I'm sorry, but to me all these proposals look like a poor attempt by desperate raiders to revitalize the moribund raiding activity by penalizing PvP.
The problem is twofold, the leechers on one hand, but the fact that the current PvP implementation has exposed PvE to be a lot less attractive than people like Tigole believe it to be. You address AFK leechers by focussing on them (like a much more heavy-handed approach - booting from the BG and a longer deserted debuff, ban if they botted ). You address the lackluster raiding experience by improving it (just like Blizzard, in general, tries to boost weaker classes rather then nerf all the others), not by making another part of the game less fun or attractive.
 

but the fact that the current PvP implementation has exposed PvE to be a lot less attractive than people like Tigole believe it to be

Haven't the changes just shown PvP to be the most efficient route to a certain standard of epic gear at the moment? Players are following the path of least resistance.

It is probably true that many players are just PvPing (and losing) for the gear but after half a dozen boss kills I'd say many players are just running raid instances for the gear as well. The problem is that the amount of time and effort versus quality of reward is out of whack between PvP and PvE at the moment. If there was more parity you could fairly say which was the most interesting for the largest number of players.

Think of it this way: If you got a certain number of PvP tokens per hour you spent in a raid instance (remembering that you don't have to win in PvP to get tokens so you don't need to beat a boss to get tokens in PvE) then what do you think people would do? I imagine they would go AFK in raid instances to get the PvP gear since it requires even less effort than queueing up for and losing BGs or arenas. Path of least resistance.
 

I don't see any difference. The min maxers take the most efficient route and eventually force everyone who is trying to keep up to do the same.

Before a lot of people that didn't like to raid were raiding to get gear because that was the only choice.

Now there are two choices but PVP is the more efficient for most classes.

Thus the AFK problem gets worse because many people who don't care about winning or losing (thus they really don't care about pvp) are just doing the bare minimun to get their gear.

Doesn't mean PVP is any more fun just the easiest way to get gear right now.
 

Doesn't mean PVP is any more fun just the easiest way to get gear right now.

That leads to two different kinds of reasoning:

1) PvE is unattractive, let's nerf PvP so it is even more unattractive and people are forced back into raids

2) PvE is less attractive than PvP right now, let's make it more attractive again by fixing it.

Unfortunately, there's a vocal group of raiders who'd rather have 1) instead of a better raiding experience. The exact same mentality as all nerf callers - they'd rather have everyone as miserable as they are rather than ask to have it as good as the others.

Sickening, really.
 

I recent posted a bit about this on my blog, as well. IMHO, I think one problem is trying to please everyone and having the game spread its focus too thin over both PvP and all forms of PvE.

I don't think it's really a question of PvE or PvP being "more fun", it's a question of what is more efficient. PvP gear is easier to get for two reasons: 1) you don't rely on the competence or selflessness of other people, and 2) you get to pick what you want instead of hoping for random drops.

I think Blizzard has tried to address some of these issues by having the instance badges drop in raid instances and expanding what the badges can buy. But, you still actually have to accomplish something (killing a boss) to get the badges as opposed to AFKing or losing Arena matches.

The other night I had a particularly nasty experience where someone didn't just AFK, but rather sat there and taunted people about not participating. Rather frustrating for some of us that actually want to play and enjoy the battleground. The unfortunate thing is that this behavior still generates rewards for the harassers.

The one problem I don't like with the proposal is that it makes people carry around more equipment. My main is a Feral Druid, so the last thing I need is to carry around another set (or three) of equipment if I want to participate in both PvP and PvE. Perhaps have special storage facilities so that people can swap out PvP and PvE equipment for matches?
 

When I saw this quote, I knew it had to be from a raider.

4. PvE gear is inferior for PvP purposes, so there is no conflict with allowing it in the BG's.

Honestly, that's a load of crap. WoW PvE gear is as inferior for PvP as PvP gear is for PvE. That is to say, it isn't ideal, but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing. Look at these two weapons:

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=32055
http://www.wowhead.com/?item=33494

Both of these are very good for PvP. Both of them are very good for PvE. They are within 4 item levels of each other.

The real crossover point that people complain about isn't the armor, it's the weapons. PvP armor isn't likely to win many awards for PvE performance, except possibly extra stamina to stay alive in large aoe damage conditions. PvE armor, likewise, in pvp situations is not good since it tends to eschew stamina and burst damage for efficiency.

