How to Revive WoW PVP

Community General Discussion
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WoW Arena is dead/dying. It has tons of barriers of entry, it takes ages to find a game, and it got optimized to oblivion, where you need macros/settings/builds/addons/was. But most importantly: WoW PvP has zero community, and it feels like a sales market, where people treat eachother like NPCs, and only see rating/ilvl.

Now how to redesign wow pvp fundamentally?

Make world pvp great again. Pvp in every mmo should be all about the community, not just the gameplay alone. Arena is not Ranked Overwatch. For gameplay alone, it will never succeed. Arena as a game mode makes no sense, the way it is designed currently for any game calling itself MMO. They need to eliminate sharding, and introduce open world Epic BGs, PVP zones, or open duelling areas, where people see eachother, and compete for things. PvP Rating/Elo Score is viewed as good in the community, because it removes the ego from bad players, but you know what: Rating is one of the biggest reasons, why this game doesn’t have a real community. People only see eachother as numbers, and there is no myth surrounding someone’s skill. It’s all already determined before you even interact with someone, and there are no rumours, or discussions about who plays better, because we have so many tools to measure someone in wow. This whole esports rating approach should not be in any mmo, because it ruins the social fun part of pvp, where your rating is determined by hearsay, and people try to figure out, who is better, by duelling. You should introduce server-specific tournaments for example, and give people rewards for winning x amount of tournaments in a season, or for winning some sort of world pvp war in a zone in a server. The possibilities are endless to shift rewards away from Arena Rating to community pvp events.
Soloqueue also won’t fix something for you, that is flawed at its core: A MMO, that tries to be an esport, where people just play for gameplay. Good luck with that in your 20 years old tab target game.

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Sharding killed the greatest PvP recruitment tool.

It used to be you would open world PvP while queuing. Down in STV or goldshire/westfall.

You would see the same people on both sides every single day. Over time more and more people would join in.

We had a whole community on teamspeak both Horde and Alliance who all got on knew each other and had massive rivalries.

Then sharding and server merges happened and the community died.

It used to be that you’d go and see the same people everytime, when sharding came it wasn’t often you’d see anyone wanting a good fight let alone that you knew.

Now I know this post isn’t about world PvP, but back then it was what kept the rated PvP alive.

The community built around world PvP survived on resi gear as you were lame without it and to get resi gear you needed to PvP.

To get the community back there needs to be a closer community than just queuing for rated. There’s no interaction in a queue to keep it alive and interesting.

Just my 2 cents from an old timer.

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I disagree unbalanced realms were a major problem and i think phasing not sharding is the problem as well.

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Weird that you think that. The whole point of my post is to shift pvp away from arena to world pvp. Not sure, why you thought I wanted something else

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I’ll be honest I skim read and replied before getting to the bit in the middle.

I agree with everything you said!

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Ok: What if we had 4 factions instead of 2, and people could change their faction without it being tied to race. Imagine your Dragon Flight was a pvp faction.

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i do not disagree with your view just saying what is a major factor in pvp.

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You are welcome to though.
Faction imbalance could have been fixed easily, if they were a little innovative, and willing to give up on selling faction changes

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You have my seal of approval

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I can speak as a non PVPer (who is terrible at it).
The rewards for losing could be improved. Not in every area of PVP but in some casual PVP content. It would probably be Open World as instanced content tends toward the more competitive.
I know there will be snarky comment about “git gud” and participation trophies wokery but I think there are probably a lot of players like me who are not good at PVP but could be encouraged into some casual form of PVP content with the correct rewards. Perhaps Marks of Honor? or other cosmetics (not the Gladiator stuff).

