Has PVP seen less participation?

[Bewarê-frostmane]

@Ghandii-silvermoon

It matters because of how it is tied to gear (and possibly title + mount).
You compare how difficult it is to get Gladiator item level gear versus the equivalent M+ or Raid. It’s not even close.

The effort needs to be rewarded. Simple as that.

But is it easy (or quick) to do? Unlikely. Not without micromanagement and actually analyzing the games.
How can Blizzard know that the games I have played have been frustratingly difficult to win and requiring a high skill-cap?

All in all, it is a cursed game development problem which happens when you have a game / PvP environment that lives long enough for the playerbase to be filtered down to practically only skilled veterans.

Your comment just screams it’s you talking from a PvE perspective. Because to a PvPer, the gear only matters until you’re done gearing. To a PvEer, they want gear for all kinds of reasons, it just never stops with them until they’ve cleared the mythic raid and fully geared up from there, along with the m+ levels being pushed to the highest level they can pull off.

The reason why your comment is so disconnected from the underlying reasons, is because gear wasn’t designed like this until Legion (yeah yeah, templates, people not thinking anything mattered, yada yada), and then made worse in BFA, and now SL is basically using the same model as BFA except for some minor differences (and ofc different borrowed powers systems).

Yet people have complained about seasons with low activity, since forever. Because it affects queue times, and makes it tougher to push rating until the end of the season.

Gear upgrades being designed like this, is inconsequential to the reason why people are upset about the lower inflation. People would be upset regardless.

@Ghandii-silvermoon

The effort needs to be rewarded. Simple as that.

It is rewarded. There are more gear upgrade tiers than ever before in the history of WoW PvP. People complaining just don’t like the fact that there are rewards they can’t get. inb4 people complain about facing others with higher ilvl than what fits the MMR, everyone faces that problem yet there are people who manages to push through regardless, usually by playing the strongest comps they can play in the meta since that always adds some extra “pushing power”.

@Ghandii-silvermoon

which happens when you have a game / PvP environment that lives long enough for the playerbase to be filtered down to practically only skilled veterans.

No, it really isn’t. The problem is that the game isn’t separated from PvE completely, which it should’ve been a VERY LONG TIME AGO.

This explains it:

@Bewarê-frostmane

The problem lies more with the reward design for WoW’s rated PvP. It’s quite literally a game mode that’s supposed to be an esport, but they’re not developing it as an esport. So it’s stuck in a place where casuals are angry, and the core gamers are unsatisfied. What Blizzard needs to do, is start pushing proper esports formats and support for 3rd-party organizers who can host tournaments more often than Blizzard does it.

WoW’s rated PvP is designed to be too hard for casuals. But that doesn’t mean Blizzard should make it easier for the casuals. It just means Blizzard needs to turn it into an esport and build an audience base, by letting 3rd-party organizers take a share of that pie. Blizzard is just being unbelievably greedy with the game and refuses to turn it into a proper esport because they won’t develop nor license out proper tournaments to be held by other organizers.

In other words, by building a proper audience for it, it gives the casual players something to aim at, and increases the chances of turning them into core gamers since they start dreaming about becoming as good as what they see.
It’s the same formula as for any sport in the world, like football for example. People of all ages watch the football matches and it makes many people, both adults and kids, dream about becoming as good, and so it turns more people into football players. Because the path they followed made them dream about it first. WoW doesn’t have anything close to that, because Blizzard holds it all in-house and does barely anything with it.

As far as gear rewards are concerned, if PvP would be 100% separated from PvE, it would not need different ilvls at all. All people need in PvP designs, is the ability to show expressions of skill. Which means things that they can do well, and can do bad. For example, templates as a concept would’ve been perfect if there’d be no ilvl difference at all, no borrowed power at all, and just the ability to customize stats allocations and save presets for different builds/matchups that’s easy to swap between just like gear sets.

Because that’s an expression of you, your choices, and your “skill”. In other words, it’s a skill expression. Same with class designs, people just need expressions of skill built into it, which Shadowlands has actually had lots of when compared to many of the past expansions.

That, plus cosmetic rewards, and a design that fosters the creation of an audience base and to enable 3rd-party hosts of tournaments in the game, and to let people spectate games in the game itself, would go a LONG WAY to making WoW PvP surge in popularity on the world scene of esports.