What actually killed each bracket?
- Thread starter Flaxy
- Start date
DetErMegJostein
Burnings lvl 10 Warlock
Lack of patience maybe
Legacyshockz
Legend
19s die because of drama. last year 10-14s had really great pops and we even had AB pop once . until one day some people decided to revive 19s and 2 weeks later, 10s and 19s died ..
Heil Tens!
Heil Tens!
madhombre
Legend
80-84 was awesome during cata, then blizz had the GREAT idea to implement lvl 80 boe gear with an itemlvl of 409.. with this gear and mop professions lvl 80s could deal more than a million dps during their bursts (due rediculous secondary stats like 1000% haste or even way more, i cant remember) so decent or atleast acceptable pvp wasnt possible (oneshots here, oneshots there).. then 5.4 hit which scaled down the enchants/profs, it was still the most bursy bracket in the game but "acceptable" but too many ppl who alrdy left the bracket didnt come back
OP
OP
Flaxy
Legend
What about brackets like 50/60? I've never played in them but im curious about them - but sadly they died out.
willix
Legend
A combination of drama, egos, major game changes, bugs, class imbalance, and how difficult it is to get a bracket going.
Rusks
Legend
School.
We we could get into the exp off thing but what "kills" 19s for a semester at a time is school. The lack of exposure from exp off has made the community smaller and that makes the school year hard because we lose a large portion of our community
Anyone who says "drama killed 19s" is an idiot. This bracket has had and thrived on drama since before I even played wow for the first time in early bc and will have drama until we can no longer play
We we could get into the exp off thing but what "kills" 19s for a semester at a time is school. The lack of exposure from exp off has made the community smaller and that makes the school year hard because we lose a large portion of our community
Anyone who says "drama killed 19s" is an idiot. This bracket has had and thrived on drama since before I even played wow for the first time in early bc and will have drama until we can no longer play
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Rih
Legend
I was getting fairly frequent 19 games before WoD.
I think it's just the nature of twinking. It'll get better as WoD gets older.
Also, BM monks are beyond broken. I've been twinking for a long time, and I've never seen anything (save for exploits or bugs) be as insane as BM monks. It turns me off from wanting to play 19s, 20s, and 29s.
I think it's just the nature of twinking. It'll get better as WoD gets older.
Also, BM monks are beyond broken. I've been twinking for a long time, and I've never seen anything (save for exploits or bugs) be as insane as BM monks. It turns me off from wanting to play 19s, 20s, and 29s.
Sponsor
Achievement Hunting
Maybe the twinking community has been segregated from the WoW players. Not many players know about Twinkinfo. So all this talk reaches maybe around 1,000 players? Which are all unevenly distributed across 10 brackets (US and EU).
I know the majority of the 70 bracket population growth thrived from the troll threads on WoW forums. People activity speak on it and trash talk each other (and somehow that causes more players to play).
I remember few years back, I was playing an AV on my 70 twink (see sig) exp locked (yes, an AV). People were SPAMMING "come visit twinkinfo.com if youre interested in twinking. lots of guides and other twinks to talk to..." and so on. I dont see that anywhere anymore.
Might seem like a really small and useless thing to do, but make a twink guild on your realm. Advertise it. Grab some friends, put some effort into getting your bracket to grow on your own end.
Only in the last day, I have had 2 of my friends ask me in-game about my 50 twink that I am constantly on now. People love twinks, they just don't know WHAT level to Twink at
I know the majority of the 70 bracket population growth thrived from the troll threads on WoW forums. People activity speak on it and trash talk each other (and somehow that causes more players to play).
I remember few years back, I was playing an AV on my 70 twink (see sig) exp locked (yes, an AV). People were SPAMMING "come visit twinkinfo.com if youre interested in twinking. lots of guides and other twinks to talk to..." and so on. I dont see that anywhere anymore.
Might seem like a really small and useless thing to do, but make a twink guild on your realm. Advertise it. Grab some friends, put some effort into getting your bracket to grow on your own end.
