A letter to Blizzard - Twinking

It’s both, but since almost every single person against this is implicitly referring to gear, it’s MMO systems that they’re trying to talk about.

The queues have been broken for a very long time now. I think ever since Panda or so? You need ~60 people qued at the same time to get a BG pop. The queing algorithms just simply dont work at all.

Pardon my skepticism.

It doesn’t really matter, It’s unpreventable anyway.

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Queues broke at the start of WoD. Hence the multiple revival events of various brackets, we needed something like 2-3x the number of players in battleground to be queueing total, before we got semi consistent pops.

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Queues broke whenever they first separated xp locked from xp on.

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I thought they worked well enough through late wrath, cata, and mop, but I might be mistaken.

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I actually do not remember when they first split the brackets but there’s a reason why 85-90% of my bgs played on my 60 are pre-cata and it’s not ‘because I didn’t want to do battlegrounds’.

That alone should say enough about the queue timers.

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No, you don’t lose that. You can just lock your experience.

Oh, but then you aren’t interested because you’ll face enemies of similar mettle, am I right? So there aren’t enough people in the queue, because they were all there to stomp on less geared/skilled people in the first place (except you, mayhaps? Right.). Oh dear.

This is all true, but none of it makes a good argument for mixing twinks and levellers.

The gear treadmill on max level isn’t actually that extreme in BG’s because everyone gets scaled within a few percentages of each other. A well geared player does less damage to a low geared player than he would to a well geared player, and vice versa. This only applies at max level though.

Now, I can’t blame yo ufor not knowing about that, since Blizzard have done a terrible job of explaining it, there it is.

But what really reveals the true motivation is that nobody came on here and started suggesting fluid brackets (it tries to match as well as it can instead of within brackets), nobody suggested making it easier to get gear, nobody suggested having a smaller power differential between levels and gear levels at low level, nobody suggested making the game harder to teach players about tradeskills, nobody suggested nerfing enchants, nobody suggested assigning a power level based on gear + character level and matching people by power level instead of character level or gear level, nobody suggested battlegroups with servers intended for lower level caps and an isolated community on them, etc. etc. etc.

The only thing people had on their minds is “I wanna collect unreasonable amounts of gear without getting into a harder matchmaking bracket”, and that says it all.

Correction: Heirlooms are weaker than blue items for the same level as your character level, but please do point out to me exactly when during WoW’s levelling you’ll get a near full set of blue gear at every single level?

I seem to distinctly recall a time when enchants at level 19 were things like “Adds 3 damage to your weapon”, and then there were like 10 different enchants, leading to a power increase of somewhere around 10% over having no enchants. It turns out there is a compromise between enchants that make you one-shot everything in sight and not having enchants at all!

Correct, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

You’re mixing a lot of different things together.

This is a red herring. At no point did I suggest punishing skilled long-term players. I suggested that skilled long-term players should either be be progressing amongst and competing with skilled long-term players, or they should give their progression advantage up if they wish to compete with less progressed players. They then have a choice to make.

I can think of a dozens of ways, and some of them are listed in this reply.

I’ll have what you’re having xD

Have you seen the dungeon item / battleground box reward revamp? Items scale based on the level you obtained them, and I have items from BGs I got a couple levels ago that have exactly the same amount of int and stam as my looms do, and they’re green quality, they have slightly different secondary combinations (With potentially 1 less secondary point because of how 70/30 combinations dont split properly)

The days of heirlooms straddling some line between green / blue but with a more modern itemization are over.

It was never meant to be, I’m not in favour of being mixed and left as they are as a solution. Because it’s not a solution, I didn’t invest any thought into bringing in other solutions until there were people willing to listen to them, and that wasn’t going to happen until people got over “You only want to pwn noobs fk off” line of reasoning.

You’ve brought up a lot of good points ultimately, and I do agree a more balanced general setup would be far better.

There’s problems with that though, power level / mix level scaled queues would have to somehow account for low levels missing half their spells (Mostly stuns / CC, very key parts of pvp).

And you’ve got the fact that at the end of the day, people playing twinks don’t want to level up, and are going to inherently accrue more gear.

