Posts Tagged ‘Battlegrounds’

Time to Rethink Arena?

This week ended up a lot better for Steptoe and I than our first week in Season 5 (where we ran 1-9), with a 10-6 win ratio out of 16 games. In general we felt a lot more comfortable with the new context and made up some of the ranking losses. The fact that both of us also got ourselves a Titansteel  Destroyer crafted (upgrading from the De-Raged Waraxes we had from Amphitheater of Anguish) certainly helped.

We’re still working on finding our correct skill / gear niche, and the teams we have been facing have been of very various qualities: some quite skilled people without necessarily imba gear, but also some teams which were outgearing us quite massively but showing little to justify it.

The fact that PvP gear can be easily obtained through PvE nowadays (and is much more difficult, in particular for semi-casual players, to obtain through PvP only) got me thinking back to the good old debates we had a year ago.

In practice, with the PvP gear acquisition made very easy through PvE, we suddenly find ourselves in a situation not unlike the WoW classic battleground scene, when T2 / T3 clad players would completely destroy everything in their path by the sheer superiority of their kit, skills be damned. In practice, the ease of obtaining PvP gear through PvE nullifies to quite an extent what the introduction of resilience was meant to achieve: to separate PvE and PvP gear, enclosing the latter in a relatively dedicated manner and rendering crossovers more difficult.

There’s little point in rehashing today the old disputes about the fact that S2 – S4 gear could be used a lot easier for PvE than the reverse. That was the 2007 debate. In 2009, though, the current situation (as well as Ghostcrawler’s repeatedly stated intention to make PvP more about skills, usually applied to BG) led me to rethink the arena.

Currently, until one reaches the point where he wears the entire current season PvP gear, arena matches (of course especially in the noob brackets yours truly operates) don’t just pitch opponents together to measure their respective skill. Gear remains a factor which can compensate for quite some other shortcomings, it is for instance quite a bit more challenging to burn down a DK with 28k HP than one with 20k health (the level you’d typically be at if you start out with crafted saronite sets).

So in any matches below the top and fully geared brackets, the contest isn’t currently just about skills, but the skills / gear combination (just as it was before). The PvE gearing route just adds to the issue however.

If you really wanted to make Arena just about measuring player skills, though, how would you go about that?

Perhaps it is time to rethink the whole PvP gear aspect from scratch, by actually getting rid of it entirely. A notion I used to oppose in 2007 on the reasoning that arena was a valid gear progression path. Well, there’s a saying in French, “il n’y a que les imbeciles qui ne changent jamais d’avis”: only imbeciles never change their minds.

With two more years of arena, what I’d advocate today is the following:

While we talk about rating brackets, this is quite informal. This could actually be formalized into, say, three leagues: novices, pro and champion’s league for instance. A new team starts out in the novice league and (perhaps reusing the current rating system) eventually work their way upwards to the higher leagues.

Upon entering the arena, the gear gets replaced by a standardized gladiator set with different qualities depending on the league. In order to leave some choice in building up your character’s equipment, players can select a set of tokens for each equipment slot (reusing the Gem name prefixes for instance, or the current gear names): each token gives a gear pieces with a baseline of resilience and stamina, and a variable mix of other stats, eg picking an Ornate leg token will add a bit of intel and spellpower to the baseline stats, a Savage leg token adds strength and crit and so on.

You then get the according gear set to match your token selection whenever you enter an arena match, with more powerful versions of the gear depending on the league you’re playing in. The key point is, though, that everyone playing in the same league as you will have the same level of gear.

If you want to tweak your setup, just pick a different set of tokens to emphasize eg haste or more even more defense, all within boundaries set by your league.

As the seasons turn, Blizzard can then adjust the values to adjust the gameplay. For instance Season 5 is pretty much a burst / burn season, but with tweaking baseline resilience, Season 6 (just as it is now) could become more of an outlast season, to provide gameplay variance and strategy evolution.

And how does that work for BGs? Exactly the same way. Using the same token, everyone gets handed out their customized gearsets at the beginning of a game, which could for instance match the middle arena league.

