QnA /spit on us by blizzard

PVP Arenas
64

I’m just saying that we’re not getting less. We’re consistently getting more frequent balance changes through hotfixes. This high frequency of changes has perhaps just become the perceived norm, so more wants more. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that we are getting more than ever before.

I’m just saying it’s hard to see how they can do it much faster.
From what I know, then the CMs create weekly feedback reports on Fridays. Then the CMs consolidate those reports on Mondays, meaning that it’s communicated to the developers on Tuesdays. That gives the developers a week until the next weekly maintenance to create changes that reflect the feedback given.

So best case scenario is that the CMs pick up your balance feedback immediately when you post it, and push it through the system as fast as possible, and the developers address it as quickly as they can. And still, that process will take a week at least, if not two or three or more.

Beyond that, there’s also a design concern about implementing too many changes too often. This was covered a lot by Greg Street back in the day when he was the Lead Systems Designer. For us folks here on the forums it’s easy to keep up to date on the latest balance changes, because we’re always following Blizzard’s communication.
But an everyday player who just logs in once in a while to play will likely find it odd that his PvP experience keeps changing constantly. One day he has infinite mana, the next day he runs dry within minutes. One day a certain class is really strong, the next day it’s not.
That can be super confusing for players who aren’t keeping up with the forum discussions, Blizzard’s Q&As, and who doesn’t meticulously read through all the patch notes and hotfix changes.
So from a design perspective there’s sometimes something to be said for less is more.

I don’t know about that. The former game director Jeff Kaplan joked about the playerbase all the time, just as he does with the Overwatch playerbase these days. A casual and lighthearted attitude toward what’s essentially a video game is not abnormal. If you can’t joke and have some fun banter about that, then something is wrong. And the WoW Q&As are an hour long. They’d be super boring if Ion and Josh just sat there with their serious faces on and answered every question with a robotic approach. God forbid they play along with the Wowhead bingo board or twitch chat memes or the likes.

65

This essay war is intense

3 Likes
66

I am so happy that i have unsubscribed. I even wrote for the reason:
pvp is garbage.

I came to see what is going on, and now I am sure that I will never play this game again.

67

If pvp is bad then why do twitch streamers have so many fun playing it.

68

:face_with_monocle::raising_hand_man::muscle::selfie::eyes::nose:

Also, not all streamers enjoy it. There are many who streams pvp while becoming frustrated, and some even to the point of ragequitting. They also have that money that keeps 'em going too, you know?

69

look at pikaboo, the guy is 10 times more happier winning a arena match then me receiving my salary at the end of the month.

1 Like
70

And one guy - an NA player - is indicative of all pvp streamers? Yeah, ok. Also, you can’t rule out the possibility of him putting on an act. There are methods to keep viewers entertained, you know? Do you really think he’s schizophrenic off the screen too and calls things out to nobody? No, not really.

And you can’t rule out that he enjoys it for the sense of social belonging with both his viewers and the people he plays with, as well as the money he earns while doing it. It doesn’t necessarily come from the gameplay.

71

With all due respect fellow wow player, I’ve had projects 10 times more complicated than “decreasing damage on X spec by N % just to release the pressure by the community a bit” pushed on the team I lead as a project leader in a week and successfully doing so with less resources than a multi billion company.
I am on too much glasses of high quality 16 years old Lagavulin to argue with you on this but please… If they can’t do incremental fixes on a weekly bases they have a bad organization or incompetent devs.
Telling you so as a project manager in a big software company. We are not talking about big new feature implementations, which I agree need time, or major redesigns but for small fixes that would improve a lot.
We call this keeping the client in the stream. You show them something small, so the client sees you are working on it and not neglecting them. You can’t even begin (I’d like you could but from you blindly defending them I see you can’t) to understand how pleased a client is with this attitude, even if you don’t deliver the complete feature but just a small portion or a fix he’s been asking for.
That’s what Blizzard is missing.
I don’t know exactly what type of software cycle management they are using for implementing stuff, be it waterfall, some form of agile or some in-house mixture, but they suck at it.
Also I’m all for having a sense of humor sometimes, but when things are obviously in a bad shape, you have to be careful what you say, because people (clients) become edgy and touchy. You can’t mock something when everybody is on their nails and you are not in your best shape, that’s bad management.
Also, if you have answered like 9 questions with a good and serious attitude you can afford to laugh and make a joke on 1, but when you completely neglect PvP and the one thing you say about it is some kind of a bad taste joke - that’s bad.

72

I don’t think that’s the issue. I mean, they’ve implemented multiple damage modifier auras to all specs so they have easy tuning knobs for hotfix changes.
If they wanted to, they could probably make a thousand balance changes every week. It would still be reacting a week late to the community feedback, but they could easily get into a rhythm of pushing out a ton of changes every week. There’s nothing that holds back the volume of sheer tuning changes.

