We have plenty of good rewards for achieving various rating thresholds.
As veteran players, we can for the most part get the rewards we aim for every season.
But noobs can’t, and it’s demoralizing.
Participation trophies work: even an uber casual player like Taliesin grinded arena back when he really wanted the hippopotamus mount from the Vicious Saddle.
I think we need more of those.
A Guild Wars 2 style reward track that grants players new rewards for every 100 victories in the arena.
Titles, transmog sets, mount, tabard (already exists for 300 victories), etc.
The noobs need a goal to work for, one they can achieve regardless of their current skill level.
By the time they finish this “reward track”, they should have acquired enough experience to reach at least Rival.
I dont think that will do anything for the true casual players. Yes, more rewards are always nice, but if you pick a an average weekend PvE guy, he won’t be bothered to grind 300 arena rounds just for a mount or cosmetic if he feels miserable doing it. There is just so much “carrot on the stick” that can motivate players.
If he gets destroyed 10 arenas in a row by a multi r1 twitch streamer at 1.5k mmr, and he doesn’t even understand which addon to look at on the screen, I guarantee you he won’t queue arena anymore even if they give Glad mounts for free.
The casuals just want to have fun. Sure, you might attract some mog/mount collectors, but those are a smaller minority.
What need to be done is the game made simpler to understand, better balanced, remove the need for 1 million weakauras and addons. A good, fun game is a reward in itself, that attracts players without the need for cosmetics. Check LoL, other mobas, other PvP games like battle royales. Yes, cosmetic rewards exist there too, but are just an aftertought.
Gameplay is PRIMORDIAL.
Taliesin did. And he’s the epitome of what you describe.
If you make the cosmetics cool enough, the Barbie fashion simulator players will absolutely give it a shot.
This won’t happen. They will face the other noobs who want to grind the cosmetics.
PvP in this game doesnt work on fundamental levels. It feels miserable to participate in it. Giving ppl incentives to que into something they hate will not fix anything.
This is kinda semi casual new player or noob experience.
Balance in this game is literally ignored by the devs. As a dps, you wait 30 minus into random shuffle, where you get stomped, because you dont have gear. If you are willing to get stomped for weeks mixed with afking 50% of the time, sitting at pc, doing nothing, now you get your gear and you still suck, because instead of practicing, you were afking a city waiting for queues. Now you will spend weeks or months trying to get better at something you cant even understand, has no logic, reason, balance or fair conditions in hope the next patch wont shuffle everything around like before. GL with that as a new player, who is trying to learn pvp. I hate it as a veteran while I know whats going on. How can a new player feel? And I cant even imagine a new player, who is trying to heal, lol. That will create some next level dead inside person and hes not coming back, ever. So no, giving them more skins will not help anyone. The game vomits useless transmogs on you all the time.
It may not happen fast enough for you, but they’ve been more active than ever before.
We get balance patches every week or two, “mostly” targeting the good things.
Dragonflight is also the first expansion where they make major class reworks mid-expansion, something they’ve never done before.
In previous expansions, if your class design was deeply flawed at launch, you were screwed for another 2,5 years.
But it is quite hilarious that you believe that the only bracket a new player can experience is the meme called Solo Shuffle.
It is also ironic for a healer main calling himself " Veteran " to only queue the bracket where they are reduced to a healbot having to heal clueless players.
Did you ever consider that other brackets exist, where people can get instant queues in groups for capping conquest, and also learn their class a bit better?
I am sure your friendlist is full of good DPS players asking you to queue up as a premade?
2v2 is a great bracket to learn the basics of PvP and the game in general. There are also 3v3 “Conquest cap” groups. There is rarely any prejudice in those, and oftentimes if some mistake is made it can be discussed and likely won’t happen again.
I find it kind of sad that people actually think the only way of playing Rated PvP is hoping you dont get trolled by some randoms after waiting for a 30 min queue pop.
They act like they are doing something for pvp, but they just want it to look like something is being done, but in reality nothing gets better. Every patch it gets worse or the ridiculously broken spec changes to something else even more broken. As a main healer playing every healer in this game, including the fugly dragon, I can tell you that every patch the game gets more and more ridiculous. I dont care, who is the broken spec in week 1, week 3 or week 8, they dont tune the game, they just add issues to it. And thats why the game has less and less ppl willing to heal this clown fiesta. DPs just swap spec, healers have to deal with all that trash o top of disfunctional cr system or quit.
I’ve been whining about how Legion turned Mana Tea into a flat and boring “reduce mana cost” CD.
In the next patch, Blizzard are reworking Mana Tea and reverting it to its previous iteration, as well as adding completely new talents to add extra flavour.
It gets better. Efforts are being made.
Again: way more than in any other expansion on the history of the game.
