"Is WoW Too Complicated?" - Pika Reacts 

The most underrtted thing they never talked about was, the abilities you needed to remember from other classes, otherwise you become dog food anyway.

Pika is vastly underestimating how much prep is needed to even play comp WoW PvP compared to your avg comp FPS. Leveling, gearing, setting up basic addons (arena frame + dr tracker at least), finding someone to play with to even get started at low rating. You dont even need all the fancy macros/WAs etc but the barriers are still massive.

You open Valorant you queue for a game. You open League/Dota you queue for a game. You open wow and pay monthly to do chores because the minigame we like to play is trapped in a MMO.

As a healer i started in solo shuffle. I am so fkn bad but solo shuffle gave me the confidence and experience to try to join 3s. I wish diminishing returns and party cooldowns were base line in the ui

The main problem with WoW is the fact that you need outside websites to play the game optimally. The lack of in game information on how to play your toon whether that's pve or pvp is really bad. A lot of tooltips are just plainly labelled wrong, no where does it tell you what you should be aiming for gear wise. Good luck finding out what diminishing returns are. New players need more information to make their journey a smoother experience.

He's so right about how unwelcoming and negative the community is... sure the game has had problems for a while. But the more players coming in the more feedback on these issues we get.

I WANNA BE LIKE PIKABOO WHEN I GROW UP TOO!

this game used to feel like a job at times. so much to know, so much to do. i miss it but lets be real, it can be a time sink

4:35 I'm sorry but this was advanced level cope. Talking about monitor settings, desk position, graphics settings, disabling vsync, and 90% of what you mentioned is for every game you're playing on PC including WoW, not just FPS games. In fact half of what you said applies to anyone who just uses a computer every day and decides to optimize their experience. WoW is the only game I have played in history that requires me to install 3rd party software to make the game playable. It's honestly one of the reasons I am hesitant to reinstall the game when a new xpac drops, because I think of how tedious and annoying installing or updating addons is going to be. WoW is also the only game where I'm required to pay $15 a month just to log in, whereas most other popular multiplayer games are literally free with cosmetic shop. (WoW has both somehow) Aim Labs is the only relevant comparable point, and I personally don't use it anymore because playing the actual game will ultimately be better practice anyway. It's not a requirement at all, whereas addons in WoW is absolutely 100% a requirement. Venruki was right here brother even though I love your content and you're the goat. I might watch the occasional video, but I'm not playing the game for the main reasons he mentioned. Saying "you wouldn't get 2 kills in cs:go" isn't analogous because that's due to a lack of skill, not a lack of completing the time gated tasks to be competitively viable. Imagine if your gun did 30% less damage than the enemy team because they played more last month. The game would die in a week. People outside the WoW community don't put up with that shit. Also imagine this 30% debuff ON TOP of there being a skill gap, and that's WoW arena for new players. Every human recreation that has withstood the test of time has a skill gap, but WoW specifically requires you to grind before your skill even becomes a relevant variable. You're the best rogue of all time besides maybe Reckful, and I would 100% beat you every single time if I'm in full conquest + embellishments and you're in random blues you got from leveling. That's not skill, and it's not the idea of fun to most people trying to get into the game.

They should just do what GW did and make a PVP mode that you can just make a max level, get full gear and go instantly. Without that WoW is a fucking grind that I dont need.

Something I told a friend who stuck to 2v2 rated and didnt try much of Solo Shuffle was games are usually 4-2, 2-4 or 3-3 for dps while for healers its usually 6-0 or 0-6. DPS are playing a game of figuring out who the weakest player is on the match while healers are competing directly with the enemy healer, as a DPS you're usually trying to scrap a win in one of the 3 rounds with the worst player to go positive while a skill gap between both healers means the best healer will roll the enemy healer 6-0. You end up playing 6 rounds having a net positive or negative or 1 game if you did not go even and then you're back to waiting for another 40 minutes. I think the easiest solution would be enabling 2v2 with 4 DPS players if there's no healers queueing up, 2v2 is a degenerate bracket but it sure beats alt tabbing for 40 minutes then getting into a game and you're also complete zoned out because you took a very long break from your last game and need to warm up again to play your best.

Venruki is 100% right. Hence the low player count and hardly any new players.

I played through all of season 1 of dragonflight - I'm a very competitive person but no matter how hard I tried to get into PVP I just couldn't convince myself to devote all of the time needed to figure out what the actual fuck is going on lol.

They need to give new players a pre arena obstacle crash course or tutorial where it puts you into a arena with bots and it teaches you basic information such as CC chains using defensives.

Not only too complicated for new player. Even for veterans. Like seriously there is so much nonsens in this game. Billions of mounts, pets, achivements, items, rep, whatever. Also too many abilities. It's blown up. And a lot of good abilities don't exist anymore. Every class can also do everything for many addons now. Knockbacks, kicks, stuns, spints, jumps, it's just too much.

