I’m not the type of person that likes to rant, I’m also relatively new WoW player, but “atrocious” is the lightest term I can find to describe what I see in game.
The current state of game is pure pay2win nowadays.
Once you level character to 60 (but you can even pay for character boosts!) you can’t progress at all, neither in PvP nor PvE.
In 2v2 rated arenas I’m absolutely stuck at 1400ish because 2 out of 3 games I encounter obviously overgeared (>20ilvls higher than me) carry that can mostly just 1v2 whoever I find to pug with. It’s been in this state for weeks and I tried several classes and result is the same. And no, “git gud” is not the solution, because even when I land all ccs in most perfect way and have perfect coordination with team - we just can’t kill those, especially if it’s some dk, dh, pala or monk, classes that are extremely tanky enough by themselves, so 20ilvl difference makes them immortal. And don’t forget those ferals that do 38k damage with double ferocious bite instantly. And other stuff like that.
I can see how arenas could be progressed at early days of expansion (when boosters haven’t geared up enough yet), so those of you who are going to say they pugged 1800 or 2100 probably did it back then. Right now if you make new alt and try to push cr then no matter your skill you can’t, you just can’t.
For PvE it’s similar, just a bit better - if you’re new player then nobody will take you to high keys, and generally people want you to have ilvl higher than what drops in that M+ (wth???), same for raids, so it’s like game pushing you to buy boost before you can do M+ (and ruin keys of course, since you won’t have enough experience). I said it’s ‘a bit better’ because occassionally you still can find a good group and push some key, because, unlike arenas, you are fighting enemies that stay at same strength throughout the expansion (while in PvP you fight people that are now much more skillful AND geared than they should be on that cr because they are boosting). You literally need 1800cr gear to get above 1400cr. And PvE gear is useless in PvP so you can’t progress anywhere, you just can’t.
Oh, and don’t forget “legendaries” that cost 100k+ gold on AH right now (something new player won’t be able to farm for a long long time). True, it’s the other players who set prices on AH, but the whole token<->boosting bli$$ard business model caused extreme inflation of gold so 1 gold is NOTHING now. Even though some gold comes from questing and stuff it’s not nearly enough to afford all game content. Everybody is poor unless they buy tokens or farm their sweat off 24/7.
So what happens is this - a new player buys sub, buys expansion, but then quickly finds out that he is stuck forever unless he buys tokens for boosts. Even when he tries to find group he is FLOODED with boosting advertisements in LFG and in trade chat.
As consequence, community is already very very dead, you hardly see anyone when leveling (it’s a single player experience now), good job bli$$ard in destroying your community by your greedy cash grab methods. Players that value actual gameplay in mmo left, mostly only pay2win cash cows remain, and of course clueless new players tricked into buying pay2win cash grab.
One of reasons people moved to classic / tbc classic is running away from token pay2win stuff-fest, but I have absolutely zero doubts token will move there as soon as retail dies out completely and bli$$ard can’t drain it’s players there anymore. After that wow will be finished for good.
I won’t even review game lore or gameplay or anything because IT DOESN’T EVEN MATTER in pay2win. If you don’t pay - you will be forever STUCK and feel like a fool because everybody else has better gear and achievements and everything than you. And while in game I heard dozens of opinions like “you are stupid if you’re not buying boosts” so community already transformed aswell into something that I don’t want to be part of.
It’s absolutely disgusting that game that has paid monthly subscription and need to be BOUGHT every expansion also turns out to be concealed pay2win scam.
So much hard work on devs side (quality really is very good!) but greedy execs destroyed all of it just to milk some extra $. I won’t even be surprised if some of those ‘boosters’ are bli$$ard employees, forcing players to buy tokens or gtfo.
Eh, I’m awful at the game and got to 1750 without boosts or tokens or whatever.
Maybe if you mastered a class instead of whining that the only reason they are better than you is money then you might get somewhere.
Just honour gear can get you to 229ilevel now, way higher than what you have…
If you got there in early days of expansion I suggest you try to do it on new alt now, you’ll see the problem. Skill can only take you so far when you’re against DH/DK with 50k hp oneshotting you while your healer struggles to outheal their dps.
My ilvl is around 229 but it isn’t not nearly enough for 1400 anymore. We can occassionally win vs same random pugging people like us, but next arena there’s overgeared carry again and cr sinks back.
