Wow pvp started out pretty freaking hardcore. I still remember the names of my rivals while leveling up. There used to be such a low guard response, people would literally grief and camp entire zones by killing the flight masters in the middle of towns and disrupt hearthstones. Whenever I wasn't out camping mad people who spammed emotes at me I'd try my hand at helping other people in my own faction being griefed.
Those were the days when wow kicked butt. Now it's all about... grinding and rushing to kill content that will be nerfed in a couple weeks anyways for pickup groups to clear.. running the FOTM class composition to abuse a gimmick in arena/bg and talking shat to people who you should be friendly with in every chat imaginable because for one reason or another one of your ratings is higher.
I played for 2/3 months during cataclysm and made a pvp video of random world pvp in tol barad, as it was a small touch of what made the original game good, then quickly burnt out when everyone wised up and started bringing 10 man groups to be safe and quest together so they could go kill dragons sooner.
Arathi Basin and Warsong gulch were some of the best bg's ever released, and they were released early-mid PRE-TBC. They added arenas in TBC which were cool but people quickly found ways to bypass skill through specific gimmicky class compositions, switching pre game into full on resist gear, and having ridiculously broken pvp items earned through PvM means. Actually the PvE gear 2.5 and on during pre-bc really started outclassing the pvp-acquired gear. Later on this brought about resilience so that pve gear wouldn't crush pvp gear for pvp while pvp gear wouldn't beat pve gear at pve, which ended up being pretty awful. This ultimately built up to the homogenization of all the classes. You can't be fair because they are different, wahhhhhh, so now every healer, caster, and every dps class are all roughly the same with many fewer differences than when they had half as many or fewer skills back at launch.
There was a season where I basically just mashed icy touch on my otherwise cool death knight to the top .5% of all players in my battlegroup. Other seasons my friends (or I) just didn't play the right classes for the FOTM compositions blizzard made ridiculously overpowering, or we had to struggle hard to accomplish anything. You couldn't enter two DPS into 2v2 unless you were a mage or a rogue. You couldn't enter two healers into a 2v2, you couldn't run certain 3v3 compositions, PMR just worked perfectly together for the longest time and hots and dots always destroyed 3v3 as well and the list goes on.
World of warcraft has become a game of convenience (aside from and paid by the annual subs), a game of mostly composition and gear based victories. It used to just be chaos. Both factions did most of the same quests, so every area you went to to quest/farm was a pvp hotspot, and it took a lot longer to level up and gear up back then. Now it's just like.. "Hey you don't have a life for a week? Grind battlegrounds and get half your epics, then slave over this raid for a trinket/weapon for 3 months and play every week to make sure you get those arena points to complete the set!"
Well... Before I ramble on any further you can see how I fondly recall world pvp and more and more start to despise organized pvp, calculated, gimmicky, item pvp.
To answer the original question posed, what it will take for blizzard to make the change is the community getting behind the idea. Currently the SC2 community is having their way with the ladder pool maps for instance. Wow has become a game of cenvenience (due to and paid for by annual subscriptions), and diablo 3 has the RMAH and planned expansions, meaning they won't forget about updating d3 for a near decade after launch. If there is an overwhelming outcry from the community to add more emphasis/modes/options for pvp then they will be more compelled to give the customer what they want in the form of mentioned pvp.
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Wow pvp started out pretty freaking hardcore. I still remember the names of my rivals while leveling up. There used to be such a low guard response, people would literally grief and camp entire zones by killing the flight masters in the middle of towns and disrupt hearthstones. Whenever I wasn't out camping mad people who spammed emotes at me I'd try my hand at helping other people in my own faction being griefed.
Those were the days when wow kicked butt. Now it's all about... grinding and rushing to kill content that will be nerfed in a couple weeks anyways for pickup groups to clear.. running the FOTM class composition to abuse a gimmick in arena/bg and talking shat to people who you should be friendly with in every chat imaginable because for one reason or another one of your ratings is higher.
I played for 2/3 months during cataclysm and made a pvp video of random world pvp in tol barad, as it was a small touch of what made the original game good, then quickly burnt out when everyone wised up and started bringing 10 man groups to be safe and quest together so they could go kill dragons sooner.
Arathi Basin and Warsong gulch were some of the best bg's ever released, and they were released early-mid PRE-TBC. They added arenas in TBC which were cool but people quickly found ways to bypass skill through specific gimmicky class compositions, switching pre game into full on resist gear, and having ridiculously broken pvp items earned through PvM means. Actually the PvE gear 2.5 and on during pre-bc really started outclassing the pvp-acquired gear. Later on this brought about resilience so that pve gear wouldn't crush pvp gear for pvp while pvp gear wouldn't beat pve gear at pve, which ended up being pretty awful. This ultimately built up to the homogenization of all the classes. You can't be fair because they are different, wahhhhhh, so now every healer, caster, and every dps class are all roughly the same with many fewer differences than when they had half as many or fewer skills back at launch.
There was a season where I basically just mashed icy touch on my otherwise cool death knight to the top .5% of all players in my battlegroup. Other seasons my friends (or I) just didn't play the right classes for the FOTM compositions blizzard made ridiculously overpowering, or we had to struggle hard to accomplish anything. You couldn't enter two DPS into 2v2 unless you were a mage or a rogue. You couldn't enter two healers into a 2v2, you couldn't run certain 3v3 compositions, PMR just worked perfectly together for the longest time and hots and dots always destroyed 3v3 as well and the list goes on.
World of warcraft has become a game of convenience (aside from and paid by the annual subs), a game of mostly composition and gear based victories. It used to just be chaos. Both factions did most of the same quests, so every area you went to to quest/farm was a pvp hotspot, and it took a lot longer to level up and gear up back then. Now it's just like.. "Hey you don't have a life for a week? Grind battlegrounds and get half your epics, then slave over this raid for a trinket/weapon for 3 months and play every week to make sure you get those arena points to complete the set!"
Well... Before I ramble on any further you can see how I fondly recall world pvp and more and more start to despise organized pvp, calculated, gimmicky, item pvp.
To answer the original question posed, what it will take for blizzard to make the change is the community getting behind the idea. Currently the SC2 community is having their way with the ladder pool maps for instance. Wow has become a game of cenvenience (due to and paid for by annual subscriptions), and diablo 3 has the RMAH and planned expansions, meaning they won't forget about updating d3 for a near decade after launch. If there is an overwhelming outcry from the community to add more emphasis/modes/options for pvp then they will be more compelled to give the customer what they want in the form of mentioned pvp.