Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
The reason why gear shouldn’t be important to PvP is that you get most of your gear via PvE. So to excel at PvP you have to do PvP
But wait, what if PvP gear was as good or better than PvE shit? Then people would PvP to get a leg up on PvE and more people would complain.
You really want people to be at equal levels of stats during PvP for the same reason why you want heroes in Overwatch to operate the same regardless of your personal MMR.
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
The reason why gear shouldn’t be important to PvP is that you get most of your gear via PvE. So to excel at PvP you have to do PvP
But wait, what if PvP gear was as good or better than PvE shit? Then people would PvP to get a leg up on PvE and more people would complain.
You really want people to be at equal levels of stats during PvP for the same reason why you want heroes in Overwatch to operate the same regardless of your personal MMR.
yeah but you don't need skill to get good gear in wow
you should have MMR for this, it would eventually even out based on gearscore in your own bracket too
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
0
Options
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
They had actually solved this problem (ish) with Resilience, and I don't know why they threw that system in the garbage if they weren't going to balance abilities for PvE and PvP differently.
+1
Options
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
Also if they ever made gear redundant in any mode of the game there would be riots. WoW is first and foremost an RPG. Character progression, gear, and stats are enormously important, and should be. They've already chipped away a lot of the more RPG-y stuff from WoW, if they started chipping away at the importance of gear I think they'd just straight up lose the playerbase entirely.
People aren't playing this because they wanted a balanced, Overwatch-like experience. They're playing because they want an RPG and there are very few games still delivering on that experience in today's gaming industry.
You're right, that's fair. Most people want to absolutely demolish someone when they play them in video games because winning is better than losing.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
0
Options
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Because resilience was an afterthought and didn’t quite help in the way they thought it would.
I.E. it ate up some of the other allotted stats
Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but dies in the process.
0
Options
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
people want the game to give them rewards that progress their character; we know this because when some mode/part of the game doesn't do that, people stop playing. One of the reasons pvp is so marginal right now is that it's a relatively bad vector for rewards.
So, they have to find some compromise between gear just being irrelevant (feels bad) and gear making some players dramatically more powerful than others (also feels bad.) IMO the pvp templates were/are a pretty good solution, and lord knows plenty of people seem to hate those.
I also suspect this might have been one of the reasons they implemented versatility, but in practice they've tuned it so low that it doesn't matter much
it was the smallest on the list but
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
0
Options
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Because resilience was an afterthought and didn’t quite help in the way they thought it would.
I.E. it ate up some of the other allotted stats
That seems easily fixed by making it a tertiary!
Then people would want to pvp to get pve gear.
I don't know why this is a problem for some.
Who cares how people play the game if they have fun. Why can't it just be "gear"? Who cares if someone poopsocked some hardcore raids or poopsocked grand marshal.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
If you have an entire pvp gear system that makes a difference, you are setting up a system where a new player or someone picking up pvp will have to fail a whole bunch and get preyed upon by players they largely can't touch until they get enough pity rewards to get gear themselves. They then get to prey upon those weaker than themselves. A smaller subset will choose to pursue more even fights, but you still see people flocking to the overpowered flavour of the month classes. Skill-based success in pvp plays a much smaller role in the game than a more traditional competitive player versus player game. The closest match I can think of is some of the grindfest phone games or pay to win phone games where the system is set up to encourage a large time investment for retention purposes rather than coming up with enjoyable gameplay and counterplay. This isn't to say WoW has never had enjoyable pvp gameplay in the PVP, but it never has been set up as a balanced skill based competitive system either.
Games like Fortnite, PUBG, Quake, Apexis Legends, Starcraft, and a myrid of other games make the gameplay of thr competition enjoyable enough that they don't need to give out unbalancing rewards to encourage people to play. At the most, they may offer cosmetic or other prestige rewards and leaderboards, but the basic start does not typically ask a new player to submit themselves to a hazing ritual with little chance of success no matter their skill level.