Only in the last day, I have had 2 of my friends ask me in-game about my 50 twink that I am constantly on now. People love twinks, they just don't know WHAT level to Twink at
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Srs
Legend
Currently, Bonus Armor scaling is wack, and speed stacking is a huge issue even in endgame RBGs. I believe these are two of the major negative forces, as far as gameplay goes, in twinking today. That's over simplistic, of course. What contributes to a community falling apart is something for the anthropologists to study, and would make an interesting grad thesis.
...or an informal essay, for that matter...
What worries me is that the things that I thought were only twink problems, seem to be as bad, if not worse in endgame. The top teams in RBGs flyhack and DDoS. People get piloted to glad. These are obviously player issues, but I think if people thought Blizzard took pvp seriously, maybe they would too. Blizzard has the opportunity to set the tone for the game. Players actually do want leadership from the designers, but the tone they seem to be setting is ineptitude and uncaring. I don't think it has always been this way. I think a big part of the reason people are giving up on WoW pvp, is that they've given up on Blizzard putting as much effort in to balance as they did to playing. They've just had their hearts broken too many times, and gave up.
Blizzard Activision CEO, Bobby Kotick, said he wanted to take the fun out of making games. I think he succeed, and what you have now is people that have the technical skill to make shiny pixels, but lack the vision on how to make a fun game. He stifled creativity, making the workplace unfun. What he didn't realize, or care about, was that fun environment was really part of the benefits package of working at Blizzard, just like the health insurance, or vacation days. Sure, you can eliminate the fun to show to the shareholders that you're a stern taskmaster, but at what cost? He took the fun out of game-making, and drove off the type of people that like to have fun playing and making games.
So, I think what you have now, is basically a bunch of talentless hacks with no vision. Game design, true game design, like the people that invented chess or baseball, is not something you're going to learn those Game Design paper mills that advertise on TV, but those are the people that blizzard has, now that they've ran off creative geniuses that used to work there.
The skill set you need to design a player vs, player game, I think is more related to something like a hockey or basketball coach, someone that can envision player actions and reaction in their mind. Games can be simple and fun, or they can be complex. But they have to be well thought out. I think what Blizzard lacks is someone with the capacity to come up with a vision, in that persons mind, for how the game should actually work, in totality, and the power to carry it out.
My guess, is that they've given the all the controls to the pve design team. I see that as a big mistake because I think it's pvp that sells games. People didn't buy Call of Duty or Madden, for the single player campaigns. People don't get all excited watching videos of 40 man raids. Blizzard once had the imagination of gamers captured; arenas were an e-sport, people wanted to come to wow because it's where the talented gamers were. When Blizzard took their focus off creativity and pvp they shot themselves in the foot. Wow, still has a lot going for it: games toward the end of their cycle can get very fun and balanced, even after they stop producing much content. But Blizzard has a lot going wrong with it, and I blame Bobby Kotick for most of it.
...or an informal essay, for that matter...
What worries me is that the things that I thought were only twink problems, seem to be as bad, if not worse in endgame. The top teams in RBGs flyhack and DDoS. People get piloted to glad. These are obviously player issues, but I think if people thought Blizzard took pvp seriously, maybe they would too. Blizzard has the opportunity to set the tone for the game. Players actually do want leadership from the designers, but the tone they seem to be setting is ineptitude and uncaring. I don't think it has always been this way. I think a big part of the reason people are giving up on WoW pvp, is that they've given up on Blizzard putting as much effort in to balance as they did to playing. They've just had their hearts broken too many times, and gave up.
Blizzard Activision CEO, Bobby Kotick, said he wanted to take the fun out of making games. I think he succeed, and what you have now is people that have the technical skill to make shiny pixels, but lack the vision on how to make a fun game. He stifled creativity, making the workplace unfun. What he didn't realize, or care about, was that fun environment was really part of the benefits package of working at Blizzard, just like the health insurance, or vacation days. Sure, you can eliminate the fun to show to the shareholders that you're a stern taskmaster, but at what cost? He took the fun out of game-making, and drove off the type of people that like to have fun playing and making games.
So, I think what you have now, is basically a bunch of talentless hacks with no vision. Game design, true game design, like the people that invented chess or baseball, is not something you're going to learn those Game Design paper mills that advertise on TV, but those are the people that blizzard has, now that they've ran off creative geniuses that used to work there.
