How did Blizzard miss the mark so badly with Cataclysm PvP?

"Shocked" is the only thing I can come up with...

Rated Battlegrounds are a debacle. You can look at the list of top players here, and if you track the top ~500 or so week-to-week, you'll notice that MAYBE 1-2 of them play any games. As the former leader of a 2300+ rated battleground team, I have to say that the fun factor just wasn't there, and the rating system was completely broken. It's extremely rare to lose points, and usually takes hours of just single-digit wins to improve anything. A few of my players are going to get Hero at the end of the season, but it's not because of skill, rather time-spent and willingness to gimmick. It's just a hunch, of course, but I'm willing to bet out of every 100 players taking rated battlegrounds seriously in January, only 1 remains. Zul'jin, a fairly high-pop server, likely had less than 10 total queues this past week.

Tol Barad is simply miserable. Starting out as a "mass PvP zone" that was impossible to win on offense, things quickly shifted over to win-trading for more honor points. Now, it's rare to successfully defend. More importantly, however, the zone is completely meaningless. When you can buy the epics from the raid in < 2 weeks with no rating restriction, it's hard to motivate people to go. Not to mention the fact that the zone doesn't matter at all outside the "bubble" that is Tol Barad. There's no "Essence of Wintergrasp," which makes people that much more not-caring. Personally, I think there's a fundamental design flaw: the idea of a 100v100 "control area" map is never going to be fun because it's too easy to avoid the other faction.

Honor/Conquest system is broken. Most people don't grind up honor for their alts. Instead, they buy the Emberfire (or equivalent) stuff and just rack up Conquest points each week. When it takes less effort to get epics than it takes to get blues, you know something is wrong.

Arena balance is sporadic and random. If you look at individual changes, you could probably come up with a justification for each one. But when you look at the big picture, Blizzard seems to balance at whim with inconsistent philosophies. Things such as "we don't want hard counters" get overshadowed by "that's a niche of the class."

It's honestly just outright shocking to me that Blizzard missed the mark so badly here.




Like the Official WoW Forums Thread Here

When I look at the rewards for completing a battleground, the amount of honor is pitifully small. Compounded with the way you get a measly 25 CP for a bg win (compared to nearly 400 for an rBG win) they just seem useless. The amount of honor you get for killing an enemy player is also non-existent, if I kill a player "in the wild" I get about 0.7 honor, which is nothing.

The top level rewards need to be more exclusive by dint of restricting CP gain, or by boosting honor gain significantly. As you said, who would take the blue honor gear that you need to grind BGs for hours on end for when they could do 5 arenas per week and get an epic item (including weapons and trinkets) for 60 minutes of time every 14 days.

Not the reward systems are the bane of Cataclysm, there's simply no reason to log on outside of raiding. Raiding is more demanding and enjoyable then ever, the encounter are tightly tuned and you can have a blast while progressing. But outside of that? Reputation grind is even more laughable then in Wrath and if you're not into achieving Loremaster (again!), what else is left to do? A sixth year of Warsong and Alterac? Solving 600 troll riddles for Zin'Rokh? Sadly Blizzard failed at the fundamentals: to keep the folks encouraged to continue to play this game like they did in the past. Server are orphaned and onesided (1:10 faction ratio is nothing uncommon) and instead of finally deploying 4.1 they further delay it for tweaks that could've been implemented later on, too.

Wailing about pvp balance is nothing new and it's simply not possible to ever bring it in line. New FOTM comps arises with every new tier, setboni and changed talent/speccs/abilities. It took Blizzard about 8 years to finally balance Starcraft around only three races and new expansions for WoW further impedes that problem.

Lets put it this way, Blizzard is bad at balancing things. A fully geared healer like a druid or disc priest can out live any DPS in 2s, any half assed blood deathknight can keep disease up and spam DS and never die in 2s. When Blizzard does something it effects PvE or PvP in a bad way so it's broken and unbalanced.

How did blizzard miss? Simple: they weren't aiming.

Well, I like this game. I log in to do a daily heroic with friends, do some daily's, farm some mats, maybe work on an alt. You can't possibly suspect them to make a game that is fun when you play it for entire days.