Games like Fortnite, PUBG, Quake, Apexis Legends, Starcraft, and a myrid of other games make the gameplay of thr competition enjoyable enough that they don't need to give out unbalancing rewards to encourage people to play. At the most, they may offer cosmetic or other prestige rewards and leaderboards, but the basic start does not typically ask a new player to submit themselves to a hazing ritual with little chance of success no matter their skill level.
They're not RPGs. And the above is also why PvE should have gear that's at least decent in PvP / why it shouldn't be an issue that PvE gear is good in PvP.
Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, games like this, are allegedly RPGs. Making the PvP just be "every Warrior is equal to every Warrior" is missing the point and if you do that, you should just can the PvP completely or make it a completely different game where one can make it a good game.
The PvP in WoW has been powercreeped and neglected, though, so....there's a lot of issues there as well.
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
+1
Options
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
I'm confused as to why the game being role playing has anything to do with gear in-equivalencies.
I'm confused as to why the game being role playing has anything to do with gear in-equivalencies.
I want to gank people not as well geared or optimized as myself enc, don't you understand my plight
Yes. Yes. Now I understand. PvP is about making other people feel like shit. It makes so much sense.
0
Options
Munkus BeaverYou don't have to attend every argument you are invited to.Philosophy: Stoicism. Politics: Democratic SocialistRegistered User, ClubPAregular
Sure do love how "it's a classic RPG, gear does and should matter" has been boiled down to "I only care about gear so I can gank lowbies."
Nothing is allowed to take time, anymore, everything must be INSTANT GRATIFICATION.
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
0
Options
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
It especially makes me, someone who really only cares about gear for the sake of high M+ keys and Heroic/Mythic raiding, feel very relieved to know that apparently all along that was just my inner need to murder an ilvl 350 Alliance player expressing itself.
So you've got all this amazing gear, and so do a lot of people, why again should you not just be matched up with them in PvP like battlegrounds then?
Also, like I said, when you do that, the gear is essentially meaningless anyways. There's no more gems to change how it acts, just talents and play styles to differentiate yourself.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
If you want to backpeddle this to mean "I want a slight edge with my gear over others" in a game like wow that means "I want to have an advantage" which means "I want to gank" because in a game like wow the slight edge in gear means you take minutes to kill instead of the 2 hit you're about to shit on their life with.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
+1
Options
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
If you're actually playing PvP at the level where skill is the determining factor (which is definitely not all PvP), you'll pretty quickly pick up gear that makes you on the same level as the other folks playing in that bracket, as you said.
Why this matters is that it has nice knock-on effect of making you more powerful when you go to do open world content or instanced PvE content, instead of needing to re-gear for those things because PvP was normalized and therefore didn't reward gear (which would 100% be the result of making PvP normalized, because in no scenario are you going to be able to take a fresh 120 to max level gear, Blizzard always maintains a power curve).
0
Options
3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
If you want to backpeddle this to mean "I want a slight edge with my gear over others" in a game like wow that means "I want to have an advantage" which means "I want to gank" because in a game like wow the slight edge in gear means you take minutes to kill instead of the 2 hit you're about to shit on their life with.
I, uh, don't PvP, and only stay in War Mode because of the resource bonus. I generally ignore others players unless they start shit with me first.
I'm presenting the argument for why gear matters in an RPG, I'm genuinely confused as to why you immediately assumed it was because I like killing people with worse gear than myself.
edit: The whole reason we have the current gear system is because people who primarily PvP were frustrated that PvP gear only mattered for PvP and was garbage for anything PvE, so Blizzard made all gear useable everywhere. Maybe not an ideal solution, but going back to making PvP its own thing off in the corner that doesn't interact with PvE is probably not the solution given that that's already been shown to make PvPers unhappy.
If you want to backpeddle this to mean "I want a slight edge with my gear over others" in a game like wow that means "I want to have an advantage" which means "I want to gank" because in a game like wow the slight edge in gear means you take minutes to kill instead of the 2 hit you're about to shit on their life with.
I, uh, don't PvP, and only stay in War Mode because of the resource bonus. I generally ignore others players unless they start shit with me first.
I'm presenting the argument for why gear matters in an RPG, I'm genuinely confused as to why you immediately assumed it was because I like killing people with worse gear than myself.