For 3v3 you might not need all those addons if you have voice coms and a vocal team, but you need most of them.... And then for shuffle you need Sarena and the omni combo for sure... and the healer cc alert... If you think you dont its because you forgot what its like to play at those levels... and while top players know what to look for and dont need so many addons, the same cannot be said of the casual players.

I started WoW this year, if you have the right friends helping it’s really not that hard to start learning.

Honestly another huge improvement to soloque in my opinion is PLEASE add RBGs solo que too, that rated ladder has also been corrupted by the same arena disease of exclusive group ques who single out everyone else and obliterate the competition, it’s becoming less and less fun if you don’t have gladiators helping carry your group. Solo que needs to solve many problems but I feel it also needs to expand past its boundaries if it is expected to have more potential in its longevity, give us RBG solo ques!

I think the CS comp is great to show the difference. I stopped playing WoW and jumped on CS and the difference of the learning curve is way different. If you get a Smurf in CS, yeah you’ll have a bad time, but that doesn’t happen that often. The amount of things to know in WoW to be good at PVP is 1,000 times more. Unless 1200 is your goal in 3s.

This was my fav vid of yours that I've seen, I love hearing your takes and just listening almost podcast style about the state of the game from your pov.

One of the saddest things that ever happened to me in wow was: I got my wife to play an evoker. We queued the first week the class was out (in DF prepatch), I was excited for her to try it. It was a heroic random queue for uldaman. And the pug was such an asshole to her, said she "shouldn't be queuing heroic without knowing her class", she never played again. Again, this was a heroic lfg..where on earth else would she learn prevoker if not in a dungeon >_

i hope you do more react content. you are a smart charismatic guy, you are made for this

I haven't pvp'd for a long time but always enjoyed the gear grind and bg stuff, which exposes you to many of the classes/abilities you'll be dealing with in Arena.

Its really easy to make friends if youre a chill person. When i came back after a 12 yr break, i knew one person. Now i have a friends list of 75 with legit people who are 1400 all the way to 2.8k exp . LFG was new for me (quit in mop s1) and I loved it

Pika it’s 100% normal to have a lot of Addons even at low rating. I played without Addons when I first got into arena a couple years ago but then I saw some RU-vid videos because I wanted to get past 1500 and they all say to get Addons. There’s so much that goes into retail WoW. The biggest problem with the game in my opinion is that you can’t tell what’s going on. There so many buttons and abilities and passives in the game and it’s impossible to know what’s happening unless you’ve played the game for a long time and you have Addons.

Interesting to hear Pika's understanding (or lack of) regarding other video games. If you have never played ranked in League and then play it... you'll end up in games with 'icon clickers' and children - you WILL win 50% of your games. The same cannot be said for WoW

The difference is that in other games you don't have to be accepted into a group to play competitive team content. You can queue as a group or you can queue into a group as an individual. To play competitive group content in WoW you have to "apply" to a group and the leader inspects your gear score and your pvp rating and then accepts or denies you. That is a WoW thing. I have played Overwatch and Apex at a Masters level and solo queued many nights that my friends weren't on or we didn't have a full team and don't have to apply to a group in order to play games. Most people would never get into an fps game if they couldn't queue solo and had to apply to a group and the group could see their KD and win percentage. There's absolutely no shot. I play WoW now and, as a new player, I have a 420 iLvl gear score and am doing high key mythics and raiding and I'm doing no worse than other players in my group who have been playing WoW for 15 years. But if it weren't for my brother who is 2000+ pvp rating and KSM in every season getting me into these groups, I'd never have a chance to do anything in WoW and that's a 100% fact. I'd never have gotten the opportunity to gear up and do the content if I wasn't tagging along with the person doing the highest dps in the instance. No way in hell.

I think the real issue with WoW PvP is the amount of CC in the game. If you look at Vanilla most classes didn't have spammable CC and not a lot of classes had stuns. But with each expansion came more CCs and more stuns to the point where if a meta comp was good enough you literally couldn't even play the game, and pretty much every class now has spammable CC/chain CC ability. Look at teams like TSG or RMP in Wrath - TSG's comp was built off a burst opening that almost no one could survive as the healer literally couldn't cast a single spell if done right. RMP comp is literally a comp built around CC - where they win by not letting the other team play and that's been the best comp in the game since I could remember (haven't seriously PvP'd since wrath so idk what the best comps are these days). Its one of the more asinine concepts I've ever seen a game incorporate. Take most of the CC out of the game and let people play the game in PvP and it'd be light years more fun.

While I 100% agree with counterstrike and how you wouldn't be able to even get a kill, your at least still playing the game mode you want to play. IN wow, theres hour supon hours of content you are forced to play before even having the option to play arenas. AND THEN theres barriers like gear and teammates. Big difference.