I guess the “gold standard” we’d be looking for was something like as long as you have a reasonably level appropriate item in every slot, you’re probably all going to be within 5-10% of eachother in PvP. Stats all still matter, you can gear for the stats you want etc, and those who want to still in the bracket can maybe get another 5-10% from acquiring the best items possible in that level bracket.

That’d be great,

This really needs to be adressed. Feels like its back to conquest vendor times, wich I hated with passion

What was wrong with MoP and WoD conquest vendors?

Huge power gap between the haves and the have-nots

Except there wasn’t. You could buy crafted gear off the AH that was enough to be able to contribute. The honour set was perfectly fine for random battlegrounds and you could get that through doing random PvP pretty quickly, a conquest set also had no gated requirement except time, and even then there was a catchup to obtain it, and it wasn’t THAT much better than anything else.

And to top it off, PvE gear was basically nonexistent in PvP aside from 1-2 socketed off pieces in Hellfire citedel being arguable sidegrades.

There was a powergap between the haves and have nots, sure, but it wasn’t large, and there was a clear progression from being a have not, to a have, that was not gated by performance at all. And then once you did have gear, you had it, there was no titanforging RNG, no “Better raid only gear” that you couldn’t get because you only PvPd.

Ok I see you mention specifically MoP and WoD gear. I cant really speak about that :frowning: I quit early MoP and came back lat WoD.
I thought it was the same as pre MoP wich was a huge power gap

the wod pvp gear was awesome tbh it should go back to that

No gap. Gear was split into 3 sets, which covered every slot including weapons.

There was the pre set, which was crafted pieces.
Then there was the honour set, earned from honour points and requiring 0 rating.
Then the conquest set, requiring conquest points but 0 rating.

Each season the sets would replace themselves, so there would be a new conquest set each season, and last season’s conquest set would be this season’s honour set, last season’s honour set would become craftable etc… This meant you didn’t require any rating at all to get BiS gear, and PvP gear had a special mechanic where it was significantly higher ilvl than PvE gear could become, if it was being used in PvP.

That sounds nice tbh. Mechanic similar to resilience gear I assume, but whithout big gap between conquest and basic? Bring it back I say :slight_smile:

They’d done away with resilience / alternatives by half way through MoP. Which was great, because it meant I no longer had a lower “good” secondary stat budget because I needed to have some pvp only stat. The items just had 2 ilvls, one for PvE, and 1 for PvP. I think the Honour set’s PvP ilvl was about equal to raid gear, and the conquest set’s PvP ilvl was 10 or so above raid gear, then the AH gear was probably 10 below.

+3 damage was an enchant nobody ever used. You’re talking about Vanilla-tbc-Wrath twinking at lv19 and even there people would have enchants like +15 agility, Crusader, +100 health, etc.

Twinks in those days literally one-shotted levelers.

There was never a compromise like a 10% total stat difference between twinks and non-twinks except for the stat templates which everyone hated because PvP turned purely in to who played the stronger class.

So then Heirlooms are only overpowered because they scale with your level =)?

…Which is the entire point of them =)?

Good luck arguing that as a reason for why they should be removed or nerfed.

Also green and blue items you get from literally anywhere scale to your level too sooooo…

So you’re fine with levelers/new players getting absolutely destroyed by a player that posesses the knowledge on what the strongest classes in a bracket are and also has a lot of experience in PvP but you aren’t fine with them getting destroyed because of a regular player with enchants?

What exactly does it matter why they get destroyed when they’re going to get destroyed just as hard either way?

And you guys are bringing up too many different points trying to argue around the fact that in the end, regardless of “why”, levelers/new players are always going to get blown up in PvP and that removing Twinks doesn’t do anything but slow queue times down for everyone involved.

It is not as it is directly referring to the point that you yourself brought up and thus does not distract you from said point.

You didn’t but we already brought that up a while back.

Which is what we have all done at endgame already anyway as well as when we face other twinks.

Those are the two choices people like you are trying to force upon us that we don’t actually have to make. We can do anything we like as long as it is within the games limitations and rules and we are not obliged to do anything we do not want to so. Again, as long as it’s within the rules.

We have no obligation to make ourselves weaker so that others can compete.

You’re supposed to progress in an MMORPG, not regress.

…like? I haven’t read about any that would “save” levelers/new players in PvP.

imgur. com/a/GmRawup

Some greens are stronger, even.

…Versatility?