources, and it's in Blizzard's interest to reward that, or at least not penalize it.

But in rewarding the wolves over the sheep, the sheep are doubly driven away: first by being farmed by the wolves, and secondly by the lack of reward.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

The problem, I think, it that Blizzard has tried to adapt a PvE-centric reward scheme to PvP.

In PvE, it makes some sense to give better rewards to higher performance, at least up to a point.

But in PvP, the bad players are delivering more value to Blizzard than the good ones are. Sheep getting killed by the wolves are entertainment sources, and it's in Blizzard's interest to reward that, or at least not penalize it.

But in rewarding the wolves over the sheep, the sheep are doubly driven away: first by being farmed by the wolves, and secondly by the lack of reward.

But anyone can get all the pvp gear they need by queuing. You can have full honor gear losing non-stop for a weekend if not sooner, and you'll eventually get conq even if you are afk because you'll win some of the time by default.

What is the argument now for pvp gear being hard to get? I don't understand. They don't even reset honor between seasons so you can start with a full set from s2 onward

[Nzx]

Epic BGs became boring when resilience was introduced as a way to make PvP fights take longer. They were designed for a different time, before CC chains were all that mattered, when being 1-shot by a three minute mage or stunlocked to death by a rogue when you were caught alone were possibilities. Something like Battlefield 6 is probably a good comparison - the 32v32 fights would not be fun at all if every kill took a full mag from two players at 90%+ accuracy.

The way PvP works now, you can't pick anyone off because the minimum TTK is too long, even when the other player isn't reacting at all. As a result epic BGs just turn into M+ runs without tanks and with more lag, where all you do is run in and play your AoE PvE rotation and hope your healers don't suck.

[trihedron]

I played alliance in original classic, probably just server imbalance or something, rarely did we ever win on Alterac Valley.

[RobertMugabe]

PVP and especially Epic BG's are just an afterthought. All of the Epic BG's need to be redesigned alongside the random queue itself. Most of the epic BG's I play are instant loses, because certain players are abusing the queue systems by essentially creating premades (of 15-20 if not more people) and then winning every BG. You just create teams of 5 and then wait with the other premades to get the queue popped at the same time, so you know you will get the same BG (well at least there is a high chance you will).

I think PVP has been dying over the last few expansions, because of their approach to PVE. In the early days of WoW until Legion, once you'd get into raiding there was nothing else to do in PVE, so people would just PVP as the filler in between raids. However since they've added M+ and put a strong focus on solo PVE activities, many players have dropped PVP altogether, because they have other stuff to do.

This is fine in principle, however they are still treating PVP like it is filler content, while it should be more or less it's own game mode and have a team solely focused on it. Maybe they could actually drop PVP from the standard game and make it a built-in game mode like Plunderstorm.