I started wow in shadowlands for the first time ever. The learning curve was Insane and PvE was so boring but shitting on someone in PvP was sick. I played hunter at first until I kept getting shit on from rogues, then I found pika and palumor and learned as much as I could and then found a mage and we became good friends using voice and after months of grinding and learning we hit 1950 in 2s and it was the most amazing feeling. Then I went to hit 1950 on my hunter, a warrior, mage, and feral. But none of my IRL friends want to put in any time to even level let along grind and learn pvp. It’s a real shame. Shouldn’t have to be forced to jump through so many hoops to just pvp. I hope solo ques pop, and I’m down as fuck for no addons

They should just give people the option to opt into triple dps mirrors in solo shuffle. That might help with lowering the waiting times and make it optional for people that always wanna play with healers.

We had a 55 y/o guy who mainly played New World and Mortal Online 2 come join a few of us on WoW SoD, this was his first time ever playing WoW in general. He would get on youtube and watch WoW videos on how to play and he was getting mad flustered on how many addons he was told he needs and was super confused on how to set it all up. Myself and a few others told him to ignore that crap, gave him 3 addons that would give him some QoL and showed him how to set it up and then told him to play the game how he wanted to. Dude is now enjoying the piss out of the game and can't get him off it. Moral of the story, just play the game. It's really good, don't mind the people who tell you what you need to do. Do what you want to do and I assure you, you'll enjoy it.

Im a new player myself, bought the game about 6 months ago and coming from guild wars all I can say is that WoW comunity is... just weird. How can someone love and hate a game so much at the same time? It is a great game but some content creators really need to chill, Im so tired of tier list and stuff like that. Just play what its fun for you unless you are a WFR raider 😂

I think PvP gearing is better than ever and honor gear being only 13 ilvl behind conquest gear makes PvP much more accessible

46:15 the difference is most of the buttons are pointless to click/are clicked in very particular scenarios (you go aoe? press this, you go single? press that). while a lot of the spells they removed were quite fun and uniformly somehow useful

Either way, the barrier to entry for WoW competitive PvP is much bigger than most other games. I think that's pretty clear.

They need to have a permanent arena tourney server with max lvl and good gear

Idk man but he explained his view of it so well

Venruki's point is valid if you're considering that a new player can only enjoy the game if they hit the top ranks of arena PVP. Plenty people can just log in and play and enjoy the game for what it is without competing at the AWC.

i think the issue that ven is talking about is the accessibility to end game content - at this point in the game there is so much to learn and understand before u can even think about getting into a match, let alone the actual leveling process and gearing process and finding optimal builds based on comps and understanding comps… any player can launch valo and get plat - diamond within probably a few months if they dedicated their time, whereas wow the barrier to entry is much higher, especially if you don’t have friends who also play the game. they need to maybe dumb it down a bit and get a solid foundation so that the game is much more accessible to new players and to grow their player base

With the original release there was a lot of stuff to learn but also lots of content to enjoy and fewer changes to classes. Compare that with today and the improvements/nerfs/mechanic changes etc that happen constantly, and instead of incremental improvements that can be worked on over time, there are sweeping alterations that don't allow for any anything other than devoting more time to stay current and competitive. Throw in all the add-ons and the game is no longer for the casual gamer logging on for an hour or so every so often. I remember the satisfaction I used to get from getting gear that gave me just an incremental tiny improvement. Now nothing you play for is meaningful because its all rapidly transient and making any effort is pointless because it will be worthless very quickly. It was nice knowing I could do something over time that would eventually be meaningful and help me in other parts of the game for a while. Even grinding for something was okay because the reward would be good for a while at least. Anyway - the game isn't going back there so at least I have some good memories LOL.

You hit it Pika I am 44 years old and have been playing wow since Wotlk. I go to work 12 hrs a day and come home and try to play I don’t want it to be like a second job so I play casual plus I have come to terms that I won’t ever be at the top b/c my awareness and reactions r not what they used to be. So I have went back to play Wotlk a slower pace more laid back. Now my kid said she does not like classic b/c it is to slow so she likes retail so they r to me headed in the right direction for the younger generation but they need to keep working to crack down on the toxic/jerks/trolls or they will run them off.

when i started playing wow arena by far the hardest part was reading my ui + addons, and knowing enemy spells and capabilities. nothing else compares to the learrning curve of that

I always loved playing feral, but i just had to give it up i mean rake, rip, swarm, feral frenzy, blood talon, brutal slash, some patches even moonfire i probably forgot something. It so much maintenance and the dots have so short duration because you need to use circle of life and death so all you do is reapply dots... not to mention classes can dispel them, you need to sit bear if someone even looks your way. They gutted pretty much all classes, made so many classes similar that when you geared up your char and played some the lack of soul makes you wanne play something else and you realise that balance druid is just a differently themed shadow priest or aff lock. Destro lock feels almost exactly the same as frost mage. I don't know what it is but somewere along the way the identity of the classes got lost. Every class is a generator/spender class now. Used to be just rogue, feral druid and maybe warlock with soulshards if you will.

I laughed waaaay to hard at that im a professional gamer and half asian LMAO

I agree with so much of what you said man. I wish you could get your points into other of the bigger creators heads. You are so right about the negativity and toxicity. It has long been my opinion that the "old guard" that have direct contact with devs have pushed the game into bad directions over the years, and no willingness to change. I appreciate this video and speaking your truth.