At that stage, all players being on an equal footing gear-wise, the focus will be centered on knowing your class and your adversaries, and exploiting your skills to the maximum.

As for rewards? Just grant a handful of PvE tokens every week, 0 to 1 emblems of heroism for the bottom of the novice league, a handful for emblems of valor for the top of the champion’s league. Enough to incentivize it for the good players, not so much that people would suddenly consider it better to dance in arenas instead of running their heroics.

Leaves world PvP, Wintergrasp in particular, which aren’t bound to instance doors and therefore probably more difficult to provide gear swapping upon entry. Well, if you wanted also to minimize gear impact, one of the possible ways to achieve that would be to expand and tweak the tenacity buff.

Am I completely off my rockers? You tell me.

On Similar Matters

Reader Question: Best Moments in WoW?

One of our regular readers would like to continue verifying how deep the often stark contrast between my favourite hardcore blogging antagonist Stop and me is running, and wrote us both asking to define our best moment in WoW (but would rather not be cited by name, so we’ll keep that under wraps).

The thing is, in three years of playing, defining the one single best moment in the game is something I’m hard pressed to do, so instead, I’ll recall a couple of highlights:

Group Quest

My first quest group was on one of my first toons in his 20ies, joining up with two other guildmates to complete several quests in Darkshore and Ashenvale. There was nothing really remarkable about the whole thing, except that the three of us would soon end up top brass in that guild, and later on transition over in one of the few successful guild mergers I’ve seen for level 60 activities. Over time, all three of us also ended up on the officer roll in that guild.

We all still play today, we are all still in the same guild (OK, me not too often since I have a dozen of horde toons wanting some playtime too).

Battlegrounds

My very first venture into WSG, at level 30 (don’t gasp, back in these days the brackets were 21-30, 31-40 and so on) on a rogue. One of the people, a pallie, queuing up at Silverwing with me (back in the day, you had to be in Ashenvale on alliance or the Barrens on horde to queue up, no fancy battle masters in the capital cities), gave me the pep talk and ran me through the basics. When the gates opened, I remember having an adrenaline rush, heart pounding, nervous like hell. I don’t remember whether we won or lost that first game, but it was definitely fun.

In late Summer and up until September 2005, I played in what I like to call the golden age of WSG – the brackets had been retooled to what we know now, and the game was still too fresh in Europe to have many level 60 toons with spare money to spend. In this relatively short timeframe, twinking was almost non-existent. I spent a lot of time on an orc shaman perfecting the twin shaman cap runs: basically ghost wolf and then rush along the Eastern edge of the map, up the ramp to the ally base, both jump down together. Two earthbind totems, two frostshocks, healing – it was a massively unfair advantage for horde, and the only time this could be stopped was when we faced three smart hunters who understood that owning the midfield was the key to victory. With Improved Concussive shot, they simply stopped anyone from passing (their team mates moping out in close quarters), and edged out a very impressive 3-0 victory in times where the best alliance could hope for was usually losing 2-3.

But then I got involved in a chat with the alliance guildmates, and we came up with a two-hunter counter to the twin shaman runs – one trap upstairs, a shadowmelt nelf hunter there, the pet hidden out of sight, and the twin shamans were separated and killed cleanly without being able to support each other. And suddenly the almost impregnable horde domination of WSG faltered, at least in that one single bracket.
The fun eventually stopped around the end of September, when suddenly every single game had at least three or four undead rogues with Fiery Weapon enchants and more HP than a blue-decked warrior (soon followed by an equally impressive army of gnome rogues). It basically removed most of the competition and fun in that WSG bracket.

Much much later, when leveling my belfadin, I stopped by in the 30-39 brackets, mainly in AB, and realizing that even without respeccing or regearing for the task, my healing definitely made a difference in the outcome of the game was definitely another highlight. It culminated with AV at level 70, where my personal pride was to sit both at the top of the healing done and HK meter, not only knowing that healing helped the team, but also certain that I had won most honour from these games.

