I agree Sushi, the state of pvp at K1 is decreasing, and i have a hard time seeing how it gets fixed. The real issue lies in the opening of K2; all new players will tend to go for the realm with a shorter lifetime, understandably. Theres no fun in getting 60 at a realm where everyone is fully T2 with legendarys. Without overthinking it too much, i think it will get even worse. Vanilla wow requires shitloads of hours put in, and i think a larger amount of people are quitting than starting at K1 atm. I feel like the people that are hitting 60 now, are some of those that started on K1 before K2 had launched, so as time progresses, even fewer people will pvp. Nostalrius players are already 60, the feenix players are done PvPing, whats left is only the small amount of people that start on K1.
How do we as a community fix this? We can't. Implementing K2 was not a mistake, but in the hindsight of the DDoS, it is! The PvP pool on K1 went from 2000 to 1000 during the DDoS, everything is about supply and demand, and there is no demand for a second Kronos server, atleast not from a PvP perspective. I wish K1 and K2 could be merged x-realm, but i dont know how they could justify that suddenly K2 people are gonna get Sulfuras rekt on a daily basis.
As for alliance pov at the pvp situation; i can clearly see the decrease in players, all the previous rank 13/14 have either quit the game or stepped down after finishing their rank, they will play a few BG's a week, but that does not help the queue or the PvP pool. When my brother (Iwilltiltyou) and i started ranking, alliance had a premade consistint of War Sole, and we ourselves made a premade of whoever wasn't invited into that group. We had plenty of people to play with. Now, we can barely pull a main group together, and when we do, it consist of 3-4 warriors, and what group have ever benefitted by 4 warriors, specially if they arn't fully epiced with Ashkandi / Sulfuras.
Not too many weeks ago, i feel that the Horde and Alliance premades (The ones playing alot, for ranking, not the ones that are already geared and just wanna snipe) fought well, but the decrease in competition on classes and fear of loosing a spot is ruining the morale. We play unorganized even though we have played hundreds of WSGs together. Alliance queues are still hot and i feel bad for the hordes having to sit in endless queues.
I cant speak for everyone on Alliance, but only from a personal perspective (and i dont play that much anymore, too much RL agro), but i can definetly understand the demotivation; We have to put in many hours a day, day in day out to reach honor caps, and there have been disagreements with Chinese premades and player that went rogue, that have forced people to play even more. And right now the typical queue session goes something like this: Horde Ranking Premade -> Chinese Premade -> PuG -> Arcanum Premade -> Horde Ranking Premade -> PuG -> Arcanum .... Rinse repeat. (The PuG can sometimes be a random horde premade)
Of course premade vs premade is hillarious, and a few weeks back when we had 10 PuGs in a row, we were hoping for a good fight soon because it got too monotone. But trying to farm 400k honor and facing premades in 75% of the games and having to fight long games, can be exhausting. From a PvP honor farming perspective, instant queues are fantastic and something you cant complain about, but from a competitive perspective, it gets hard to focus, we could just take a break once in a while, but that brings me back to the instant queues being tempting.
I talked about us not being able make a proper setup, often bringing 3-4 warriors, but i also feel that not only do we have a small player pool, we also get outgeared badly. We are all equipped in Blue pvp gear, while our competition is T2 + R12/13 geared. Malise / Naturalist / Any Warlock can basically oneshot all of our Warriors in matter of 1½ gcd. This does not take anything away from any of you, i think people like Sushi, Burn, Malise, Swag, Ladow, Naturalist, H2K and most of the frost mages and hunters are all really great players, and i wish Alliance had a bigger player pool that dosn't just consist of warriors (i swear we could make a WSG premade with 10 warriors who are all ranking atm).
My conclusion? K1 PvP can't be fixed. Over the next 2 weeks atleast 7-8 high ranked alliance PvPers will be done, and theres barely anyone to take over, and these people are all playing every day, so this basically means there will be 1 less WSG. My best bet is that Twinstar has to rethink K1/K2.
// Tiltinc