Has any streamer talked about the possibility of making solo shuffle only being dps if no healers are online to reduce que times? However, when two healers are available, the game prioritizes having the 2dps and 1 healer teams.

I really enjoyed playing WoW, I’ve played since release of villa, quit in cata and started playing again about a month into DF. While totally different than what I was used to playing, the strategic game play of PvP was fun getting back into. I quit again at start of 10.1. There’s a laundry list of issues with the game, but having so many fotm rerollers is tiresome, especially when you wait 45minutes for a queue to pop. I used to complain how long the grind was to level and gear a toon, but I miss that now. The ability to go from 1 to max level and be fully geared in a week made fotm rerollers way to easy. Also I was frustrated with the embellished gear bullshit. I tried for two weeks to figure out how to get the embellished gear, and for some classes it’s essentially mandatory. Also wayyyy to much going on with cc and interrupts, I wish they just released a game like wotlk but with solo shuffle. Remember when holy pallys had ice block and mages had ice block? Now hunters have a bubble essentially, same with rogues, resto seuids (tranq), dhs with the flying bullshit, shamans with burrow, and I’m sure I’m missing a few.. Oh well, I doubt I’ll play again but we’ll see.

Sitting in 1600 with BiS for content and currency is what ruins pvp.

To be decent at WOW PvP you do have to do everything Venruki said and get some years of practice. Good PvPers take for grated all the knowledge they know about the game such as it's classes, specs, comps exedra. To be good at an FPS or MOBA, play a couple of months if even that and you are good to go! Pikas comparison of what you have to do to be pro at an FPS is the equivalent of what you need to do to not be horrible at WOW PvP. So not horrible vs pro, but same amount of work, ruffly. :P

i think its ok to make damaging/healing easier in pvp is because theres so much shit going on, its ok to have the ez mode damage build the one to use in pvp just to help people pay attention to whats going on beside whats happening with their character

I started in March. I had played in Cata, MoP and Legion but I stopped playing till this March. I had never done proper arena pvp before though. I still don't know how to optimize omnibar or how to setup tellmewhen but gearing I figured out. Got full conquest for multiple chars and highest elo I got was 1900. I feel like a bit more playing and I'll get to 23-2400 or something. Once I figured it out it became really fun. (OH btw, I CANNOT figure out how to play rogue. I tried so hard I played so many games but it's so hard to keep track of who to kidney, cheap shot, gouge, blind and stuff...)

It's not really an issue of it being complicated gameplay wise, it's just not straight forward enough to simply play the game so the barrier to entry is incredibly high. Pika mentions Counter-strike, and how a new player wouldn't get a kill because it's complicated like WoW, which is true, but the difference from WoW is the fact that a new player immediately has a chance to at least *try*, you simply download the game, which is free, and press the competitive button, it's as simple as that. In WoW's case if you want to try competitive PVP, like Venruki said, you have to buy the game, pay a subscription, make a character, level that character, build that characters talents, gear that character, and then find players to play with or wait in solo shuffle for 30 minutes, as well as understand add-ons. You can see the issue here for new players.

As a returning arena player who brought a bunch of new friends to WoW with them, Ven is absolutely right.

The ironic thing is: that all that stuff in the Raids and Dungeons that increases the complexity over the addons depends on the fact that DBM had such an massive influence on the gameplay as it appears over the time that Blizz was forced to creates more complex Dungeons and Raids what on the other hand means that u need the AddOn more then before and its all a circle of hell. For me personally, i would also prefer to increase the UI Options from Blizz themself and ban all those addons like in FF14. For me PvP in some points are totally ridiculous, i'm able to track f*cking everything, all CD's of the enemys, the addons tell me when someones pop up in my back and even if i didn't notice it personally i'm able to counter everything while i still showing the enemy my back. I can track the whole Enemy Suqad on the BG and where their going, Experience and strategies in the game are invariably subordinated to the AddOns and that is a great pity.

The appeal of CS, Valorant, DayZ, etc., etc., is that you can log on fairly quickly, click your mouse and get an immediate response from the game for it. WoW being an MMO, that left click has like 15 per-requisites you gotta complete before it'll do anything of any import. Because MMO's require such a big time investment to get much of anything done, it also requires a huge return on that investment. Like I said earlier, FPS games, Arena Shooters, MOBA's, BR's, etc., etc., they all have a return on the time investment basically the moment you click something, which isn't the case with MMO's. If you don't have a lot of time to play, then it could literally take months to get a return of any substance on the time you invested into that particular character. Unfortunately for WoW, Blizzard hasn't provided much compensation for time spent in their game recently. That's why I've taken up permanent residence in Classic WoW/Season of Discovery because raids even with a bad group only take like 1 and a half hours at most, and there's no such thing as Resilience in Classic PvP making fights take way longer than they should, allowing classes like Druids and Paladins to become absolutely bullshit.