Eh it's not really directed at you. I know where you're coming from. I'm mostly coming at this from everyone else who I'm 60% positive would gank someone over and over in STV if given the opportunity to do so.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
0
Options
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
edited July 2019
I'm fine with grinding, I play WoW after all. But there is a difference between gear progression or gear unlocks and something akin to having a playable multiplayer experience. Right now, PvP is great for the people who are geared and have time to devote hundreds of hours to get good with their character through miserable failure via the gear and design imposed skill curve, which is formidable.
I've done that in plenty of expansions. Hell, from Beta through WotLK I was all about it.
But that doesn't mean that game design is viable in a modern play environment. It's less about instant gratification and gear grind/achievements and such and more that a wide range of competitive play games have moved away from [time-sink = tilting the balance in your favor] to [time=sink = cosmetic rewards and status titles], with skill, not gear, giving the player an advantage. This makes competitive gameplay more approachable. I can be bad at PubG or Fortnite and still have a good time. I can be amazing at those games and still have fun with my friends who are very new and bad at the game and we can all end the night having had a good time. I can't do that in WoW. You never really could, unless you were being a dick to some poor soul in STV or Alterac Valley.
WoW's pvp requiring significant re-learning every expansion is part of the problem. The capability differential between people who devote 2-10 hours a week and 20 hours a week is insurmountable, and similarly so with those from 20 to 40 hours a week. And most people who are in the 2-10 hours a week range of play end up 100% facing the 20-40 hour group as a matter of odds. You don't get to play against people with the same level of investment as you in WoW, not like, say, Hearthstone. Instead you are almost always thrown up against people who you will never have a chance to catch up with unless you invest more time. Which isn't really a good game design, frankly.
So, yeah. It would piss me off as well if I had invested 20-40 hours a week into WoW PvP only to hear that my ability to absolutely crush people was going away. I get that. But the other side of that is that, if you aren't in 20-40, you aren't going to PvP. Ever. Because all you will be there for is to be crushed as farming without any real agency to improve aside from grinding out hours and hours of misery in getting curbstomped until you have hit enough points to get a gear level that will allow you to survive long enough actually learn the skills needed to be competitive.
That, plus the inherent inequities between the factions due to historical balance problems (aka most people in the competitive environments and high-time investment trend to Horde), lead to the current war mode problems. Nothing can convince me to play horde as a working professional in my 30s with a family and non-wow obligations. Maybe as a carefree 20 something in college I could do that again, but I'm lucky to get a few hours during the week and maybe a morning on the weekends to play. Nothing in that range is going to give me enough time to keep up with the PvP scene.
Everything about the system, the design, the history, the current mechanics, only promotes an environment where those with more time will face an every dwindling pool of people to play against, as over time the people engaging in war mode will trend more horde and fewer total.
Enc, War Mode's problems don't really seem to be related to gear, so unsure why you brought that up....and the rest is just you saying you want other PvP experiences, other games, put into an RPG, and for the RPG PvP system to be ripped out because you don't like it....all the while ignoring that if you want those PvP experiences that are not RPG based, you have them in shooters and other games where gear progression is (generally) not a thing.
You label it as poor game design when it's not. It's just a different game. Poor game design would be imbalanced classes, etc., things like that. Your complaints are "I want chess, not checkers. Change checkers to chess!"
It's like complaining about Eve Online because not everyone there is equal when....that's the point.
Bizazedo on
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
I can't imagine there being anything able to really be balanced in a game with so many classes.
Something is inherently going to be unfair.
Yep, you're right, but that's still game design. Hell, in the fighting game genre, people actually seem to prefer fighters where there are identifiable low and high tiers rather than ULTIMATE BALANCE (this gets called boring, amusingly).
People are weird.
