First of all, if my suggestion has already been made i'm sorry but didnt found it on forum to be honest.
Altho here it is.
With the well know accessibility from Blackrock to obtain 3v3 gear easier then Icecrown/Lordaeron player i was tryng to figure out how could be "fixed".
This is from the PoV of someone who dont need any of the mentioned gear, as i got them,so i hope to not look like "QQ NEED EZ GEAR QQ"
Right now (i suppose almost end of the season) we can clearly notice how is the 3s overall,
in order to obtain shoulders right now u're supposed to reach 2k rating in 3s, but in reality we're talking about reach approximately top 10 in Icecrown/Lordaeron, which is for obvious reasons not how's supposed to be.
So, any "casual" reach 2k for an item isnt supposed to bet that hard to obtain (people in WOTLK or classic, getting these rating in PvE gear..) will meet in their way top10 teams which are fighting for titles, as soon as reached above 1900 mmr usually.
I'm not even talking about the T2 weapons or even more...the tabard.
My suggestions are the following:
- Lower the overall rating for Shoulders, T2. In order to make it "easier" to reach that rating, allowing people to see their "goal" and do not give up after meeting high rated teams that are going for glad/r1 so much often (one thing is being stuck at 1600, while your goal is 2000 and top teams have 2300 max...Another thing is you're stucked at 1600 and you see your goal at 1800, so meeting such high rated teams wont destroy your team rate that much in your way to an item).
- Allow the 3s teams to start at 1500 rate or so, in order to make shorter the road for the items, in this way there will be an easier gap between teams which are fighting for titles, and players who are just aiming to 2k/2.2 for their gear. Of course u're gonna say "Well, in this case people get istant S8 gloves and offset...." my answer would be, why not? you can pretty much get 1500 in any way with any gear you want so wouldnt be any different or "unbalanced".
Considering that right now only 36 teams in whole 3 servers are above 2k rate, i think something has to be done in order to increase the activity, and i personally didnt saw any attempt to solve this or even test other things despite "If the ladder is inactive is a problem we cant fix" which nowdays isnt.
Making teams start at 1500 rating, would easly increase the rank titles by far, creating at least a gap between casuals and pro, allowing casuals to enjoy and get slowly better at the 3s bracket while obtaining their gears without being just "free rating meat" for meeting every 2-3 games a top team which ends up have not even 2.2k mmr.
As usually you tend to reach 1500 rating with at least 30 (?) wins, to end up with more like 1800 mmr.
Making a bigger gap between casual 3s and "title/rank" teams would definetly revive even more the bracket , isted of right now where so many people dont step in 3s just because in order to get their shoulders, would need to get top10 or close to, while T2 is like Gladiator range...
Hope to have been the most clear as possible, and sorry to the mods in case this suggestion has been already done and denied, would gently receve the link of it in case just to read all the discussion.
I've been reading this whole post and i can totally agree in many and most of these suggestions.
I, myself, not a huge tryhard gladiator or anything like that, im not even afraid of admitting to be a casual pvp players, since most of the time, my main goal as a pvper is to gear up my characters and becoming more powerful at pvp (In a figurative way of thinking).
As i said in a post i made hours ago, i've been struggling so hard at 3vs3 for the last few years and nothing have been done in order to adress the many problems pvp arena brackets has it. specially getting WF shoulders. Since yeah, you pretty much need to get to gladiator rating so you can the very least get shoulders and ultimately T2 weapons and tabard.
with not that much to say i truly agree with the many suggestions you came up with.
This is still about changing how the shoulders (or other similarly rate-gated gear) can be earned. Wording it differently, changing how it works in you idea to get the shoulders, nothing makes it a different suggestion. The aim of the suggestion is still something that has been denied numerous times.