So many good points made by Pika in this vid. Normal people aren’t min maxing with all these addons and rotation stuff and still get 95% of their performance. The negative stigma and downers around the game are the main reason that new people aren’t playing. Also never considered how much I put into my fps gaming when I do that (setup, peripherals, settings, etc.). Something which people don’t bring up at all is that you probably need to play for 20-30 hours in any of these games to unlock ranked which is the “main mode”. Easily could level and gear a character in less than 10h in WoW.

You could basically 'log in and play' during MoP. The amount of people I got to start playing was stupid lol and it was easy for them to learn. now, when I don't play for a patch, I feel like I don't wanna play as there's so much I need to catch up with and do lol i couldnt imagine being a new player.

I think the most fun I ever had in WoW was Survival Hunter in Cata. The DoTs, the Procs, the traps and all the other choices. It always felt like I was trying to make sure the right things were going on, and then Explosive Shot or Kill Shot procs had me in MOAR DAMAAGE mode.

Biggest problem with WoW PvP is that many animations are not clear enough. So per example,many people especially casuals don't know a stun happened unless the addon tells them. All people can understand is healthbars when they watch wow, they have no clue who's doing what unlike FPS per example.

I think gear difference in pvp is a big stopper for most people. I would jump on a healer an Q right now if I didn't have to grind out gear for the next 2 weeks.

I have been playing wow for more years than I want to mention and I agree.. noobs come on thinking it will be a breeze and they never really gear up before they give up. All the pros even ven himself make it seem easy.. I'm a pvper only so let me say it is not easy and i seldom do arenas.. I love bg's and world pvp. it's a struggle to gear.. didn't used to be.. I dislike the direction pvp has gone, and I don't want to do pve.. Ven has a grip on how the average player feels. Pika I think your so beyond the average player you don't see it.

I think Pika is not understanding the point Venruki made. Venruki isn't comparing the complexity and difficulty of wow vs other games. What Venruki is saying is that just getting properly setup (character, gear, add-ons) takes an eternity in wow. And in other games, all you do is press play and start actually playing.

I think it is very important to understand that for the most part, everything that makes WoW complicated is true of every MMORPG. It is sort of part of what defines that genre, and people know what they are getting into to some extent when they begin playing a game like that. I do think people struggle to want to start games like WoW these days, though. I have played WoW since vanilla and I don't think I could bring myself to begin a new MMORPG very easily. I played New World some and got pretty into it but it is hard for me to stay hooked into them because of the complexity of learning all the new systems in a game like that. Games like Counterstrike, League, Call of Duty etc... they attract a different kind of player. There is certainly some overlap because a lot of people who play WoW also play those games, but a game like WoW is supposed to be complex and the only way to really fix that issue is to dumb down the game (which they have done in the past) and it ultimately creates a less enjoyable experience for their existing/returning customers in order to cater to new customers. I don't know that it is necessarily possible to reduce the complexity of the game enough to actually attract and retain new players that aren't interested in the full scope of what WoW is as a game. It is a strange situation because for the people who already play the game, the complexity is part of what makes the game exciting. But for new players, and particularly younger gamers, it is what keeps them away from the game.

To help healers, blizzard should impliment something that tells DPS when it was their fault haha. Something pops on screen "you died with wall".... "you LOS'd your healer while they were CC'd"... "dont grief the healer, you know what you did"

The solo format is the future of wow arena, but not nessecarily through shuffle. I've been promoting a groupmaking system based off the 2v2 and 3v3 bracket that would add to or replace LFG. Instead of listing a group and have anyone sign up, you would mark yourself as your preferred spec and your preferred teammates' spec. For example, I main surv hunt and enjoy mostly jungle and thug and will therefore search for ferals, sub rogues and disc/holy priests, which means if there is a feral/sub rogue and a disc/holy that has marked surv hunt + feral/sub rogue then the game would put us together in a party and let us queue 3s as if we just formed a group through LFG. So far I honestly think this is as close to a flawless groupmaking system as we can get. I'll happily answer any questions about this idea

Also i love Arcane Mage, but I just get clobbered in arenas because I'm trying to do differential equations while the DH and War are finishing their addition tables and going out to recess. Fun spec though.

its the 37 key binds for a spec and mastering the rotations to be competitive that make it difficult for new players. ive tried to bring friends over to it and they are overwhelmed and get frustrated after a few months then give up.

Blizzards employees are a bunch a clowns now, more worried about making a baby day care in game then improving solo shuffle

How to resolve much of this complexity: transform all continuous damage (dots) into singular types, that is, Vampiric + Unstable would be a DOT SHADOW (stackavel or something along those lines, becoming a single stack, so I don't need to know that the DOT Vampiric is from Priest and Unstable is from Lock). Another thing is to do the same thing with CC's, if I give a rogue STUN, it's the same thing as a pala stun, as it's the same thing as a warrior stun, etc... This way it's easy to know when you're stunned regardless of the class and ease of knowing which skills besides DR's. "Ah, but the pala stun is magical and the rogue stun is physical, you can't dispel it...", fuck it, it does 2 different stuns, one magical and one physical. good!

