So how is the PvP and are there any future changes coming?

[Fordel]

Well one of the problems is they can't figure out with any certainty who is actually doing stuff, who is not doing stuff and who is just doing stuff very badly. They can't even stop all the rampant botting that goes on in BGs.

[WindupAtheist]

Just give points for kills, more points for kills near objectives, shitloads of points for capturing flags and stuff, and a big-ass multiplier if you win the game. Zero times zero is still zero, so fuck that guy in the cave. Throw in a little captcha popup before the start of each match if you absolutely can't do anything more elegant about botters, but quit fagging up the game for everyone else because you're worried about them.

There, bam, done.

The only reason BG PVP is such a pain in the ass that requires extra hoops to jump through if us peons expect to get cool shit anyway is because they're afraid that if they put in a path to nice gear that isn't a big cockstab, nobody will do their precious raids. Everyone would just shrug, BG to leetness, and spam /spit and /duel at the odd poopsock insulting their welfare ubergear.

[Ingmar]

Just give points for kills, more points for kills near objectives, shitloads of points for capturing flags and stuff, and a big-ass multiplier if you win the game. Zero times zero is still zero, so fuck that guy in the cave. Throw in a little captcha popup before the start of each match if you absolutely can't do anything more elegant about botters, but quit fagging up the game for everyone else because you're worried about them.

There, bam, done.

The only reason BG PVP is such a pain in the ass that requires extra hoops to jump through if us peons expect to get cool shit anyway is because they're afraid that if they put in a path to nice gear that isn't a big cockstab, nobody will do their precious raids. Everyone would just shrug, BG to leetness, and spam /spit and /duel at the odd poopsock insulting their welfare ubergear.

You just fucked the spotter at LM in Arathi Basin. You know, the guy who actually wins the battle for everyone by calling incoming.  

EDIT: Point being, a lot of important, contributing-to-game-win stuff in BGs is going to be completely unreflected by actual stat keeping.

[Fordel]

The Botters don't actually stay in the cave anymore, they're pretty darn good at blending in with the regular retards. There are also plenty of legitimate reasons for someone to have little to no kills in most BGs. Even the captcha thing isn't going to stop the assholes that join, stand in the middle of the BG and shit up the BG chat instead of actually playing the game.



I agree that they fuck over the PvP reward scheme constantly, trying to maintain their PvE progression ideal.

[WindupAtheist]

The Botters don't actually stay in the cave anymore, they're pretty darn good at blending in with the regular retards.

That's why you give them a captcha. At least if you can't think of anything better. I don't know what sort of anti-bot tools they may or may not have.

There are also plenty of legitimate reasons for someone to have little to no kills in most BGs.

I know everyone likes to think that they were providing an important defensive contribution by picking their nose at some back tower in AV for 20 minutes, or whatever, but if they didn't kill anyone and didn't capture any objectives then I'll bet they were a lot less helpful than they think they were.

Even the captcha thing isn't going to stop the assholes that join, stand in the middle of the BG and shit up the BG chat instead of actually playing the game.

Shitting up chat isn't worth any points in my scheme.

[caladein]

There are also plenty of legitimate reasons for someone to have little to no kills in most BGs.

I know everyone likes to think that they were providing an important defensive contribution by picking their nose at some back tower in AV for 20 minutes, or whatever, but if they didn't kill anyone and didn't capture any objectives then I'll bet they were a lot less helpful than they think they were.

It's not that you get no kills on defense, it's that over 4-5 minutes at the tower you get maybe 3 and those were really important to the team compared to 30-something someone else got zerging at the front.

[Fordel]

How do you decide who captured an objective? Is it just the guy who clicked the flag first? Anyone in range when it was clicked? Anyone who is in range when it turns over? Does it poop out points at X second intervals to anyone in range?



How do you decide who gets a kill even? You basing this off KBs or HKs? Base it off KB's and you fuck over a shit load of specs, notably all the healing ones. Base it off HK's and you are just back to people gaming the system instead of playing the battleground.

[Koyasha]

I know everyone likes to think that they were providing an important defensive contribution by picking their nose at some back tower in AV for 20 minutes, or whatever, but if they didn't kill anyone and didn't capture any objectives then I'll bet they were a lot less helpful than they think they were.

Even if nobody comes to take that objective in this particular game, it may still be an important objective that needs to be defended.  If nobody's there it can be taken without contest or warning to the rest of the team.  If you don't reward defending it even if nobody attacks, then nobody wants to defend it, even when it does get attacked.

And the point of the guy on offense getting more kills, but those kills being of considerably less individual importance than the defender's 3-5 kills is also a good one.  You might just weight the multiplier for defending to something crazy I suppose, so that one kill on defense is worth like 30 on offense.