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I agree, losing should be more fun, but I don’t think rewards alone fix that. Rating should also be changed: People, who are extremely good, should have some trophy, but others should not have their wow skill put into a number. It kills the community, and the myth surrounding someone’s skill. Tournaments with leagues maybe should be introduced instead of rating. For winning tournaments, people get special rewards like store mount recolours. For participating without being last place, people should get tokens to get rewards. There are easy ways to move away from the current elo system to something way more fun to a broader audience

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I disagree what you said about arena and it’s not dying at all, also SL revived rated bgs like never for years, there are still rbgs being formed, i don’t know if you’re talking about skirmishes. But yeah epic bgs are too outdated, wish they made something like GW2 WwWs. WwWs are what epic bg should be, they tried it with ashran but ruined it.

edit: forgot to mention, DF removed gear entry from arenas like it was in legion, i don’t know what else they can do to make arenas less “barriers”. You only need omnibar addon, that’s all, maybe gladius sarena etc. M+ and raid entry barrier is much more larger in this case, you need tons of weird WAs, boss mods etc

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I couldn’t care less about Open world PvP.
It has zero benefit nor progression, it is fun for a week or so untill you start getting killed over and over by ppl who did actual content and overgear you immensly.

They cannot allow Open world PvP to grant you any kind off gear because cross-faction boosting is a toxic feature.

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Fights could be arranged here on the forums. A bit like what football hooligans do. I am certain there would be people up for it. A mass brawl over Halla would be really cool or the Gurabashi Arena. Maybe some prize money or items to tempt people to take part. The possibilities are endless. There are hundreds of epic places in WoW to do this.

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Wow is an ultra-casual game , I doubt there are lots of people who love pvp , + the lack of balance was always an issue .
Let me ask you op what mmo has great pvp . i played several mmo’s and in all of them was half-baked at the very best .
PvP is hard , pressure toxicity .
Most mmorpg players are here for fantasy .

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I can’t say better in a competitive sense, but other mmos have more fun pvp, where the focus is the community with world pvp, and duelling. Wow pvp almost doesn’t have a community at all outside of guilds, because pvp is sterile due to the elo nature with esports, and there is server sharding, which destroys any sense of community instantly anyway. At the same time, wow pvp isn’t simply put good enough quality wise as an esport for it to be played just for the game mode itself. They should shift wow pvp away from ranked ladder, and focus on its epic nature with community drama, and maybe small Tournaments as the focus over an Elo system. They need to figure out, how to implement world pvp in a fun way in a closed server with people recognizing eachother. I have tons of ideas for that

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World pvp was never great.

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While all of this is true, I feel like it’s very hard for a new player to get into PvP, especially Arenas.

Feel free to correct me, as I am neither a new player nor a PvP player (anymore). Sometimes I really wonder what is actually getting people to play this game, furthermore stay and keep playing.

I mean, in order not to drag your “team” behind, as a new player in arenas, I feel like you have so much more to learn than before. Tacts, comps, setups, all 13 (soon to be 14) classes and their skills. It sure does looks way more intimidating than it used to be, back in the day.

Even then, there’s no “teams” anymore. I don’t know if there’s still a lot of PvP guilds, but I sure noticed that they are not as advertised as they used to. New players would basically found themselves playing alone, and against people that have decades of experience in PvP.

Sure, they could always “get gud” and work really hard towards that goal. Pretty sure some do. But I fear that they are met with disdan whenever they are trying to learn while playing the game (as opposed to studying the game before playing).

It’s something that we 100% have in PvE too, and imho, is part of why the new players experience can be awful. I hate the fact that we have to “study” in order to learn, as opposed to actually playing.

Not sure if anything can be done at this point. Although, I look forward to DF and it’s “new” gearing system, so that I could once more enjoy PvP in pretty much all forms.

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With Solo Q, I would imagine Arena will become more popular, if only because now it is easily accessible without the hassle involved in finding a team. So I would not say it is dead or dying.

I agree though that WPvP has really been the only kind of WoW content that was memorable, at least for me.

I hope they implement something similar to the Ordos/Talon Vengeance/Nzoth “neutral ganker faction” feature, had huge fun with those (well not the Nzoth one, did not play during BfA).

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It is a dirty lake without rivers infested with boosters, and it has barely any water in it (players)