Holy cow, totally underselling how much stuff is going on at a given time in an arena match. That's like wayne gretzky saying "I don't know...hockey's not that hard, just score hundreds of goals"

So I know what attracted me to playing WoW for the first time in 2005 watching my college dorm mate fly around Azeroth on a flight path was the sheer size and scale of the game; it is MASSIVE. People who start playing WoW become completely immersed in the complexity of it all and can't wait to explore everything. Looking towards playing at the end game is actually not a high priority for new players I imagine.

Never seen you before, but I just came back to wow a week ago after switching from classic to give it try. Been years since I've played wow classic reeled me in and retail has kept me so far. You have some really good takes. I 100% agree. Make the solo shuffle pop! everything else is secondary. Some people just wanna get on and play

Lol, when I was a kid, we didn’t have such many vids on RU-vid or this amount of tutorials on internet. And we played WOW, we were learning it day by day. We were enjoying levelling and were really surprised by end-game content. We discovered key bindings, macros, addons and the other on our own, no one told us we have such options. We didn’t have any centralised repo and downloaded addons manually from different websites. On top of that there was no localisation and game itself was way less newbe friendly (no quest helper, mounts required higher level, no portals, higher cd on hearthstones). And we were enjoying playing game and our discoveries within.

I like Guild Wars 2 system for PvP where everyone is scaled to the same level and gear so you can just jump right into PvP content and do the PvE questing / gearing process if you want to do the PvE content. I don't think it would fit within WoW's systems, but I think an easier access into the multiplayer PvP would significantly help the WoW scene.

To be fair you don't "Just play League" or any other MOBAs, those are also super complicated buy ins. But a lot of MOBAs don't have this issue WoW has.

The only solution i see to fix solo queue is adding healer bots that would replace a player, but it's weird in a ranked match and wont happen. Having a matchmaking system that depend on having a player to play something that most people dont like is the issue there.

It's so refreshing to finally see higher caliber players disowning addons. I've basically played with no addons my whole time on WoW. Minor exceptions like details or questie occasionally. But never performance enhancing ones. No DBM, no Gladius, etc. I generally keep up with or out right out perform people that are using addons. Two things that weren't addressed: A) Just as going from full addons to no addons would cause a dip in performance, going from no addons to full addons can have that same effect. But as long as you're used to using no addons, not having that crutch, you get used to actually having to pay attention. B) Addons, as much as I hate them, actually help make the game more playable in the sense that it helps close that gap between bad players and good ones and creates a bigger pool of players to do content with. If you kill addons, you literally kill 50%+ of the player base because they simply can not fnction without them. And that's before players that quit because they hate the UI (I hate the new UI, I want a classic option).

I disagree with Pika here. He mentioned first time in Apex he got 1 kill in an hour, but how long would it take to get an arena kill from first downloading WoW? It would be days or weeks until you're levelled and geared enough to get there so I think in terms of accessibility Wow is much harder to break in to. Also the amount you have to keep track of in arena is crazy. There is a lot to keep track of in high end fps shooters but WoW is another level with DRs, cooldowns and set ups. Maybe it's because I'm better at fps than arena but even just to get to something easier like KSM would be harder than to get a foothold in an fps imo.

There are some great points that both Pika and Ven mentioned. I have played WoW on and off for 10+ years. What brought me to game was the commercials, with Mr. T, and Verne. It looked fun, but now there doesn’t seem to be much advertisement on the game, like some of the more popular games. Then you finally get a new player to play WoW and you instantly boost them to 70 and get a tutorial on 5 main abilities. Then you complete a tutorial and now choose a spec. Then all of a sudden you get 20 more abilities and have no idea what is good or bad. Oh, then you get Talents and then have to read all these abilities and then possibly get more abilities. Great! Now, you may have some abilities that are set 1-+ and now you ask how you’re going to be hitting + comfortably. Then, you realize most your abilities aren’t keybinded. But you just spent $60 on a game and you just want to play. So, you skip all the other parts of the game that make you “successful” at the game like keybinding, macros, addons, UI, I.e. so, you finally finish the campaign, learn dragon riding and figure out a new set of talent tree for dragon riding and then you hit max level. Let’s start pve or pvp. You need to gear, so you get to join the queue, you join and then majority of the players make fun of the new players, or tell them they don’t know what they’re doing and won’t try and help because they just took in a lot of information just to make it to max level to play the game. This discourages players and if they make it through the grind and the other grinding like professions and dailies. You get to finally queue into the three main goals at max level, raiding, mythic +, and pvp, you face people that are either way out gear you or just deny your applications because you’re not meta or I.O is too low. Now you’ve spent 30-40 hours to just get frustrated. That’s not a great experience for a new player. As a community, the game isn’t perfect, but no game is, we need to be welcoming, helpful, don’t only post the negatives about the game. Like Pika mentioned. We should talk about the stories that come from playing the game, how it’s helped us, or what brought you to the game and why you still play this game. But, this game also needs to be easier to play to the average player, whom play maybe 2 hours a day. Since the average player is 31, and the people who would have more play time would under the age of 26. There is an average of 8 millions players a month and to see that there is only 700 people in the top rankings is mind boggling. Because most of those players are the top competitors that also probably have 3-5 alts that are also in the 2400 ladder. Which means there around probably 200 players that are in the top. I am sorry for the rant. I believe this is a great game and I do want to see this game get back to what I remember it as a teenager. Thank you for anyone who read this. If you are in this community, we need to do our part to welcome new players. So, we can see it the peak that you remember, and that’s the reason we continue to play this game.