The skill set you need to design a player vs, player game, I think is more related to something like a hockey or basketball coach, someone that can envision player actions and reaction in their mind. Games can be simple and fun, or they can be complex. But they have to be well thought out. I think what Blizzard lacks is someone with the capacity to come up with a vision, in that persons mind, for how the game should actually work, in totality, and the power to carry it out.
My guess, is that they've given the all the controls to the pve design team. I see that as a big mistake because I think it's pvp that sells games. People didn't buy Call of Duty or Madden, for the single player campaigns. People don't get all excited watching videos of 40 man raids. Blizzard once had the imagination of gamers captured; arenas were an e-sport, people wanted to come to wow because it's where the talented gamers were. When Blizzard took their focus off creativity and pvp they shot themselves in the foot. Wow, still has a lot going for it: games toward the end of their cycle can get very fun and balanced, even after they stop producing much content. But Blizzard has a lot going wrong with it, and I blame Bobby Kotick for most of it.
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Mocha
Legendary
Here is what killed brackets:
Simply merging brackets to a more concentrated state.
Back in the day, realms PvPd together and did not PvP against other realms. Back at this time, every realm had MANY twink guilds. There were SO many guilds on nearly every single server... It was insane. Then they took down the barriers between realms and created battlegroups where now a handful of realms played together. What this did was created super guilds where guilds would merge and and there were dominant guilds in every battlegroup. Battlegroups did not play against each other so every battlegroup had their own unique level of competition and their own super guilds.
In Vengeance at this time, we still had MANY guilds per sever because Vengeance really is the source of 19 twinking as weird as that may sound. Without Vengeance twinkers, we would not have had Pwndepot, Twinkinfo, most if not all exploits originated in Vengeance between the realm Kul'Tiras and the realm Akama. We really had some of the most insane 19s and they paved the road for 19s. Keep in mind, Vengeance twinkers were scroll clicking back when people still were keyboard turners and clickers. Through word of mouth and PvP between battlegroups on the PTR, people found out what was really going on in Vengeance and picked up on some of our tactics. Then we moved to Cyclone back in TBC and a lot of twinkers over there were pretty much up to speed with what was going on back on Vengeance. Cyclone buzz died down and a lot of players went to Ruin (you can thank Drayner for this as he is responsible for creating the buzz which brought over most players from Cyclone and Vengeance.
Now when EXP lock became an option, it did 2 things for twinking: 1) it made it extremely easy and idiot proof to make a twink. 2) It killed pops on every single battlegroup besides Ruin. Although, there were MANY twinks back in the day, we needed the levelers to get pops as most games did not have more than 3 twinks per game and we always had at least 5 games going at once. It was instant pops all day long for 19s... Then exp toggle became a thing and now we had to sync queues between all of us to get a single pop after waiting in queue for a few hours. After a few days, 19s died on every battlegroup besides ruin.
Now we're looking at the entire 19 player base having to exist in one single battlegroup. What this did was basically created a small handful of Vengeance All-Star guilds and a small handful of Cyclone All-Star guilds to go against the small handful of Ruin All-Star guilds. This is WOTLk at this point and premades are happening often. Vengeance basically formed 1 guild on Skullcrusher known as Shield Bashed By Heysus (although we had a few other trial guilds such as Don't Talk Back To Silin etc before we really landed this Vengeance all-star guild) and we had the Ally guild on Zul Jin.
SO if you take a step back, looking at ONLY Vengeance... we've seen it go from having MANY twink guilds on every server in Vengeance, all the way down to only 1 Horde guild on Skullcrusher and 1 Ally guild on ZJ. The entire Vengeance community filtered down into 2 faction specific All-Star guilds. The same occurrence happened for the other former battlegroups that moved over to Ruin.
The problem is, many 19 twinkers quit at this point because they did not want to go to Ruin which was notes for having insane epeen and insane levels of Drama and elitism. Believe me, our Vengeance players were all about elitism, but we understood the community's needs and we would always play with amazing sportsmanlike conduct. Sure we would farm the heck out of levelers, but there were also some games where we would hide and then pop out and scare the heck out of them and then help them win against us. it was about fun... not winning in PUGs. Premades, oh my god you better bet yourself we rolled into every single Premade with 10 charges of really sticky glue, every buff obtainable at 19, demonic runestones, Halaani Whisky, the whole 9 yards.
