PVP Ranking Pages - Now you can see how little you matter!

[HRose]

Finally we agree on the faults of WoW PvP.

The first problem is, as others have noticed, that the whole purpose is in the personal advancement.
The second problem is that the system lacks of persistence. So reasons to fight for and so the actual "conflict".

As I wrote on my website, the players learnt and discovered the actual pattern offered by the game. It isn't the conflict, it isn't the war. It is just the carrot-on-a-stick. (and, in fact, the honor rewards are the only persistent element of the PvP)

As always the players narrowed the shortest route to reach the carrot. Which is about AVOIDING the conflict.

(also because PvP in WoW is about "Players Vs Time", so everyone needs to quickly run through the process to maximize the effect and they cannot just enjoy a 10-hours Alterac BG. You may have fun, but you aren't going anywhere if you don't optimize the time)

[HaemishM]

Strangely, Blizzard/WoW isn't what upset me. Funny that.

With MMOG's, it's usually a race to see who completely fucks up the game worsest firstest, the player community or the developers.

[Righ]

On Earthen Ring, AV lasts for 8 or more hours and ends when the Horde runs out of catass reinforcements and loses enough numbers to let the Alliance win. The one time the Horde had an effective commander (who I suspect has gone back to playing his Alliance character), we crushed the Alliance in a couple of hours. If you knew the depth of faction imbalance (numbers, equipment, guild sizes) on ER, you'd understand how significant that is. People like to bitch about Alliance drama on ER, but the sad fact is that the Horde just don't play together well. As well as having an edge in maturity, the Horde also appear to have the edge in elitism and narcissism.

WSG is of course exactly as Torvald describes it in the post referenced by HRose.

[Morfiend]

Iim thinking it works out to winning 10 or so AV a day, plus killing everyone inside over and over and over again.  On our server, this isnt terribly hard to do, since the alliance has maybe one or two even remotely good AV guilds (Other then one Asian guild who practically lives there. 

I guess thats the difference. My server is very balanced, and there are a bunch of really good horde and alliance guilds. Winning one AV usually takes 4 to 6 hours. Also, due to deminishing returns, the majority of players stop giving honor after an hour or so. If you are in a raid group, more like in 15 or 20 minutes. Which is why no one really wants to group there. Which is counter productive.

They really need to remove diminishing returns for AV. That way, there will be two or 3 raid groups, and a lot more coordination, and more healing.

[Rasix]

More than 1 AV instance.  Out of everything discussed, this is what blows me away the most. 

The honor ranking stuff, along with the testimonials from the people at the top, makes me reluctant to return to WoW and PVP once I get back from my long vacation (current subscription ran out due to having to change CC cards due to identity theft, yay).  I know 4 of the top 15 horde side from my old guild.  The top guy is a really efficient rogue (guy rarely ever dies) who spends about every waking hour outside of raiding running WSG or AV.  The other 3 guys are mega-catasses.  One guy is a hunter that basically had never missed a raid and had an obscene amount of DKP.  The other 2 you can basically count on to be playing 24/7.  Both have 3+ lvl 60 characters a piece.  It's sick.  Even if I was king badass, I would never be able to keep up with that.

Note: Heh, looking at these scores, my server sure doesn't appear like they PVP a lot.

[Sogrinaugh]

You are simply playing different games.

The type who /afk outta AV or WSG aren't playing what you are playing.  You log in to play a match of CTF, you enjoy it and want to win it.  Winning a long difficult match is more satisfying then a short easy one.

The people who /afk out at the first sign of a real challenge aren't playing CTF or AV.  They are playing Point-Farm.  The goal of Point-Farm is to have the most points, and CTF or AV are simply a means to an end.  After analyzing what behaviors give the most points from said battleground per unit of time, those behaviors are adherred to with religeous devotion, because the whole point-farm game is graded on a curve...

In trueth, Point-Farm has NOTHING to do with alliance vs horde, it is intra-factional.  Thier is nothing inherently wrong with this, except that Point-Farm directly conflicts with those who want to play WSG or AV.

I can't see a way to seperate the two types of players (maybe i lack creativity).  No amount of que penalties or other bullshit slap-your-hand-fixes will address the core problem.  In fact, if the que penalty for /afk were severe enough, Point-Farm might require simply allowing the opposing team to grab the flag 3 times, rather then leaving and perhaps allowing more willing participants to zone in and take thier place.