XBL: Bizazedo
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
0
Options
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
It's not really the point in WoW, though. Not from the framework of the developer interviews. Not from their fixes and enticements to get people who wouldn't play war mode to do so. The gear progression bit is part of the broken framework here. Faction imbalance is part of that (driven mostly by history and racial benefits in endgame), but both work together to reinforce a gameplay where people are actively driven away from PvP. EveOnline is a perfect example, you are 100% correct there! And if the Blizzard development team were saying that was what they were wanting to foster I wouldn't be talking about this in the least. But they aren't, they want an inclusive PvP model where all players have a shot. They just created the opposite of that and are trying to fit that square peg into a round hole.
And, to be clear here, I'm totally ok with not being a part of WoW pvp. Like I mentioned above, I've been there and enjoyed it. It's just not in my cards anymore as someone with significant time constraints from work and family. It's not for me, clearly!
But then the developers talk about "why aren't folks like Enc playing War Mode? Let's increase the buff percentage!" and wonder why it fails. It will never work. It's not the root of the problem, and no incentive will ever be worth it without wrecking the day of the people who HAVE done the grind.
I used to love WoW PvP and but haven't really participated since WotLK. So I'm enjoying this conversation as I've been leveling up my warlock with the intention of making it my new 'main' for both pve and pvp content.
I admit I've burnt out a bit on my warrior. I made him with the intention of being an occasional tank, but now that I'm at end game I find tanking to be a stressful ordeal for the most part, which means I'm mostly doing dps. This is fine but if I'm going to be DPSing I like doing it from range where I get to see the fight a bit more. There's just so much visual noise in melee.
Just hit level 60 on my lock this morning! Off to northrend I go!
It's not really the point in WoW, though. Not from the framework of the developer interviews. Not from their fixes and enticements to get people who wouldn't play war mode to do so. The gear progression bit is part of the broken framework here. Faction imbalance is part of that (driven mostly by history and racial benefits in endgame), but both work together to reinforce a gameplay where people are actively driven away from PvP. EveOnline is a perfect example, you are 100% correct there! And if the Blizzard development team were saying that was what they were wanting to foster I wouldn't be talking about this in the least. But they aren't, they want an inclusive PvP model where all players have a shot. They just created the opposite of that and are trying to fit that square peg into a round hole.
And, to be clear here, I'm totally ok with not being a part of WoW pvp. Like I mentioned above, I've been there and enjoyed it. It's just not in my cards anymore as someone with significant time constraints from work and family. It's not for me, clearly!
But then the developers talk about "why aren't folks like Enc playing War Mode? Let's increase the buff percentage!" and wonder why it fails. It will never work. It's not the root of the problem, and no incentive will ever be worth it without wrecking the day of the people who HAVE done the grind.
Not enough agree buttons in the world for this. Any folks in War Mode for the bonus are already there, and you're never going to convince the folks who have chosen to forego the bonus to toggle WM on by making it arbitrarily large.
I actually think the problem isn't solveable, because it speaks to a much older, much bigger divide in the game: in general, on the NA realms (from which the bonus is calculated), Horde players like PvP, and Alliance players don't, and those tendencies are self-reinforcing are Horde guilds are vastly more likely to encourage their members to dip their toes into PvP.
It's not really the point in WoW, though. Not from the framework of the developer interviews. Not from their fixes and enticements to get people who wouldn't play war mode to do so. The gear progression bit is part of the broken framework here. Faction imbalance is part of that (driven mostly by history and racial benefits in endgame), but both work together to reinforce a gameplay where people are actively driven away from PvP. EveOnline is a perfect example, you are 100% correct there! And if the Blizzard development team were saying that was what they were wanting to foster I wouldn't be talking about this in the least. But they aren't, they want an inclusive PvP model where all players have a shot. They just created the opposite of that and are trying to fit that square peg into a round hole.
And, to be clear here, I'm totally ok with not being a part of WoW pvp. Like I mentioned above, I've been there and enjoyed it. It's just not in my cards anymore as someone with significant time constraints from work and family. It's not for me, clearly!
But then the developers talk about "why aren't folks like Enc playing War Mode? Let's increase the buff percentage!" and wonder why it fails. It will never work. It's not the root of the problem, and no incentive will ever be worth it without wrecking the day of the people who HAVE done the grind.