Every time barriers in the twinking community were taken down, we compressed in numbers and as guilds and good players were either benched or just quit. We were filtered down to 1 battlegroup and lost a lot of members doing so.
Fastforward to Cata where now we're seeing ENDLESS GY farming in our ONLY battlegroup and I know there are several hundred 19 twinkers who quit because it's disgusting to see what 19s had become. We literally farmed ourselves into inactivity and we literally killed our own community by treating pugs like premades and farming our own community dry.
None of this is speculation. This is all factual information. There is no arguing against anything I've said here. Perhaps maybe a few exaggerations I've made, but in essence this post is 100% factual. If you don't take this post as accurate, chances are it's because your vision is still clouded by competition and you refuse to see that our own drive for elitism and competition is what drove the nail in the coffin. Blizzard downsized our entire community and we finished it off.
NOW if we can get Blizzard to remove the EXP separation between battlegrounds, every single twink bracket would be thriving once again and we'd have instant pops on nearly every single bracket. This is fact. If we made this happen, every bracket would be active once again. We wouldn't have the separation between battlegroups so our numbers would be condensed almost as if it were 1 battlegroup, but that will still be a huge step up from where we are now.
Just some words on the subject.
Simply merging brackets to a more concentrated state.
Back in the day, realms PvPd together and did not PvP against other realms. Back at this time, every realm had MANY twink guilds. There were SO many guilds on nearly every single server... It was insane. Then they took down the barriers between realms and created battlegroups where now a handful of realms played together. What this did was created super guilds where guilds would merge and and there were dominant guilds in every battlegroup. Battlegroups did not play against each other so every battlegroup had their own unique level of competition and their own super guilds.
In Vengeance at this time, we still had MANY guilds per sever because Vengeance really is the source of 19 twinking as weird as that may sound. Without Vengeance twinkers, we would not have had Pwndepot, Twinkinfo, most if not all exploits originated in Vengeance between the realm Kul'Tiras and the realm Akama. We really had some of the most insane 19s and they paved the road for 19s. Keep in mind, Vengeance twinkers were scroll clicking back when people still were keyboard turners and clickers. Through word of mouth and PvP between battlegroups on the PTR, people found out what was really going on in Vengeance and picked up on some of our tactics. Then we moved to Cyclone back in TBC and a lot of twinkers over there were pretty much up to speed with what was going on back on Vengeance. Cyclone buzz died down and a lot of players went to Ruin (you can thank Drayner for this as he is responsible for creating the buzz which brought over most players from Cyclone and Vengeance.
Now when EXP lock became an option, it did 2 things for twinking: 1) it made it extremely easy and idiot proof to make a twink. 2) It killed pops on every single battlegroup besides Ruin. Although, there were MANY twinks back in the day, we needed the levelers to get pops as most games did not have more than 3 twinks per game and we always had at least 5 games going at once. It was instant pops all day long for 19s... Then exp toggle became a thing and now we had to sync queues between all of us to get a single pop after waiting in queue for a few hours. After a few days, 19s died on every battlegroup besides ruin.
Now we're looking at the entire 19 player base having to exist in one single battlegroup. What this did was basically created a small handful of Vengeance All-Star guilds and a small handful of Cyclone All-Star guilds to go against the small handful of Ruin All-Star guilds. This is WOTLk at this point and premades are happening often. Vengeance basically formed 1 guild on Skullcrusher known as Shield Bashed By Heysus (although we had a few other trial guilds such as Don't Talk Back To Silin etc before we really landed this Vengeance all-star guild) and we had the Ally guild on Zul Jin.
SO if you take a step back, looking at ONLY Vengeance... we've seen it go from having MANY twink guilds on every server in Vengeance, all the way down to only 1 Horde guild on Skullcrusher and 1 Ally guild on ZJ. The entire Vengeance community filtered down into 2 faction specific All-Star guilds. The same occurrence happened for the other former battlegroups that moved over to Ruin.
