However, WoW has over the years been reduced to a raiding game.
You can criticize nearly any aspect of the World of Warcraft and you would probably be correct.
When it comes to raiding it is still the best game in the market. They have focused on that niche and put all their eggs into one basket.
It’s not only that - Blizzard simply does not know how to manufacture player versus player content anymore.
Look at Starcraft 2, shadow of Starcraft 1 which was THE original e-sports game.
Overwatch has fun moments, but was never balanced from day 1.
Heroes of the Storm is a corpse.
Blizzard is afraid of players making choices, and they are afraid of players being upset.
Player vs player does not sync with their modern philosophy.
Raiding is safe. You learn the scripted NPC’s formula and everybody wins. You feel like a champion and Blizzard receives dollar.
Heroes of the Storm is in its state because Actiblizz deemed it not profitable enough and decided to stop trying too much with it. Somewhat understandable, as it was a late attempt to cash in on a saturated market (and yet in 2018 it was 3rd-4th most popular MOBA).
Too bad, because after buying Overwatch in 2016 it was HotS that got me into playing other Blizzard games (believe it or not I got curious trying to play Overwatch characters in another game). Wouldn’t be playing WoW if it wasn’t for Heroes of the Storm.
You know what? I actually wanted to give it a shot. When Archeage Unchained was announced, I pre-ordered the game right away.
In the meantime, I wanted to try it out and see what it was all about, so I downloaded regular Archeage and I played the game for about 2 hours, wandering in the main leveling zone, completing quests and killing monsters.
Then, I got banned.
I got banned from 2 hours of leveling. I didn’t interact with any player, I didn’t “cheat” or abuse any game mechanic or anything.
After looking it up, what I found is that the anti-cheating software they have going on apparently recognizes Razer Synapse as a cheating software.
I tried contacting the support, but they wouldn’t answer at all.
I got refunded by Paypal and my account is still banned from Archeage despite the fact that I didn’t play the game long enough to break any rule. Great experience.
Even PvE in PvE game haven’t good class design. And people please it for PvP. Game turns not aroun arenas tho and its not based on PvP in general.
Btw here is a speech nowdays ex-game design Rob Pardo in 2009, thats said
Arenas were the single biggest mistake in WoW 's history
We didn’t engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There’s constant pressure on the class balance team, there’s pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don’t PvP don’t understand why their classes are changing. I don’t think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we’d have to do to balance it in that direction.
Btw PvP focused players not happy if 1 spec not viable(bad or worst) than META spec and loud whine about it when in the same time in PvE ur class can be not viable whole expansion and this is normal thing.
The one thing the OP is right about is that removing PvE and focussing on PvP only would mean a lot less complains and Activision saving money with the development.
Afterall, if there is nobody left playing your game, you have no complains and can save a LOT of development.
In all honesty, removing PvE from the game would also mean removing factions, as there would no longer be anybody playing the underdog faction at all. Without factions, WorldPvP would need to be Free-For-All and for some players “faction pride” is the only reason they engage in PvP at all. You would obviously lose players no longer interested in the factionless-version.
What you would be left with is basically the rated PvP part of the game. That would obviously be insanely popular, just like it is now.
Please don’t say “it would be more popular if it would just receive more attention and better balancing!” - no it would not. Because the same thing is true for ALL parts of the game and, spoiler alert, there currently is no part of the game gaining players.
Not a single one.
Edit:
Also, the rated PvP part of WoW is not an MMO…it is a std multi-player PvP game. The only MMO part of PvP is WorldPvP - which would have to be changed into FFA, as i already said.
