WoW's Arena system: more hardcore than ever

But in practice it will just stratify the ladder.

In the sense that if you are at the bottom your chances to climb are nearly zero.

Actually I was wondering if the system ALWAYS put someone at the top every three months, or if everyone starts at the lower rank and has to slowly grind to climb as in the current Honor system.

What I mean is that, yes, the matches should be more balanced and so more fun to go through. But this won't do much to ease your path to the reward. It will be still hardcore and only reserved for hardcore players.

I really don't think that a PUG winning against another PUG will open the door for the top rank. It will open the door for rank 2. Eventually you'll have to go against that super-organized and super-equipped hardcore group. And your PUG won't have a chance (obviously).

So, as written in the other post about PvP:

- Hardcore will play the Arena to compete for the carrot
- Casuals will play the Arena for a quick, mindless fun

Personally I hated the honor system. But I'm a lot more optimistic about the arena system. The problem with WoW honor was that it rewarded time spent in BGs over how successful you were at PvP. Obviously in the arena system, the best teams that want the top ranks have to win other top teams, meaning that finally WoW is going to be rewarding skill over time spent.
The real question is to what degree. If a group of morons can get to the top of the ranks by playing 200 games, once again blizzard has undermined skill. However if you only need to get your team to play about 30-40 games a week, almost anyone who is serious enough to be a top ranking team, will be able to put that together.
My hope is that the arena will reward players that almost always win, but play less. Over players that play all day every week, and lose 40% of their games. With a complete item reset and removal of the two shot phenomenon, players really have to excuse for not being succsessful in BC PvP.

Fact #1

You need gear and a team to win games.

Fact #2

Grinding makes Blizzard rich.

Fact #3

PvE-oriented teams usually win in PvP.

The master plan of most PvE geared players is to raid end instances and then go in BGs and win all the time, to unwind, to relax. It's not their main concern, and not their main priority timewise. When BC comes out, PvE oriented players will want to run the new instances, not play arena over and over again. By allowing casual arena players to have access to the best rankings, you are basically saying to end-game PvE players "come unwind with your guild in the arena for a couple of games and dominate this place too, for minimal amounts of time which you can afford". If the argument is to give a chance to casual players to have access to nice arena gear, I don't think this is the way to approach it. I really don't know how Bliz can try to please both hardcore and casual players in a fair manner. Both of them are clients that pay the same amount of money at the end of the month, so you need to keep both interested. Hardcore players like the carrot, casuals want it too, but would rather like to have quick fun, since time spent in WoW is an issue.

If you want a quick picture of how PvP is represented if everyone was of same gear level, create yourself a character in the 10-19 or 20-29 BGs, and for about 500-1000 gold, you have pretty much next to the BEST character you can get, EVER. No more brand new tier sets, no more gear updates, or skill sets, etc... Low-level characters are a "fast-forward" in the PvP timeline in WoW. Hardcores make twinks, casuals do not, and then complain about the twinks. Play twinks vs twinks, and you have pretty much tier 3 guild against tier 3 guild. Same thing, but a LOT more accessible. The day Bliz puts requirements on enchants is the day they decide to flatten PvP, in my opinion, and "punish" hardcores.

All in all, myself being a PvP oriented player, it's all a matter of where you have most FUN. I had a twink in the 10-19s, and was BORED out of it because it was always the same easy wins, until alliance organized themselves and made a twink guild. Then I saw the other side of the coin, where you mostly lose. WSG basically became a rep grind. Then cross-servers came, and that pretty much ended it, since you could see teams all the time. Being part of a twink guild became a NECESSITY to win. I think this was a factor Bliz considered for creating arenas, so that teams would go there instead of BGs (for the higher levels).

True, it's frustrating to see those tier 3 guilds come in AB and 5 cap, or farm your graveyard in WSG. Why should it be PvE gear that wins over PvP gear, when you are doing PvP? This is because Blizzard chooses to reward hardcore PvE players with the best gear instead of hardcore PvP players. I think it's that simple. At the moment, you can't expect to win them all if you haven't experienced everything the game has to offer. This means that you are forced to organize or be part of a PvE guild if you want to succeed in the high tier PvP matches.