A long time ago I came up with some ideas that would work with that, such as allowing players to 'attach' themselves to defensible points and such, which would give them a certain number of honor per second, possibly determined by the average honor your entire side is earning at the moment, as long as they're attached and in range, and would make it more difficult to capture the flag (either impossible to capture while someone is attached, or takes 2-3x the time to capture while someone is attached).  Something like that might make make it possible to more fairly reward defense, but even then there's going to be jobs come up that could be strategically important for victory, but give no rewards.

Bottom line, getting the computer to judge who actually contributed and who did nothing is pretty hard, and will need a lot of complex systems depending on the battleground's objectives.  You might be able to come up with something that is fair enough to only skip rewarding 1% of useful activity, but even that much is going to be quite challenging.

[Rendakor]

You reward defending by giving honor to everyone in range every so often. You give honor for flag caps similarly: anyone in range of the cap gets honor (which rewards defenders since they're in your base, and healers since they were escorting the flag carrier.

[Ingmar]

You reward defending by giving honor to everyone in range every so often. You give honor for flag caps similarly: anyone in range of the cap gets honor (which rewards defenders since they're in your base, and healers since they were escorting the flag carrier.

This still discourages some currently good behavior - positioning yourself for an instant grab after the flag resets, for example.

Worse, these sorts of reward schemes force people to a certain strategy in order to maximize honor gain, and thus they discourage any kind of strategic innovation. AV is the big example of 'this is the best way to win based on how much bonus honor the objectives give'.

IMO they just need to reward winning a rated BG amply rather than trying to reward the individual steps that make people win. That way players can find their own strategies rather than feeling like they have to do it this One Particular Way or they're costing themselves points. If they want to focus their work on improving some aspect of BGs it should be working on the time it takes to play a match and trying to get that to a more consistent level - again, if we look at AV, strategies that can work for winning the game are discouraged because they can lengthen the game. If honor/minute was more or less static no matter the strategy used then more options are opened up and the metagame in rated BGs will be more interesting.

[WindupAtheist]

Even if nobody comes to take that objective in this particular game, it may still be an important objective that needs to be defended.  If nobody's there it can be taken without contest or warning to the rest of the team.  If you don't reward defending it even if nobody attacks, then nobody wants to defend it, even when it does get attacked.

Depends on the BG, but let's see...

AB: Being near a base you own spews out points for you. But that spew is multiplied by the total number of bases you hold, and being at an enemy base when it's capped gives you a large bonus. Double points if you win.

AV: An enemy tower that you've captured gives you a big lump of points when it finally burns. Recapping a tower that the enemy was trying to burn gives you a big lump of points. Generals nigh-invincible until all towers are down. Double points if you win.

You could remove points for kills entirely and these schemes should still produce nice fights. Above all, just relax. So someone not as awesome as you got just about as many points. Big deal, sometimes people doing 800 DPS win rolls in a dungeon. Life ain't fair.

[Ashamanchill]

Is anyone else as nervous about rated BGs as I am? The whole thing feels like some asshole at Blizzard saying: 'Hey guys, remember the roaring success that we made out of the Arena? Who's up for trying to extend it over all of PvP?'

[Shrike]

Not really nervous about it. PvP doesn't mean all that much to me. Personally, I think the whole concept should be shitcanned yesterday. However there is some fun to be had in it--in small doses.

In my opinion, the whole thing is an unholy mess and they can hardly fuck it up worse than it is. So...we'll see. We as a community will either adjust or not. What PvP I do now is mostly bracket twinks and some world griefing on the side. If all that were to go away it wouldn't effect me much--maybe even save me some time in game.

[Ingmar]

Is anyone else as nervous about rated BGs as I am? The whole thing feels like some asshole at Blizzard saying: 'Hey guys, remember the roaring success that we made out of the Arena? Who's up for trying to extend it over all of PvP?'

I'm not nervous about them. I don't think they'll kill the regular random BG queuing or anything.

I *do* think they will be a bit more underused than Blizzard hopes just because you have to set up actual same-server PUGs to do it. They'll probably need to extend the LFG interface to cover building rated BG groups in some way or another to get what they want out of it, especially for the larger BGs. The other issue is that on some underpopulated realm/sides you may just be SOL in terms of ever even getting into a rated BG because there just won't be enough interested people putting groups together.

[Dren]

Some of these points are good, but I didn't see much for the few healers in BG's out there.  My priest typically goes through an entire BG without getting a single kill.  Of course, you could go by the amount of healing I did and my proximity to all the killing.  I get plenty of that.

My biggest beef the last two weeks has been with multi-boxers.  3 elem shaman all blasting the same thing at the same time with a sea of 12 totems all at once?  That is just painful and nearly impossible to overcome without *extreme* coordination.  As we know, random BG's have very little of that most of the time.