Here’s Ghostcrawler talking about the topic in regards to League of Legends:

And here’s a blog post he wrote in regards to WoW on the same subject when he was the Lead Systems Designer:

I think it’s those design drawbacks that are the reason why we’re not getting drowned in balance changes every week. And from a pure PvP perspective I’m not sure if it’s that desirable either. Imagine working on a strategy for a specific comp one day, and then the next day Blizzard nerfs it into the ground so it no longer works. That’s an incredibly demoralizing feeling, because you’re not in charge of your own skill progression then – you’re at the mercy of Blizzard’s balance changes.

But they covered several PvP topics in the Q&A, so it was hardly the only mention of PvP that was made. Gear RNG, gear resets, PvP item levels relative to Mythic+ and raiding, and secondary vs. primary stats. These are all questions and answers of relevance to PvP. So it’s not like PvP only got the joke comment and that was it. There was more.

73

Blizzrd team should always strife for diversity. The whole “meta” philosophy is bad in a game where you need to invest a lot of time in one entity. It might work for something like LoL, but for wow it’s bad and alienates players. There will always be some meta, but it should not be so defining.
If they make small incremental balance steps often this would even out eventually into a more balanced state of the game.
Currently it’s exactly the opposite - glaring disparity issues, low diversity, big gaps in class viability.
Gearing system might require more time to change, but balancing should be their priority and be constantly a target to a relatively spread out power distribution. Class redesign also needs more time I would suppose, but that doesn’t mean they should and couldn’t make a better balance in the current state.
I fail to see a reason to avoid fix - test - fix - test approach except for some monetary incentives for ppl to use their services to roll different classes/races.
If you are working on a strategy with a broken spec, that’s bad for the game.
If you have diversity and relatively equal power distribution you can work on your skill and the entity you like, not on extracting the most of an unbalanced situation.
I am sure they know this, which makes it sadder as the explanation to them not doing anything atm to fix the problems is either a lack of desire or other incentives like the ones I mentioned above - just milking people.

74

Personally I don’t think there exists a utopian state in WoW PvP where everything is in perfect balance.
It feels more like a game of opposites. Turn something down (healers’ mana) and something else goes automatically up in reaction to that (Dps’ self-healing).

Regardless, I do agree with the sentiment that Blizzard could do more balance changes in terms of sheer volume (albeit there is a limit to the volume of changes people can comprehend at a time). I’m not sure the frequency can be any better than it is today. And I don’t think any of it is because they don’t listen to feedback. If you read through the hotfix notes history, then it’s pretty much a retelling of the feedback given here on the forums over time.

75

At this rate why don’t they just literally let players who want to PvP purely create any character they want.

Select the level bracket you want to do arena/bgs etc
Once in game you get granted points like the old conquest ones which lets you kit out one spec for now.

Upon winning you get more points which can nab you higher tier gear or more for different specs.

You still get achievements etc except you’re locked out from raiding/mythics on that character.

If you’d like to do both on one character any character that is levelled or was levelled/boosted can simply enter like usual and benefit from the same system.

Keep it instanced so PvP procs like it used to once upon a time.
Separate sets so Blizzard can focus little or some attention.
PvP talents can be broadened.

For lords sake give us back reforging game wide. It makes it so much easier for the players and actually created some fun niche specs.

Or just listen to the players, give us back vendors but actually put a tiny amount of effort in.

Who am I kidding

:sleepy:

76

Please, not “all gear scaled to same level” a.k.a. templates again. NOT EVER. The only reason I still play PvP is that the templates are not ingame (tho this shady scalling is also pretty “sh**tty”). Legion showed that templates are not gonna fix anything.

77

Legion scaling / templates where no issue, the issue was more class balance.
Im not saying it was super good but better then this crap and more alt friendly also when they introduced artifact catch up system. Also I played Wod and iam talking about Wod gearing system not talkin about templates just pvp rule from Wod search it up on google “gearing system Wod pve / pvp”"

Wod was by far best gearing system and alt friendly expansion.
Only it lacked a lot of content, so in compare BFA looks stunning and all they need is the gearing system (pvp rules) applied as WoD system.