You can't stop people from being hardcore, and making very effective teams. It's just a fact to accept. Casuals have a disadvantage right from the start, because they simply have less experience and organization than the hardcore players. When they ACCEPT that fact, then they should opt for fun games instead of that carrot. It's window shopping, really. Showing it to them makes them want to have it, and BECOME hardcore about it, or give up.

In conclusion, I think that Bliz should do something to reward PvP-oriented players. This is a reality I have found annoying for quite some time now: PvE oriented players dominate PvP, even against organized PvP teams. Blizzard should give access to unique skills or other such advantages in the PvP sets which only work on PLAYERS. When they realize that PvP and PvE are separate things, I think matches will be much much more interesting. Even casual players could do that nice ability from his normal PvP set to the well geared PvE player with monstruous stats, but no such ability. There is simply no advantage to being a uniquely PvP oriented player now, even with Arena.

-0.1 seconds on Cyclone? please... I'd rather have that Dreamwalker set ANY day!

The problem isn't that Blizzard didn't just hire ex-EQ raiders to drive the game's development. It's that they hired the specific breed of ex-EQ raider who is at least as concerned, if not moreso, with what content and rewards OTHER people have access to, and not just what they themselves are doing.

Which is why PvE gear allows a small subset of players to absolutely dominate an entirely different aspect of the game. It's also why crafting is such a joke, and why non-raid itemization was so pathetic versus raid itemization. It's why they poured god knows how much time and money into designing content (Naxx) that only 3% of players have made any real use of.

Content and reward exclusivity in an MMO isn't a bad thing is an of itself. When development is driven by the mindset that only a certain, favored group should EVER be rewarded, like WoW has been for the past 2 years, then that exclusivity becomes a liability. It's OK for PvP to be dominated by catasses in Tier 3, because the "right" people on the development team don't want PvP'ers to aquire equal or better rewards outside of what they consider to be the "best" MMO playstyle, or to be competitive with catass raiders. In their minds, the top raiders should be at the top of every aspect in the game, not just PvE raiding.

While i agree on many points, i don't think it's impossable to reward good players and still make it possable for anyone to eventually get the items. Here are the problems i see.

1. BG's rely on large teams, which are usually PUG's. You generally have no idea who your with, what gear they have, how they play, or what they are going to do. Classic example is that your a warrior with 20% health left, and there is a druid right next to you. Instead of healing he goes feral form. On many servers it's very one sided. One side has the majority of the morons, and lose. Individiual skill can't shine in a team full of idiots running in a differnt direction. You will get zerged by the other team and die, no mater how good you are.

2. Battle grounds all favor closed arena style combat. You have a base objective, and 90% of it is simply rushing the enemy. That means strategy, and most of the alliance racials are out. It also means again, no skill. Most everyone knows what button sequence to push, but a skilled pvp'er knows when to push it. Rushing in head first is a must in the BG's. Thus removing tactics and skill from pvp. Also some class's naturally shine more where others do better in open combat pvp or world pvp.

3. Eventually, if someone plays long enough, they will get the good raid gear anyways.

4. Some guy's will always have better gear then you.

5. Pots, sharpening stones, engineering, all can drasticly win a fight, thus it becomes who has more gold to spend.

You can't solve the gear or item problems. It doesn't really need to be fixed. What you need is a scaling pvp system. On Dark Ages of Camelot it took a year to reach realm rank 8. It had some great bonus's and prizes, but it took forever. All it requires is to increase the ranks of gaining arena points scalability. 500th place may be 6, 30th may be 500,000 and 29 may be 520,000. In the end if your real bad you can still get the best sword in the game, it will just take you next to forever. If your the best mage in the game you will have that staff in a heart beat. That solves the problem there.

