I agree with you 20 years ago.. I had 6 AAs as a Rogue.. I couldnt solo, I couldnt join AOE groups... like getting those 6 AAs took a lot of fucking effort, and having the baron title was a big deal...

i dont think this is the case on TLP though...

like fam I did 20-54 in like 3 days without killing myself... i think people get max AAs in like a day now D:

Well, there is no such thing as “owning noobs” when we are talking about an environment like rated arenas

For one, when I was doing arenas you were matched against someone of similar skill. Nowadays apparently there is a lot of “boosting” which is selling rating by carrying a scrub, when I played it wasn’t nearly as prevalent

You also tended to have almost identical gear. There was a best in slot for pvp, and that gear was almost always a set you earned by doing pvp

So close in skill, close in gear. The only thing that you could use to an advantage is your team comp. Just like how in card games an aggressive deck tends to counter control decks and control decks tend to counter midrange decks, etc, arena comps could be like that. There were some that had a significant advantage over another

But usually it wasn’t destiny. Kids who feel like people who were good at pvp lacked skill, could never hack it at pvp. It’s like saying “basketball is a silly skill-less game. All it takes to be good at basketball is being tall” ok there, go see how well you do in the NBA

In pvp, you would have (if you were skilled) a strategy based on opponent’s team comp going in, that’s your macromanagement. This you would need to adjust on the fly. That’s your micromanagement. No one could get to the top rank in arenas by thinking “ok every time we see [x] comp we do [y] plan”. Because at super high ratings, a skilled team is going to anticipate it, because they’ve likely seen it 50+ times that week in games, and they will adjust to make it difficult or impossible. So adjustment in response is necessary

The thing that keeps the skill level from approaching something like a RTS game is the global cooldown. There is no way to separate oneself as an extremely fast player when you can only execute so many actions per second. Unlike RTS where people can have APM’s (actions per minute) in the 300+ range

As the medium gets smaller, things get less balanced. Meaning 10v10 is better balanced than 3v3. 3v3 is better balanced than 2v2, and everything is better balanced than 1v1

Individual skill absolutely matters. Look at WoW now. People can “boost” which is where a scrub pays someone to take them to [x] rating. That number can NEVER go beyond a certain point. There is absolutely zero chance that a scrub can be boosted to something like a top 100 rank. They absolutely have a huge role to play and if you have a scrub in one spot, you are only going to get so far. Typically boosts in WoW now end around 1800 to 2k. To be top 100 ranked you would need about 2700 rating

And all those idiotic titles above their heads. What a decline. :o

you remember back in the day when battle groups was separate? and people would like transfer to moon guard right before a season ended to get gladiator lmao.. oh man.. i didnt even know about this and transferred to moon guard for reasons unrelated and instantly gained like 600 rating and felt like a god there.

But imagine now, that you were grinding AA’s, and playing let’s say 6 hours a day, every day

Then one week, you could only play 4 hours a day for 2 days, and the rest of the week you played 6 hours a day grinding those AA’s. At the end of that week where you had shortened play time, you discovered that not only did you earn zero AA’s for that week, but that 20% of the AA’s you earned from last week had now vanished

That’s why the grind was so insane. You couldn’t even remotely slow down, because slowing down meant losing progress you had already made...

Oh yeah battlegroup was almost everything. My 5v5 arena team had around a 95% win rate, and was so deep into rank 1 that it was pointless to keep queueing. We would risk losing 25+ rating per loss and only gain 1-2 rating per win because the next lowest team was like 200 below us

When I mentioned our success on the forum, everyone was like “yeah you’re in BG1, try that in BG9” BG9 was the one with Tichondrius, and Blackrock, the servers with the most gladiators and the only one with sponsored teams. Everyone who was super serious about pvp was xferring to BG9

So we did, and it cost us our rank 1 title. At the time I was also around rank 3 (2600 rating) in 3v3 playing as hunter/lock/Druid. We abandoned our server, battlegroup, and rank 1 title for 5v5, and server xferred to Tichondrous mid-season. The competition was insane. We stagnated around rank 20 and we nerd raged at each other so hard in the process that it broke our team up :(

That was the end of my arena days and WoW playing days

Back when I was playing, the best way to get on a serious team was to record yourself playing, then post it on the site Arenajunkies. When you have a recording showing your playing, it was much harder for people to dispute skill

Quake 3 and Unreal 2 are the best pvp games. Skin them with elves. Or furries or animes or w/e.

I don't generally like mobas. WoW in my playing experience is a walking simulator. Leveling is the most boring shit ever. Walk over there, kill 5 boars, walk over there, kill 5 lions. 5550 Experience! Repeat. I don't know why I hate that over say, grinding hours away at the same exact camp for hours on end, but I do.

But when it came to PVP in mobas, most kind of, had something missing for me. I was huge on diablo 2 pvp... I liked EQOA pvp.. but idk something was always slightly boring to me with most other PVPS. It always felt devolved into an orc and a night elf circling around each other while spamming buttons. Kind of like... Dota with way less complexity. So if i'm in the mood for a pvp enviroment that isn't FPS.. Dota is my go to for that.

I think there's a reason WoW PVP never took off as an esport even though it had virtually everything going for it --- it's boring as fuck to watch. Duels last forever, there isn't any kind of exciting outplays.. idk.

In terms of bringing viewers to P99.. it would take somebody who is in a raiding guild and also very entertaining. 95% of the stream would just be the streamer bullshitting with his chat and his guild mates, watching videos on youtube maybe, etc.. then boom. POPOPOPOPOPOPOPOPOP GOGOOGOGGOGO and bam you have sudden intensity.

=P