Arenas

I joined up with my buddy Steptoe during season 2 for a lock / pallie duo. When I joined the team, it was at 1440, and we promptly proceeded to tank down to 1323. But then, the steady progress we made, week after week, while our duo started to act as a functioning, well-oiled team, was definitely one of the other highlights in the game for me. We ended up just shy of 1700 rating. That’s of course still massively in the scrub range by all standards, but for us it still meant steady progress and an improvement week after week. I still miss arenas with good old Steptoe, bless his black rotten forsaken heart.

Raiding

The first time Stoney dragged me through ZG was an amazing moment. It was just a short two-boss run and my lock was level 53 at that time. I felt utterly useless but still, the scale up from 5-men to 20-men play was definitely an impressive experience, along with the unique jungle atmosphere of good ole’ Trollville.

Another memory which stands out was when we quickly assembled 16 people to have a quick go at Kurinnaxx after an MC run – it was far from an optimal setup, it was getting late-ish, but we just went in there, cleared the trash methodically and downed the boss without any fuss. Oh, the kill itself was nice, but it was actually the pride in the guild chat that we were able to simply get job done despite not having the optimal setup (most of the guild was still in ZG kit at that time, it’s not like we were 16 full T1 or T2-clad warriors) which stands out most in my mind. Oh, and remember the two guys I mentioned in my first group quest memory? One of them was running on a dorf priest alt, and won the Vestments of the Shifting Sands. When his white-bearded and dignified elder dwarf character donned these, hilarity ensued.
I’ve always thought of him as the pink plush pocket healer since.

Tanking

Long time readers will remember I had issues with Shadow Labs early on, in particular finding groups which would be able to pass Vorpil. After Steptoe quit the game earlier this year, I respecced my belfadin to protection just so that I could go back to tanking and test out the various odd pieces of gear I had assembled in 7 months as a healbot. Well, going in there with your random PUG, I didn’t expect too much but that flawlessly executed run still stands out as one of the great moments I’ve had in the game.

Exploring

The first thing which really impressed me when I started playing WoW after two years in FFXI was when I noticed a wolf killing a squirrel in Dun Morogh. I watched this happen in awe and this simple bit of coding to improve the atmosphere of the world made a huge difference for me. Suddenly I felt like I was playing in a world which felt “real” in the sense that it conveyed the impression that it was existing for itself. FFXI always had a certain artificial quality to it, a bit like those horror rides you can find in theme parks where the various figures and effects only spring to life when a visitor (or his cart) passes by. WoW had that unique quality that it was a “living world” functioning regardless of whether a player was present or not, and other elements only reinforced that feeling. In FFXI for instance you could cross an entire zone chased by a train of monsters (back in the days you had to zone out in order to have a mob return to its spawn or patrol area, they simply never gave up), reach the gates of the city with a sliver of life and watch, with your final breath, your blood splatter the armor of the totally impassive guards who simply ignored what was happening at their feet (not that the goblins chasing you would be bothered by them witnessing your murder either). In WoW, at least at the lower levels and around factions you’re in good standing with, a guard means salvation instead of stony indifference.

In general, even years later, WoW never ceases to amaze me with little details I hadn’t noticed before. Rhoelyn’s little Azerothian picture quiz was really fun in that respect. Just a couple of days ago, while leveling my latest little belf mage in Eversong Woods, I noticed, for the first time, that behind some troll village where you are sent on one of those nice extermination quests, there was, just out of reach, a burning tower.

Well, there we go. Those are definitely among the highlights of my three years in WoW, and among the reasons why, pre-WotLK depression or not, I keep enjoying the game. Is this specific to a casual player? I doubt it. I am however quite curious to read what Stop will come up with, if he decides to answer our reader’s question as well.

And you? What are your own highlights in the game?

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Matticus Channels Cosmo: 16 New and Sexy Additions in 2.4

Well, Matt, I’m not suffering from writer’s block, but I take your challenge nonetheless.

