i've already laid out my opinions on
this but i figured i would post a more detailed explanation on here as well.
as i stated in my ban thread, i do believe this bracket is “absolute garbage” at the moment. here’s a disclaimer for my post - i’m a total scumbag. i don’t care about the competitiveness of games. i just want to play, and i will farm if that’s what my team wants to do - the most enjoyable moment for me in MoP was stomping horde f2ps on 24s when myself and some other bwl players
rerolled.
i have over 400k hks in this bracket. i’ve been playing f2p on and off since june 2012, so i can’t speak on the earliest part of its history, yet i do feel like i have a decent grasp on the motives for both the f2p and p2p players who are still queueing. i’ve played on pretty much every major f2p realm - ap, bwl, mixxar, et, etc - and for me, f2p 20 was endgame - i almost stopped playing my p2p account entirely, left the heroic raiding guild that i was in, etc. pretty sure i’m still top 3 overall for f2p char specific achieve points, in addition to being one of the first (shoutout to bisonpower for
#1 ) pure f2p bloodthirsty on US.
the first major issue with this bracket at the moment - queues. the one redeeming thing about pvp in this bracket has always been the queue times, and unfortunately, they’re absolute shite at the moment. as someone with thousands of wsg and ab games played at this level, i had no interest in those bgs - yet, due to the queue times on random bgs (30+ mins all day), i was forced to queue for those two instead - lowering the queues on horde to around 15-20 mins at what used to be peak hours. sometimes you’ll get lucky and have a few instant pops in a row, yet this is still horrid compared to the previous queues - if they were over 5 mins for horde wsg, even at 5am, something was wrong.
i couldn’t care less about the class balance, considering that i had at least one of every class and several hunters to faceroll with, yet i have to admit that it’s not too bad at the moment. the bad thing, however, from a f2p perspective, is the amount of p2p in the bracket. for as long as i can remember, this bracket has had a f2p majority - usually, there were 3-4 p2p on a wsg team at most unless it was a premade. at the moment, that is certainly not the case - with the influx of both vets and 29s, especially on bleeding hollow and other high pop realms, the large majority of players in this bracket are p2p - it’s not uncommon for there to only be 2 f2p on a team now, and in most cases they will be undergeared jajas.
is this amount of p2p a bad thing? not necessarily. yet, in this case, it is, as f2p are now near useless in comparison - i was still able to compete with, and most cases outplay, most p2p rogues on my f2p, yet i still felt pressured to upgrade to vet in order to stay competitive. the only classes unaffected by this are priests and druids - everything else is near-useless as f2p in comparison to vet, with some specs being unplayable as f2p. a great example of this is f2p affliction warlock, or any non-disc clothie for that matter - aff has never been a strong spec, in most cases i would die pretty quickly in MoP too, yet at the moment it is absolute rubbish - at least in MoP everyone else was still gimped as a f2p too, so you could derp around without fear of being too much of a hindrance to your team. one of my favorite moments as a f2p in MoP was an ab game where i broke 100k dmg as an affliction lock - hid in bushes at BS during teamfights to avoid the jaja rogues who didn’t have nameplates turned on, tab dotted everything in sight, ended up going like 3-8 but guess what? i topped damage and it was still a fun game in my opinion. now, that would never happen, considering that p2ps will global you and there’s no chance of being competitive on damage - now, the most you can hope to contribute is cc, yet that is still unlikely too. it’s the same way with mages at the moment - even vet mages, as i was able to outplay equally skilled players, e.g. tacticz (sorry for being an annoying gnome), with complete ease on my vet rogue.
