Try watching the AWC games (currently a miserable 19k viewers on Twitch) and imagine you’re a new player, or never even played the game but you heard it’s cool and are thinking of trying it.
What you’re watching makes no sense. The game is no longer played on the screen, it’s played in the players’ heads. Nothing that’s happening on the screen seems to have any relevance to who is winning or losing. Is a team ahead? You can’t know that without tracking the cooldowns of 6 different players.
Spell effects explode everywhere on the screen, seemingly at random. Players’ health bars might go down if magical bolts hit them, and might just stay where they are. A player gets low on health, and then the other players just stop attacking them: there is no logic, without a very in-depth knowledge of the game, as to why anything is happening.
Games should be intuitive, and understanding what is going on at a basic level needs to be obvious if the game is to keep new players. What was happening in WoW PvP used to be obvious, even if you were a noob you could watch a video of a class you didn’t play and it was easy to grasp. Watching players up to Cataclysm it was easy to understand what was going on, even if you had never seen the game before. When you hit someone with spells or attacks, their hp should go down.
As a player who started in 2004 and quit in 2016 and focused on arena, then picked up again this year, the game bears no resemblance to what it was. It might as well be a different game. I cannot understand anything that’s happening besides occasionally a defensive cooldown gets called out (Spirit Link Totem! Dispersion!) none of which look like anything, and essentially all do the same thing (deny a ‘try’). I used to be a freakin’ GM and it’s impenetrable.
Retail caters only for a diminishing player base. Globally they can rustle up only 20k viewers. At the same time, Sodapoppin has 12k viewers while he just plays some random game nobody has heard of.
I dunno what I hope to achieve by saying this except that I wish Blizzard would stop releasing expansions and just make WoW 2. The devs went in the worst possible directions, adding more and more complexity while forgetting to make a game.
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Literally the best AWC i’ve watched for EU. Couldn’t call it, new players, new teams taking down the big dogs.
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this cup had the most views out of all awc for many cups
this cup was imo the most fun there is
pvp is already pve style trash, you want it to be even more simplified ? More dh and war ?
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Tbh this. Personally i can’t see whats going on at all while playing. There’s dh flying over my screen, 366215 random pets nameplates, most of time i’m playing vs totems, random pets. It’s absolutely disgusting. In wrath i can atleast see what i’m dying to as casters have to cast for example and spells do similar dmg all the time. Now i can do my best pve rotation and noone Is dying for some reason or sometimes i’m just jumping around and people die out of nowhere when nothing happened.
Awc having some viewers (i Guess mostly cos its on twitch and not on YouTube anymore) doesnt change the fact the game is awful to both play and watch. (Actually watching Is a little bit more Fun than playing cos youre not the one suffering).
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yep, they have ruined and destroyed the game really badly and even with losing 1-2 million subs every xpac they just refuse to fix it and accept that they are incompetent
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It should, but then the Resto Druid heal over time effects makes most of your damage irrelevant and the game becomes a battle of the Druid mana bars / drinks.
It’s a new age and a new era for the game. Which in some ways can be more appealing to new players, but more so for PvE. Personally I think new players, especially younger ones (younger than 20 years old), who have played other newer games, wouldn’t really enjoy the ultra slow-paced arenas of old. WoTLK arenas for example could sometimes take hours to win, animations clunky and slow, straight up unfair matchups etc.
Retail has a surprisingly decent amount of new players, but not in PvP. PvP is a bit too complicated in terms of external setup and game knowledge. Certain things in the game need to be pruned, and a wider division of PvP and PvE needs to happen.
The knowledge required for PvP is so vast, that I oftentimes see people with very high PvP experience who don’t know certain interactions, talents, specs, builds etc that they randomly lost to.
“What am I dying to?” is a question a lot of such players often ask themselves.
The biggest gatekeep factors for new players, in order, for getting into rated PvP, especially Arena, are:
- Addons / WeakAuras
- Learning what every spec does both on enemy and your own team, and all the interactions - this takes an extremely long time and a lot of practice on top of knowledge
- The community itself having a large amount of ego freaks who think they are better than they are, never giving people that are trying to learn a chance (in 2 word Toxicity + Elitism)
- Amount of keybinds, macros and getting used to all of them
- Figuring out the gearing process, best stats, talents, builds etc on your own - this is quite literally impossible without the assistance of another person and 3rd party websites. While this is very easy after time, initially as someone who has no clue this can be tough
- After going through all of the above, learning to make quick decisions and play under pressure
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I think WoW PVP is super fun, and the devs should invest more into making it attractive for new players. At the same time, I don’t think the AWC is an indication for what PVP should look like to new players.
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I myself don’t play 3s and don’t watch AWC, because it’s just absolutely over the top for me, my brain turns into mush whenever I’m trying to understand the hell is happening, and I’ve got 7 elites in 2s. It’s uninteresting to watch and incomprehensible to play.
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I’m amazed that people still watch AWC 
19k is quite a lot of people.
PVP would be so much better if AWC didn’t exist
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Its total mess, understandable only for players with 5+ year exp.
Whenever I toon in to watch AWC, there always are rogues. over all years rogues must be around 80% of comps played? boring
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What would specifically be better?
These are the same fever dreams as “Removing SS will resurrect/balance 3v3”, never mind those 
The guy is kind of reaching with that claim but one thing that I think is realistic is that it would probably discourage a bit of fotm rerolling (which would exist anyway, but who is even playing Sub WW before AWC anyway?).
Also arguable that tuning could be more frequent instead of being hindered by ‘gotta wait til AWC is over!’
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a friend who doesn’t play wow anymore and hasn’t really gone past heroic raiding found it very appealing having the hp bars on the sides actually having a reference of who is who in-game made it somewhat exciting for them with very loose knowledge.
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I only can follow AWC if i am active playing the game, the conmentators help allot and are rly good explaining whats going on
But if i am not playing eaven for a season i tune in and have no clue whats going on if i dont get a trained eye at what i have too look
That’s what I’m thinking. Nothing stood out to me straight away, so I wanted some clarification.
I could understand this as a reason. However, when I read “PVP would be so much better if AWC didn’t exist” I just think AWC has been going on for a long time and all, but it’s only a competition. Besides people being possibly influenced to play something a pro played, I don’t see how it would really impact anything else. Maybe even fewer people would play without AWC passively advertising PVP.
from watching AWC this year, you can clearly see the balance issues for certain classes
and lack of other specs
however, without supatease and venruki it would of been boring to watch
@blizzard REWORK FROST DK
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Yea, best AWC cup i’ve seen so far, and i’ve seen alot, so idk what this guy is smoking
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It was exiting too watch
Worst one are always high damp meta where games start at 80% damp
But on the other hand that games gave me the best power naps of all time
Other healers than resto druids? The games became more interesting.