[SurfD]

More than 1 AV instance.  Out of everything discussed, this is what blows me away the most.

We regularly have 2-3 AV instances up on Tichondrious, and on a busy weekend will steadily hit 3-4

[Strazos]

Maybe this is why PvPing in Ashenvale was mroe fun than the BGs;

In the BGs, people are there to run up points. Also, Alliance on Moonrunner was a bunch of fucktards, and I've never personally seen a win. Also, I hate playing against Mass Shamen teams.

In Ashenvale, people are PvPing just for its own sake.

And it was FUN.

[Paelos]

My guild recently decided to do a drunken raid on the Zep platform near Org to try and see how long we could hold it.

We made it about 15 minutes and 50 kills, but it was fun as anything.

[Calantus]

Remove honorable kills from BGs (up honor bonuses if needed), give a honor penalty for leaving a BG, make sure losing is still decent enough honor, and give bonus honor based on the overall honor of the opposing team. People will still go for the easiest way, but when the easiest way is to try and win every game you enter, never leave a BG once you start it, and actually be happy to come across an A-Team I wont really care.

[Paelos]

Remove honorable kills from BGs (up honor bonuses if needed), give a honor penalty for leaving a BG, make sure losing is still decent enough honor, and give bonus honor based on the overall honor of the opposing team. People will still go for the easiest way, but when the easiest way is to try and win every game you enter, never leave a BG once you start it, and actually be happy to come across an A-Team I wont really care.

That would drive people insane if you took out kills as part of PvP. Penalties might help, but I think scaling bonus honor for longer games is a better idea. If you win a game in ten minutes, obviously you didn't meet much opposition. You could argue then that people would just prolong games to get more honor then. So even then people would game the system there too.

No, the only way you get good games is to have an installed time limit on both sides, high and low. If you leave before five minutes, you lose points. If you don't have a conclusion by thirty minutes, the game goes to the team most ahead in flags, kills, or whatever you may have. Obviously, I mean this for WSG. And for heaven's sake, scale back bonus honor for winning in the short BGs like WSG and the new one coming out. Give us a damn incentive for actually queuing up in AV.

[Threash]

Remove honorable kills from BGs (up honor bonuses if needed), give a honor penalty for leaving a BG, make sure losing is still decent enough honor, and give bonus honor based on the overall honor of the opposing team. People will still go for the easiest way, but when the easiest way is to try and win every game you enter, never leave a BG once you start it, and actually be happy to come across an A-Team I wont really care.

That would drive people insane if you took out kills as part of PvP. Penalties might help, but I think scaling bonus honor for longer games is a better idea. If you win a game in ten minutes, obviously you didn't meet much opposition. You could argue then that people would just prolong games to get more honor then. So even then people would game the system there too.

No, the only way you get good games is to have an installed time limit on both sides, high and low. If you leave before five minutes, you lose points. If you don't have a conclusion by thirty minutes, the game goes to the team most ahead in flags, kills, or whatever you may have. Obviously, I mean this for WSG. And for heaven's sake, scale back bonus honor for winning in the short BGs like WSG and the new one coming out. Give us a damn incentive for actually queuing up in AV.

On high pop servers its AV running 24/7 and no wsg games.  You can get 10k honor for a 30 min win in AV vs 1.6k honor for a 10 min in WSG.  AV definitely gives alot more bang for the buck on servers that can support it, increasing it won't help anything.  We didn't have AV for weeks at a time on my server, people don't queue because they don't think one will start.  Then someone decided to cordinate with the other faction to get people to queue simultaneously almost every day and games began to start by themselves.  Now people queue on their own because they expect a game to happen everynight, as opposed to queueing for 20 hours a not seeing a game for weeks.

[Kail]

Problem is that the game can't tell if you're playing the "right" way or just to farm points.  If you take away honor from kills, people won't have a reason to fight.  If you reward people for sticking around when they loose, you can combine those, and have your entire team of ten stand around the flag room and wave as a parade of cheetahs whisk away your flags.  Congratulations, you just earned 500 (or whatever) honor, the exact same amount as if you had been in some complex, back and forth battle and lost by only one point after three hours of play.

No, the only way you get good games is to have an installed time limit on both sides, high and low. If you leave before five minutes, you lose points. If you don't have a conclusion by thirty minutes, the game goes to the team most ahead in flags, kills, or whatever you may have. Obviously, I mean this for WSG. And for heaven's sake, scale back bonus honor for winning in the short BGs like WSG and the new one coming out. Give us a damn incentive for actually queuing up in AV.