I stared wow at the end of shadowlands and didn’t play much and decided to come back and try at 10.1 and just hit 1800 in 2’s playing disc priest after 3 weeks it’s definitely a little daunting but I did it with 3 addons which were gladius a atonement weak aura and sexy map😂

I think you're kind of missing the point. Yes there is a huge skill difference if you join an FPS as a new player. But in wow, there is a time gate with leveling, then when you finally get max level and you can PvP, there is an objective disadvantage with your gear, skill and UI all at once. If you don't have at least bare minimum of addons, you're at a disadvantage. You don't have PvP gear, so vs ppl who do you're at a disadvantage. Then there is the skill diff that is present in other games. That's the problem with wow PvP. In other games, you just work on the skill as you play. If I play an FPS, my guns won't be doing lower dmg to you because you've played longer. They do the same damage. In wow, you have so many layers to it, and that's really intimidating for new players. Having better gear literally makes you stronger, putting new players at an objective disadvantage from the start.

Very few people know about the communities tab also. Very good place in game to find people to play with.

Its more that pvp is complicated to become competitive. Wow is a pve game first and is pretty casual friendly in this regard. This is true for most games that are PVE focused, its usually not super easy to get into the pvp niche of it

Its the keybinds and the fractional reaction time - thats what kills it. if you dont have proper keybinds that flow youre gunna be .5 seconds behind and in DF thats a matter of a life bar sometimes depending on procs

There’s a fundamental incompatibility here. The WoW designers want dungeons and raids to feel interesting to players, and one way that they make repetitive, fairly mechanical content to be interesting is to up to the complexity involved in just the basic, passive gameplay. Having a lot of skills to use feels good. The problem is that this total over abundance of skills is not AT ALL desirable in PvP. There’s a reason why most PvP-first team games have a fairly limited number of kills, and rely on players awareness of the larger tactical situation to use those skills effectively with their teammates. To have a very large number of skills that your teammates and the opposing team’s players can use quickly becomes overwhelming to players. Like, SUPER QUICKLY. The fact that your average WoW spec has between 20 and 40 abilities is just complete overkill for the 99.9% of players who aren’t deeply invested in succeeding in an environment that isn’t well designed for human comprehension. That’s ONE reason why the game is impossible to follow, and of course it’s compounded by the fact that Blizzard has essentially given up on doing UI design for PvP and outsourced all of that to unpaid people out in the Internet. There’s a huge array of skills and interactions, and if you look at paladins for example, Avenging Wrath isn’t just a skill, it’s a talent that has like five or six other talents THAT CHANGE THAT SAME TALENT. You kinda sorta know what’s happening, and you kinda sorta think “okay, other guy used this thing and I know it’s a big deal”, but down in the nuts and bolts you probably don’t know what’s involved there unless you happen to play that class quite a bit. And then look at warriors - Blizzard went and made talents that proc Avatar for a short duration when you use another skill. So you don’t even fucking know for sure when Avatar gets cast whether it’s a major offensive push unless you also check the duration of the buff, and by the way, you or your teammates can potentially die within a GCD so it makes a pretty big fucking difference to know when the enemy damage window is. They literally designed the talent system around what’s interesting for PvE rotations, and in doing so, they basically just said “okay guys, good luck over there in arena land, we’ll turn the knobs up and down on damage if we think one class is doing too well”. It’s blatantly obvious that the game isn’t accessible to newcomers who inevitably get sick of getting exploded without knowing how or why. But then there’s #1 player world over here saying “IDK, seems fine to me”.

Blizzard could make a server "World of Warcraft Arena" same as WoW classic servers, select a class/race and q arenas with your friends or lfg (not gear needed)

Took a five year or so break from wow for Apex and i dove headfirst into DPI mice and mouse pads lol… I think part of what I like about games is finding that sweet spot with add-ons or peripherals. I definitely feel like this can be a barrier for some people though. That’s why there’s console. lol.😊

the ui should include: - sth like threatplates where you can get rid of all the shitty unimportant debuffs/buffs for pvp so you can see if the guy is cheap shotted instead of seeing wound poison stacks - dr tracker - cd tracker for your team and enemy and that's it

