How long have you played WoW?
i have been playing for a week and i cant watch plebs writting bu;**s*ts on pvp forums my eyes are burning!
Be honest now, how long?
You see, in a discussions about judging past PvP expansions, the word of one who has played all of them would inevitably hold more merit than the word of one who has hardly played any of them.
So how long have you played WoW?
I finks Batle Azerot good expacs buh Blizzrd make bad meny change for pleyer veus pleyers arina sistems. 
No pvp venders etcetera. I finks blizzrd needs add pvp vender then makes meybe tokens for buy gears. then i finks it make game balanced more bekoz now pleyer go do mytik and gets best and makes sad bkoz pleyer who no do mytik no get gear very sad mens make cry for pleyer who like game . I finks it why meny pleyer stops sezen 3. blizzrd can make game more good. Need make small fixs to game then i finks game more again good.
That’s because we’re basing our enjoyment on PvP differently.
To you, more content means more enjoyment. BG makeovers and War Mode is a success in terms of overall PvP activity, but this isn’t what people complain about. People want better class design and a meaningful way to gear up via PvP.
I realise OP is refering to PvP in general, but you gotta remember what kind of audience you’re talking to. Arena players care for competition and care little for aestetics. For a big portion of people, they’d want to make preparements for rated PvP as little as possible.
Likewise, an arena player doesn’t really care that much for BGs or WM. It’s nice and gives him/her something to do outside of arena that’s also PvP related, but BGs aren’t exactly a flawed design and work just as well as they did 15 years ago.
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I’m not sure if the Arena audience is as homogenous as it’s sometimes presented as.
As was said above, there’s oh-so-many PvEers with PvE gear who seemingly do lots of Arena at all levels of play. I’m not sure if that group’s desires for Arena are the same as everyone else’s – or if they are even a homogenous group themselves.
Regardless, as I also said above, the desire for class design and balance adjustments and so on – in the name of competition – is a constant desire. There’s not been a season or expansion where Arena players haven’t voiced this desire. And not a season or expansion goes by without some spec or comp being overpowered and broken and Blizzard being criticized for being inept at addressing the concerns of the playerbase.
Judging one expansion by this is judging them all. It’s constant. It’ll be the same for Shadowlands as well. And the expansion after that, and after that, and…
But it’s also not a dichotomy, things aren’t either balanced or unbalanced, and while people’s complaints can be generalised to just be “It’s not balanced enough” or “My spec is bad therefor im upset”. You can’t really just say “Oh there’s always complaining therefor its not a problem”, it gets better and worse as expansions come and go.
For the most part I stay out of class balance discussions, but what I will pipe up on is azerite trait balance, distribution, and the overwhelming power of tank trinkets to the point where caster dps have begun wearing them even when they provide zero primary stats and don’t even actually drop for that class.
I’d say that it’s a permanent problem that’s never going to go away.
But whether it gets demonstratively better or worse doesn’t change the fact that it’s perceived as a negative.
Whether Demon Hunters are worse today than Death Knights were in WotLK, and by how much, is not something that’s discussed. Demon Hunters are just overpowered, and in WotLK Death Knights were overpowered, and that’s as much nuance as there is to it. The community is very here-and-now focused on balance. The delta between current and past is not really something anyone takes into consideration.
PvE is a good example. Dps-rankings have just steadily improved over the years, with specs getting closer and closer to each other in performance. But players today will still obsess just as much over a 1% difference as they obsessed over a 10% difference in earlier days of WoW.
The here-and-now is all that matters.
So balance concerns and such just come across as the same to me each expansion.
People might say that this time it’s different! This time it’s really bad! This time it’s the worst it’s ever been!
But then again, they said that last time too. So…
And let’s be honest, it’s impossible to objectively measure anyway. How do you rate the balance during TBC – when the game was in a completely different state and players were more inexperienced and the theory-crafting was in its infancy – compared to today where everything is way more advanced and players have far more knowledge and experience?
It’s like those sport discussions. Is Garry Kasparov a better chess player than Bobby Fisher was? Is Tom Brady a better quarterback than Joe Montana?
