Why do I make these threads? Because I believe that WoW PvP is not fulfilling it's potential, I believe that Blizzard are missing a major opportunity with WoW PvP and that bothers me. So I want to do what I can to improve it, I want the community to help.
So I've made a similar post to this before but it was in other threads, I decided to make this thread as this issue deserves it's own recognition. It also means that if you post regularly on this forum, you've probably read a few of these points before from me.
So people really play PvP for generally 2 particular reasons, fun and competition. Being capped by gear hurts both.
I play PvP for both, fun and competition however if I take time off from the game or start a new character, than my ability to both be competitive and to have fun is severely limited.
This is made even worse by the conquest point system, which limits your ability to gear up.
The game has moved on from Vanilla WoW, gear is no longer exciting enough to attract people to play PvP and it should never be a deciding factor in PvP at all. If I'm a vastly better player than someone, but I'm in Ruthless gear, I shouldn't be losing to someone worse than me because I'm playing an alt which has only been 85 for a few days. My ability to play my class, my teams ability to play our comp, should be the only factor in deciding whether we win or lose.
So firstly, allow me to explain why the current system doesn't work.
Considering the ease at which gear is obtained in WoW now, it's no longer the exciting prospect it once was, in Vanilla getting some "epic l00t" actually took time and effort, I remember back in Vanilla WoW grinding the
Earthstrike trinket in Silithus when the patch came out, I spent 2months farming this trinket, farming those mobs to get the text to hand in for rep as well as doing AQ20, I was really happy when I got it. I was not so happy when TBC came and I replaced it a few hours later with a quest item, but that's another story.The allure of getting epics has long gone, long gone, it's no longer a big enough attraction by itself to get people to do PvP. Even though I started playing this character again about 2months ago? I haven't capped points in like 3 weeks, because it's boring, haven't logged on in awhile either.
And I'm the type of player who cares about min-maxing, I'll farm something for a 1% increase because I've always been that type of player. But I no longer bother, because it's not interesting for the 11th season in a row.
Let's add on-top of that that leveling alts has become so easy that people now have upwards of 3-4 level 85s, unless you religious gear up all 4 of them, then deciding you want to play a different one today can be a pain.
Myself as an example, I've never had a max level of any class bar Warrior until Cataclysm. And now in Cataclysm I have 2 85 Warriors, 85 Mage, 85 Lock, 80 Druid, 80 Shaman, 80 Paladin.
My decision to play a class for fun, shouldn't have to take into the consideration "Ah but that character only has Ruthless gear atm, so I know it's not going to be that fun :/"
So how can we change this?
My solution is this:
1.
Pre-set gear in Arena
This means that you choose the gear set you want to use, the example I've given before was having an additional character frame, much like the character tabs we have ingame now (Character, Reputation, Currency), there would be another one just called "Arena Setup" or something like that where you choose the gear set and even spec that you want to play Arena with right now.
So why this? As I've said, gear just is no longer a big enough attraction to get people playing PvP. So instead of forcing people to do something that they don't find fun, let them have fun as soon as they hit max level.
The benefits?
a. You'll have a much happier community. The top level PvP players don't care about gear farming, everyone will have full PvP after a month or 2, the only gear that effects the top end is PvE gear.
For the community that isn't at the top of Arena? Takes them longer to gear up, but in the end it's not that big a deal. The real problem comes when people want to play new classes/characters. You often have to play against teams with much higher level of gear, it's not really that fun, you get frustrated losing because of it and alot of times those players just stop playing that character.
It's unreasonable to expect people to wait weeks before they can have fun with there characters.
With the points earned through Arena, those could be used to buy the gear still for use outside of Arena, for say Battlegrounds or World PvP, that means the gear-farming aspect, which there are some people that still like it, would still exist.
b. This is also a good way of dealing with balance issues. With the way WoW is, where you can go from being a god in one season, to a pauper the next, you're asking people to spend weeks to gear up, than they realise that there spec/class isn't that great now. For the average player, they will not succeed playing spec/class which is weak, more often than not they will want to try a new class or spec. Now they have to wait more weeks in order to gear up to a level where they can start having fun.
Example:
Druid plays Resto in one season, he/she enjoys playing the spec. The next season comes around and Druids got a nerf, the spec isn't as good any more. They aren't having fun any more. He/she wants to try Boomkin? Now he/she has to go to Battlegrounds to farm a whole new set (of last seasons gear) for Boomkin, before he/she can play Boomkin in Arena to start gearing for current season gear.
All the while everyone else is farming Arena for themselves, so this Druid is getting even further behind everyone else.
And unless you are the type of person with a lot of time on your hands, it can take some people weeks (or longer) before they are fully geared in last seasons gear.
So if people were able to change their specs much more easily (without the need to farm gear), then balance problems would be less serious, people are willing to forgive balance problems if they are still able to have fun.
c. You'll also see a massive reducing in people botting. People only bot because farming gear is boring.
This is not fun for the people who play Battlegrounds for fun, because every game has botters.
It's not fun for the people botting because they'd rather be playing for fun.
So the community would be happier as there would be less botting, less joining a BG which has 3 bots and because of that you're probably going to lose.
2.
Cosmetic Rewards.
I've talked about this before, but because gear isn't a good enough reward any more for PvP, then other rewards are necessary.
In the form of cosmetic rewards, people love cosmetic rewards. People will farm old content for months on end to get a particular weapon.
I myself have farmed Stratholme about 50 times recently because I want the sword from the last boss (which has below a 1% drop rate).
I'm talking about tabards, trinkets, gear re-colourisation, mounts and so on.
This is how you attract people to play, not by offering them a 1% DPS increase which most people generally don't care about.
A sidenote: With the increase in player-ran tournaments and other player-ran events. PvP is not the "mini-game" that it used to be in WoW, there are a lot of players who only play WoW for PvP, there would be many many more if the community was treated with respect by Blizzard.
PvP is it's own stand-alone part of the game now, it deserves to be treated as such. WoW is a game that will eventually be survived by it's PvP community, up until the day the servers are turned off.
As ever, keep it constructive.
This is just one of many changes that PvP needs in WoW. I outlined others in this post for those that haven't read them.
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3553418473
http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3483961360
