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  1. #1
    Player
    Ayuhra's Avatar
    Join Date
    Apr 2015
    Location
    Palace of the Dead
    Posts
    1,483
    Character
    Ayuh'ra Bajhiri
    World
    Mateus
    Main Class
    Dancer Lv 90
    Eeeeh... Maybe if classes were balanced around abilities that did completely different things in Arena this would work. I know when Blizzard implemented Arena it took off into a meta game in ways they didn't anticipate and they've been struggling ever since.

    Lest you don't believe me:


    As for the biggest mistake? There's a lot of them that I think, were ... they just "fell out" of things. One example: I wish the servers were more stable when we launched, of course - there's a lot of that sort of thing. We have a lot of excuses for that - we didn't expect nearly the response - but we can't say it wasn't a mistake. If I was going to pick on a game design thing that I look back on and think was a mistake? We really never designed WoW to be a competitive e-sports game; it was something that we decided to start tackling because there was such a desire and demand to evolve it in that direction, to introduce competitive arenas. I'm not sure that that was the right thing to do with the game.

    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. Either I'd go back in time to before WoW ever shipped and change the rules to make the basic game more conductive for being an e-sport, or if not that, just say it doesn't make sense. Right now, WoW has a bit of a schizophrenic philosophy behind it, and we're trying to figure out how to guide it.

    It's tricky, now that we've gone down that road, because we have a passionate, large audience that enjoys it - the Arena, the e-sport - so we can't just chop off that head. We can't just say, "We fouled up and will go back to how it used to be before," because we have a really passionate audience that wants it in the game.

    If I could go back in time before we shipped WoW, I would have either made serious changes to basic class balance to facilitate that type of play, or if I went back to when we had the idea two years later, I would have said, "Maybe we shouldn't go there."


    Source

    I'm not at all into PvP and I wouldn't want to deny PvPers their fun but if laddered Arenas were put in it would have to be very carefully. Above quote is from 2009 and, no, Blizzard still has never figured out a solution to this problem.
    (1)
    Last edited by Ayuhra; 07-30-2015 at 07:00 AM.

  2. #2
    Player
    Awful's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2015
    Posts
    1,280
    Character
    Awful Name
    World
    Faerie
    Main Class
    Dark Knight Lv 100
    Valid criticisms for sure, and I agree WoW's isn't balanced by any means I don't believe that this would be balanced either. I just wish there was an option I would LOVE to do arenas and have fun with my friends and make teams and strats. It's just a big piece that's missing for me that could be like "hey I did my eso cap, raids, etc now I can push for arena ratings". It'd create more longevity in the PvP system and community. I would love SE to at least balance as much as they could and test it carefully instead of just throwing it in all wishy washy making classes way to overpowered.
    (0)
    Last edited by Awful; 07-30-2015 at 02:45 PM.