So, basically, topic ^ bring back arena teams, ty.
3 Likes
Definitely, it provided much better social cohesiveness even though it made it less convenient in terms of shared times online. But what nay-sayers have said throughout the years about how it was “non-functional” when matching play times, it’s what raiders have kept doing since vanilla and still continue doing to this day. Even though pugging and lesser restrictive raid locks has made it more flexible, it has also shown a negative effect socially by making it so flexible.
And the game has needed more social cohesiveness for many expansions now, considering the ever-increasing difficulty of creating lasting social bonds in the game as a direct result of changes to the social designs.
Not to mention the negative effects to the immersion it has had, since with a drastically reduced social element, there’s less that makes you invest emotionally in the game.
It has also had negative effects on guilds, ESPECIALLY PvP guilds.
(Social butterflies will argue against this post, but what they may not be aware of is that social butterflies are not the norm. The game needs to provide better incentives and social glue to encourage social bonding, especially for introverts and socially selective people.)
1 Like
Couldnt basically say better.
To add another point - it partially fixes boosting/coaching problems, as high rating players wont like to ruin their stats in particular arena team.
That isn’t exactly correct though, however it would limit it a little bit. But considering the financial turnover of boosting, it’s not much of a problem for the boosters to keep paying for level boosts up to 110 and then have characters specifically for the purpose of coaching and/or boosting. It would make it take longer for the boosters to keep the extra characters up-to-date gear-wise, but it’s not impossible to do so. And since everyone on that level has several characters on max level already, they can instead choose to give up going for rating on a few characters and keep them solely for the sake of boosting and/or coaching. Or they can even set aside time at the end of the seasons when they focus mainly on going from low rating to high in preparation for reaching the cutoffs.
So all in all, it doesn’t really fix anything regarding that, but it makes it less convenient for these high-performing players to do so.
It might help Blizzard to punish the boosters and coachers since the irregular team pairings would be easier to track though. Hard to say if they would actually bother to do so though.
1 Like
Arena teams severely limit the amount of PUG pvp you can get, though. Considering how dead the PVP LFG is that would be really bad.
1 Like
Read my first post again, because you clearly skipped it or didn’t understand it at all.
You are not wrong per se with what you said, but it’s called social glue. In other words, by making it punishing to leave after having played up the rating with people, it incentivizes social bonding with the ones you’re already invested in. Just read the damn post, please.
1 Like
I liked teams when they existed but to be honest, I don’t think they should come back.
Except people won’t invest at all they’ll just stop playing.
No. It’s a wall of text.
Learn to be concise.
Is everything longer than 2 lines a wall of text to you? 
If it’s not xunamate statistics of how unplayed DH is than yes
3 Likes
Considering I’m soon to be an Engineer, I’m no stranger to reading. But I see no reason to read that long winded post that’s literally wrong. Commitment makes people play less.
That’s why LFR and LFG are so popular, because you press a button and find yourself a team. If you had teams again a lot of people would quit arenas altogether.
/r/humblebrag
… Oh sorry, I don’t read walls of tests. Learn to be concise.
No but for real though,
- You don’t understand social functions & utilities.
-
They aren’t. Considering the amount of players in the game and average queue time for each player, it shows it struggles more than it should if it would be “popular”. Not to mention the negative social impact it has had already, and how many people has left because they “can’t find people to play with” whenever they’ve tried to do something outside of the automatic queuing. And also the people who left for the sole reason of being unhappy with the changes to the social climate overall.
If you for some reason mean the premade groups for things like m+, then that makes more sense, but you’re still not right. Again, even that should see far more activity considering the amount of players if it would be “popular”.
To bottomline it: The player retention rate is bad. Because there’s less and less keeping players playing the game. m+ had a miraculous effect when it came in Legion, but even that is fading, because it’s so dependent on the entire size of the player base.
You don’t know how many people play the game and queue times are long because everyone’s a DPS.
???
You make no sense. Teams make it even harder to find someone to play with. Your long time partner quit? Oh shoot, I guess you have to invite someone new to the team and raise them from 1500 to 2400. Have fun with that.
/s
Lol. Far more dungeons are being done since the LFG was added, compared to when you had to wait 40 mins in trade chat to get a 5 man BRD going.
BFA has as many players as Legion did towards its end is what you doomsayers fail to realise.
BFA had a huge expansion start spike and then it went back to Legion end numbers.
Around 3 million when you combine the largest regions
But Blizzard has reported a continued drop in “player engagement” the last couple of quarterly reports, in all of their games (yes, that includes WoW).
That’s exactly my point. How did you miss that? Even that is fading. It should last longer before it goes back to those kinds of numbers. This, right now, is abnormal. The game is losing popularity overall, of which no small part is due to the lack of immersion. In other words, the emotional investment isn’t as strong as it used to be. Why, you may ask? Well, it’s simple. It’s because of the social factors and stupified classes.
The rest of what you posted has already been explained or I just cba to deal with it. You keep missing that social psychology factor being an integral part of MMO gameplay though.
