The state of PvP in WoW

PvP in World of Warcraft is a work in progress. If you read my first WoW Journal from 2 years ago, from the US stress test beta, all the PvE I describe there has remained virtually unchanged from then until now. The user interface has improved, and content has been added. But PvE is still following the same rules it had two years ago. Meanwhile PvP has changed a lot, having received major changes in every second patch. The basic rules of PvP are totally different now than they were two years ago, and they will be totally changed again before the end of the year. So where is PvP now?

As a disclaimer, I would like to mention that I only play on PvE servers, so anything I say might be slightly different on a PvP server.

In a way PvP is healthier than ever. The cross-server battlegrounds introduced in patch 1.12 are a huge success. There are always battlegrounds of every type open, waiting queues are much shorter than ever, and the availability of battlegrounds got more people than ever interested in PvP. As a viable alternative activity to PvE, PvP has really come of age.

Outside of battlegrounds, on PvE servers, PvP is rare. People duel for fun or to pass the time when waiting for something. But the overland PvP objectives introduced in patch 1.12 aren't exactly popular. People do them once, to get the related quest rewards, then yawn and move on. I flew a spectral gryphon between the 4 towers for the first time recently, and there wasn't a single player at any of the 4 PvP locations in Eastern Plaguelands.

The weak point of PvP is still the reward system. Very few players seriously go for the high-end rewards in that system, most players are content to reach Sergeant and get the 10% NPC vendor price reduction. Going for the highest rank means you need to compete with people who do nothing else but PvP up to 16 hours per day, and to most players that is just not possible. This isn't about skill, any idiot can make more honor points in 16 hours than the world's best PvP player in 4 hours. The one skill that helps in PvP is organization. Going to a battleground in a "premade" group, using voice chat, is the best way to collect honor points.

A number of positive changes to PvP have already been announced for the Burning Crusade expansion. It seems that Blizzard has realized the potential of battlegrounds as "casual" PvP entertainment for the masses, and is changing the honor reward system accordingly. The relative rank system will disappear, and people just collect honor points like they collect experience points or faction reputation points, in a cumulative manner. These honor points can then be spent, like a currency, to buy PvP rewards. Thus finally 4 evenings of 4 hours PvP give the identical reward than one day of 16 hours, which makes PvP a lot more interesting to the majority of players.

But the hard-core PvP fans will also get a major improvement: a PvP league system called battle arenas. You form a team of 4, 6, or 10 players on the roster, staying together for one season. At any time half the players of the team can compete in a battle arena in fights against another team. So there will be arenas for 2-on-2, 3-on-3, and 5-on-5 combats. Any win in an arena will increase your team's rating, and at the end of each week you get points based on your team's rating, for which you can buy PvP rewards. Interestingly the arenas are *not* about Horde vs. Alliance, any team can be paired against any other team of the same size, regardless of side. Will be interesting to see how the team's rating will be determined. Will there be a fixed number of matches per week? If not, how do you count the rating of one team that won 10 out of 10 matches against the other team that won 11 out of 30?

So PvP is bound to improve further with the expansion. The only negative side in that is that it diminishes the interest in going after PvP honor rewards now. You certainly don't want to be half on your way to some PvP honor rank when the system is abandoned. It isn't clear at all whether and how your current honor rank is transformed into the new honor points, it is quite possible that you just lose all. But of course the same can be said about PvE rewards, why break your back to get some level 60 epic now, when it might be a lot easier to get a level 70 blue item that is better? And why not wait with going to AQ40 and BWL until your guild is all level 70 and doesn't wipe twenty times on the first boss? But I guess some people always prefer the hard way, the challenge, the achievement.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:29 AM Permanent Link