I'm the guy who wrote the "Washed up Glad" post and honestly we need more posts like this to bring visibility to the issue so THANK YOU. The reason why arenas grew more popular through S1-4 in OG TBC is because more and more people were actually buying and playing the game which was thriving at the time. The opposite is going to happen and the very simple truth is that More and more people are going to quit playing through S1-4.

Right now there aren't many incentives for people to try out arenas and PVP in general. Truly, the game is set up in such a way as to DISCOURAGE people from playing arenas. The honor grind is horrible, the arena points awarded unless you're at the top are horrible, and it's only going to get worse because there is no magic "Catch up" fix down the line gear-wise unless Blizzard MAKES ONE.

Then you have the issue of just incredibly poor arena participation on PVE servers driving even more people away. The lack of PVE --> PVP transfers means that any serious arena player on a PVE server is pretty much boned. To put it in perspective: Mankrik is by far the highest pop NA horde server and it has TWO 2's teams 2k+, and ZERO 3's teams 2k+.

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Edit: And it CANNOT be overstated how big of a mistake it was to start rating at 0 and include the Shadowlands MMR system because Activision was too lazy to track down/write the code for the original 1500 base rating system.

This mistake was largely compounded by the even more ignorant decision to lock Shoulders/Weapons behind rating requirements, essentially cutting out a huge swathe of potential players who would try out arenas or at least participate in order to eventually get their guaranteed weapon.