And the necklace and traits should also be disabled while in pvp combat.
Bit class / spec tuning like for example a nerf to deathstrike for dks. :thinking:
And it will be a good expansion.

grtz

78

If class design would be atleast Okey, not so many ppl would playing Alta, since there would be a greater learning curve, which means more time invest in one specific class/specc.
With the current talents there would be so much room for so much different builds for speccs and yet there are few which are viable, which is sad.
For example there is a build for feral which takes moonkin aff + blood talons, but there is also the one with feral frenzy+resto aff, yet none is focusing on moment of clarity, beside some pve build which are heavily outperformed by the bloodtalon one.
I’d like to see a build revolving around savage roar, a talent which was a core ability back in wotlk.
Also they removed a jagged wounds, a talent which should be iconic to feral, since it was a specc revolving around bleed damage and some bonus direct damage(Fero bite).
All what I want to say is that with the current talent system they could make so many type of playstyles for one specc, that the player wouldn’t want to touch Alts, and ofc there would be another layer which build to play against certain comps.
Blizzard is just ignorant, and they don’t see the possibilities what they could actually do.
And also idk why are they affraid of asking players help( I mean r1 players) in class design there is no shame in it. Like interdisciplinary consultations in Medicine, there are so many different specialities, that you can keep up with all of them, and when a case is out of your current knowledge/field you can ask for the opinion of someone working in that domain or a colleague with some more experience

79

Jito, Bragamond and Beware :astonished::astonished:, we need a whisperer for full tryhard squad.
I want to see Jito vs Whisperer clash, gonna be epic.

grabbing a popcorn :popcorn::popcorn:

80

I just want an new expansion in winter 2019.
I lost already any hopes for BfA.

81

The atitude is a general problem toward the playerbase, If i got a dollar for everytime Ion said "we need very specific feedback not that general “fix this”. I would have a nice new gaming pc right now. The feedback is out there but the forum-community managers rarely dare diving into negative threads adressing the the feedback thats constructive. I know its a hassle, but why are you here if you are just acting as a pseudo player support half the time and talking about ransmog and pets for the other half.
Hearing what Ion thinks about gear upgrades highlights how much he is opting into the seasonal model of wow and that he is taking into account that its killing a satisfying charater progression once the seasonal week-long hype is over.
“items need to be at least 15 itemlevel higher to feel like a real upgrade”
If you are actively playing the game in both pvp and mythic+ you wont make giant leaps in difficulty, certainly if you are reclearing raid content you wont. So when its about same Itemlevel pieces or sockets or 5 ilvl forges secondary stats matter a lot more than he is willing to admit. And the reality of the situation is that there wont always be straight 15 lvl itemupgrades for any slot you get a new item in unless you are playing seasonally.
It feels bad to hear him say he wants to foster in game communities since meeting new people ingame is part of the mmo experince that set wow part from other games. And then at the same time promote a playstyle where you play for a month AT BEST after the new content patch is out and then go play another game… every q&a is just pissing all over dedicated players in a new way every time.

82

I have made a topic few days ago. Anyway here’s the main post:

The current state of PvP is garbage. We (the PvPers) are being forced to do PvE content in order to obtain gear, because there aren’t any PvP vendors & literally have to depend on “RNG” to get gear, hoping we would get our best stat one. And even then, some 400+ ilvl PvE Hero can come and faceroll with his Meta class.

Alts are Unplayable, have to spend weeks doing PvE & gearing up your character if you want to even stand a chance in Arena. Anyway, enough rant. I’ve posted after a long time, so here are my suggestions: Edited Main Post with updated feedback.

:star: Solution #1:

  • Add the PvP Vendors back in addition to this current RNG system, so we can work towards obtaining Gear Pieces of OUR choice through pure PvP Progression: Arenas, Battlegrounds etc. instead of being forced to do PvE or Depending on luck.
    (This is the easiest solution, since they don’t need to change anything, just add the damn PvP Vendors to the game.)

:star: Solution #2

  • Upon entering Arena or any Instanced PvP, gear should be scaled to a Same ilvl for all players.

  • Let the secondary stats (Crit, Mastery, Haste, Vers) will remain customizable, and so will the trinkets. This will allow players to tweak their gear accordingly and will maintain diversity.

Add your suggestions, thoughts to this post. But, I don’t think any devs care about the EU forum, so the best possible thing is to spam their twitter with these issues so they can atleast think about making changes - https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs

83

Why letting the secondary stats matter? People should not be penalized for not getting BiS items with good stats. Everybody should be even so that only skill can matter. And moreover, everybody should have the same set of abilities. Like wtf, classes are unbalanced and thus class > skill. When everybody has the same stats and the same abilities, it will be only the skill that matters. Moreover, it will fix the problem with alt unfriendliness. When people enter arenas or bgs, their abilities would be replaced with special PvP abilities. I think around 7 would be enough (1 stun, 1 interrupt. 1 heal, 1 dmg, 1 burst ability, 1 defensive and 1 movement boost). They would just be called differently for each class/spec. So you could play with like 10 alts without any disadvantages. And there would be no gear > skill or class > skill. Only pure skill would matter. PvP would be so much fun!