I did it on August the 10th.
How many carries did you encounter statistically? For me it’s more than half of arenas, something around 60%.
I don’t know. Too many for sure. I think boosting is more prevalent in 3’s but for sure theres too much of it.
I think you’re misplacing root cause of your problem if you can’t break through 1400 though.
That’s a you problem. Gear isn’t why you’re stuck at 1.4k. Even overgeared players at 1.4k are utterly terrible at the game. I pushed to 2.1k with 220 item level about 2 weeks ago. And 220 ilvl is very easy to get, and clearly behind the gear curve.
Boosting exists in every game, no company has ever figured out how to combat it, if you know though, feel free to making millions.
Boosting has and will always happen No matter what Blizzard does.
Step 1 would be making boosting illegal as it was before. Yes it will continue existing but at much much smaller scale. Neigher players nor boosters like risking account bans so not many will go that path. Now bli$$ard gave green light to them and actually promotes it by selling token (because, why else would people need so much gold in game???).
But that won’t happen since tokens are main source of income now. So bli$$ard will keep actively promoting it. So you loud mouths here should stop strawmaning like ‘it always happened’ because it always happened BUT AT MUCH SMALLER SCALE.
Imagine if suddenly all heavy drugs will be legalized and then people will start telling that ‘BUT YOU COULD ALWAYS BUY THEM, NOTHING CHANGED’, you’re giving exact same arguments here.
And just to prove my point I hopped onto my character just now and played some arenas and recorded it ( see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XO2SVxKURQ , wait a bit for HQ to process ), and here are observations on opposite team:
game 1: overgeared balance druid (likely booster) + undergeared healer druid
game 2: overgeared monk + overgeared warrior
game 3: booster on monk + undergeared pala
game 4: undergeared dh + undergeared pala
game 5: booster on hunter + undergeared pala
game 6: slightly overgeared mage + slightly undergeared rogue
game 7: booster warrior + undergeared rogue
game 8: overgeared pala (likely booster) + average hunter
game 9: overgeared warlock (maybe booster) + average pala
game 10: slightly undergeared hunter + very undergeared priest
game 11: undergeared druid + slightly undergeared warrior
game 12: booster druid + undergeared priest
game 13: average pala + average dh
game 14: very overgeared dk + very overgeared pala (what are they even doing there?)
game 15: overgeared hunter (maybe booster) + undergeared pala
game 16: undergeared shaman + undergeared pala
game 17: booster monk + overgeared pala
game 18: overgeared monk + average pala
game 19: undergeared dh + average pala
game 20: average dh + undergeared monk
game 21: overgeared shaman (likely booster) + average (not sure) druid
game 22: booster druid + undergeared mage
game 23: average warrior + undergeared shaman
game 24: booster priest + undergeared rogue
game 25: overgeared pala (likely booster) + undergeared shaman
game 26: overgeared hunter + overgeared druid
game 27: overgeared dh + overgeared pala
game 28: slightly overgeared druid + average rogue
game 29: overgeared pala (likely booster) + undergeared dh
game 30: average druid + undergeared monk
game 31: booster rogue + undergeared priest
Then I grouped them up to make some approximate statistics (tried to be as objective as possible):
obvious boostgroups: 8 (~25.81%)
likely to be boostgroups: 5 (~16.12%)
games vs overgeared team: 7 (~22.58%)
similar gear games: 4 (~12.90%)
games vs undergeared team: 7 (~22.58%)
So that’s what we see. Gear was high enough only for 34% of matches. 25%-41% of matches were boost groups, and another 22% were vs overgeared players (and the question is - what are they doing on that cr? what if they bought boosts to get that gear and now pvping for fun / conquest farm to buy more gear they don’t deserve?)
Just FYI: my gear’s PvP ilvl was 232 and 29% versatility.
Yes, I judged gear by HP which isn’t 100% accurate but it’s close enough in most cases (i.e. rogue shouldn’t have 50k hp on 1.4k cr, no?). But at same time I know there are boosters that abuse Versatility scaling or some other cheese to oneshot for 25k hp (‘touch of death’) on 32k hp monk (actually happened), so they shift statistics back as it’s written above even if it was a bit wrong due to some false positives.
What other conclusions can we make from it?