Here are 16 Patch 2.4 changes and additions worth mentioning:

Shorter 2v2 Arena queues

2v2 has, admittedly, several balance and synergy issues, but one which is more irksome is the queue time on heavily-populated Battlegroups. Due to the sheer number of people wanting to play 2v2, which, let’s face it, is the easiest to set up a team for and requires least coordination, queue times can exceed 15 minutes at peak time. Due to the low organizational requirements, 2v2 will always remain the bracket with the lowest barrier to entry for the most casual player, even if entering it as a brand new green level 70 player is going to be quite an experience.

Well, fortunately, Blue has recently posted that this will change for the better:

There is a change in 2.4.0 that will allow the servers to kick up more arena instances in a shorter amount of time, generally lowering the amount of time it will take to get into a game with an equal amount of people queuing. We want to avoid calling this a one time “queue cure” as we’re still not entirely certain how the changes will affect queue times under full load. Especially considering the increase in activity we see with any major patch release.

I think they’re guaranteed to have some effect, but if it isn’t an adequate impact we’ll need to make further adjustments.

Although I don’t have an arena partner or arena spec at the moment, shorter queue times = win.

The Sunwell Plateau

Part of the current higher-than-average tension between “hardcore” and “casuals” (also in its side incarnation PvE vs PvP) is most definitely due to the fact that the top raiders have run out of content, some of them several months ago. While I definitely don’t like AQ-Style server-wide unlocking events, this one looks to be less mindless grind-focussed than its infamous predecessor. The Isle of Quel’Danas is probably going to be as packed as Hellfire Peninsula was during the first days of TBC’s release, and since I currently don’t play my horde pallie, I’ll give the whole offensive a miss.

Still, the whole Shattered Sun Offensive comes along with a huge amount of new content from solo to five-men to full raids, so people who more or less ran out of things to do will have plenty new stuff to keep themselves occupied for the coming few months.

Of course, the top catassing guilds may very well burn through the new content in two weeks like what happened with MH and BT, but designing content with these people in mind is, fortunately, no longer on Blizzard’s agenda. Either Tigole and his crew grew softer on the catassing part or the rest of the design team has been overshouting them for a couple of months now (in fact, Tigole has been very subdued since his ill-advised Welfare Epics remark). Whatever the reasons, this is full of win for the large majority of the playerbase, hardcore and casual alike, and the couple of sour apples who don’t find the game challenging or fun enough for their taste anymore will move on. Less lag for me, and probably 0.1% less QQ on the o-boards. Not that you’d notice any difference of course.

The New Combat Log

The new combat log is going to increase data collection accuracy for damage meters and for WWS alike. While the change will require all addons working with the log to change, the net result is more precise information from all relevant tools. For any player, hardcore or casual, striving to improve their playing skills, accurate measurement of their performance is a good thing. Always remember, though, that in a group or a raid, you are actually playing an instance, not “top-the-meters”.

Teleport to CoT

Due to the travel time involved, getting to Caverns of Time is almost as much as a pain than going to Kara. Adding a means to teleport from Shattrath straight to the summoning stone is removes a lot of the wait, leaving more time for actually playing the instances.

Intellect Boosting Mana Regen from Spirit

While I don’t play any classes which rely on spirit and the 5-seconds rule as part of their normal routine, this will be huge for priests, druids but also mages. Other classes will spend less time drinking, which equates to less downtime. Now if it would only affect MP5 while casting too…

Faster Weapon Skillups from 1 to 295

Anyone who ever had to skill up a neglected weapon by even a mere 100 skill points will immediately remember what a pain in the nether regions this is. Less mindless killing for skillups? Yes please. The only thing unclear to me is whether it actually applies to weapon skill below 295 or players below level 60. If it’s the latter, the change will be, unfortunately, not noticed by level 70 toons, which would immediately remove this paragraph from the sexy additions to the “badly thought out” list.

Daily Quest Amount Raised to 25

Not that I’d care too much since I rarely do more than 3 dailies (never managed to unlock Ogri’La on the paladin). Still, more choice is always a good thing in my book.

