As I have spent some time in the past railing about several flaws in raiding which were being exposed by the availability of arena and BG gear, I haven’t yet really written about where BGs in particular need work and improvement. Pretending all is fine in PvPland is of course blinding ourselves from reality, and while I do not believe that the gearing mechanisms themselves need much tweaking in their current state, Battlegrounds currently suffer from several issues.
The introduction of daily BG quests, combined with the changes to AV in patch 2.3, have magnified the AFK problem to a serious proportion, and the only consolation here is that while every faction believes they are being hurt specifically by this problem, the true proportion (at least in AV) tends to be similar on both sides (and growing). But the daily quests have also helped spread the problem beyond AV, proof, if it were needed, that a simple hotfix lowering the amount of reports required to flag a player won’t do the trick.
Blizzard recognizes this to a point, quoting Drysc:
We want to fix the main issue.
The main issue is not that people AFK, it’s why they AFK.
The main issue is not that some no longer queue, it’s why they no longer queue.Asking to make the AFK or queuing system more robust (read: punishing) is really just band-aiding a band-aid and on and on. It will never stop, and we’ll only reach a point of total agreement when no one is allowed to play.
We’re attempting to put in good, balanced, fun changes that fix these issues at their root.
I’m being a bit hypocritical because the hotfix today did none of this(…)
Thing is, how do you patch fun back into the game? Fun is a relative notion. And in all things PvP, or rather the BG aspect, the participating player demographic is comprised of at least three major groups, with distinct interests:
- Those who play to win: These are people who want to win while holding to the notion that a victory without challenge is of little honour. They want to be recognized as the most badass kings of the hill, typically the people who started PCTing to US BG9 when that one acquired a reputation of holding the best teams in the region.
- Those who play to crush: These are the breed qualified as griefers in other MMOGs. They aren’t interested in challenge in the least - what these want is to make their victim suffer until he packs his things and goes home crying. The stereotypical schoolyard bully, they’ll opt for GY camping every time, even back in the days before battlegroups were introduced and camping in WSG would eventually piss off enough players that they’d have to wait several hours until people would queue up for another game on the opposing faction
- Those who play to grind: these don’t really care that they are in a BG. They have rewards as their goal, they need points (and marks), and they will treat PvP as just another grind standing in the way of what they want. Typically, you’ll find some hardcore raiders who hate PvP in this group but are in there because they need the trinket for a boss fight, or a piece of gear they can’t get out of raiding because of itemization gaps.
And you could probably add a couple of subgroups, including the casual player who queues up because he doesn’t really have time to do anything else.
Obviously, each group will have fundamentally different notions of fun, and I think Blizzard has an uphill battle ahead of them if they want to genuinely patch fun back into BGs.
Still, there probably are several adjustments and improvements which can at least incentivize active participation, making it more attractive. Good ideas are a dime a dozen, and in no particular order, here are some of mine:
- Get rid of the current BG daily, replace it by objective-based quests, like the basic AB quest where you need to cap the 4 nodes farthest from your starting location. Expand the scope of the possible objectives in a way that helps further your side’s progress: instead of just getting nodes capped, take and hold such and such node or tower for X amount of minutes. In AV, this could include taking an objective within a certain amount of time, freeing a specific wing commander, keeping a tower until X minutes of BG duration (or a win, whatever happens first). Careful design would have to ensure that the possible objectives your battlegroup could generate independently from each others don’t work against each other or don’t spread your resources too thin, obviously.
- AV needs to be redesigned as a perfect mirror. Before patch 2.3, horde was at a disadvantage because you just couldn’t cap the Aid Station without fighting your way through every single NPC sitting in the base while alliance could pretty much bypass most of them, giving them a speed advantage. But with 2.3, defending your Captain during the first 10-15 minutes is one of the major strategies to craft a win, and let’s face it, Galv is much easier to defend than Balinda - if the tank goes down, Galvanger will pretty much make mincemeat of the rest of the assault group, whereas Balinda poses little challenge in that respect.
- Reserves should be applied to WSG, to break up long standoffs. A cap dents opponent reserves as does killing your foes, while a defense recovers a couple reserves. Alternatively, you could up the pace by making it so only one flag could be carried at any time, forcing FC attack or defense for any success.
