Arenas were a mistake - Blue Tracker

#0 - Nov. 14, 2009, 8:39 p.m.

John Funk of WarCry recently interviewed Blizzard's VP of Game Design, Rob Pardo, about WoW's five-year anniversary, and he shed some light on a number of topics, including their total subscriber numbers (twice to three times as much as its current 12 million), what audience their new MMO is meant for, and what he thinks WoW's greatest successes were. But some other very interesting information came up when the interviewer asked what he thought WoW's biggest mistakes were.

He begins by saying that he wishes that the servers had been more stable at launch, and that there had been more of them, but he says that in terms of design, Arenas were the single biggest mistake in WoW's history.

Says Pardo:

We didn't engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There's constant pressure on the class balance team, there's pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don't PvP don't understand why their classes are changing. I don't think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we'd have to do to balance it in that direction.

Pardo indicates that most of the changes to the game since launch have been a success -- the shrinking of raid sizes, the addition of Heroic dungeons, etc -- but that Arena has been a huge headache for Blizzard and players alike. He goes on to say that if he had the choice, he'd either go back to WoW's beginnings and change the fundamentals of class balance, or, barring that, would nix the decision to add Arenas during the development of the Burning Crusade expansion.

A pretty candid statement about a pretty controversial topic. It's good to see that Blizzard understands that the implementation of Arenas was a mistake for a game like WoW. Of course, Pardo also says that they can't just axe Arenas completely, at least not yet, so we may be stuck with them for a while. Sorry about your PvE burst damage, guys.

You can read the full interview with Rob at the Warcry Network. It's not all about Arena, I promise.

Source : http://www.wow.com/2009/11/13/blizzard-arenas-were-a-mistake/

Vaneras

#55 - Nov. 17, 2009, 10:32 a.m.

Q u o t e:

Q u o t e:
That's a little bit about what Rob is talking about -- the difficulty we have had retrofitting WoW's PvP. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I don't think he is saying Arenas were a mistake. It's the way we introduced Arenas that has continued to cause ourselves a lot of work and occasionally caused frustration for players. We like the Arena gameplay though or we would have cut it or overhauled it long ago. We do think we have shifted the PvP attention a little too much towards Arenas and away from BGs, and yes we understand that loot rewards are a big part of the reason why

source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=21038227946&pageNo=3&sid=1#46

Was just about to quote this myself, but you beat me to it :-)

I think it is important to reiterate that we like the arenas and the arena gameplay, but that we regret the methods of how the arenas were implemented, which turned out to be a tough endeavour indeed. The arena implementation has caused quite a few headaches and frustrations for many people, but things have become better over time though. Of course there is still room for improvements and there is still much work to be done to improve the World of Warcraft PvP experience.

Vaneras

#59 - Nov. 17, 2009, 11 a.m.

Q u o t e:
I'm just kind of wondering, how do you call Arena-World of Warcraft PvP?

I think i've seen this question somewhere, but not sure where. Arena is E-Sport isn't it?

So what does that have anything to do, with World or WARcraft? Just wondering?

When I said "to improve the World of Warcraft PvP experience", I meant improving PvP in World of Warcaft as a whole, and not just the Arenas. We have lots of plans regarding improving Battlegrounds and world PvP as well, and since all these things are all related to PvP in one form or another, they can be categorized as being a part of the World of Warcraft PvP experience :-)

The Arenas are indeed very much related to eSports, as they are about competition, titles and ranking, but please do not confuse eSport with "for professional players only", as everybody can and do play in the arenas.

It was quoted before, but I think it is necessary to repeat that we do feel that we have shifted the PvP attention a little too much towards Arenas and away from the Battlegrounds, and that we plan to fix this with Cataclysm.

Vaneras

#63 - Nov. 17, 2009, 11:32 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Just out of curiosity Vaneras, what do you feel is what made World PvP so much more frequent in classic than it is now (Or perhaps your experience tells you otherwise)? Can you disclose any details on how you guys plan to improve the World PvP experience in Cataclysm?

I personally believe that world PvP was more frequent in Classic World of Warcraft because there was no alternative at the time and there were no rewards. The introduction of the Battlegrounds, and later the Arenas, brought rewards and titles into the picture and people tend to go were the rewards are :-)

I do not believe that World PvP can ever become the same as it was, but I don't necessarily think that this is a bad thing. I feel that a lot of people are primarily only remembering the fun parts of classic World PvP, when somebody formed a raid on crossroads, or when the random PvP encounter or gank near Tarren Mill turned into a fully fledged battle, but nobody seems to remember how frustrating hour-long ganking or corpsecamping can really be, and that some people never got to experience certain areas simply because they could not quest there without having to corpserun every two minutes.

Unfortunately I cannot give you any more specifics on our plans to improve the battlegrounds and world PvP at this point in time, but rest assured that we will let you know once we are ready to share this information :-)