sure, there have always been strong and weak specs, yet people who are too stubborn to upgrade to p2p, or people who do not have financial means to do so, are not able to compete in pvp at the moment - i know many f2p players who have stopped queueing for this reason. sure, f2p premades might still have some semblance of a chance at winning, yet i’m talking from the perspective of a solo queuer. the bracket also just isn’t interesting at the moment - in MoP, i mainly played on low pop rp realms for easy agm + fishing contest rewards, yet the f2p player base still felt like a community - i would constantly see the same players night after night of bging, despite not being on their realms, and i met many great people from doing so. at the moment, the vet community feels a similar way, due to access to battletags - yet, the f2p community is now an absolute shadow of its former self, with aerie peak being the only active f2p realm. i remember queueing with, and playing against, premades from smaller realms on a regular basis - bwl, vashj, mixxar, etc - they’re all pretty much completely dead now. ap is the only remaining f2p realm, which i think is really sad as i have never agreed with the mindsets of some of the prominent members on there - especially ap horde, which was known for being pretty much as scummy as it gets in MoP, and i deleted my characters on both factions last summer.
now that i’ve finished my rant about f2p, i’m going to try to view this bracket from the perspective of a new player - as a vet, i’ve introduced and funded several, who seem to be finding some degree of enjoyment in the current state of the bracket. positives of this bracket - still faster queues than any xp off bracket outside of endgame, jokingly easy to play pretty much any class, and still a decent amount of undergeared players to farm. most people in this bracket are not playing, at least in random bgs, for competitive games - they want to stomp people with overpowered characters, and horde 29s at the moment is pretty much the best way to do so. horde wins over 80% of the games in this bracket - that’s a fact, and no matter what time of the day you queue, it will not change. feel free to look at all of my characters’ stats if you wish to verify this - my win/loss on my rogue, despite that i played the spec to its fullest potential, is still trash in comparison to some of the characters that i admittingly botted on horde. av is perhaps the best example, with the conqueror title grind being 3x faster on horde than it is on alliance.
outside of the terrible faction balance in pvp, which has existed in previous expansions as well, there really isn’t much going on in the bracket at the moment - i used to always be able to find stuff to do on my alts, whether it be dueling and playing arenas against other f2p in goldshire or farming achievements with other interested f2p. i understand that many players are not interested in these activities, especially players who are new to this bracket, as they mainly just want low level pvp - yet, it’s still depressing to see that there is really no f2p community activity outside of the occasional wargames.
do note that this entire post is my opinions, yet i believe this bracket used to be enjoyable for all players - everyone could find something that they wanted to do in pvp, whether it be facerolling bgs on a 24 or as a f2p hunter, premading with a group of f2p and having a chance at beating 24s, solo queueing and still having a decently fun experience at times as a f2p - i personally believe this is not the case anymore. f2p will now have a pretty horrible time in most battlegrounds, assuming that they aren’t rolling broken specs (shoutout to feral druids), yet you can argue that the same has always been the case - i do believe that in WoD, however, with the addition of vet accounts, things have worsened in terms of balance between f2p and p2p. you will now be pressured into rolling a vet account in attempt to find enjoyable pvp, and i do admit that vet accounts can be fun - i average over 40 kbs in av games now, for example, which i would not have been able to do as a f2p sub rogue. the issue is that the bracket is significantly less enjoyable for everyone, and queue times have suffered as a result - also, due to the addition of the two new battlegrounds, which are a mixed blessing - they give more variety and the potential for new achievements, yet they lead to longer queues for both random bgs and people who specifically queue wsg.
this entire post is my opinion - i’m sure some of you will disagree. with that said, in my opinion, this bracket has never been at a worse state - feel free to counter any points that i made. do note, i have personally not enjoyed this game for quite some time, as i mentioned in my ban thread - was still playing out of the feeling that my rogue was not entirely “complete” after upgrading it to vet, which probably sounds like the dumbest shit possible, but it was enough to get me hooked on this bracket again for a bit longer. i’ve been burnt out from f2p for ages, and that can be some of the reason for why i haven’t found enjoyment in this bracket, yet i do believe all of the points that i mentioned are reasonable and not entirely related to my personal feelings. lenny's post on here, for example, is another good outlook on the issue - all 3 "factions" in this bracket (f2p, vet, 29s) must be finding enjoyment for the bracket to truly flourish in terms of queue times, and that clearly is not the case at the moment - less people are interested in this bracket than ever before, most likely due to the reasons that i mentioned above.
tl;dr: this'll be my last major post on ti, for obvious reasons, so skip it if you want