Multi-Target Abilities no longer hit CCed NPCs

I have a bit mixed feelings about this one, actually. It certainly lowers the skill requirements in instances and participates in the dumbing down of the playerbase. On the other hand, it also means less wipes when running with people who lack the most basic CC management skills. An interesting side-effect, though: people who no longer care how they position CC relative to tanks will actually find running with a tankadin more difficult than before if their CC ends up in the Constant Consecration area. Since the Flavour of the Month in terms of 5-men tanks remains firmly in tankadin hands, the dumbing down may result in a couple of unexpected and hilarious wipes. Then again, good tankadins don’t really need CC in the first place.

Mana Cost Reduction on Regrowth

I don’t play a drood but from what they tell us, this is a very nice change, which actually gives them more variety in their spell casting rotations. As a recovering healadin, having just one single heal which makes up most of your casting routine (at least there’s cleansing and protecting to break the monotony) is something which gets pretty dull. More tools to keep your party or raid group alive, more varied gameplay? Yes please.

Avenger’s Shield Won’t Hit Critters Anymore

I love this one. Imagine the following pull: 3-mob group to the left, another group farther back on the right. The closest mob of the left-hand group stands at the right side of that group. Your tankadin positions himself and pulls with Avenger’s Shield on the closest mob of the left group, expecting all three mobs to have a good does of front-loaded threat on them.

Unfortunately, there’s a pesky critter sitting, unnoticed, between the left and right group, and Avenger’s shield actually bounces over it to hit the closest mob of the right-hand group. Your group now has to deal with 6 mobs instead of 3, 4 of them without any frontloaded threat.

Sounds familiar? Won’t happen again. Win.

Turn Undead Rank 3+ working on demons

Makes sense. Though why not Rank 1 and 2 escapes me. Then again, I think the last time I’ve ever used Turn Undead was on my level 26 alliance paladin desperately trying to survive an unexpected meeting with Morladin in Duskwood while bubble was on cooldown. And that was before TBC got released. So it’s a sexy but pointless change for the sake of consistency.

Partial Vanish Debugging

There’s been various abilities which would leave a rogue stealthed when using plain normal stealth but break vanish. Bug fixing is always nice in my book, and vanish has been plagued by bugs for a long time now.

New Stormstrike Icon

I’m kidding. Shamans get little love in this patch, and one of the more jaded shammies out there once commented on a message board “it will be changed to a middle finger Blizzard is pointing at shamans”. ‘Nuff said.

BG Honour calculation changes

There’s no more diminishing returns per kill until an opponent dies 51 times, and honour gets awarded on the spot. If it helps diminish the AFKing in the peace cave, I’m all for it.

Horde AV starting point moved back

This is a change for the better, and will help balance the map. In the same spirit, actually mirroring the whole map perfectly would definitely remove any claims of map imbalance and make it all about teamwork and tactical skill. This has been suggested for much longer than I’ve been playing AV and should come back.

In the same vein, joining AV as a group is something I have very mixed feelings about. If the group is 5 or 10 friends joining together, I rather like it. But with the extremely soft matchmaking happening, getting steamrolled by a 40-men preform AV for 0 honour (which you probably never will be allowed to join if you don’t have 350+ resilience, which you won’t be able to get in a hurry because the bloody AV premades kill you over and over for 0 honour) is going to be utterly detestable.

Warsong Gulch changes to Flag Carriers

In a valiant effort to shorten the pat situations where both sides could have been hiding with the opposing flags for ages, Flag Carriers will now appear on the map within 45 seconds and will get a 50%/100% damage increase debuff after 10/15 minutes. I like it but I still don’t think it goes far enough. Add reinforcements like in AV, each cap and kill taking off from the enemy reinforcements, and you could pretty much guarantee much more action-packed games lasting 15-20 minutes tops, and perhaps even kill the mindless HK farming which happens way too often. One can always hope…

And that takes up to 16 changes. There’s actually more to be highlighted, but Cosmo said 16, so 16 it is.

On Similar Matters

How to Improve level 70 Horde PvP

Euripides over at Critical QQ relates his past 7 months of disastrous experiences in the level 70 BGs as horde. Although by all accounts how each faction fares depending on the battlegroup you are playing in, I have definitely noticed a difference (read “a slump” to put it politely) between the level 70 bracket and all other ones as well, regardless of the BG.

