World of Arenacraft

"I play Alliance, so I don't care about Horde. You should just remove those guys from the game and spend more effort on the way I like to play. Me. Not those other guys. Cool?"

[Not tracked]

Q u o t e:

I can tell you are getting irritated.

You guys give yourselves too much credit for being able to irritate me.

This is a discussion that comes up maybe every other week on these forums. Maybe the turnover of posters is more frequent then I imagine. The way I respond to these kinds of discussions every time is to say that WoW is a game with a PvP and a PvE component. We're not asking you to like both parts of the game, though I might suggest that maybe you're missing something if you don't participate in both.

However, if you are going to participate in the role forums, which are here for discussions of class mechanics and balance, it is not acceptable to say that you don't care about PvP or PvE. We care about both. We balance around both. If you post here, you need to keep both aspects of the game in mind or your feedback is going to be of much more limited value.

If you wish that one of those halves didn't exist, that's fine, but trying to articulate that argument in these forums is an utter waste of your time (and I rarely ever say that or use those terms lightly). Similarly, so is saying that WoW should break apart the PvP and PvE components into different games. You may think that's a swell idea, but we don't, and this is one of those very few topics where you aren't going to be able to change our minds even with the most logical and impassioned argument.

It is perfectly acceptable to talk about the ramifications for PvE of specific PvP changes and vice-versa. Those kinds of discussions go on all the time. But the posts that essentially say "I don't like PvP so I wish nobody else did" within the role forums are more or less a waste of 1s and 0s. I have made the comparison before to trying to argue that we should remove the Horde or Alliance -- which are core components of the experience and not open for debate... just like PvP and PvE.

Q u o t e:
See I think the assumption here is that people dont like PVP if they PVE or PVE if they PVP. I think the reality is that most of us just dont like the fact you balance pvp on arena because most of us like the BG implementation of pvp. You implement arena only rewards (weapons, which is the only way to get them btw, which is retarded in itself) but most of your playerbase doesnt even like arenas. Most that actually utilize it do so because you force them to if they want to get their character decked out in full pvp gear for what we love to do: BG.

We make balance changes for BG PvP all the time. We make fewer changes due to world PvP (I'm talking mostly about PvP servers) but those still exist.

Most of the PvP discussions in these forums tend to focus on Arena balance because frankly that's what most of the participants here seem interested in discussing. If I had to guess, it's because you are constantly running into BG situations in which class balance makes very little difference, say the other team was smarter with how they handled the flags. Or maybe you just plain went up against 20 opponents at once, in which even our most naive posters don't really expect their 51-point talent or whatever to be able to save them. That's not to say you can't have interesting discussions about BG strategy or even BG balance issues... but that's not the purpose of these role forums. Perhaps Arenas just shine a harsher light on class balance than do BGs.

We have acknowledged that we need to offer better PvP rewards for players who like BGs over Arenas. You shouldn't assume that means you can just AFK your way to epics though. You need to win a lot of BGs to get the best rewards.

Q u o t e:
Arena was the worst idea made by you all. You shouldnt have seperated arena from BG's. There should have been premade (team options) vs random queueing just like BG's. You should have gotten honor and marks for winning. The fact that you have 2 pvp games and one pve game mean you definitely and obviously value pvp over pve and that you obviously have to balance PVP more then PVE and continue to do so.

Oops. But then you kill your argument by coming back to "Arena was a bad idea." This to me equates to "Adding blood elves was a bad idea." You're arguing against a core component of the game, one that a lot of players (including the design staff) happen to enjoy, and one in which you must take into consideration if you want your posts in these role forums to carry any weight.

Q u o t e:
Having said all that, I strongly disagree with not having widespread differences between how class abilities work on PvP vs. PvE targets. This ranges from damage done to CC effects to numerous other mechanisms. Sure, you've taken a piecemeal approach where you felt it was appropriate, but this should have been approached holistically IMO, with an overarching strategy.

It's fine for you to disagree with us. I'm just saying that one of our core philosophies for WoW is that the same rule set applies to PvP and PvE. There are exceptions where we can't avoid it, but that doesn't mean we don't follow that philosophy. That should come as no surprise to anyone who reads these forums and I will go ahead and sticky it up above.

I'm willing to entertain almost any kind of discussion on class abilities, relationships, talents and class balance. There are some things that are very core to the game though, and the relationship of PvP to PvE is one of them. There is almost no chance you are going to convince us to change that philosophy. If you want to post about it anyway armed with that information, go right ahead.