- Grant some bonus honour for being within a certain range of an achieved objective: capping a flag in WSG or EOTS, recovering it, capping a node, a tower, or a GY all should reward participating to the action. Balancing it so it is interesting enough to be there instead of AFK or fooling around in the midfield yet not so interesting that the games move from turtle to turtle would, however, prove particularly tricky.
- Improve / rework the AFK debuff: the smart leecher will activate his AV trink and simply get his debuff removed by the opponent’s offensive when they get close to the boss (and then end up yanked to whatever GY their faction holds, making it hard for the rest to track them down). Add in some automation: As time passes, damage taken, dealt and healing done minima slowly rises, and if you get below the threshold, you get the AFK debuff.
- The AFK debuff should also get combined with honourless target applied a moment later, at least in AV (and WSG if reserves get implemented there too). Getting killed while both honourless and AFK are active no longer removes the debuffs, the player must engage in active action once he’s hit by both to remove them. And get rid of wolves and rams, it’s too easy to remove the debuff with these around without actually contributing at all.
- After a certain time being hit with both AFK and HT, you get booted and deserter applied. Getting deserter that way is punitive and the debuff lasts longer each time you get it (as opposed to self-initiated deserter when a player HAS to leave due to RL or something).
- Improve the matchmaking system already.
- Another BG is long overdue.
- Disable queueing while in BG for all queues below 20 minutes when in WSG, AB and EOTS, 30 minutes when in AV.
Will any of these propositions patch fun in the game? Probably not, and certainly not by themselves. Still, I think some of them may at least encourage participation to a certain point, and make the experience more enjoyable for the participants.
I’d like to close this post WoWInsider-style with a question to my esteemed readers: what are your ideas to improve BGs? Which of mine are especially stupid? I’m looking forward to your input.
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10 Responses to “A few Ideas to Improve Battlegrounds”
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Definately matchmaking improvement would help AFK. Some people AFK to abuse the system, but others AFK because they feel like they have no chance or fighting/struggling is pointless. This secondary group of “AFK” can be corrected if everyone feels like they have a shot.
Premade vs Premade, PUG vs PUG, and track “daily” records and sort queue by those measures. If you’ve won 5 WSG in a row via PUG queue, your next matches will be sorted with similar record teammates and opponents. If you’ve been losing WSG, you get sorted out with people who have also been losing.
For Premade queue, broaden the battlegroup restriction across more then 1 server cluster. This rewards them with more chances for good competition and cross realmforum bragging rights, without lengthening their queue times by crazy rates.
I’m not big on PvP. While I understand the AFK problem, whats the problem currently with queueing and why would you recommend disabling it?
The problem isn’t with queueing in itself, it’s with BG-hopping: you are in the middle of AB, you’re doing well, and suddenly an AV pops for some of your players. They vanish from all the positions they were holding, and after a while replacements spawn… at the starting point. In the meantime, the previously defended nodes are in enemy hands.
I like the ideas you’ve presented. I would like to see the BG daily simpler and for less honor (with a change). I wouldn’t always want to play several BGs to get the quest done, so cap 1 or 2 nodes for the quest and it should work by being near it, not actually capping the node yourself. At least make it proximity if nothing else. You could then lose the BG but complete the quest. There will always be dominant factions, so don’t punish the casual.
The AV changes are spot on for me, but I don’t know that BG that well.
WSG should have a timer IMO. Long BG’s are hardly fun, so there should be no way for one side to purposefully prolong the game for “honor farming.” WSG would be much more fun if you had 20 minutes, there wouldn’t be a turtle option. If one side turtles, at least the other side would know to go all offense. This solves the problem of the flags as well. No need to have one flag or the other out, it doesn’t work in anyone’s favor to hide the flag. Or combine them and have the timer and one flag out at a time.
Can’t agree more about bonus honor for being near completed objectives. This seems long overdue, there should be a reward for playing the right way. Adding on to what you’ve said, give a small honor bonus for defending a node. If an enemy player dies in your vicinity and you are close to a captured flag, you should see a small bonus. Especially since there are diminishing returns on kills. If I defend a flag and kill the same 4 players 30 times, I should be rewarded for my successful defense. Clearly this would compound the AFK problem if that weren’t addressed as well though.