You make good points, and in fact point out the key difference in WoW (at least, so far):

No matter how much time you invested, unless you were raiding, you would never have access to the best gear. (I'm speaking pre-2.0)

The epic PvP sets are certainly nice, although the grind to get them was insane. At least 3 solid months of virtually 24x7 pvp play was required to get to rank 14. Conversely, AQ40 gave out PvP-oriented gear that rivaled the GM/HWL sets for compartively far less work. And none of the GM/HWL weapons had anything on drops from the later AQ40 bosses, and hell even Naxx trash dropped superior weapons.

It's certainly OK to stratify itemization...in fact it's necessary for certain content to be viable. Most people would NOT raid if they could get equivalent gear elsewhere...raiding came to a virtual standstill when 2.0 was released and people could "buy" GM/HWL stuff with honor points.

The problem was that in the EQ-catass mentality of the developers, they were so concerned with trying to turn WoW into a raiding game that non-raid PvE development effectively stopped when Dire Maul was released in March '05. When BC launches on Tuesday, it'll be the first genuinely new non-raid content in almost two years. In the meantime, Tigole and Co. went on a non-stop orgy of new raid content and itemization. It was so bad that when Naxx was first released, less than 100 guilds in the US (less than 1 guild per server) were even capable of attempting it. You had 90%+ of the population starved and begging for new content, and yet here comes another complete raid instance, with ridiculous itemization to go with it...and barely anyone has finished enough of the prior raid content to even start on the new stuff.

So of course, people turned to PvP for something different to do. And there, instead of just having certain content being off-limits to them, they got steamrolled by bored raiders using their ridiculous gear to annihilate everyone while killing time between raids. The biggest "screw you" from the developers came when, after Blizzard repeatedly stating "We will not allow PvE to PvP server transfers", they allowed the PvE server that Foror's guild was on to transfer to a PvP server.

PvP has been WoW's bastard kid ever since the raiders took over development. It was looked at as something that bored raiders could do in-between raids. Maybe with the leadership shake-up at Blizzard this will change somewhat with BC, but it seems that ultimately they are still catering to the catass above all else.

Exactly how does grinding make Blizzard rich?

I have been playing this game for years, and I really don't bother to grind. Still, I pay the same amount as someone who grinds 24/7. The net return for Bliz is 0.

We all pay the same amount every month. So it shouldn't matter to bliz if someone wants to stand an fish and look at their excellent water effects, PvP hardcore, Raid, or just sit in IF and spam the trade channel with useless banter.

wel lthe last guy who posted was not very intelligent, people who play 8 hours a day play the game way too much anyway. and people who have a life still deserve rewards that match the people who have no life at all and just exist to play wow. pve gear should be COMPLETELY useless in pvp because warriors armor for example has tanking stats on it, that should be useless in pvp because its not tanking that helps in pvp its hit rating, crit rating, and attack power that help. the arena gear is just as good as the end-game tier 4 looks just like it, has pretty much around the same lvl of stats, and its for people who cant stay up til like midnight or past to do raids with idiotic guilds that are pretty much made up of players who are like 30 years old and live with their moms. if someone wants to pvp to get good gear then let them and make it to where the pve armor cant compete with it in a pvp setting. end-game raiders do deserve some sort of edge...the edge should only exist in pve though not in pvp where the armor made for pvp rewards is supposed to be good anyway.

and yet it's still better than grinding honor like the battlegrounds. The fact is if you want the best stuff you have to be hardcore to get it. Sort of like in real life, we don't all get to be millionaires with fancy houses and what not, you have to work hard to earn that stuff.

i think that it would be interesting to have gear given to you when you create an arena team and gear restricted so that would be the only set you are allowed to wear that would make the arena skill-based rather than gear-based

very true, i think that a great idea to make the balance perfectly, but i dont think thats gonna work because everybody has its own playstyle so lets say u have choosen a shaman in pve u got much mana and u need that to oplay ur style, but when ur coming to arena with that set u use maybe its lesser mana and u cant play that style anymore. thats unbalance, so i dont see thats gonna work.

but maybe u get some sets to choose ore something.

well thx for me sry for my bad english ^^