A blog by Hildegard, featuring Rasen from EU-Stormscale.

The WoW PVP community is known to be a bitter, troll-infested bunch of wanna-be hard asses, that hate on enthusiasm. With the lack of tournaments since Cataclysm started and the easy access to boosting services or the MMR exploit, Cataclysm was a huge letdown. Although most of all top players agree, that the game mechanics are better than ever before. Add two legendaries and other broken PVE stuff into the mix and it is no wonder, that the scene went stale, „Off topic“ became the most-read area of Arena Junkies and on the official forums things got even worse.

With the introduction of Real ID and war games as well as more players with high-speed internet connections suddenly tournaments became an option and the PVP landscape started to change. Competition was back, not about live ratings and titles, that could be exploited but for the best players in the region or even the world to compete against each others. Also RBGs started to be organized over multiple servers since the latest patch.

With the tournament realm balancing became easier, because tournament organizers did not need to check for hidden pve gear and everyone was on the same playing field. Teams could be created, comps and racials changed like on the original tournaments back in TBC and WotLK. You can also see, that every day new players start writing interesting topics on AJ, more and more players look for help there.

We are now at the end of an expansion, most that can be done has been seen. This is a time to prepare for what is coming with the new expansion Mists of Pandaria. The tournament realm will be extended to work on level 90 with the full new PvP gear. So we will have the chance to watch the best players in the world facing off against each other in a gear-balanced environment. I do not expect balance to be good or no exploits to exist, but expect to see amazing matches, new comps coming up and I have high hopes for monks as a class. They look solid, not overpowered, maybe even a bit weak.

I think the tournament viewership will sky-rocket with the start of MoP and overshadow everything except BlizzCon, that has been done before. We have many organizers, camera men and commentators, that became better and better over the last few months and a hooked up the community, that is actually interested in the results and the games. I know players, that never watched tournaments before, especially because of the bad times in Europe (middle of the night) and the lack of videos to watch what happened later on.

My readers know me to get excited, once I have an idea in my head, so I decided to ask Rasen, some questions, who is known to be the most insightful poster on the official WoW PVP forums in Europe.

Hildegard: Rasen, you read this blog, as someone following the PVP scene for quite some time, what are your thoughts?

Rasen: Well firstly, just a small correction, not really that important, but you couldn't change races on the original TBC tournaments, you were locked to playing a specific race, like all warlocks had to be Orc female for example.

Anyway about the content, I think honestly think that if Blizzard are going to make a permanent TR like you think they need to basically balance it on those realms, even if it means making balance changes which only effect that realm and nowhere else

Which I'm not sure Blizzard will actually do, but considering the state of live realms (filled with mass corruption) nobody really takes them seriously anymore. It just turned into a way for kids to make money instead of getting a job.

But I believe this would be the best thing for Blizzard as well, it's far easier to balance things when you know what gear people are going to be using, the high rated PvP community as a whole doesn't care about gear, some do, the vast majority of them don't, so if they made the TR permanent than actually do small balance changes here and there than you can get rid of a large amount of the complaining that happens about PvP.

They make the community much happier and WoW can only benefit from that. The more balanced it is the more people who will want to watch, eventually you'd have organizers of bigger organizations than just player-run events coming and wanting to pick it up. As it would already have an audience, a stable way of running tournaments and a history of successful tournaments.

Hildegard: Did you notice any change in the forums, since the tournaments started with the latest patch?

Rasen: There has definitely been more activity since the tournaments started, people seem more interested in talking about PvP again, whereas there is still the usually complaining and that probably will never disappear there has been more constructive posts and more "Well I watched NAO yesterday and X class did well, whereas everyone through that class was awful so maybe I can do better if I tried", basically when you can see people of specific classes doing well which are considered weak on live than it can inspire people to do better themselves.

When the vast majority of the high rated community are just complaining about the "game being shit" that filters through to the entire community.

When people aren't complaining (Balance is still bad, but the tournaments can sometimes put balance on a backseat even if you still hear about "oh look its 7 shaman/lock teams lololol", when the games are good, and for the most part they have been good, than people are more willing to forgive balance problems when they are having fun.

Hildegard: You are one of the very few high-rated players, that frequent the official forums, while others simply bash on the players writing there. How come?

Rasen: That's just my personality, I generally prefer to avoid drama and things of that nature, which is basically all AJ has been about for some time now, so I stopped going to that site. I also have many friends who post there so generally most of the posts are just having fun and than every so often I'll have an issue I want to bring up where I'll make a "serious" post.

And I guess I like helping people, so if someone makes a post there I can help them, whereas there are many people who can help someone on AJ (although the vast majority of the community simple ignore that forum completely) so they are likely to find better help from someone who plays their class.

Hildegard: Would consider visiting AJ more often if the community further improves there?

Rasen: Well the thing about that is it's not just the drama nature of the community there are a lot of things I do not like about most high rated players, the willingness to cheat is a big one, I'm a very honest player and I don't change that just because of the anonymity of the internet, I don't believe something is worth "achieving" (example being a R1 title) though illegitimate means, something the community doesn't seem to have any issue whatsoever with

So I don't know, there would have to be a lot of changes for me to consider AJ being worthwhile again

Hildegard: Thank you for your time Rasen. Keep it up, I love reading your posts and I actually bookmarked the official PVP forums because of you.

Links:

Official forums: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/…

Rasen: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/…