First let's define "Holinkoaster effect": Activision bought blizzard and Holinka assumed the PvP team back at cata, and that marked the downfall of WoW PvP as we know. a lot of bad changes happened over and over and despite a few people claiming "it wasnt holinka, it was decisions from the inside" his leaving may cause a future turn of events for the next expansion.
A lista of things included in the Holinkoaster effect:
- "Elitization" of PvP - removing 2v2 and 5v5, making it so only PvP mounts would remain character-bound (instead of account bound) and other changes based on "elitizing" the game were done since cata. The aim here was to make WoW PvP feel more about the competition and less about the experience itself, which diminished the interest of players on PvP over the years up until the moment that barely anyone wants to do it nowadays.
- "Casual PvP is only for fun" - Removing rewards and incentive for normal players to do random battlegrounds and such is also a big issue here. Despite there being prestige progress (which still exists for rated), there is no progression or anything on doing Casual PvP such as arena skirmishes and random BGs, which caused the player base to stop doing random BGs.
- "PvP Templates" - Having everyone being equal on PvP isn't really a bad thing, but when you remove customization entirely from the game and everyone is playing a game that is even less customizable than MOBAs things become a problem.
- "PvP talents" - this one is a personal issue that I have. I kinda hated having PvP talents instead of a customizable normal talent, because it pushed players even further away from PvP as the rotations and gameplay from a few classes change completely from PvP to PvE with different abilities and such.
- "No new rewards added to rated PvP, ever" - This is also another issue, since Holinka's (Or Whoever was in real charge) aim was to have PvP be only about the competition and not about the gear, and casual PvP being just about the fun, they also didn't care about giving PvPers any other real reward besides the "Gladiator" achievement for the top 0.5% and a mount they can't even use on their alts. This meant that PvP players lost the interest in doing rated PvP as there was no reward on doing so while the PvE rewards were distributed across the board with different mounts, transmogs and titles being constantly added to the game.
All these changes, I think, pushed players away from PvP and all started with mister Holinka.
So I call for your opinion: Now that he is gone, will we have a new light on PvP for the next expansion? Can a new light come even before that?