[Rendakor]

I've got a guy in my guild who 4 Boxes elemental shaman; are you in the Stormstrike battlegroup?

[proudft]

My biggest beef the last two weeks has been with multi-boxers.  3 elem shaman all blasting the same thing at the same time with a sea of 12 totems all at once?  That is just painful and nearly impossible to overcome without *extreme* coordination.  As we know, random BG's have very little of that most of the time.

We had some of them in our battlegroup for a while.  If you have any fear abilities at all, it really seemed to screw them up, since they had to have all their guys refollow or whatever since they are now scattered all over.  

I haven't seen them in a while for some reason.  Maybe they moved to your battlegroup.  

[WindupAtheist]

Whirlwind is fucking hopeless. Resubbed earlier, 1-5 in battlegrounds so far. I'd focus more on PVE, but half hour queues to do anything as DPS is bullshit.

[koro]

Looks like Rated Battlegrounds are going to be premade-only. You can pug 'em with people on your server, but good fucking luck with that.

[WindupAtheist]

Also, I'm sure everyone on the overpopulated side of an imbalanced server will just LOVE Blizzard's new solution for their "world PVP" battlegrounds. Hey Horde on Cho'gall (or whatever), 90% of you aren't allowed to do Wintergrasp anymore because no Alliance play your server. Sorry.

But hey, don't worry, Blizzard has finally figured out how to keep bots out of battlegrounds so that they can actually give out some nice rewards: Make you join a Trade PUG to do them. Oh fucking boy.

[WindupAtheist]

Looks like Rated Battlegrounds are going to be premade-only. You can pug 'em with people on your server, but good fucking luck with that.

[2. Trade]Pwnius: LF heals for rated wsg, min 1500 resil or gtfo

Gee I can't wait.

[koro]

And then that WSG group will proceed to get curbstomped by a premade consisting of nothing but Druids.

[Paelos]

And then that WSG group will proceed to get curbstomped by a premade consisting of nothing but Druids.

Nah, 9 druids, and a pally for freedom. Balance, yo! 

[Lantyssa]

Someone asked for pew pew?

[Sheepherder]

[Fordel]

Relevant to the Discussion:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=25482320318&sid=1

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/25482320318/rated-battlgrounds-why-premades/


Same thread/posts, second link just filters the Blizzard responses quickly.




My best guess currently, is the logistics of trying to make a BG squad will quickly burn out everyone but the most dedicated and we'll actually get a big surge of fresh Arena Teams that just want to 10 games for free points.

I also don't know how they intend to match make rated BGs, if at all.

[WindupAtheist]

It's all wank anyway. The only reason they won't let us auto-queue for rated BG is because they want someone to be able to kick botters if they're going to be handing out top-notch gear. Otherwise there's no functional difference. Premades could still queue together, and random puggers could be auto-grouped.

[koro]

I figure there will be a couple months of casual players flooding rated BGs, but then it'll simply turn into Arenas where the only people who need apply are those who view PvP as their serious end-game and those poor schlubs who struggle for a month to get and maintain an 1800 rating for some weapons that are optimized for their non-rated BGing.

[WindupAtheist]

0-3 trying to win a random BG daily. If you're running around battlegrounds in PVE gear and it's NOT because you're literally just starting out at PVP, I want to blow your brains out in front of your children.

[Evil Elvis]

Meh.  I lost 6 AV's in a row Sunday.  2 1/2 hours of failures not defending towers until we finally managed to squeak out a win.

[WindupAtheist]

0-5. Will WUA get any arena points today? Sources say no!

[Righ]

Guaranteed to induce mail, gun and DPS dagger drops.

[Paelos]

I'm sick of all the mail drops. I very very very much want a feature where you could turn off types of drops from the raid. That would bring the awesome up a notch. Cloth and plate wearers rejoice.

[Malakili]

I'm sick of all the mail drops. I very very very much want a feature where you could turn off types of drops from the raid. That would bring the awesome up a notch. Cloth and plate wearers rejoice.

Well they've already gone to tokens for set pieces, so I can't imagine its impossible to think they'd go further from random loot.  Hell, maybe eventually you'll just a steady stream of badges just for logging in and not being AFK.

[Paelos]

I'm sick of all the mail drops. I very very very much want a feature where you could turn off types of drops from the raid. That would bring the awesome up a notch. Cloth and plate wearers rejoice.

Well they've already gone to tokens for set pieces, so I can't imagine its impossible to think they'd go further from random loot.  Hell, maybe eventually you'll just a steady stream of badges just for logging in and not being AFK.

We essentially have that now with normal raids.