They are doing some pve reworks. We are here just to deal with the consequences. Nothing is being done about fixing pvp issues, not even the core ones. Thats the problem. I agree with the pve reworks, I think they are making the game better, but there is literally no pvp development. The 5 mins a random intern spends every 2 weeks on changing few numbers in pvp, which they get from statistics, not from feedback or any meaningful resource to understand the root of the problem, are pointless.
More rewards would be nice and it will get a few people playing.
The main problem in rated PVP is the game design which has become to complex and punishing for casual players and for those players new rewards won’t matter.
Yes, I am not against more rewards at lower CR levels, and overall, but this will not fix participation. Maybe just by a smaller amount. I will give you a real life example: I started playing in 2006, but was too much of a kid to understand the basics of pvp. But still enjoyed the world pvp, fights in STV around the arena, BGs etc. Then in late TBC and WOTLK a lot of my friends from school started playing as well. Most were mega noobs, but the pvp participation among them was like 75%. All of us did arenas, bgs, together or against each other, some of us played horde, some alliance, we would set up meeting on Skype in different zones and brawl it out 6vs6 or more. The entire vibe was different , because it was very ACCESIBLE. Get your character in honor gear combined with some similar pve pieces and you were actually ready to stand your own against anyone. If you wanted more, you did a few arenas per week and collected the points, then slowly geared up in better pvp gear, or did raiding and completed your resilience with gems/enchants etc. It was simple, no other systems. The classes were also simpler to understand. Warrior = Brawler, dont stand in front of him, Rogue = Squishy but deadly with burst/CC. Abilties were much simpler, did what they were supposed to do, and anyone could learn the game in 1 week max. You had 1 or 2 filler attacks, 1 finisher, 2 defs, 2 burst cds, maybe 1 or 2 CCs. That was it. Have fun.
NOBODY HAD ADDONS, the first addon I had was Bartender I think, and that was simply to organise my bars better.
I am not saying dumb the game down to Vanilla levels, but WOTLK/CATA was peak design in PvP IMHO. Simple, Clean, Understandable. This is what they should do to bring back people to PvP. And ban all addons in Rated Content from the API. I’m sure they can easily do that.
I remember using my eyes to see if a DK popped gargoyle, if a ret used wings, if a warrior spin around in bladestorm.
Gearing, and the complexity of systems: This was fixed in Dragonflight. PvP gearing in this expansion is fast, 100% PvP, with no external system (except maybe crafting orders if you really want to optimize every bit of secondary stats, but that’s irrelevant for a new player).
Addons: You say they should disabled. I agree, but before you do that, BigDebuff and Omnibar must become part of the base UI.
Classes being “too complex”: It’s actually what I enjoy about WoW, and why I’m not playing Classic. Depth and complexity are fun.
I still stand behind my point that overall spells of classes should get pruned and instead there should be more talent points improving existing spells. Sort of like how Diablo 4 is.
Let’s say a spec has like 10 spells total. You can choose more-reliably via talents on how you want to play those 10 spells, which ones mean the most for you etc.
Via the talents you can buff up your spells, reduce their cooldown, give them proc chances to cast twice etc. Can even add extra effects.
This will also kind of destroy Addons and Weakauras, since they won’t be able to predict what the player has modified in their 10 spells. The general concept for the spells will remain the same, but you will have to know some of the more dangerous effects.
I specifically mentioned I don’t want them to return to Classic. But a lot of the toolkits are extremly bloated, counterintuitive, and simply bad design. That’s why I mentioned Wrath/Cata and even MoP.
How can you explain a new player that a Sub rogue vanished 3 times. Doesn’t vanish have a long cooldown? How can you explain to a new player that a Fire mage popped combust again 15 seconds after the last combust? How do you make a new player understand that a Plate wearing Huge hp DK or RET is a better kill target then a mage or a rogue? What does a new player think when he wants to kill a healer but the healer just tops himself with instants and there is nothing to interrupt, he doesn’t even understand what keeps the healer full, as he doesn’t see any spell names? The basic fundaments of an RPG have been distorted, that’s my point. Gameplay should make sense.
There is literally no other way of making WoW more-new player friendly.
Just because I have played the game for years and know what every single other spec can do in any given situation and what to do in that situation doesn’t mean that a new player should bother learning that.
Eventually you will run out of people who want to get into such a convoluted concept. It becomes more of a scientific study or a job experience than playing a game.
I even make my own WeakAuras, I have one for literally everything in PvP.
The problem that Blizzard faces is that they’re caught between attracting fresh blood and keeping the existing hardcore PvP players happy.
If you want to appeal to newer or more casual players then you have to start pruning abilities and slowing things down. There’s no way around it. The game is way too bloated and complex at the moment. It’s hard enough to keep track of what’s going on in a duel let alone a 3v3 brawl.
I don’t even bother with arena. The barrier to entry is way too high. I could learn a new instrument or language in the time it would take me to get to challenger. Why bother? I’ll just stick to random BGs and the occasional world PvP.