Source please.
Or because it’s a 15 year old game and people got bored of it? They grew up, and have other things to play? And WoW is not particularly attractive ( most MMOs aren’t ) to the young kids that want instant gratification games?
The point I’m making is that if quality was what made people quit then legion’s ending should’ve had well close to 10 mil because Legion is widely accepted as one of the best expansions.
Could you imagine if arena teams didn’t exist in the past and you just made it up on the spot?
“Hey guys, let’s make a system that punishes you for playing with other people by making you start all over again everytime you want to try something new (or your current team just doesn’t work out), completely alienating most of the playerbase from participating in pvp more than it already does.”
Terrible idea that people in this thread only agrees with because of nostalgia.
edit: also screw people that have existing partners from different servers
Yeah I’m pretty sure way more people use the LFG to PvP than people did arenas back in WOTLK when you had teams. Didn’t you also have to spend money to create teams?
Like, how can you compare those 2 systems, it’s night and day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFogWej65mQ you can use his source to check for yourself. They stopped publishing the OFFICIAL numbers back in 2015 after the first quarterly report of WoD, so 3rd party tracking in the API is the best you’re gonna get. Of course, as he put it himself in the link, it’s ASSUMING it doesn’t track alts. (I think it does, but it can’t be guessed how much that lowers the amount so go figure.)
I suspect the post and/or thread will be taken down if I link to the source he uses, so just listen to the source he says out loud at the start if you’re so curious and then google it.
You do realise you’re saying the game can’t attract new players, right? That it just attracted the flood in its early years and then stopped. And you’re phrasing it like it’s something natural.
- The taste in games is not all that different as you seem to think it is, just because there is an age difference now. Humans aren’t as different as you apparently assumes. Just because the original wave of players are significantly older than their teenage years now, it doesn’t mean the game lost its attraction to the people younger every year as a default just because the game was released that long ago.
It means the game dropped in quality so much that it 1. dropped in player retention numbers, and 2. failed to lure in new players. All from dropping in quality. Emotional investment, and by extension immersion, is a strong motivator for playing any game. It’s what makes people spend money on microtransactions when it’s only cosmetic, for example. So how a game accomplishes that effect is something that’s usually planned out.
Yeah gosh, I mean, it’s like social psychology has nothing to do with it and it was a MIRAKURU (=miracle in rōmaji) that people even got to play arenas back in the day! Oh wait…
PS:
Kelduril, you can look up the last couple of quarterly earnings reports Blizzard has published to see for yourself what they’ve been saying about customer retention. Last I heard, their total amount of customers went from 352 million to 345 million, but keep in mind that includes Activision titles and King titles, like CoD and Candy Crush. They did report that ALL of Blizzard’s games has been on a downward trend recently.
I’ll put it in an easier to read way for ya’ as a bonus favor - what made today’s players like it back when they first started way back when, including those who have already left, is not unique to those players. The game (practically speaking) never runs out of new minds to entice. But it has failed to do so with the changes over the history of the game, at the same time as it has also lost most of its then-existing players.
In other words, the game’s player base is bleeding and has been doing so for a very long time.
To say it has to do with the age of the game just shows you really don’t know what you’re talking about. A game can be 100 years old, it can be over a 1000 years old (like chess) and still be as popular. It all comes down to the quality of the game itself, the player retention rate, and how well it draws new players into playing it. These are the general outlines of what determines the size of a player base, which of course can be done in a lot of different ways.
Changing the game for the worse is not one of them though.
It’s no secret that WoW started going down hard in Cataclysm and never really recovered past expansion launches. So yes, when the game had 12M and it sometimes goes from 2-3 M to 8-10M during launches I would assume most of those are the 12M coming back.
WoW really doesn’t appeal to young players. The MMO market is not what it was 10 years ago and MMOs are far more complex games than the crap of today. They require long term investment, character building, economy skills.
Whereas kids just want to plug in their Mid or feed Yasuo. They lack the attention spans and dedication gamers had in the 2000s.
Lol yeah they are. Look at all the games today. Loot boxes everywhere, casual games that let you play a 20 min match ( LOL, CSGO, PUBG/battle royales, Rainbow Six, OW ).
Kids don’t have the patience WoW players had in the 2005s when BRD took 2 hours to complete.
That’s why WoW went with shorter raids and dungeons, LFG, LFR, they adapted it to the times.
But it did, though. The average WoW player is like 25+ these days.
Far fewer people played arenas back in wotlk than they do today, compared to the total % of players.
No. This is outright false. MoP was better than Cata and WoD, Legion was better than WoD and they both had smaller numbers than the respective expansions they were better than.
It’s not quality, it’s accessibility. People don’t have the time, patience, or skill to do Mythic raids and even Heroic achievements aren’t as common as you’d think.
That’s why WoW went casual, because they realised the old players who would raid a whole night grew up and no longer had the time to farm the gold and grind the amount of time it needed, and the new players that followed weren’t willing to do what the old players once did. So they had to revamp their entire philosophy.
1 Like