However, the weapons are excellent in both arenas, and that is what has the raiding population's panties in a knot. They absolutely hate the fact that people can actually go shopping for weapons, while they are forced to play the lottery each week and hope they get the drop they want.

The best solution I can think of is one Blizzard already implemented - rating requirements. Honestly, it's already temporally expensive to obtain arena weapons (with a 1500-rated 5v5 team (the median team rating!), it will take roughly 8 weeks to obtain a 1-handed weapon, 11 weeks for a 2-handed weapon, or 10 weeks for a caster main hand. These are not trivial amounts of time. If one started now, it is unlikely that they would be able to obtain more than a handful of items before the next expansion actually was released. Yet the raiders will continue to complain, because the simple possibility exists.

Blizzard should fix raiding loot distribution so that it is less of a roll of the dice to get the items they want, not keep trying to come up with spurious arguments to separate PvP and PvE.
 

I don't understand saying PVP is not popular by itself. What is? Are people doing quests that offer no rewards? That doesn't mean PVP isn't fun. It can be a lot of fun. Sure you get some bad BG groups just like anything else. As an endgame option, it has to offer epics, and the vast majority of people are glad that is does.
 

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gwaendar said:

That leads to two different kinds of reasoning:

1) PvE is unattractive, let's nerf PvP so it is even more unattractive and people are forced back into raids

2) PvE is less attractive than PvP right now, let's make it more attractive again by fixing it.

----------------

I think that is not correct, in the sense that it is NOT what is being pointed out in the original letter.

This is what it is trying to say:

PvP is unattractive, however many people are pvp'ing just to get the gear.

As a result, the attractive PvE endgame is compromised, making it harder to get groups for level 70 instances etc.

I agree with what the original letter said, both from personal experience doing PvP and PvE endgames and also from other indications (like for example the huge number of AFKk'ers in BGs). One caveat however - I think unorganized BGs are no fun, only reason to do it is for gear; organized, premade BGs are really fun though.

Seems like the million dollar question really is how to make unorganized (hence casual-friendly) PvP and PvE endgames attractive.
 

I remember when they did away with the titles and added badges and turned PVP into a gear based grind. Before that you could argue it was one but for your average casual player the grind was so hard it might as well not be there.

Back then most casual players that qued up just wanted a diversion. It was just something I used to do for fun when I got tired of questing or running instances. When they added the badges it turned it into a grind. The fun began to evaporate. Part of that is a lot of people who are only there for gear are not haveing fun. The AFK'rs the people who only put half the effort into anything they do. The healers who don't heal because it is the most inefficient thing to do if your playing AV WST or AB. PVP isn't a game anymore it's become like raiding a job that must be done efficiently if you want your gear.

Thus we are now haveing discussions that mirror the ones we've had about raiding for years.
 

Sorry in advance for getting long-winded...

Neither PvE nor PvP is perfect, but I think that the proposed solution fails to address the problem. And yes PvP battlegrounds continue to suffer from AFK leeches, and I'm disappointed that Blizzard has failed to address that problem forcefully. At present we just mark 'em and play on, knowing that the leeches won't know the first thing about how to actually use the gear they've leeched, and will be laughed-at when people inspect their PvP tab and find almost no HKs.

IMO, the article is flawed because of generalizations based upon what I believe to be misconceptions.

The first misconception is that PvE gear is useless in PvP battlegrounds; anyone who has actually been there would know that is a fallacy.

Second, the Large Prismatic Shard argument is in error. The fact is that there are many more popular enchants that require Large Prismatic Shard than Void Crystals - supply & demand. And the truth is that if I want a Large Prismatic Shard I can get one at any time by sharding a *crafted* level 66-70 blue!

Frankly, the criticisms of the current PvP system are not convincing to me. I would more likely be convinced there was a problem if there were a flood of blog / forum boasts and Armory links from PvE raiders who had taken advantage of "broken" PvP rewards to gear out in 'leet PvP lootz'. Why is it that these raiders cannot take advantage of the very loophole they assert they have identified...?

One also wonders why raiders haven't been complaining about the 'easy epic' crafted items or badge gear that some classes use all the way into Hyjal / BT. For example, based upon my Armory research, it is unlikely that my shadow priest will ever need to replace the crafted Frozen Shadoweave set that was crafted upon reaching level 70 with mats I farmed (but could just as easily been bought off the AH with questing gold). For 25 BoJ that could be obtained without ever setting foot in a raid instance, the Orb of the Soul Eater will likely be my offhand until the next expansion goes live - even if I were to be in a BT raid group!

