IS THIS ARENA FUN? DOESN'T MATTER.

The minority of people who genuinely have fun in arena fall into one of two categories:
1) They are attracted only to the novelty of the mosh pit.
2) They enjoy tic tac toe.

And there's nothing wrong with that. 3rd graders everywhere have fun playing Tic Tac Toe. Millions of grown adults have visited Yahoo! Games. Millions more have played web ad games for free mortgages. The real question is, does Blizzard want to become known as a peddler of Tic Tac Toe? This is how the image of Blizzard is being shaped in many of their formerly loyal customers' minds. There are consequences for whoring yourself out, Blizzard.

"Fun" is not the issue here. Blizzard's reputation as a gaming company is at stake.

The two most successful competitive games of all time are Starcraft and Counterstrike. Neither of these games is afraid to let matches go on for hours if needed. Imagine if in Starcraft, a player was PoM'ed and CS'ed during the opening cheap shot, and lost the game 3 seconds later. It would be as though the scouting peons just so happened to have the ability to launch several Nuclear Warheads in quick succession. Starcraft would have been a laughingstock of a competitive game and "e-sport." Starcraft is admired and its professionals exalted precisely because it is the exact opposite of what arena is striving to be.

No one in WoW arena has come close to the stature of an X'ds~Grrr... or a [SlayerS]Boxer. And with the direction the dev team is taking arena, no one in WoW ever will. But some people are having fun, and that's all that matters, right?

The real issue is not fun. The real issue is whether this is a well-crafted competition.




IS ARENA SMART? NOT EVEN CLOSE.

When you remove strategic options from a game, you make the game exponentially simpler (See Appendix for a non-rigorous example of this). Because the damage increases have been so overwhelming, the game becomes more and more 2 dimensional. Healers have to spam heal more, and have less time to use the other 90% of their spellbook. Players now know that the range of strategies that the enemy can employ is very limited. Imagine Tic Tac Toe, except you have you tell your opponent what your next 3 moves are going to be.

The argument is similar for DPSers and I won't belabor it. Basically, every incremental increase in damage that Blizzard decided to approve made the game exponentially stupider. Congrats.

But wait, like a slimey infomercial, there's more. Mana efficiency has been nerfed considerably. So players now have a smaller mana pool to work with. This constrains players' choices, because instead of spending their mana doing that minor incremental thing that separated the great players from the good, they instead are increasingly forced to make the same decision as every other mana user, because that minor incremental bit of skill costs too much mana and will wind up losing you the game. For each increment you shrink that mana pool, the game gets exponentially stupider and more predictable.

This is as non-academic and non-abstract as I can make it. Dramatically increasing DPS relative to survivability, and reducing effective mana pools, has made this game far stupider than the sum of its parts. Get it?

"Is this...completely pathetic devolution of arena, intentional, or an unforeseen accident?"

BOTTOM LINE, BLIZZARD. ARENA IS DUMBER, INTENTIONALLY OR NO?

Let's cut to the chase Blizzard. There are lots of long-winded blue posts with specific examples. Enough rhetoric, enough fuzz.

The game has been made dumber. The vast majority of players can see that, so don't beat around the bush like we're a bunch of 1st graders:

-Exponentially less strategy
-Exponentially less anticipation of opponent actions
-Exponentially less brains required.

Is this state, this completely pathetic devolution of arena, intentional, or an unforeseen accident? These are the only two possible answers, and neither is pretty, but how about having some balls and owning up.

APPENDIX

Player 1's Choices:

Strategy A

Strategy B

Strategy C

Strategy D

Strategy E

.

.

.

Strategy Z

Player 2's Responses:

Response to Strategy A:

Strategy 1

Strategy 2

Strategy 3

Strategy 4

Response to Strategy B:

Strategy 5

Strategy 6

Strategy 7

Strategy 8

Response to Strategy C:

Strategy 9

Strategy 10

Strategy 11

Strategy 12

.

.

.

.

Response to Strategy Z:

etc.

etc.

etc.

As you can see, the initial strategic choices each have a range of possible responses. Each of THESE responses have a range of responses of their own. Every time Blizzard removes one of these initial strategic choices, they exponentially shrink the potential "he knows that I know that he knows" type of situation, which is what well-made games are all about.

You and I both understand that the strategies aren't so discrete as they are a gradient, a ratio between how much, say, you're mashing your healing buttons, to how much you're doing with the other 90% of your spellbook. But the point and proof is clear enough.