If my skill would be “average” for 1.4k cr then my cr would sink because of gear, right? Oh, and that’s what it did and you can see it on video. Because 50/50 wins in ‘fair’ games aren’t quite enough to compensate for nearly 100% lose chance vs booster teams (and that’s around one third of all games!). So to push cr above 1.4k cr we need to win around 75% of ‘fair’ games (games vs teams with similar gear), so that games vs boosters won’t sink cr fast enough.
So, in other words, to be 1.4k cr I need to be much more skilled than 1.4k cr, isn’t it strange? So skill-wise 1.4k is really 1.8k and 1.8k is like 2k or so. Only 1.8k-skilled player can push through 1.4k.
How is any new or average player supposed to win 75% of games vs similarly geared people? If I was some multiglad on alt and had same buddy and we had perfect comp that doesn’t depend on gear too much (rogue/mage?) we could pull it off, but I’m just new player. So that means I’ll be stuck at 1.4k for VERY long time, most likely forever or until next expansion. What’s the incentive to even play arenas then? I already got almost best gear I can for Combatant rating, and I won’t be able to get better one because I’ll be stuck at 1.4k cr forever (hell, I saw boosters all the way from 1k to 1.4k, just not in that amount, here it’s like inpenetrable wall).
Yes there is a benefit of slowly learning to PvP but it’s going so slow and it isn’t motivating when I try my best, do many things right but get facerolled anyway because some rogue has 50k hp and oneshots during second stun (when I don’t have trinket anymore). It’s not fun, not motivating and not useful experience-wise.
I always enjoy getting beaten by skill, because that’s where I can learn, but when overgeared booster just hits us till we die - cr just sinks back and we get nothing out of it.
When around 1/3 of all games are guaranteed to sink cr it’s really hard to push it.
Your ilvl is 222. Yes boosting shouldnt be a thing in PvP at least.
Also removing the rating requirement could also help in regards of gear at least. I could see people abuse it for easy high ilvl gear in the early stages during a tier. Well unless they bring back resi etc.
It increases to 232 in PvP, that’s what I meant.
Fair enough. Also you could try to do RBGs instead of Arena. And then whenever you hit a certain rating in either you do the other for CP. Also RBGs arent as Boost infested due to its abysmal price. And unless they fixed RBGs rating gain gaining rating in there is a joke.
True, but Blizzard has allowed it to flourish. The only action they’ve taken was to prohibit boosting spam in the finder but they never backed it up with action.
Blizzard have implemented overly complex technical marvels to problems in the past but they just cant be bothered to apply it to boosting spam.
It puts me off pugging. I used to raid with a guild until MoP T1 and would pug from then on, the last time I pugged was Antorus. I tried the first tier of BfA, looked at and the finder with 99% spam and just haven’t bothered since.
It’s lazy f2p game level of spam.
I couldn’t find a group for it, ever, there’s barely any of them in LFG and they want 1600+ rating at least. But how am I supposed to get any RBG rating if nobody would take me? Also they typically want voice communication and I don’t like that, also bg takes way longer than arena match.
I made it my daily (hourly?) routine to open LFG and report them all as ‘Advertisement’, and hoping for the best.
I feel your pain mate. honestly I do. May I suggest playing on a new player realm. Less players and boost spammers. That’s why I abandoned tarren mill realm.
I think a lot of the boosters are blizz staff. In fact I Accuse Blizz of scamming us all by doing it to make people buy tokens.
Its an option. Whether you want to do that is up to you. As for the talking: You will have to do that in Arena sooner or later as well. In RBGs however the amount you talk is limited unless youre a shot caller.
And yes they take longer. They are however an easier way to gain rating.
Aren’t all realms merged in group finders? I’m seeing people from various realms there.
We can’t get proofs but I won’t be surprised a tiny bit. It’s super easy for them to find employees, give them good gear or even secret arena benefits (such as better RNG on RNG-based abilities, more crits etc) and let them carry and faceroll through those who don’t want to pay $$.
Also the current price of legendary items is obviously bli$$ard-decided.
can you at least start lying somewhere at the end? 
because yes there are BOOSTS
and yes you can buy gold with real MONEY
but NO
you can easily progress in PVE or PVP you just need to be GOOD and have friends to play with
I don’t even care if they ban me for saying that. If they do then it must be true! muhahahahaha. balls in your court BLIZZ. What ya going to do when they come looking for you?!