But a much more important problem with the proposed solution is this:
The proposed solution will have the result of farming normal instances for random drops to try to gear up for heroics, vendoring/sharding many useless drops along the way, leading to...
Farming the very same instances with the toggle set to heroic for random drops trying to gear up for raids, vendoring/sharding many useless drops along the way, leading to...
Many runs through Kara again hoping for random drops...

Either that, or leading to quitting because of a combination of frustration that the upgrade never dropped (or losing the roll when it finally does), and boredom from being channeled into one and only one PvE gear improvement regimen.

The PvE problem is obvious.
A PvE solution is already partly implemented in the Badge of Justice system, which looks, not coincidentally, like the PvP honor & marks system.

Bottom line, IMO, is that the PvE reward system based upon random drops is in need of a full overhaul.
 

I no longer play WoW but I find it entertaining how the raiders everywhere now seem to be panicking now that many people are not showing up for their boring, repetitive activites. I've always said give players a choice, raiding will kicked in the FACE
 

Just a little detail.

AFK'ers are not only PvE's but also new PvPer's who have to fill the entry gap in order to be competitive in Arena.

This result in this fact : At 1500 bracket you will se optimized composition (War/Druid/Something - RMP) with full gladiator equipment S1/S2/S3. And that just one month after the beggining of the season. Any new fresh 70's teams entering now in the Arena tournament will see below the 1300 bracket. And I'm not talking about BG9 or something.

But that's another debate.
 

Nerf vs Buff, relativity and game balance
Any nerf is a buff to everyone unaffected by it. Any buff is a nerf to everyone unaffected by it. Calling for one or the other should be a matter of efficiency, nothing more. If one class is vastly overpowering the others.. you don't raise the power of several classes to meet it rather than lowering the power of a single class.

Sure, you might be slightly more popular the first way, however, in the long run you just created a much larger workload for yourself and issued a shotgun blast of changes that are only predictable to a certain degree. Odds are you just created more problems than you solved and fixing those is going to cause more subscriber complaints than being sensible and efficient originally possibly could have.

Lesson: if you're actually trying to balance, take the shortest, least invasive route that involves the fewest changes to obtain the desired effect. If you're just trying to mix things up, then by all means make all the random changes you want.


PvP gear vs PvE gear, division
First, separating PvP and PvE gear is a bad idea and will only drive a rift between the two preferences even further. The most tangible reward of any MMO once you've reached the level cap is advancing the power of your equipment. That's what half of the MMO experience is really about, and that's assuming you're enough of a social creature to spend and enjoy the other half of your effort interacting with your fellow human. That's pretty generous of a thing to assume for a lot of WoW denizens.

If you make one type of gear only usable in the environment it was obtained from.. you're essentially dividing the gear into two separate progressions. By dividing the methodical progression of the power (the addictive part of mmo's and a few other rpg's cough*Diablo*cough) you're making two separate games who's only mechanical overlap is your character's level which is already strictly controlled in both pve and pvp environments so that people of significantly different levels practically never meet for any meaningful reason.

If you're going to separate them why in God's name didn't you just make two games instead? Though I will admit one minor saving grace, if you separate the progressions it would be necessary to reduce the time investment of both halves to make it possible for people to do both separately.


Organization in Battlegrounds, marriages of equals
I've been saying since they first introduced them that they need to organize battlegrounds to place the largest preformed teams in first on either side and work their way down to the single guy's just trying to get in some PvP for fun or before work or whatever. They need to pit the people who are organized and premeditated in their PvP against each other. The same applies to the guys that are casual and unorganized.


Raiding, fundamentally flawed game design
The core derivations of fun from raiding are the problem-solving aspects of figuring out the particular patterns and methods viable to defeat your chosen raid encounter. Unfortunately, that type of gameplay has almost no replayability whatsoever. It's one-shot to the extreme (even worse, people often research and use the strategies of previously successful raiders before even attempting the encounter on their own). You can't take minimized "Zelda" boss gameplay, put 40 people in front of it and expect it to remain fun for more than a few hours. It's a formula for grinding and they've done everything possible to ensure that people still keep coming back.

