Seriously though, what % play arena? Is it growing?
Over the past 2 expansions I have yet to come across one guild member or friend who is arena active. Any one I ask about arena says something across the lines: ‘Tried it, not for me.’
Why is arena still a thing that affects balance?
Wondering why you think arena is taking effect into PvE? It’s actually the complete other way. They buff/nerf based on PvE and if PvP is lucky, they implement changes for PvP (only take effect as soon as you get into fight with another player).
PvP isn’t actually affecting PvE at all, since they can change spells/traits/etc. only for PvP while it’s untouched in PvE.
Well, based on numbers, the pvp playerbase is/was increasing. We had 512 R1 Slots last season → 512000 player above 1k CR. Compared to last Legion season where we had 232 R1 Slots, the playerbase is more than doubled (complete Legion was around 200-250 R1 slots).
Also in WoD we had less player (with around 300-350 R1 slots).
Anyways, there are rumors that R1 isn’t 0.1% anymore and noone except for Blizz really knows. If you look into what they all are doing to hide the dropping overall playerbase and to decrease the effect (timesink whereever it’s possible), it wouldn’t wonder me if they increased the slots to get such an effect like “Oh look how many people are playing arena right now - must be great!”.
The player base isn’t increasing, that’s a fallacy. It’s just that more people were drawn into arenas last season again. Not going to last though, because it was the casual “I don’t want to be punished in my games” audience that shifted over to it. Blizzard stopped reporting sub numbers after the fiasco of the first quarterly earnings report in WoD, but they still report the number of “active users” across all of their games in the ActiBlizz corporate group (which includes candy crush).
ActiBlizz has seen a downward trend of active users in all of their games, and it includes games like WoW, hearthstone, overwatch etc.
However, since we can’t get that data officially anymore, we can only rely on 3rd party sources. Heelvsbabyface on yt did a video a while back, about what the number of logged in users looks like based on a website that tracks the active users the last 2 weeks. So when he did that, it showed WoW had a player base of around 3 million, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. And that’s counting the Eu and NA regions btw. Then there is CN, KR and TW of course, but they just add a couple of hundred thousand more. (Or he might have included the CN region, I don’t remember if it was 2 or 3 regions he counted.)
So no, compared to the 9.something million players they officially reported at the end of MoP, and the 5.something million players they officially reported at the first quarterly earnings report in WoD, the player base hasn’t “gone up”.
They did a quarterly report in… November I think it was, last year after Blizzcon, and then they had reported a drop from 352 million active users to 345 million, across all of their games (like I said, this includes all of their games, including CoD, candy crush saga etc.). They’ve also said that the Blizzard titles, including WoW, are losing player engagement as well, however they didn’t really specify how much. They reported a drop of players in the earnings report last week too, just fyi.
But really though, why would you even think the r1 cutoffs is any indicator to the size of the player base? That makes no sense.
The reason WoW isn’t reporting a “major loss” in $ is only because of the microtransactions in their store.
I was only talking about the PvP player base in this example (obviously). Not about the overall active players.
If R1 cutoff is still 0.1% then we had a lot more players in PvP then in previous seasons / expansions.
So don’t be mad at me but your whole post is pointless (even if interesting for some people). ^^
P.S.: Changed my previous post to be more specific.
I was mulling this over last night after reading people wanted to remove a WW ability because they didn’t like how it’s used in Arena.
I don’t play Arena, but removing that spell would screw up my little corner of WoW.
That’s assuming they’d do it because of that one thread. You can estimate the likelihood of that yourself. It’s used by monks, including windwalkers, in m+ too, and m+ is their baby rn in WoW.
The thing is, in the distant past they were designing encounters to fit the classes. So it went classes>encounters. But then they started to shift that design process around, and started to design classes to fit the encounters, i.e. encounters>classes. This is how they design PvE these days, including class designs.
Well, I think they were talking about Ring of Peace. Not sure how often you use it in PvE…
Anyways, they will not remove it - and if they would really do (remember: they dont!), they would need to replace the talent with something else - maybe something, that is even more often used in PvE (and/or PvP).
They removed the thread though. 
its 10.5% of the world of warcraft player base that plays arena
Where did you get that number?
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