AFK problems will always exist, so that should be worked on as well. There has to be a long lasting punishment for repeat offenders. It’s not fair to a BG to even have AFKers in it. Since you can’t have players kick afkers to avoid griefing, have the matching system take AFK reports into account and make them queue longer and be grouped with other AFK abusers. This also gives players incentive to report AFK. Also, make sure that you can’t falsely report AFK based on contribution to the BG. This is already getting into a complicated AFK system, but if even 1 player is AFK, it’s one less player to help try to win the BG and can have an impact. The only way to help is to add accountability to the individual. If there is punishment for AFK, less people would do it.
I like the idea of honorless target and afk debuffs, after a certain amount of time kicking the player out. It should be a short time, like 5 minutes. Also, if this happens to a player, they should get a penalty point or something, which goes away after 30 days. That way, you can keep track of repeat offenders and people could change their ways or only have 1 black mark against them. Actual intentional deserters would get no such point, since they open up thier slot immediately. Perhaps each penalty point could add 1 minute of queue time before elegibility to the BG. 1 minute seems reasonable for one offense, but the stakes get higher quickly.
Just throwing out ideas here; I may have missed some obvious flaws in my ideas as well.
All of your changes seems logical to me. For me my main issue is AV because I am on Stormstrike and Alliance has basically given up on AV in our battlegroup.
What I would really love to see is mirror AV and the AFK debuff to actually kick people with a couple reports. I think they need to drastically drop the amount of reports it takes to get the debuff going and enough reports should kick them from the BG regardless of whether they shrug off the debuff initially or not. Make it a bit more like Xbox Live. Even a simple vote to kick option would be nice.
I also want group queueing back. AV is too miserable not to have some friends in there.
Lastly though I have rarely done WSG… I agree WSG needs a timer. Something to force it to finish in say… 30 min. If you cap two flags and the opposition turtles but you are able to keep them from getting any on you then you deserve to win! (in my personal opinion)
> “For me my main issue is AV because I am on Stormstrike and Alliance has basically given up on AV in our battlegroup.”
Interesting, I play Alliance on the Thunderhorn(EU) server and for me, AV is where I go to win.
The sad thing is I see Alliance are not even trying, sometimes I’ll be the highest “damage done” Alliance player and my gear sucks!
On the other hand Alliance have totally given up on WSG and EOTS and on AB the lose percentage is pretty high. This is pretty depressing as I need these other BGs for both marks and daily quests and currently I can do 10 WSG matches and lose all. Badly
@Gwaendar : you are definitely a smart guy.
As I really love BG’s, even in pick-up trying everytime to help - aka leading gently, defending, talking : sometimes it works - the measures you propose could really purify the BG’s environnement.
Do you know what is the last trend in Alterac ? Non-afk people going to chain kill Afk people in their own spawn points… (Pally Bubble/Mage go AP/AoE in the cavern). It’s really symptomatic of the easy honor (s)illness.
@gt : It could be a good idea but the problem I see with the voting AND group queing is that organized group will just kick up every 61-69 players as they will “slow” them or be focused by an adverse player.
But why do people don’t want to try together in BG’s ? Especially in Alliance side ? I don’t think Alliance players are dumber than Horde one’s.
If Blizz’s goal is “making BGs fun again” I think they have some work ahead of them, the fact of the matter is that no matter how fun something is, it’s going to get boring if you have to grind it over and over and over.
I love battlegrounds myself but it’s so much less fun when I “have to do it” for marks/honor as opposed to when I “want to do it” for the fun of it.
@Solidstate - It really is a freak of nature. Horde rolled us hard post patch and after a week of coming out of AV with oftentimes 0 honor… we just gave up one by one. I haven’t heard of anything on this scale anywhere else. Horde side queue times are 2-3 hours.
I guess you proved that each battlegroup has its own personality and chain of events that dictates who wins X more so than other things? Mentality and luck goes a long way.
@Dajay - I see your point!
[...] I’m holding the opinion that AV needs fixes, both in its design and more generally through improvements with the AFK [...]