The problem is, many 19 twinkers quit at this point because they did not want to go to Ruin which was notes for having insane epeen and insane levels of Drama and elitism. Believe me, our Vengeance players were all about elitism, but we understood the community's needs and we would always play with amazing sportsmanlike conduct. Sure we would farm the heck out of levelers, but there were also some games where we would hide and then pop out and scare the heck out of them and then help them win against us. it was about fun... not winning in PUGs. Premades, oh my god you better bet yourself we rolled into every single Premade with 10 charges of really sticky glue, every buff obtainable at 19, demonic runestones, Halaani Whisky, the whole 9 yards.
Every time barriers in the twinking community were taken down, we compressed in numbers and as guilds and good players were either benched or just quit. We were filtered down to 1 battlegroup and lost a lot of members doing so.
Fastforward to Cata where now we're seeing ENDLESS GY farming in our ONLY battlegroup and I know there are several hundred 19 twinkers who quit because it's disgusting to see what 19s had become. We literally farmed ourselves into inactivity and we literally killed our own community by treating pugs like premades and farming our own community dry.
None of this is speculation. This is all factual information. There is no arguing against anything I've said here. Perhaps maybe a few exaggerations I've made, but in essence this post is 100% factual. If you don't take this post as accurate, chances are it's because your vision is still clouded by competition and you refuse to see that our own drive for elitism and competition is what drove the nail in the coffin. Blizzard downsized our entire community and we finished it off.
NOW if we can get Blizzard to remove the EXP separation between battlegrounds, every single twink bracket would be thriving once again and we'd have instant pops on nearly every single bracket. This is fact. If we made this happen, every bracket would be active once again. We wouldn't have the separation between battlegroups so our numbers would be condensed almost as if it were 1 battlegroup, but that will still be a huge step up from where we are now.
Just some words on the subject.
Rusks
Legend
honestly i think 70 and 60 49 and maybe 80s are the only brackets that are truely dead. 19-39 could come back to life at any time if we got together and did it, not that im interested in doing it this second because i have classes to keep up with and a job like many other members of our community
the way 19s cycles through dormant and active actually fits my life very well at this point because of school. if 19s was active all year id just get burned out on it and maybe a bit distracted from things i need to be doing
the way 19s cycles through dormant and active actually fits my life very well at this point because of school. if 19s was active all year id just get burned out on it and maybe a bit distracted from things i need to be doing
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Srs
Legend
If the whole f2p vet thing works out, I could see it being a new golden age of 19 twinking. It really depends on how blizzard plays it. I have almost no confidence in upper management to make the right decision at this point, but if they actually consider where the market is going, they might see that letting people play for free, with the only limit being the expansion, might actually increase revenue in the long term. Here's hoping they don't disable xp-off for unpaid accounts; that might just piss off every off-and on-19 to the point that they never come back.
NineteenGLAD
Legend
Reading this is giving a lot of insight into the twink community history.
Chubbybunny
Legend
Last time I checked 20-29 was as good as dead as well with 45min+ queue times in prime time. At least in EU they are complaining about queue times, we don't have the luxury of having all the regions merged like in the US. This work against us.
During MoP, some of us noticed that in exp-on there was a dead zone that had never existed before between level 45-89, where battlegrounds were very rare, you could simply run a /who to see that. What was so special about 45-89? Well it's the first time Alterac Valley crops up. This covers the deaths of the upper brackets as far back as 2012 except for one game or 2 a day avoiding AV within a round robin.
Don't forget the anti premades things, starting at about 2011/2012, they disabled the "we have 5 horde, 5 alliance let's start a game!" 10 players each side were not enough either for that. The game waits for 2 rosters minimum. (if the map is Alterac Valley, 2 rosters as well maybe. Surprise, surprise. 160 players much?) The number of players required for a decent flow of games if there is random bg+av+4maps+ must be at about 200players (horde+alliance). This is not the numbers most twink brackets can pull off.
That's what killed twinking initially.
Who thinks in their right mind it's easy to fill 80 players maps? Why dungeon finder has no 80 players map?