Not enough agree buttons in the world for this. Any folks in War Mode for the bonus are already there, and you're never going to convince the folks who have chosen to forego the bonus to toggle WM on by making it arbitrarily large.
I actually think the problem isn't solveable, because it speaks to a much older, much bigger divide in the game: in general, on the NA realms (from which the bonus is calculated), Horde players like PvP, and Alliance players don't, and those tendencies are self-reinforcing are Horde guilds are vastly more likely to encourage their members to dip their toes into PvP.
damn you know we need that raid out if this is what we're doing
Yeah it's very good that it and Season 3 of M+/PvP come out today, people are climbing the walls.
Yeah, this is exactly what I'm thinking. The problem is unsolvable without radically changing the nature of how one looks at PvP in Wow. Getting rid of the factions or making gear primarily cosmetic would be the level of changes required to get close to solving it.
But, even then, as others said here those would be different games. I agree with that notion, but at the same time that is really what it is going to take if they are actually wanting to solve the problem. Hence: unsolvable.
0
Options
EncA Fool with CompassionPronouns: He, Him, HisRegistered Userregular
do you know why classic RPGs don't have any design problems with gear disparity in PvP? they're single player games
Building games as actual-experience based rather than numeric-experienced base would be a neat way of changing this mindset. Your character progresses in that they have achieved more by doing more over time. Sir. Enc is wise (both as a player and a meta-story) by doing a lot of adventures, his stats don't change, but how NPCs look at him might.
Leveling isn't really even a mechanic anymore in WoW, rather than a timegate. If you had endgame powers at level 1 and just played your way through the stories with the various faction mechanics things wouldn't be significantly different and I really don't think the lack of gear progression beyond aesthetics would hold back most players from wanting to do more adventures. Lots of game genres have proven that aesthetics can be just as motivating a reward as getting a new move and certainly more engaging of one than a few arbitrary numbers increasing. And players who have played more will know more about what they are doing and still have an advantage in skill, though not an insurmountable one with luck or good ambush circumstances.
Essentially: put an Overwatch like system into a leveless WoW with a more nuanced faction system and let people adventure for the sake of adventuring, or PvP for the sake of PvPing.
I still think PvE oriented gameplay with a PvP twist (like AV) is the correct way to address these issues.
Players shouldn't necessarily fight directly, they should be competing to capitalize on a goal.
I can agree on this, for a game where it's systems are designed and balanced around the PvE content. If you have a PVP game and all the design is aimed at the competitive PVP then it makes sense to look at more of a deathmatch/arena type gameplay. I would argue however, that in an arena type gameplay you want the gameplay itself to be a lot of fun and to minimize anything that will put a weight on the balance scale on one side or another.
Posts
But wait, what if PvP gear was as good or better than PvE shit? Then people would PvP to get a leg up on PvE and more people would complain.
You really want people to be at equal levels of stats during PvP for the same reason why you want heroes in Overwatch to operate the same regardless of your personal MMR.
yeah but you don't need skill to get good gear in wow
you should have MMR for this, it would eventually even out based on gearscore in your own bracket too
People aren't playing this because they wanted a balanced, Overwatch-like experience. They're playing because they want an RPG and there are very few games still delivering on that experience in today's gaming industry.
I.E. it ate up some of the other allotted stats
That seems easily fixed by making it a tertiary!
So, they have to find some compromise between gear just being irrelevant (feels bad) and gear making some players dramatically more powerful than others (also feels bad.) IMO the pvp templates were/are a pretty good solution, and lord knows plenty of people seem to hate those.
I also suspect this might have been one of the reasons they implemented versatility, but in practice they've tuned it so low that it doesn't matter much
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
Then people would want to pvp to get pve gear.
I don't know why this is a problem for some.
Who cares how people play the game if they have fun. Why can't it just be "gear"? Who cares if someone poopsocked some hardcore raids or poopsocked grand marshal.
Games like Fortnite, PUBG, Quake, Apexis Legends, Starcraft, and a myrid of other games make the gameplay of thr competition enjoyable enough that they don't need to give out unbalancing rewards to encourage people to play. At the most, they may offer cosmetic or other prestige rewards and leaderboards, but the basic start does not typically ask a new player to submit themselves to a hazing ritual with little chance of success no matter their skill level.
