This has been an unfolding drama over the past few days, and for me is one of those moments where, even making the best effort, I literally cannot understand where Blizzard are going with a change to the game. For a while now, the Conquest system has remained the same. If your rating in either arenas or rated battlegrounds is below around 1550, your arena point cap is 1350 for the week. The total cap is 1650, but in order to reach that higher cap, you need to do battlegrounds. If you're doing rated battlegrounds, you can get all the way to 1650, but not with arenas, unless your rating is high enough. So, when players noticed they weren't getting their conquest above 1350, they took to the forums.
At first, Blizzard Blue Sapperwix said the issue was being looked into, and later he came back with this:
SapperwixTo clarify:
With the latest hotfix to the Conquest Point cap, it is intended that the Conquest awarded by winning Arena matches and Random Battlegrounds will never go above your weekly Arena cap. The only way to gain that last bit of Conquest is to win Rated battlegrounds after you have reached the lower cap. (This is all assuming that your Arena point cap is lower than your Rated Battleground cap)
Now, this has no real impact on experienced PvPers. It doesn't take much of a rating hike to push your arena or rated battleground rating to the point where your arena cap hits 1650. I did work out the exact rating in the past but I can't recall it right now.
The people this does have an impact on, however, are new PvPers. New PvPers were previously able to hit their conquest cap by winning 8 arena matches, and grinding out some battlegrounds. No longer. Now they have to get into a rated battleground team to get the remainder of their points.
This has the effect of widening the divide between the experienced PvPer and the new PvPer even more. New PvPers will struggle enormously to get places on RBG teams. No matter what Blizzard say, this is a sad fact. Furthermore, if new PvPers put a rated battleground team together, rather than joining an experienced one, they'll most likely be facing off against far better geared, and experienced rated teams, thanks to the dearth of novice RBGers. They'll probably have their asses handed to them, winning no points. "How do I get onto an RBG team" is one question I'm asked very regularly. And while there are many great ways to do so like Blizzard MVP Eldacar's LFG List, it's not easy. Blizzard can hand out base resilience 'til the cows come home, but it won't fix that.
Given that this is allegedly the expansion that brings the war back to World of Warcraft, and is apparently a PvP-focused expansion, this move makes no sense to me whatsoever. It's very rare that I say so, I always try to look on the bright side and understand what Blizzard are up to, but this is a bridge too far for me. My mission, with Blood Sport, WoW Insider's fortnightly PvP column, is to get people PvPing, to get newer players over the hurdle into PvP. And that hurdle just got a tiny bit taller.
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Tags: cap-conquest, conquest-cap, conquest-point, conquest-points, cp-cap, mists-of-pandaria, mists-of-pandaria-pvp, mists-of-pandaria-pvp-changes, Random-Battleground, Rated-Battlegrounds, rbgs
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