My patience with Blizzard and the severe lack of attention paid to PvP and its community has reached a tipping point. For so long I was the person countering the complaints on the forums and rolling my eyes at people and their takes about PvP on Twitter. Sadly, after Blizzard’s announcement of the upcoming hardcore servers, I am, or soon on my way to becoming, one of those people. Dragonflight is an amazing expansion and Blizzard is communicating more than ever to the community. Well, to everyone but the PvP community that is. There are a few things that have bothered me recently that have gotten me to this point, so that is what I am going to focus on.
Furthermore, while balancing is happening more often, in a lot of players’ eyes there are changes that need to happen that seem to go ignored or take a longer time to address than others that are having obvious effects on the PvP side of the game. Two instances are Assasination Rogues in 10.0 to 10.7. They became an increasing outlier because of the damage they were doing as season 1 rolled along especially at the higher end of the PvP ladder. They were only first addressed after the 10.0.5 patch with small changes and it wasn’t noticeable until the 10.0.7 changes hit live servers. Many changes were released early in the weeks leading up to the 10.0.7 patch. Now when the 10.0.7 patch went live, oh boy. 10.0.7 for many players ruined all of season 1 for them. I have also talked about this in the past so I will try not to go too deep into it, but Retribution Paladins got a rework and were extremely unbalanced. The havoc that was dumped on to the PvP ladder was that of nothing we had ever seen. Blizzard did release a fix for Paladins that they had set to go live on next reset (4 days after the announced balancing) and there was such a call for the balancing to go live asap they decided to put it through in a hot fix that night–just hours later. The wild part of this is it did not seem to make that much of a difference even though the changes look significant on paper. What I am getting at with this is: more frequent PvP balancing is great but it doesn’t mean much if certain things aren’t getting addressed or major imbalance still exists. Balancing will never be perfect, but in 2023, something like the Ret Paladin fiasco that occurred in 10.0.7 should not be happening.
The next thing I want to address is developer interviews. In particular ones done with content creators. The World of Warcraft development team has been doing a fantastic job with the number of developer interviews for content they are releasing especially with content creators within the WoW community. That is minus the WoW PvP community. I was really hopeful this would not be the case and things were changing for PvP when we got a PvP targeted developer interview the day Dragonflight was announced done with Content Creator, Bajheera, and with one of my favorite devs, Brian Holinka. However, there hasn’t been a PvP interview since. In fact, as someone who watches all developer interviews because I love World of Warcraft, there has literally been one PvP question asked during these content creator dev interviews since April of 2022 during the dozens of interviews done. Now why is this? Well it’s simple. The people hosting the interviews are not going to ask PvP questions because PvP isn’t something they focus on. This is not the interviewers’ fault; they are asking questions about the content they cover and about the things they do and enjoy, as they should. The frustration is that it’s not like there aren’t people that could do PvP interviews with the devs, or content and changes being made that have to do with PvP that couldn’t be covered in a dev interview. The CC changes made in patch 10.1 are a prime example of a great PvP dev interview topic. Being able to ask questions and get an answer back instead of just silence or maybe a forum post about changes coming would be amazing. PvPers want to know if or what kind of plans there might be for PvP in the future, just like the rest of the community.
I started with the statement that the announcement of hardcore servers coming this summer has worn my patience with WoW’s PvP thin. Classic Hardcore servers are a slap in the face to PvPers. Not because they are a bad idea, not because they shouldn’t happen, but because a hardcore mode that makes you delete your character when you die is going to be a mode that a lot of people try, but won’t stick with. PvP is already here, and the PvP community has been screaming for attention for years.There’s no doubt it will boom at first, but after dying a few times after putting work into a character, or dying in a dungeon because someone else messed something up is going to turn people off. I think it will always have a place on the content creator side because people love watching people die in silly ways, but overall it will be far too punishing for most players to enjoy. I will play on hardscore servers and have some fun, but people love to point out how small the PvP community is. Now there are a lot of reasons for that but without getting into those the hardcore community isn’t something that is any bigger in my opinion. Viewership on Twitch doesn’t prove that it’s big and the server most hardcore players play on is not even capped out. There was even a survey posted by Blizzard themselves where the only thing that got more votes for content they enjoy than Dragonflight PvP was Mythic+. But Blizzard is giving this Hardcore mode its own servers which is a slap in the face to PvPers.
Maybe Blizzard has some big plans ahead for PvP. Time will tell, but right now? There is nothing but silence.
Mhortai
Mhortai is a PvP writer for Bonus Roll Productions and an admin in the Oasis WoW Community. He is also an active member of the Technically PvP podcast community and can be found via his twitter or chatting in Bonus Roll’s TPVP discord channel.
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