Those of you who have spent any time perusing the WoW forums have most likely come across the phrase that is the title of this post. For those that haven’t seen a posting of this sort on the forums you are part of the fortunate few.
As a quick rundown of what a post of this sort would be like it typically has some or all of the following points:
- Blizzard what were you thinking!?!?!
- I’ve played game [since vanilla,bc] [for x number of years]
- Things are not as good as they used to be
- Community is broken
- World PVP is dead
- World is dead
- Things are no longer fun
- Since Blizzard won’t fix, I’m leaving
- I wish ponies would rain from the sky since there aren’t enough ponies, yet as soon as it starts raining ponies I will subsequently complain that ponies are too easy to get and thus ponies should no longer fall from the sky.
Now while the pony raining argument wasn’t made verbatim, it pretty much sums up how I see every single complaint that is currently in the forums. I’m not talking about actual balancing issues or broken mechanics that are indeed problems, I’m talking about people complaining that Blizzard broke the game, when the community is who requested everything that consequently broke the game.
Basically stated if there is something someone likes, someone else will directly hate and oppose that thing.
I’d like to focus this post on one such point:
Do something about world PVP
General consensus of what is being voiced on the forums about world PVP is that it no longer exists. Gone, poof, adios, nowhere to be found. It’s stated that this is a result of people no longer needing to go out and about and they can just queue for dungeons all day long to level, so why would anyone ever go out into the world? Or that guards hit too hard, etc.
Let’s look at this from a couple perspectives:
The Ganker
The ganker spends his/her time running around low level areas killing other players that have no hope of winning the fight, e.g. My 85 vs your level 10. For some reason the absolute lack of a challenge provides a form of enjoyment to this player. However, with the current state of things, guards that current protect the lower level areas hit too hard (“I can’t kill them with one hit!”) or people spend all their time in the LFD and thus aren’t out in the world to gank. (I can dispute this simply because I spend about half my time in dungeons and the other half questing)
Fix for the ganker – Encourage low level gold farming by giving bonus gold to anything killed outside of a dungeon while flagged for pvp. Or the gankers should just look a little harder for their prey. Believe me when I say there are still a lot of people out questing.
The Low Level Gankee
Typically only a problem on PVP servers the low level would be happily questing along when out of no where a skull level player from the opposite faction would hit them once and kill them.
I cannot think of a single instance where this was enjoyable. I managed to make it enjoyable by letting the higher level kill me a couple times and then sit on my corpse as a ghost until they got bored and left with the full intention of making them think I was going to go get a higher level character. A couple times on my shaman I reincarnated with the sole purpose of taunting them or laughing before they could kill me again. So for the gankee, being able to queue up for dungeons is awesome.
Fix for the Gankee – already in game. Called Looking for Group dungeon finder.
People who truly enjoy world PVP
These are few and far between, but the best way to describe them are people that are of the mindset “If it’s red it’s dead, with the exception of those that are pointless to kill. Give me some challenge!” This is the optimal group since they are out to fight to be able to prove their prowess. Often found in quest hubs where both factions are found on a regular basis, or out and about in the world.
Fix – some sort of incentive to continue doing dailies beyond the minimum. Daily quest hubs typically have a period where questing is lucrative and then when the max rep or rewards are earned will slowly go back to being a ghost town. But last time I checked there are still plenty of people running around max level questing hubs, both on my low and high population servers. So these people probably know this and already use it to their advantage.
As far a World PVP goes, sure there may not be as much to gank but people still have plenty of reasons to be out of the main cities: farming materials, doing dailies, exploring, archaeology, looking for world pvp. I have a mindset that people will do what they want to do and the state that old world pvp was in wasn’t somehow forced upon us by Blizzard; World PVP was something that happened because people sought it out as something to do. We were explorers, adventurers, with the mindset of having fun. The real fix isn’t what Blizzard will do with the game, it’s what we will come up with the game that Blizzard has already provided.
I’ve seen amazing things happen when people have a little time on their hands and decide to have a little fun. Flocks of druids in crow form descending on their prey from above. Tauren doing a running of the bulls across the lands, mass amounts of level 1 hunters raiding world dragons. I even remember being in a raid on Ironforge to kill the gnome king before the achievements to kill the faction leaders was even in place. Did Blizzard somehow put something in place which caused all of us to rally together and do this? There wasn’t an achievement, or gold, or rewards from this. Just the pure fun of raiding a town with guards and opposing faction members as a 40 man raid. A lot of us died repeatedly, but eventually we killed that silly gnome along with a bunch of alliance, and it was all done because we thought, “Let’s go kill the Gnome King”
So the real state of things is this…
Players have gotten to a point where we think fun should be hand fed from Blizzard instead of looking at everything that we have and making something even more amazing with it.