What actually ends up providing the challenge once you've discovered a proper strategy are the logistical problems that crop up when coordinating the actions of 20-40 individuals to a level of efficiency and precision capable of overcoming the raid encounter's various obstacles. I admit that must be entertaining to a particular demographic.. but I don't think most people are really that anxious to become a minor cog in the machinery of a 40 person killing machine, performing the same pared down subset of activities for 3-6 hours multiple times a week. I think they have other.. external motivations.


Equipment, walking the line between solid and liquid
The fact is that people do it for the carrot. But the carrot (powerful loot) is out on the end of the stick that is: huge manpower requirements, multiple day cooldown times on raid instances, linear or semi-linear boss "progression", and percentage dropped loot. You've got a lot of factors against you here and with percentage dropped loot, there's never any guarantee you'll get what you want. You're playing a slot machine, the coin is several hours of your leisure time, the potential jackpot is a minor upgrade to an electronic avatar's power. Maybe it's not the best use of your time? Or maybe you should find something else to focus on while you're there besides the loot.

Only the upper echelon of raiders avoid spending most of their raiding time sitting around chatting, buffing, and corpse running. The problem is that the core "fun" of raiding is one-shot, just like all of the quests, leveling, and exploration in WoW... once you've had your fill it's no longer amazing/interesting/fun and it's unlikely to ever be again.

One alternative to percentage drops is to make equipment drops incremental as they've been doing with the token drops that you can eventually form into a full item. And the next step after that is to make sure that you can spend those tokens on the specific item that you want. In fact, they've basically already done this with the PvP system. You can now sit down and calculate how much time equals how much "money". But wait a minute... Isn't this starting to sound a lot like the definition of currency?

Is turning raid loot into currency a bad thing? Well as far as maintaining the sense of cool from "holy crap that guy has a sweet item, I need to figure out how to get one" and "holy crap that rare item just dropped for me." Yeah I think making the path to that item a static distance does take away from certain aspects, it becomes a steady, methodical build-up, a measurable accumulation rather than a sudden and unexpected reward. However, it also removes the "god damnit another raid with nothing to show for it" that so often accompanies the other method. I also think the "holy crap that rare item just dropped for me." effect is mostly non-existant in WoW outside of world drop epics anyway so you're probably better off with "loot currency".


AFKers
Afkers, are just mildly clever or well-informed people who are lazy or decided they didn't want to spend countless hours performing a task they despise or at least do not particularly enjoy, but still want the reward for said task. They aren't a scourge to people who genuinely enjoy doing that particular task regardless of the reward, people who PvP or PvE because it's personally enjoyable couldn't care less about AFKer's hanging around as long as they aren't actually interdicting any of their potential fun. The people they truly piss off are the ones that don't want to be raiding or honor grinding, but continue to do so in order to collect that eventual reward.

I understand the frustration, but maybe you should reconsider your position if AFKer's are really detracting from the experience that much for you. Perhaps your time would be better spent somewhere other than throwing yourself against the shins of a high-end raid boss or into the forty-man fray of Alterac Valley for hours on end. In the end, you're not really gaining anything by obtaining the arbitrary power upgrade of that item, if you're going to be there you should take pleasure in the journey not just the destination.
 

Blizz could get rid of AFK,ers easily. Just make is if you get no HK's and do 0 damage you get no honor or tokens from the BG's.

Problem solved.
 

People would go out and get 1 HK before AFKing or whatever arbitrary minimum number of HKs you set.

You might be thinking. "Oh well then Honor and tokens should be directly proportional to the number of HK's you get." That's how it used to be and it meant that healing people was an even worse idea than it is now.
 

thats a terrible idea we barley get enough people that can do dungeons on are small server limiting there pvp purples would only make them wear greens and they suck hard. Above where u said that dungeon gear was inferior to pvp gear is a total misnomer as i have seen fully epic pvp geared people begging to join a kara group for better gear so i doubt that your at all correct about that. Spending a week in pvp to get one piece of crap gear while everyone does 10 or 20 levels is retarded. my alts lv 60 green ( not that they ever have a green there normally all blue at lv45) is like a lv 50 purple so if I do 20 levels on you its like you have grey gear....enjoy! but i do feel your pvp gear pains they do steal aggro and suck in dungeons make sure your group gears towards low plus to crit if you have a normal group