Remember pre SL / DF leveling?
At least I played 10-20 small games every bracket 10-59 every day and some 1-5 epic games, 10 if there was a bonus event going on.
Now you can queue 24h a day for 6 months and ZERO EPIC GAMES.
For convenience I’m going to call “battle ground matches” games from here on.
What caused this?
I don’t remember which came first, but there’s 2 main factors:
The level squish and party sync.
I recall being 50 and some 60 players in bis endgame gear partied up with others, then joined my 50-59 bracket which would otherwise be unaccessable to him.
I had bis gear, but my same skills did barely 1k dmg where his all did 10k.
This opened the abuse and was “the new twinking” for these low lifes who just wanted a fix by gaining a poorly designed system to get 100:0 kills in absolute godmode taking on 10 guys at once without breaking a sweat.
This was even worse in epic games, because toons in the end of a epic bracket had 5000% more life and dmg than those in their 20s. EVERYONE was baffled and you would see half the team quit going “wtf is this bs??” after getting one shotted 10 times in a row by these abusers.
There was absolutely no point in joining any epic games unless you were in the 1% of the top lvl toons, or abused party sync to downscale a capped player.
So 90% stopped right there and stuck with normal games because those at least still had the 10 lvl gap range and gave players a fighting chance.
Then we had the following nails added to the coffin:
Classic wow came.
Then classic wrath.
Then DF was done, players got so bored they moved to HC by the millions.
Now we got literally NOBODY playing epic games in years.
And that’s not how it should be.
Players should always have a small and epic BG available, with them being able to get in and have a FAIR fighting chance. Most people played because of BG action, and as this unbalance mess unloaded on the community overall retention numbers dropped.
So how do we fix this?
You make scaling good.
It doesn’t matter if a lvl 22 has to fight a 58 in a epic BG if their powers are scaled to the same level. So whatever formula you use to upscale low players and downscale high players gear and stats, the difference shouldn’t exceed 10% top to bottom.
Just to paint a picture:
- green gear 20 has 100,000 hp and 10,000 dps.
- bis gear 20 has 102,500 hp and 10,250 dps.
- green gear 60 has 105,000 hp and 10,500 dps.
- bis gear 60 has 110,000 hp and 11,000 dps.
See how easy and fair it would be?
If you “worked hard” and are higher level with better gear, you still get a 10% power advantage over anyone else, no reason for anyone of those top end players to complain.
This would be so much better than the last versions we had, where top players have 10x more hp and dmg, which is actually so insane I wonder how it ever got through, or why, like did nobody do any testing at all? Did they just look at it and went “whatever, go level up who cares it’s not end game” ???
BG pvp is a HUGE part of the game, and should always be available, and always be as fair as possible.
The second fix is to merge battlegroups.
Add some lists into the game so players can see what global battlegroup they belong to. If the queue times are too long for their taste, add a option to include other regions too with check boxes. Simple fix to shorten queue times, not sure about the technical framework but hey at least I showed you the way now.