Dark Age of Camelot, World of Warcraft, games like this, are allegedly RPGs. Making the PvP just be "every Warrior is equal to every Warrior" is missing the point and if you do that, you should just can the PvP completely or make it a completely different game where one can make it a good game.
The PvP in WoW has been powercreeped and neglected, though, so....there's a lot of issues there as well.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
I want to gank people not as well geared or optimized as myself enc, don't you understand my plight
RPGs are about progressing your characters power. If everyone is equal, you don't need to progress. There is no progression.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Yes. Yes. Now I understand. PvP is about making other people feel like shit. It makes so much sense.
That’s world pvp.
Completely different.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
:rotate:
Also, like I said, when you do that, the gear is essentially meaningless anyways. There's no more gems to change how it acts, just talents and play styles to differentiate yourself.
Why this matters is that it has nice knock-on effect of making you more powerful when you go to do open world content or instanced PvE content, instead of needing to re-gear for those things because PvP was normalized and therefore didn't reward gear (which would 100% be the result of making PvP normalized, because in no scenario are you going to be able to take a fresh 120 to max level gear, Blizzard always maintains a power curve).
I, uh, don't PvP, and only stay in War Mode because of the resource bonus. I generally ignore others players unless they start shit with me first.
I'm presenting the argument for why gear matters in an RPG, I'm genuinely confused as to why you immediately assumed it was because I like killing people with worse gear than myself.
edit: The whole reason we have the current gear system is because people who primarily PvP were frustrated that PvP gear only mattered for PvP and was garbage for anything PvE, so Blizzard made all gear useable everywhere. Maybe not an ideal solution, but going back to making PvP its own thing off in the corner that doesn't interact with PvE is probably not the solution given that that's already been shown to make PvPers unhappy.
Eh it's not really directed at you. I know where you're coming from. I'm mostly coming at this from everyone else who I'm 60% positive would gank someone over and over in STV if given the opportunity to do so.
I've done that in plenty of expansions. Hell, from Beta through WotLK I was all about it.
But that doesn't mean that game design is viable in a modern play environment. It's less about instant gratification and gear grind/achievements and such and more that a wide range of competitive play games have moved away from [time-sink = tilting the balance in your favor] to [time=sink = cosmetic rewards and status titles], with skill, not gear, giving the player an advantage. This makes competitive gameplay more approachable. I can be bad at PubG or Fortnite and still have a good time. I can be amazing at those games and still have fun with my friends who are very new and bad at the game and we can all end the night having had a good time. I can't do that in WoW. You never really could, unless you were being a dick to some poor soul in STV or Alterac Valley.
WoW's pvp requiring significant re-learning every expansion is part of the problem. The capability differential between people who devote 2-10 hours a week and 20 hours a week is insurmountable, and similarly so with those from 20 to 40 hours a week. And most people who are in the 2-10 hours a week range of play end up 100% facing the 20-40 hour group as a matter of odds. You don't get to play against people with the same level of investment as you in WoW, not like, say, Hearthstone. Instead you are almost always thrown up against people who you will never have a chance to catch up with unless you invest more time. Which isn't really a good game design, frankly.
So, yeah. It would piss me off as well if I had invested 20-40 hours a week into WoW PvP only to hear that my ability to absolutely crush people was going away. I get that. But the other side of that is that, if you aren't in 20-40, you aren't going to PvP. Ever. Because all you will be there for is to be crushed as farming without any real agency to improve aside from grinding out hours and hours of misery in getting curbstomped until you have hit enough points to get a gear level that will allow you to survive long enough actually learn the skills needed to be competitive.
That, plus the inherent inequities between the factions due to historical balance problems (aka most people in the competitive environments and high-time investment trend to Horde), lead to the current war mode problems. Nothing can convince me to play horde as a working professional in my 30s with a family and non-wow obligations. Maybe as a carefree 20 something in college I could do that again, but I'm lucky to get a few hours during the week and maybe a morning on the weekends to play. Nothing in that range is going to give me enough time to keep up with the PvP scene.
