Blizzard has no plans to implement any form of rewards into the game's newly released "brawling" PvP system. As it is, the system only allows for you to go head to head with each other in battles that offer no rewards aside from the satisfaction of having defeated your sparring partner.
In the absence of any sort of reward system, PvP is a free exercise that lends nothing to, and doesn't take any cues from the game's persistent character stat trackers, which typically reward players for accomplishing various deeds throughout the game.
According to Diablo III lead designer Kevin Martens, the studio considered implementing point systems and other forms of tracking brawling, but ultimately decided against it.
"We know that, for many players, having some way of "showing off" your skills in battle either through a point tracker or reward system is very desirable, and we debated various different ways of doing that within the current design of brawling," wrote Martens. "We even discussed adding ears for players to collect after they'd slaughtered their opponents, and whether that type of "reward" could exist as items or as an ever-growing counter in the UI.
"After all those discussions, though, we always came back to the same principle: brawling is a simple, straightforward way to knock your friends and/or enemies into next week. That's it. No rewards, no objectives, no scores," he said. "The goal of the feature is to give players a way to fight each other in a no-holds-barred kind of environment, and we want to keep that environment as simple, straightforward, and "no-holds-barred" as possible."
Martens went as far as to suggest that players make up their own rules for combat in the absence of any official ones. Prior to the release of the current brawling mode, the original PvP system even had a full point-based system with rewards.
The developer admitted that much of the PvP features, including 2v2 combat, was scrapped due to time constraints and a rush to release the system.
"2v2 brawling is another form of team-based Deathmatch. The problems we had with depth and balance with 4v4 aren’t better at all with 2 people per side. It's not like we don’t like this idea, to be clear," he wrote. "Here's where we are right now: we want to get the basic player-vs-player combat to you all as quickly and as simply as we can. Brawling in the Scorched Chapel is that."
News of the PvP mode's simplicity may come as a disappointment to many who were expecting the game to offer PvP content on par with its PvM-focused (player vs monster) campaign.