Love your take I’m a newer wow player 2 months in and it wasn’t hard to learn but you can’t really compare a fps with a mmo there 2 different animals I played cod and apex semi professionally found the elder scrolls online and fell in love with mmos got to end game and needed more so I looked into guild wars and wow and wow is the best game I have ever played the community is amazing and the game is just fun you can do what ever you want I love it so much and love your view on wow I’m proof that a new player can learn and do good I’ve cleared normal raid im pushing 15 17 keys in mythic haven’t done much pvp but still a great game and it’s not that hard to learn if you want to

I'm trying to do my part in making the game more welcoming. I made an alt and wanted to farm some conquest. Found a rogue who it turns out didn't have any addons installed, soon found out he needed help with bindinds, and macros. Its few days now that I take some time out of my day to help him get his foot in the arena. Im by no means a great player, but I have played on and off for a while and even just offering someone to play with them helps them out a lot. Sometimes you gotta know when to be a sweaty gamer and push, but also when to make choices that will help the community grow.

They need to add solo queue RBGs. Queuing into a BG is a lot less daunting for players than an arena match. There’s more room to not be a great player, you can have a big or a small impact on the match, you don’t need to play frame perfect, there’s down time between fights and defending flags, it’s not just GOGOGO the second the doors open, people enjoy doing objective based game modes. IMO they should have 2 options for RBG. One should be a team and the other is solo or small group queues. If a team has 7 out of 10 players, they can queue and pick up 3 pugs who are solo queuing. At the end of a match they can choose to invite them to the team and push higher or let it cycle new players in until they find a good fill. It sucks being in RBG-LFG looking for 1 healer or tank for an hour and 7, 8, 9 people are just chilling waiting. I personally hate arenas but love PvP, I imagine there’s a ton of players like me who just don’t enjoy cooldown trading and optimized play for PvP. We still want PvP gear and to have a cool rank titles though and RBG fills that void.

Pika you are an inspiration to all of us older guys who first started playing WoW after barely switching over to cable internet from 56k dial up 😂 I’m used to no addons but can’t keep up anymore 👴 lol.

its not JUST the queue times. WoW still had massive issues before solo shuffle even existed. I’m sure a lot of people were like me and had a friend who tried to get them into WoW, my friend begged me to play and it took like a month to even get to the point where I could play PvP with him. And when I did, I lost every game because I didn’t have gear. Then after quitting and starting about 4 or 5 times. I stuck through for about a month to get to level 120 and get conquest geared after days of losing to fully geared 1300s. I finally enjoyed WoW. Whereas I got recommended League one day, played it immediately, was on a level playing field with the people around me, and immediately got hooked for years.

31:40 Lmao! I'm really impressed by how casually he can say that. His composure already proves how strong he is beyond just his skills.

Fascinating take by Pika. Really agree with his sentiments on the persona and public image of WoW and how it's always negative or uninviting. Plus how he tied it in with the fact that any game that you start out with is always hard as heck. Any game will take a long time to get good at. Although I think there is merit to the argument of add-ons being an issue. But personally I came back to retail from classic WotLK, and I decided to try it out with no add-ons, and honestly retail UI has gotten really good. Hit 1550 achieve on my Rsham with no add-ons, and the default arena UI has everything I could ever want, other than DR tracker. Now if they can make CDs more obvious visually that would be such a huge bonus too. I still can't tell for some classes when they're about to do big damage. Wrath has retail beat in that aspect (knowing why you died or how damage is dealt).

I played with elvui and weak aura Ui for years until i started to pay attention to high rated arena players not using major ui changes and decided to drop all ui addons except gladius and i have to say was the best decision ive made in wow, now i dont constantly stare at my wa timers and actually learned my rotations on every spec i play, improved my awarenes in arenas alot and now i pay way more attention to team mates and stun dr times cause im not only focusing on weakauras

The good thing about CS tho is you can just install the game and queue up. Everyone starts with the same baseline gear and money. Queue time is also quite short. Of course you can also spend tenthousands of hours into the game min maxing everything but for new player and those who got no time for that we have other game modes or silver/gold nova rank. The humps to get into WoW 3v3 arena are insane. For a new player it takes weeks to level and gear. They know nothing about anything and in WoW the most important skillset is knowledge. Also not sure but wouldn't 3v3 3xdps solo shuffle be cool? Nowadays any class can heal anyway and it would heavily reduce the q time.

As a mid-high level fighting game player, I can say that we have this discussion in the community all the time. I see a lot of similarity with wow arena where it's very intimidating for new player. I think you are right about instant gratification cause most newer fighting game game player are gonna take a lot of games before their first win so they just quit. I also find a lot of people that think fps and moba are more accessible when they really aren't. I think the only reason it is is because you can play with multiple friends so lost feels not as bad. Anyways, love you insight since it looks very similar too my view of fighting game. Keep up the content

41:33 this is why we need add-ons or to integrate their functionality in the game, like clique, and to some extend just for CDs you can take everything else away, anything else that it's not cosmetic or adds non-combat functionality i mean and i am probably fine for the most part but add-ons are not really the main issue right now