I do believe that an important part of that is due to the level 10-19 and 20-29 bracket which are heavy with twinking since fall 2005. Many players try out their newest toon in these brackets, get crushed, and no longer worry about BGs at all until 70, where they grind honour at all cost for their S1 kit. Which is all fine and dandy, but a combination of the inexperience, the usually wrong specs, daily PvP quests and an overall pessimistic outlook (“It’s a PUG, we’re gonna lose anyway, just hand me my mark and let’s get this done”) give the more dedicated PvPer a miserable team to work with.

Add the general Internet Anonymity factor which tends to turn your averagely educated person into a jerk when faced with adversity (like losing BGs over and over), the matchmaker which still pits organized preforms (premades for us EU players) against ragtag PUGs, and the potential for weeks of horrible BGs gets realized.

There’s one method which works pretty well in AB (a bit less in EOtS and WSG for some reason, go figure). People react to leadership. When you enter a match to grind your marks and your motivation is low because you are already sure the other 14 people with you are scrubs, setting simple instructions can change things entirely. Back in the day before TBC, I could experience this on my level 60 alliance lock: AB was pretty much horde-dominated and alliance did the headless chicken run every single time. And one day, I wrote a simple macro which I would use 15 seconds before the game start unless someone else was taking charge.
The instructions? Simple.

Group 1: Mine. Group 2: Stables. Group 3: Mill.
Announce incoming in chat, and remember, 3 bases wins the game.

That’s all it took to go from a 1-9 win ratio to 4-6 with that toon. Something I verified over several dozen games.

Nowadays on horde, it works the same way, except the dispatches are sent to LM, farm and BS. I usually add a “stables last only after the other 4 are secured” after the first nodes cap for us. And you know what? It works. A ragtag PUG will tend to follow whatever commands are given in a firm and clear manner, simply because everyone craves organization.

Of course it won’t be a 100% win ratio, among others because you can get matched against a preform, or an alliance group which organizes in the same fashion. Still, 18 marks in 10 games is a lot better than 12 in my book.

Organization beats chaos every single time. Rome built an empire which lasted close to a millennium on that principle. And the only thing it needs is a bit of communication. Your BGs suck? Don’t sit on your hands cursing the other 14 people. Take charge. At least if you fail you will have put up a decent fight. That’s always better than getting mad.

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I’m so Dense…

So here I am, with my epic flyer, some pettycash in the pocket, playing too late for raiding, and while levelling my mage is always fun for a while, my rampant altitis, as usual, wants me to play something I do not have.

I want to heal on a different toon. I want either the HoT goodness of a Tree, or to toss around chain heals in BGs and see if I can top Healing Done on a shammie in AV just like I routinely did on the paladin. Only problem is that I don’t have any high level drood or shammie to play, I actually have neither on my current main realm.

And just right now, the prospect of going through the first 20 levels with either class is… yuck. Fatigue. Slow starters, both of them, and going from swift flyer to normal footfolk is totally anticlimactic.

I wish I had a shammie with at least travel form or something.

*fast forward a couple of days later, repeat the last sentence like a mantra once or twice per day*

I wish I had a shammie with…

Oh wait.

I have. Remember the one I mentioned just a couple of posts ago? Sitting at level 29 since twinking killed the fun of 20-29 WSG in September 2005? Well, I suddenly did too. Remember her. And remembered, too, how my paladin landed on Doomhammer.

/cast credit card

/cast paid character transfer

There. I have a level 29 shaman to play. With Travel form. Without needing to do the rather difficult water totem quest chain again. A mere experience level away from bonus quest exp, self-rez, and windfury. And she can FROSTSHOCK! She could have ages ago. She even has a spare talent point since 2-H weapons are now innate. And contrary to the realm she was before as a lone horde toon among a big alliance stable, access to my banker’s money stash.

To think that I could have made this move days, nay, weeks ago.

