Jaxtrasi

Put PVP aside for a moment. Focusing purely on PVE, we have two conflicting groups within WoW: raiders and five-manners. Both groups want more content, both groups want viable progression. The raiders are of the opinion that, since organising 25 people is hard, their content should provide better mechanical rewards, and for the most part the five-manners are happy for this to be the case. The conflict arises when one or other group is of the opinion that while Blizzard are developing content for one group, they are not also developing content for the other.

(Note that not only the existence of content, but also the quality of that content is relevant. Would any raider claim that Ogri'la was interesting, challenging or rewarding content on a par with Black Temple? I hope not.)

This is a difficult problem to solve; Blizzard have only finite development resources and we have to trust them that developing more, and more exclusive at each tier, 25 man raid dungeons is good use of their time. However, of all things the Arena system suggests a solution. Each new season in the Arena, new gear becomes available at the same price as last season. It's harder to get to the top spot now, because your competition are wearing last season's gear rather than janky blues, but losing ten games per week earns you just as many points now as it did then. For a brand new PVPer, either more gear (in the form of old gear which has a reduced cost) or better gear (in the form of new season's gear at the same price) is available for the same or only slightly more effort.

Arena thus has a relatively static barrier to entry over time. This is absolutely necessary; if the cost of gear grew over time (for example, if season 2 gear cost twice what season 1 gear cost) new PVPers would find it impossible to ever progress toward the top end of the table, no matter how skilled they were. You have to spend a season playing catch-up, but you only have to spend one season (as a highly skilled player) acquiring gear which allows you to then compete on a roughly even footing with people who've been around since day 1.

By comparison, new PVE content has a dramatically higher barrier to entry over time. One cannot simply walk into the Black Temple in 115 blues on patch day. Even if there weren't an attunment process involving The Eye, Serpentshrine Cavern and Mount Hyjal, the bosses are intended to require a lot of game knowledge that can only come through long experience, or other people telling you how to do it, and a relatively good level of gear. Unlike PVP, the release of new top-end content for PVE does not affect the old content - whereas in the Arena, the release of Season 3 means that Season 3-geared warriors are going to come and kick your head in, the release of Black Temple (or any of the Burning Crusade zones) makes very little different to your progress in the Scarlet Monastery.

Of course, the barriers to entry are lowered over time. Both raid and five-man dungeons are nerfed (slightly or hugely), attunments are dropped, existing gear is buffed and new, available gear (such as the engineering hats, or badge gear) is added, all of which provide a boost to people who haven't made the leap to the next tier of raid content yet. However this process is gradual, informal, and may or may not make a practical difference over time. Magtheridon is undoubtedly "easier" now than he was at release, but not to the extent that season 3 gear is better than season 1 gear. His complexity is still infinitely beyond the reach of those unable or unwilling to coordinate in 25-man groups. In PVE it is now *slightly easier* to obtain items of the same quality as a year ago. In PVP it is now *slightly harder* to obtain items of hugely superior quality to a year ago.

One might reasonably say, how is this a problem? The person in the Scarlet Monastery doesn't care about Black Temple, and nor does the person keying and gearing themself for Karazhan. Static content which they haven't enjoyed yet still exists for them to experience, so why don't they go and experience it? The answer lies in the player's behaviour. Rational or not, people want gear and they want good gear. They look at available gearing routes and say "well, I could spend this week running Heroic Shattered Halls... which is stupidly hard (in blues, with a warrior tank) and provides 115 blue gear, or I could spend the week playing my ten Arena games and doing PVP and have a lot of gear to show for it". This is even more skewed on PVP servers where your survival walking around the world is substantially better enhanced by PVP gear which is not only higher iLevel, but more appropriately itemised for being ambushed while standing outside Karazhan. It becomes harder and harder to find level 70 players willing to *start* the chain of PVE content that leads to the top of the raid tier, and finding people willing to finish it has always been difficult.

What I propose is not to nerf Arena rewards, buff PVE rewards, nerd PVE content or anything like that. It's to apply a similar philosophy to PVE as is currently being applied to PVP. The following assumptions are made:

a) Five man content is always easier than twenty-five man content given similar encounter complexity and gear requirements.
b) There exist a significant number of players who demand top-end content which is exclusive and provides superior rewards as a reward for being in an elite, cutting-edge group.
c) The current model of PVE content while perfectly good on paper, loses out in practice against a competing system (PVP) which offers a reduced barrier to entry for superior quality gear, drawing players away from PVE.

The proposed system works like this:

Significant endgame content is divided explicitly into seasons, each one coming with a major content patch. To fit with the entertainingly overblown style of WoW, we'll call them Ages. Each new Age brings with it new content for the available play styles - explicitly bringing content for all of them so that there can be no accusations of favouritism. Let's start with an illustration of the hypothetical Age 1, the release of Burning Crusade.

"I've never known people as dogmatic as those who insist that all opinion is equally subjective."