My biggest problem with Blizzard is that their developers, as a company, seem to operate like that nerdy kid in high school who wanted the cool edgy kids who all skipped class to smoke behind the bleachers to like them. The problem with that analogy is that the 1400 other people the nerdy kid goes to school with aren't sending him a check for 14.99 a month.
What I mean is, the overwhelming majority of wow players don't PVP - only a handful of PVP servers are heavily populated and PVE servers outnumber PVP servers to begin with by a substantial margin. on those PVP servers only a fraction of
those people do Arena. I would guess that maybe 10% of the level 80 non-alt non-super-casual playerbase is actually doing any of this content. When Arena first came out it was different, but when Arena first came out you could reasonably get rewards through the arena system even if you sucked terribly.
Consistently, almost every nerf or balance change to a given class is because of... drumroll... PVP mechanics. Arena players whine because prot warriors are critting 12k shield slams or because tree druids heal too much, and instead of Blizzard band-aiding the problem for that aspect of the game, they make sweeping changes with short and long term PVE implications. Sometimes an ability that had interesting utility and mechanics in PVE and was potentially useful in the right scenarios gets utterly obliterated because of PVP and never gets fixed. (Raise Ally for one example.) And unless the playerbase rises up as a large group to object such changes they go through without any consideration of the circumstances. The ham-handed "drinking fix" from late TBC comes to mind here.
I just don't get it. I understand that their business model revolves around attracting all kinds of players, including xbros who have too bad of reflexes to play Halo. I get the whole "E-sport" thing and I get that there's probably about a million hardcore arena players who only play WoW for that aspect of the game. What I
don't understand is why blizzard hasn't done what
every other MMO and online game is doing and create seperate game rules for PVPers. It's not like there isn't a precedent or that they don't know how to balance PVP this way - Diablo 2 had a seperate ruleset for players in PVP and it was one of the things that kept players like myself playing the game for years after it came out and got stale. Sometimes I feel like Blizzard takes the hardcore PVEers for granted because they know we're not going to go anywhere, but the Arena guys can go play another game at any time given that they don't have much invested beyond their ten games a week. Insidiously, I suspect this may be the real reason Blizzard has rating requirements on Arena gear - to make it so that once Arena players are in, they're more hesitant to quit, knowing that when they come back they're going to have a much harder time catching up to the rest of the Arena community.
I think the reasonable thing to do would be to create a guild wars esque setup - Arena/Battlegrounds servers where you start at 80, get issued a set of blue gear, and can only do your PVP crap. They could apply completely separate game rules to these servers without the added effort of coding one ability to work two different ways in the same setting, and from then on when a PVP balance change gets made or a PVE balance change gets made, it does not have any effect on either side. We wouldn't be put in scenarios like we are being put in right now, where warriors, who already do less damage than any other tank class, get their damage nerfed for PVP and get awful threat scaling mechanics to make up for it.
Bloo posters keep saying things like "We don't understand why increasing the threat of an ability is such a bad idea" - it's clear to me that Blizzard's community reps are going through a constant revolving door, because when Wrath came out one of the things they proudly announced was that Blizzard was stepping away from threat scaling and increasing tank damage. Tanks that do virtually no damage but generate lots of threat are a relic from the past - like talent trees that are only useful in PVP, hybrids only being useful as healers in raids, blue drops off raid bosses and top tier talents that aren't worth taking. These were all Bad Things to begin with, recognized as Bad Things and fixed. Stepping away from that, and back to the so-called "glory days" is a big fucking mistake.
no more pve nerfs to satisfy pvpers plz
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Topic: Wrath of the Lich King (Read 239934 times)