I’m so dense…

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AFK BG Leeching now a Big Deal

After clinging to the “we want to remove the reason people AFK in BGs” line for way too long, Blizzard has revised their stance and will now crack down hard on the eternal leechers:

Says Bornakk:

In our continued efforts to support fair gameplay in World of Warcraft and to provide a positive experience for players, we are currently taking steps to ensure fair and enjoyable competition in the Battlegrounds. Starting immediately, we will be issuing warnings and penalties, including suspensions and the removal of Honor points and recently acquired Honor rewards, for non-participation in Battleground games.

We are taking action against thousands of accounts immediately, and will continue to monitor these situations and regularly take action against violators. If you encounter a player in a Battleground who is intentionally not participating in the battle for an extended period of time, please help us track the situation and report the player as AFK. For information on how to complete an in-game AFK report, please go here: (http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/battlegrounds/info.html). All reports will be thoroughly investigated, and corrective action will only be taken if the violation is confirmed.

There we go. About time, Blizzard.

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The Losing AV gives Zero Honour Fallacy

Every other month or so, there’s another common QQ theme, and the current one is about AV post 2.3 -  the complaint that losing nets you next to no honour, making queuing up pointless.

Now I’m holding the opinion that AV needs fixes, both in its design and more generally through improvements with the AFK mechanism, but what strikes me with this current wave of forum angst is that the current belief prevails so much people don’t even put a honest effort into the game anymore.

Undeniably, the heavy strategic weight the captain has in current AV is what usually decides the battle, and horde do have an unfair advantage on their side, as much as alliance has one with the positioning of Dun Baldar’s NPC and the bridge. Nonetheless, in the first weeks after 2.3, especially at the later hours (past 1am) when you’d find a bit more of the dedicated PvPers in any given game, it wasn’t unusual to have the losing side actually get more bonus honour than the winners.

The key being, of course, to play the new AV instead of the old one.

It has been said by many people in the blogosphere but bears repeating again. Today’s AV requires a combination of offense and defense to score honour. Rushing the enemy general (made harder with patch 2.3.2) actually nets little points, whereas downing the general, capping towers and defending yours is where the money lies.

“But Gwaendar, it’s easy for you to say, you’re horde and you have Galv!”, some will object. And there’s some truth to that.

But let’s think in broader pictures. For horde, defending Galv during the first 10-15 minutes is one of the most important keys to victory, for two reasons. First, it breaks the alliance assault and scatters their forces along a fragmented GY line, making a Drek + 2 marshalls rush more difficult to pull off. Second, it creates traction – Balinda usually goes down within the first 5 minutes, and the difference in reinforcements puts alliance under pressure. Add Stonehearth Tower which caps within roughly the same timeframe, and at that point, the score is usually around 400-580 in favour of horde.

That’s not entirely trivial to turn around, and at that point, often alliance just plain gives up and leave the game in the hands of horde.

But let’s look at the scoring system in a little bit more detail:

  • Capping an enemy tower or killing a general nets you 62.7 bonus honour when it happens
  • Killing the general earns 83.6 bonus honour
  • A wing commander reaching his base nets 20.9 honour

Here’s the other important part, though, what happens when the victory screen goes up:

  • A surviving Captain is worth 41.8 honour
  • Each tower you defended is woth 41.8 honour as well

So how do you capitalize on that?

  1. First, write Balinda off. She’s literally undefensible, that’s just a fact of the game.
  2. Unless there happens to be a well-geared PvE tank available, killing the general with more than one marshalls is now quite challenging. Capitalize on that from the start. The horde offensive will rush Balinda and then move on to SH GY and towards Dun Baldar. The SH Bunker cap, however, rarely gets defended by more than 3-4 horde. Make sure SH doesn’t fall
  3. Don’t charge Galvanger when the game starts, you can’t mirror what horde does. Instead, the objectives during the first 10-12 minutes should include defending SH Bunker, capping SF and IB GY, and burning Tower Point. Mount a defense of the Dun Baldar Bunkers, and if you get a chance to defend IW, do it. Frostwolf GY and putting pressure on FW towers will help
  4. When the game clocks above 10-12 minutes, the Galvanger defense tends to get bored and leave. Half of them will move to offense, the rest will go to FW keep and try to defend the towers. Now is the time to go kill Galvanger, and burning IB tower at the same time. If you have IB GY, FW GY and SF is either yours or disputed, horde will rez either at the Relief Hut (and will stick to FW towers and the GY), or at SH / SP and tend to join the offense.
  5. From there, react to the situation. Your objective should be that when one side runs out of reinforcements, you have burned 3 towers and defended at least 2 bunkers.

