September 26, 2007

Dear Blizzard, PvP is a Mess

Dear Blizzard,

PvP in World of Warcraft is an absolute mess.

Players that were not fortunate enough to participate in the first two Arena seasons are now at a distinct disadvantage. E-Z mode epics are no longer attainable for lesser geared players to become competitive. Alas, the tried and true MMORPG rule, exploit early, exploit often (or abuse early, abuse often), is proven once again.

Also, the Arena system is severely imbalanced towards OBVIOUSLY overpowered class and skill combinations. It does not take a rocket scientist to look at the number of each class represented in the top 100 teams to recognize the problem.

Yet, for two full seasons these problems have been ignored and players have been allowed to gain superior quality items with little effort. But now, anyone coming into the system will not have the same opportunity.

The battlegrounds are in no better shape. Warsong Gulch is a bore fest; either ending extremely fast or going for hours on end. Eye of the Storm rarely actually fills with enough players for both teams and usually ends due to lack of players.

Alterac Valley has been designated an AFK zone for Horde players. Patch 2.2.0 was supposed to fix this, but alas your "AFK flagging" system was a broken design that is now punishing honest players while AFKers simply "buff a guard" to collect honor. On top of this, the map in Alterac Valley is still heavily skewed towards the Alliance.

Fortunately, Arathi Basin is somewhat balanced and still fun to play. Unfortunately, all the fucking rewards for battlegrounds absolutely fucking suck compared to the Arena rewards. Would it be so hard to update the fucking rewards?

Sadly, open world PvP is the worst aspect of World of Warcraft PvP. There is almost no point to playing on a PvP server. Rarely do you find any PvP in the open world that is not just someone getting ganked. Ganking is not PvP. Very little honor is gained for open world fighting compared to the immense amount that is given for battlegrounds. Also, most of The Burning Crusade objective-based PvP encounters are boring and exploitable.

Blizzard, you suck at PvP.

Yours truly,

Heartless Gamer

PS. Warlocks really need another way to make players run around helplessly as they die.