Everything about the system, the design, the history, the current mechanics, only promotes an environment where those with more time will face an every dwindling pool of people to play against, as over time the people engaging in war mode will trend more horde and fewer total.
You label it as poor game design when it's not. It's just a different game. Poor game design would be imbalanced classes, etc., things like that. Your complaints are "I want chess, not checkers. Change checkers to chess!"
It's like complaining about Eve Online because not everyone there is equal when....that's the point.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
Something is inherently going to be unfair.
Yep, you're right, but that's still game design. Hell, in the fighting game genre, people actually seem to prefer fighters where there are identifiable low and high tiers rather than ULTIMATE BALANCE (this gets called boring, amusingly).
People are weird.
PSN: Bizazedo
CFN: Bizazedo (I don't think I suck, add me).
And, to be clear here, I'm totally ok with not being a part of WoW pvp. Like I mentioned above, I've been there and enjoyed it. It's just not in my cards anymore as someone with significant time constraints from work and family. It's not for me, clearly!
But then the developers talk about "why aren't folks like Enc playing War Mode? Let's increase the buff percentage!" and wonder why it fails. It will never work. It's not the root of the problem, and no incentive will ever be worth it without wrecking the day of the people who HAVE done the grind.
I admit I've burnt out a bit on my warrior. I made him with the intention of being an occasional tank, but now that I'm at end game I find tanking to be a stressful ordeal for the most part, which means I'm mostly doing dps. This is fine but if I'm going to be DPSing I like doing it from range where I get to see the fight a bit more. There's just so much visual noise in melee.
Just hit level 60 on my lock this morning! Off to northrend I go!
Not enough agree buttons in the world for this. Any folks in War Mode for the bonus are already there, and you're never going to convince the folks who have chosen to forego the bonus to toggle WM on by making it arbitrarily large.
I actually think the problem isn't solveable, because it speaks to a much older, much bigger divide in the game: in general, on the NA realms (from which the bonus is calculated), Horde players like PvP, and Alliance players don't, and those tendencies are self-reinforcing are Horde guilds are vastly more likely to encourage their members to dip their toes into PvP.
Yeah it's very good that it and Season 3 of M+/PvP come out today, people are climbing the walls.
Yeah, this is exactly what I'm thinking. The problem is unsolvable without radically changing the nature of how one looks at PvP in Wow. Getting rid of the factions or making gear primarily cosmetic would be the level of changes required to get close to solving it.
But, even then, as others said here those would be different games. I agree with that notion, but at the same time that is really what it is going to take if they are actually wanting to solve the problem. Hence: unsolvable.
Building games as actual-experience based rather than numeric-experienced base would be a neat way of changing this mindset. Your character progresses in that they have achieved more by doing more over time. Sir. Enc is wise (both as a player and a meta-story) by doing a lot of adventures, his stats don't change, but how NPCs look at him might.
Leveling isn't really even a mechanic anymore in WoW, rather than a timegate. If you had endgame powers at level 1 and just played your way through the stories with the various faction mechanics things wouldn't be significantly different and I really don't think the lack of gear progression beyond aesthetics would hold back most players from wanting to do more adventures. Lots of game genres have proven that aesthetics can be just as motivating a reward as getting a new move and certainly more engaging of one than a few arbitrary numbers increasing. And players who have played more will know more about what they are doing and still have an advantage in skill, though not an insurmountable one with luck or good ambush circumstances.
Essentially: put an Overwatch like system into a leveless WoW with a more nuanced faction system and let people adventure for the sake of adventuring, or PvP for the sake of PvPing.
Players shouldn't necessarily fight directly, they should be competing to capitalize on a goal.
I can agree on this, for a game where it's systems are designed and balanced around the PvE content. If you have a PVP game and all the design is aimed at the competitive PVP then it makes sense to look at more of a deathmatch/arena type gameplay. I would argue however, that in an arena type gameplay you want the gameplay itself to be a lot of fun and to minimize anything that will put a weight on the balance scale on one side or another.