Yeah, that's about as good a system as I can think of, but even with timed rewards there are issues.

As long as the game is a means to an end, rather than an end of itself, people are going to try to find ways around it.  If you put in timed rewards for the BGs, before the week was out, you'd see analyses of time invested/points recieved, so players would know exactly when to throw the game.  Take away points for winning a game in under ten minutes, and I bet you fifty bucks you'd start seeing the winning team turtle up in their flag room with the runner to wait out the timer, and cap their last point at 10:01.

[HRose]

Problem is that the game can't tell if you're playing the "right" way or just to farm points.

The problem is not that, the problem is that the game mechanics want you to farm and *not* to fight. That's the point. It's not that the players do not play correctly, IT'S THE OPPOSITE. The players play the game exactly as it was intended: farm the points in the most efficient way.

That's what games in general are about. There's a situation and you try solve it the best you can, hoping to have fun in the process.

PvP in WoW is a ladder system to catass to obtain personal rewards. The players have found the most efficent way to go there.

The players jusr revealed that WoW STILL HAS NO PvP. Because there is absolutely NO REASON TO FIGHT. Beside wasting time in the name of the "fun".

[MrHat]

Beside wasting time in the name of the "fun".

Last I checked, that's the definition of ANY game EVER made.

[Merusk]

Beside wasting time in the name of the "fun".

Last I checked, that's the definition of ANY game EVER made.

No, no, no.  This is an online game, it's about replacing your shitty real life, measuring e-peen and proving to the rest of the game population how leet you are and that everyone in High School was a punk and didn't know what they were talking about when they called you a loser! THEY were the losers! It's THEY who suck. ALL OF THEM! FUCK YOU BILLY, SHE NEVER LOVED YOU! I'M THE HERO!! **I'M THE HERO, DAMNIT!!**

Or at least that's what I've gathered from the last 8 years of message boards/ usenet.

[MrHat]

I stand firmly corrected.

[Calantus]

That's what Hrose is talking about. Not enough people care about intangibles like fun.

Can you wear fun? Can you link it? Is it purple?

[dEOS]

As long as you play with young teenagers... aren't you going to be forever in that "e-peen" measurement scheme ?

[Merusk]

As long as you play with young teenagers... aren't you going to be forever in that "e-peen" measurement scheme ?

Although I was doing it tongue-in-cheek, that was my exact point. It's not just because there's teenagers, however.  Some of the most egocentric pricks older males with 'something to prove'.  What this accomplishes in an online game, I have no idea, but the mindset is there and all competative measures are steeped in it.

[HaemishM]

Beside wasting time in the name of the "fun".

Last I checked, that's the definition of ANY game EVER made.

No, no, no.  This is an online game, it's about replacing your shitty real life, measuring e-peen and proving to the rest of the game population how leet you are and that everyone in High School was a punk and didn't know what they were talking about when they called you a loser! THEY were the losers! It's THEY who suck. ALL OF THEM! FUCK YOU BILLY, SHE NEVER LOVED YOU! I'M THE HERO!! **I'M THE HERO, DAMNIT!!**

Or at least that's what I've gathered from the last 8 years of message boards/ usenet.

IT IS YOU WHO ARE THE BALLLICKERS!

[Train Wreck]

but thats the entire problem. No one WANTS compedative AV.  They want fast and easy AV. Its just that simple.

A: Good group of AVers VS Good Group of AVers = 4 or 5 hour game for XXX CP / YYY Faction

B: Good Group of AVers VS Poor Group of AVers = 1 hour game for slightly less CP and probably a lot less Faction

However, if you can repeat  scenario B 4 times for every A, then no one is really going to want to do A for anything other then E-Peen waveing contests which will likely be mutually arranged between the 2 guilds/groups in question inbetween bouts of scenario B.

ER AV doesn't have this problem.  It tends to only launch on Thursday through Sunday, and usually only once per those days.  The battles are fairly even and usually last about 4 hours.  I wasn't aware other servers were treating it as a grind.  I hope it doesn't catch on here, because it sounds like total shit.

[Train Wreck]

I think scaling bonus honor for longer games is a better idea. If you win a game in ten minutes, obviously you didn't meet much opposition. You could argue then that people would just prolong games to get more honor then. So even then people would game the system there too.

