I remember when it used to go for hours if not days, and you did turn-ins, summon the bosses, did the Griffin bombing etc... and it was not uncommon to have over 1000 hks in a single round. Those epic battles were a lot of fun but those days are gone it is now it is nothing more than race.

If there were no reward for losing in PvP, the number of people participating would be DRAMATICALLY reduced. This argument has been had around here a dozen times it seems in the past.

WoW is all about the path of least resistance for many many players. Maybe a small handful of people would still PvP, but no, generally speaking, few people would bother if there wasn't some guaranteed consolation prize even if you lost.

Look, most people can't even be bothered to put together a 2, 3, or 5 man arena team and go lose 10 games a week (or whatever it requires now to get base level points), do you think they could be bothered to put together a premade PvP team if that were what it required to not lose? Right now most PvPers are happy with not putting forth the effort and getting AT LEAST their losers points. If you remove those losers points, you will lose better than 80% of BG PvPers, if not 90%.

 

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WoW is not a PVP game. If you want hardcore, your options are 10/25 hard mode PVE raids.

Until they add something to the game that fosters a feeling of the _need_ to defend the "homeland" as it were, or provides a notable incentive* to do so, you'll never see the kind of "competitive" PVP some of y'all seem to be after.


* Titles, mounts and other fluff are not an incentive to be competitive -- they are an incentive to learn how to game the system so you get the most reward for the least amount of work. Everyone else seems to know this, from the lowly "scrubs" that lose their 10 games a week and spaz around BGs on weekends to the "pros"(lol) that wait until 3am to win-trade/queue-dodge their way to 2500+. If Wintergrasp, Halaa, Zangar towers, Hellfire towers, EPL towers and the Bone Wastes towers(lol) are the best they've been able to come up with for PVP incentives so far, there isn't much hope they'll be able to come up with something that really puts the war back in Warcraft. And considering 90% of the people arguing FOR PVP stuff are arguing for 1v1 PVP buffs to the detriment of team-based buffs, your own team is backstabbing you. And you wonder why people consider WoW PVP such a joke.

 

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Reduced by the number of people who just want to easymode their way to epics?

And this is a drawback... how?





Someday you'll learn that there might be other considerations to whether or not you deserve to be rewarded besides how much time you put into it.

Or maybe you won't.





Aww, poor beebee casual, can't get his gear because the big meanies on the other side keep winning.



Clearly, CLEARLY the best option is therefore to utterly wreck the BGs with afkers and bots. That is a MUCH better alternative, yes. Because this is WoW, and in WoW, EVERYONE's a winner!

 

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Clearly it's not a drawback if you're interested in PvP for actual fun.

However, for most people, especially the casuals, that would quickly become not fun. If 80% or more of the casual PvPers stopped logging in, many would cancel and subscriptions would start to fall. Blizzard would respond by either providing another path of gear acquisition, or by reorganizing the existing paths. Considering that the "points even if you lose" model has been hugely successful for them (overall), they would likely rescind the "no points for losing" decision and go back to "the worst of the slackers can still AFK their way to epix" mode.

I have no idea, but how is the rated BG thing going in terms of participants?

 

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So if people get gear from losing, why does it matter to you?

 

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To be fair to the OP, the original question was (if I may paraphrase) that free swag just for showing up makes WoW PVP much like your last open house party with free beer: sure you get your friends there but you also end up with That Guy(tm) that just showed up for the free beer. And the rest of the idjits that nobody would invite to a normal party.

 

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That's the crux of the problem. People in MMOs don't do anything if they're not rewarded with something that unbalances the game and makes their character stronger than the competitor. It's a bogus design and was botched during the initial implementation when Blizzard decided that PvP = PvE.

 

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