rayijin

To summarize what the changes do is bring the effort required to get pvp epics closer to that of pve epics.

Here is what happened:

1) Season 1 and 2 gear requires zero skill, zero effort and zero gear to acquire. Instead, a player must make a miniscule time investment to acquire it. S2 weapons better than PvE equivalents and far easier to obtain.

2) PvE gear requires consumable, repair money and high time investment to acquire. The "good" loot is not guaranteed, and wiping offers exactly zero rewards. In fact, wiping punishes players by forcing them to farm more.

3) This leads to much complaining, rightfully, that pvp epics are "welfare" epics. Many PvE'rs are disgruntled with the free epics being better and easier to acquire than PvE gear, and either quit, make angry noises, or pvp even though they hate pvp to get a pve edge.

4) Season 3 gear finally requires some skill to acquire - at least the most highly visible and biggest upgrade pieces. Some bitching accompanies this, but point selling/point boosting is rampant, meaning players can be carried to it (opinion: similar to PvE, except it's done for gold rather than for "the guild", leading to a negative view of it).

5) Season 4 is announced, and requires skill/effort/time commitment/practice to obtain about half of it - or rating selling/carrying. Getting PvP gear begins to resemble the skill required to get PvE gear.

This is my own theory:

The cycle has come full circle - except now the people still playing the game are used to "welfare" epics, while most of those who would have been happy with these changes in s1 have already quit.

Hence, now that the "welfare" epics are being taken away, those that remain, that have been complacent with their free epics, are now upset.

Even those that originally raised protest but then ended up simply farming the easy epics - such as myself - am feeling a little sad that my soup kitchen purples are being taken away.

However, what the overall effect is balancing pvp/pve rewards, and I consider it a good thing:

PvE has taken some of the best aspects of PvP (gold inflation ==> less farming ==> more skill, less timesink; Always have been trash epics to make wiping not quite as bad)
PvP has taken some of the best aspects of PvE (skill required to get gear ==> gear has meaning ==> no longer just a timesink, doesn't reward "wiping" as much)

What we're seeing is PvP and PvE converge in reward/effort ratio - PvP just lets you do it with fewer players.

** Edit: I think PvP is a timesink similar to PvE, if you want to get good at it. Play a lot of games, develop PvP strategies and reflexes, and you can get better. Maybe you'll plateau at a certain spot, but those who play an hour a week would never be able to get epics from a hard PvE instance either. So when I say effort, I don't just mean natural "skill" or reflexes, but also, time.