Obviously, once AV can be joined as a group again, coordinating all this becomes much easier. Still, taking the lead and announcing a short battle plan before the game starts, then driving one objective after the other will get 10-15 people to follow, because most people are just content to follow directions from anyone pretending to know what he’s doing. If at the end of the game you scroll back to /bg chat and the majority of the communication is insults, you know why you lost. If it’s timers, objectives and situation reports, congratulations, you were in a good AV PUG and you will have gotten substantial bonus honour even in defeat.

And another thing. I don’t know how this plays out on other Battlegroups than EU-Blackout on horde, but if this one is any indication…  Remember that WoW has integrated voice chat nowadays? Yes, nobody uses it, and in any given PUG, 75% won’t even hear it. Still, try out just giving calm commands and objectives to the 10 other people who will listen, and add the other 10 who will read what you type. Horde has 10-15 afkers per game these days, so you suddenly lead a coordinated group of 20 against 25 people split in two barely coordinated groups.

Theorycraft, since I’m horde? Sure. But give it a shot. If you pull it all off, you will get 334 bonus honour from the game. Horde would get 314 provided they killed Vann. In about 20 minutes. That’s hardly “zero honour” in my book…

On Similar Matters

A few Ideas to Improve Battlegrounds

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.

On Similar Matters

Putting a few things back into their right place

There’s a strange thing happening in the wowosphere these days. Due to a couple of rants I wrote, and my admittedly vehement participation in certain welfare epics debates, I have apparently become some kind of advocate for the PvP viewpoint on arena reward distribution.

While I appreciate the additional readership this generates, I don’t want to set false expectations here. As a player, I’d qualify myself as “dedicated” at best. To a hardcore gamer, I’m casual as muck. I am not a particularly skilled PvPer as my arena partners and my rating can attest.

I only have opinions and a soapbox. If you are looking for specialized and serious PvP-specific opinion, commentary and advice, a few sites and blogs you should visit are:

  • Out of Mana: Megan arenas and raids, with quite some success. If you are looking for solid, experience-backed arena advice, her blog is the place to visit
  • Gameriot’s World of Ming: If you’re looking for commentary and analysis of what’s going on in the top ratings and arena as e-sports, this is definitely your starting place
  • PVP Scene: You know of MMO Champion as one of the leading information and news resources pertaining to PvE? PvP Scene is its PvP sister site, by the same author. It should be on your reading list as well.
  • Arena Junkies: A site contributed by reader Bubblez which I didn’t know of (which basically proves the point of this post), and from a quick glance at the forums, this may well be the arena’s Eltitist Jerks.

Edited to add Arena Junkies, thanks Bubblez

On Similar Matters

One Key to Notice about the new AV

While grinding 7k honour last night for my S1 healing mace, I forgot one important thing, to press the screenshot button to record what I am posting about here.

Still, on one of those 15 games I had last night, something interesting happened. The game had lasted about 25ish minutes, during which both captains were killed early. Alliance killed Drek, ending the game (we were on Vann at that stage, it was a matter of seconds, in one of those twists you see less often since the patch). The main difference though was that about 10 seconds before the scoreboard came up, we capped the 4th alliance bunker while we had two of ours intact.

Horde earned about 150 more bonus honour from that run than the winning alliance.

This is something I cannot stop stressing enough. Rushing to the enemy general is the measliest tactic in terms of honour since the patch. For other ways to wreck the new AV for your team, wowinsider’s Matthew Rossi wrote a nice little piece of (mild) sarcasm.

PS. I’m sticking to using crimson for PvP item links for the time being. Who knows, maybe this could eventually pick up.

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