No, the only way you get good games is to have an installed time limit on both sides, high and low. If you leave before five minutes, you lose points. If you don't have a conclusion by thirty minutes, the game goes to the team most ahead in flags, kills, or whatever you may have. Obviously, I mean this for WSG. And for heaven's sake, scale back bonus honor for winning in the short BGs like WSG and the new one coming out. Give us a damn incentive for actually queuing up in AV.

Your time scaling idea would probably fix much of the problem in AV.  Four hours could be the target for AV, and if a game is over in only 30 minutes, they only gain 1/8th of the honor.  If the game lasts for eight hours, they get double the honor.  This is more appropriate to AV than WSG, obviously, as the faster WSG is over, the better the winning team was over their competition.

As far as min and max time limits, that would probably be better suited for a future battleground.  It looks like Blizzard plans to have different goals for each BG, and having a 30 minute long fragfest would probably be a lot of fun.  As far AV, I think that the longer it lasts, the better, because it implies that the sides were evenly matched.  If a hot contest ended because an arbitrary time limit expired, it would be very dissapointing.

The population balance on the BG should also be taken into account.  When one side outnumbers the other by nearly 2 to 1, they should get far less points for HKs, and perhaps give bonus points to the outnumbered side for putting up a good fight rather than just Hearthing out to jump into the next queue.  Maybe the outnumbering side should be prevented from entering too deeply into the outnumbered side's territory until they gain more players.  On my server, the Alliance usually does this on its own by skirmishing with them in the Field of Contention but not taking any points of interest until more Horde arrive.  I doubt this practice is widespread on other servers, though, from what I'm hearing.

[Calantus]

The population balance on the BG should also be taken into account.  When one side outnumbers the other by nearly 2 to 1, they should get far less points for HKs, and perhaps give bonus points to the outnumbered side for putting up a good fight rather than just Hearthing out to jump into the next queue.  Maybe the outnumbering side should be prevented from entering too deeply into the outnumbered side's territory until they gain more players.  On my server, the Alliance usually does this on its own by skirmishing with them in the Field of Contention but not taking any points of interest until more Horde arrive.  I doubt this practice is widespread on other servers, though, from what I'm hearing.

Haha, no. Just left an AV where we had contested their north bunker before they hit 30 players.

[Ironwood]

This always seems to me to defeat the purpose.  Doing that shit just means that the horde will, er, leave.  (at least on our server).

Bang goes any HKs or CPs for the night.

AV and WSG suck.  I loved them at the start, but then it became clear, as many have already stated, that the meta-game of farming had started which made it, er, not so fun.

(Post may contain understatement.)

[Morfiend]

(Post may contain understatement.)

Gee, you think?

[Strazos]

Random PvP in Ashenvale and Barrens FTW.

[Righ]

All you people dicking around with lowbie alts on the new servers might like to know that Arathi Basin is hella good fun.

Its simple - there are five resource nodes, four points on a diamond, one in the middle, unequal terrain such that each boundary node has a short route to an adjacent boundary node and a long route to the other. Control of a node cause it to tick up resources. First team to 2000 resources wins, so if it averages even just one node per side with three in flux and turnover nearly all the time, its still game over in a little over a half hour. Nobody can turtle in a graveyard and stall, and battles can't go back and forth all night.

Somebody will find a way to fuck it up in due course, but its proving to be a lot of fun now.

[MrHat]

All you people dicking around with lowbie alts on the new servers might like to know that Arathi Basin is hella good fun.

Its simple - there are five resource nodes, four points on a diamond, one in the middle, unequal terrain such that each boundary node has a short route to an adjacent boundary node and a long route to the other. Control of a node cause it to tick up resources. First team to 2000 resources wins, so if it averages even just one node per side with three in flux and turnover nearly all the time, its still game over in a little over a half hour. Nobody can turtle in a graveyard and stall, and battles can't go back and forth all night.

Somebody will find a way to fuck it up in due course, but its proving to be a lot of fun now.

Cool, we'll no doubt try it out in a few levels :p

[HaemishM]

So Arathi Basin is essentially Unreal's Onslaught mode without vehicles?

[Calantus]

No. Onslaught required you to assault a base, and the nodes were just stepping stones to that goal. I like to think of AB as King of the Hill, only with multiple hills.

[Der Helm]

So Arathi Basin is essentially Unreal's Onslaught mode without vehicles?

I would play BG more often if there were voice emotes of "HEADSHOT" and "RAMPAGE".

I am tired of yelling at my screen while playing.