This problem was scaled up to all remaining brackets 20+ in WoD. That's why some people complained about queue times thinking like naive kids that it was the expansion "give it some time". My ass. This is the big picture, this bug has been around for years and years since the inception of Exp-locked. By the way who else than blizzard contribued to the death of twinking? All these pseudos heros that were saying "yeah!! so nice, we can circle jerk with other twinks now, best change ever". Each of you killed twinking.
You also amazingly shot yourself in the foot asking for skirmishes. And these too are the same people. You all asked for more maps also, you have them, and you got fucked deep. The game was initially conceived with only WSG and AB. And I have never understood that need for more maps. You want different pixels in your screen, dear you!
If tomorrow they removed all the maps and kept warsong only, I can guarantee you 100% all the brackets would be up and running and fuming. 100% guaranteed. But this will never happen as long as Blizzard lives.
I have an immense respect to the very few twinks that stuck by their guns even ran exp-on games and are not ashamed to request and support a merge of exp on/exp off. This is the best realistic shot to revive twinking to its beginnings.
In a nutshell the awful design of queues killed twinking. Absolutely nothing else, all these years there was enough people, unlike what people complained. "not enough people queued", I'm sick of hearing this and still today. There has always been enough people, maybe not anymore (in the mid brackets), but the queue system has never worked in our favor. There is supposedly 2 millions players each region, how is there not enough twinks. There is. There was. But the game design is faulty.
Edit: And the problem of the 10-19 is similar, if I'm not mistaken, for the majority of the history of WoW, only Warsong Gulch was available. AB only came a couple of years back, funny enough shortly before 19s died. Coincidence? I think not. The more maps, the bigger the maps, the more fucked we are.
During MoP, some of us noticed that in exp-on there was a dead zone that had never existed before between level 45-89, where battlegrounds were very rare, you could simply run a /who to see that. What was so special about 45-89? Well it's the first time Alterac Valley crops up. This covers the deaths of the upper brackets as far back as 2012 except for one game or 2 a day avoiding AV within a round robin.
Don't forget the anti premades things, starting at about 2011/2012, they disabled the "we have 5 horde, 5 alliance let's start a game!" 10 players each side were not enough either for that. The game waits for 2 rosters minimum. (if the map is Alterac Valley, 2 rosters as well maybe. Surprise, surprise. 160 players much?) The number of players required for a decent flow of games if there is random bg+av+4maps+ must be at about 200players (horde+alliance). This is not the numbers most twink brackets can pull off.
That's what killed twinking initially.
Who thinks in their right mind it's easy to fill 80 players maps? Why dungeon finder has no 80 players map?
This problem was scaled up to all remaining brackets 20+ in WoD. That's why some people complained about queue times thinking like naive kids that it was the expansion "give it some time". My ass. This is the big picture, this bug has been around for years and years since the inception of Exp-locked. By the way who else than blizzard contribued to the death of twinking? All these pseudos heros that were saying "yeah!! so nice, we can circle jerk with other twinks now, best change ever". Each of you killed twinking.
You also amazingly shot yourself in the foot asking for skirmishes. And these too are the same people. You all asked for more maps also, you have them, and you got fucked deep. The game was initially conceived with only WSG and AB. And I have never understood that need for more maps. You want different pixels in your screen, dear you!
If tomorrow they removed all the maps and kept warsong only, I can guarantee you 100% all the brackets would be up and running and fuming. 100% guaranteed. But this will never happen as long as Blizzard lives.
I have an immense respect to the very few twinks that stuck by their guns even ran exp-on games and are not ashamed to request and support a merge of exp on/exp off. This is the best realistic shot to revive twinking to its beginnings.
In a nutshell the awful design of queues killed twinking. Absolutely nothing else, all these years there was enough people, unlike what people complained. "not enough people queued", I'm sick of hearing this and still today. There has always been enough people, maybe not anymore (in the mid brackets), but the queue system has never worked in our favor. There is supposedly 2 millions players each region, how is there not enough twinks. There is. There was. But the game design is faulty.
Edit: And the problem of the 10-19 is similar, if I'm not mistaken, for the majority of the history of WoW, only Warsong Gulch was available. AB only came a couple of years back, funny enough shortly before 19s died. Coincidence? I think not. The more maps, the bigger the maps, the more fucked we are.
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