You can have endless discussions on that.
The difference between talking to jito and playing vs a dh, anyone?
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You can choose not to talk to me. There’s no queue system that forces you. 
Since I said I stay away from class balance, I generally use a metric of “How many things that cannot be obtained doing only PvP are generally considered better than things obtained from PvP in PvP.” since as you’ve said, class balance is too large a topic to really evaluate.
Currently we’ve got the essence system, azerite traits that aren’t available from pvp content, numerous trinkets for both dps, healing, and a return of tank trinkets, and next tier we’ll have the corruption system as well as multiple melee weapons that provide perma slows.
But there has been seasons where the amount of posts like these are fewer. You’ll never reach a stage where PvP’ers are statisfied, but I’ve definitely seen seasons where people make posts about finding partners and seeking help instead of just complaining. It’s the same for any PvP game out there.
I disagree, I think Shadowlands will bring a positive change. One of them being we’re seeing more focus on class design. Will it quell the negative posts? Nope, but it will probably improve things.
I once had a friend jokingly tell me; that the state of competitive PvP could directly be linked to how many complaint posts there are regarding RMX. Because RMX is something everyone universally agrees is broken for 15 years, so when there’s nothing else to complain about, it’ll be that subject people will be talking about 
I don’t know. To me it feels the same. There’s a spike in the outcry when something is really busted, like Stampeding Hunters in early MoP, or Retribution Paladins in WotLK pre-patch, or what have you.
The only time I’ve noticed a shift, was the last Season of WoD, where the complaint changed from “It’s broken!” to “It’s not broken, but it’s boring!”, which is probably the closest to a compliment the PvP community has ever given Blizzard. 
And that’s just the English-speaking community. I have no idea what they’re saying on the Korean fansites, or in Brazil, or in Russia, or wherever.
It’s really difficult to gouge the signal to noise ratio, but to me it always feels like it’s the same thing being said when looking at entire expansions.
I think WoW is the worst.
Its fundamental design just breeds player negativity.
For example, in Heroes of the Storm they just released a new balance patch with some nerfs for Alarak.
That doesn’t really cause a lot of anger, because players can just play another hero if they don’t like the changes.
In WoW it’s different.
You have a main character. You’ve invested a lot of time and effort into that character. If Blizzard nerfs your class or spec, you can’t just pick another. It’s not that simple. You’re stuck with the choice you made way back when you started playing.
So players obviously get angry when they’re on the receiving end of nerfs (“Don’t nerf me, bro!”), because they are powerless to do anything about it.
So rather than play the game in its entirety and perceive balance as a whole, players in WoW stick to one or a few characters, and the balance is perceived entirely in regards to whether they are on the receiving end of nerfs or buffs. And everyone lobbies for themselves.
There’s a lot of tribalism and lobbying that you just don’t see in other PvP games, because few games hook you to a permanent choice of character from the start, the way WoW does.
So a lot of the PvP negativity is just because the game’s competitive design doesn’t mix well with the desire for constant balance changes. MMORPGs aren’t really made for this, and it goes for PvE too. It’s an RPG at its core, not a race for world firsts or a PvP eSport. Making it into those things isn’t elegant, and players naturally get upset…all the time. Such is the price of forcing a game genre down a path it’s not suited for. 
You can beat Jito… Unfortunately, there’s no scoreboard to tell him!
That’s because the game never ends. 
i dont think the reason of every streamer leaving retail is just classic hype. it is just retail arenas are soooo boring. worst ever been. first time in my wow life i dont queue arenas. even my full bis pve friends doesnt want to queue for conflict essence
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25 responses from Jito in this thread … Does this guy ever play the game ?
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well its a bad pvp system ,we need pvp vendors 2 levels of itam level the same gear pool for each class ,so we have gear itam level balance ,its not fun op pve trinkys essences ruining the game ,mythic pvers are dominating make pvp gear count .world pvp legion was worst
No ,it wasnt worse th wod. Which it felt like a real ripoff for me.
Legion and BFA have been the worst for PvP, even WoD when the prune commenced was better than those two as it had PvP vendors.