f13.net

I've been in games lately where as many as half the alliance players are afk, and even more horde-side.  When only a few afk, it's not a problem, but with this many, it's ridiculous.  At least my battlegroup has < 1 minute queues (some, I've heard, have half-hour queues).

I'm one who actually enjoys AV.  I liked it back with all the mobs, before it became a 20 minute race to the boss.  I like it now, although I tend to defend towers and graveyards more than lead the charge because I get to pvp more that way.  I don't farm it for honor; I enjoy playing it.  I'd play it for no honor.

(I reached exalted in AV on my lock before hitting friendly on any other BG.  My hunter still isn't past honored with any other BG faction, but exalted in AV very quickly).

I can't figure out where Blizzard stands on this.  They're clearly against afk-botting, but the fix for cave-dwelling seems somewhat easy (remove all honor for people who don't leave the cave) - why don't they implement it?

I've asked GMs about it, and their stock response - report cave-dwellers.  I don't, because that means I have to stop playing myself so that i can make a list of who has no honor, no damage, no healing, no captures, no defends, and who haven't moved, and then submit a ticket.  There's no easy way to copy the names-servers over to a ticket, so it's a real pain.

The Blizzard pvp forum is ablaze with complaints and suggestions, but no blue responses. 

I had a point but I've been interrupted so many times writing this that I've forgotten it... just venting now, I guess.

Maybe somebody should write a mod that makes it easier to report them? Also, why would you go AFK in a Battleground?

In AV you get Honor & tokens no matter who wins. The amount you get is determined by the success of your team in capturing certain goals/ killing certain NPCs.   If you're AFK in game the whole time you still get the honor, even if you haven't gotten a kill.   Honor is, as you know, the PVP currency.

Even though Honor & token gear are < arena gear, it's easier to get them while /afk at work or something then pick up stuff to do 'real' pvp later.  It's a pisser and happening in a lot of BGs, which is why I don't bother other than on my twink these days.

The original design of AV was great, if a little too big and Korrak was a dumb idea altogether. They ruined the zone when they took out join as group, and the way people play now (if you get a side all playing) to see who can defeat the other side's general first and the "gentleman's agreement" to not contest anything except the final graveyards/generals is dumb as hell.

We used to really piss people off in my alliance guild as 10 of us would all queue up at the same time, and usually get the same AV. Then we would spend the entire time defending the "LET THE HORDE TAKE THAT YOU NOOBS!!!!" graveyards and towers. The matches would last about an hour and a half, but we actually were doing something other than rushing the boss that was more fun and was within the design parameters of the zone.

A friend of mine AFK bots in AV now all the time, because he wants one piece of gear. I think it is stupid, personally, but I think the whole PvP rewards system has been all kinds of borked up in every iteration. People don't PvP for the fun of it, they PvP for the pruplez. Any time it is possible to get those purplez without doing anything but queing up, tabbing out, and turning on your windows script that sends the equivalent of "hit the turn right key" every 20 seconds a lot of people will do that.

I've noticed lately that, of the people who do play, whatever agreement people had to not take Stonehearth graveyard has disappeared when it's not AV weekend.  On my battlegroup, horde is defending more, and alliance is too. It's not just a race.

Maybe they should just take the guards out of the caves so that the other side can farm the AFKs.

The Original AV design would have been great, if they went ahead with that they originally planned. Having the zone be a open PvP zone for all comers, instead of instancing it. The Original AV was built around a hundred people per side, with everyone spread out doing all the little side quests. It was supposed to be a real zone. Then someone at Blizz HQ realized PvE servers have on average a 2:1 Alliance population advantage and went "quick instance this!". The zone wasn't built for 40 vs 40, and it was reflected in how abysmally long the games were. Things like Land mines didn't make sense in a 40 vs 40 instanced scenario, now in a persistent zone shared by everyone, the time needed to deal with land mines would pay off. All the side quests, the PvE camps etc... they make no sense for something designed to be instanced, but plenty of sense of a 24/7 zone .


As to why Blizz doesn't do anything about the AFK'ers in the cave? They can't. If someone wants to stand in the cave like a douche bag the entire game, as long as they aren't using third party software, it's legit. Just lame. Force them out of the cave, they just move to their general, or to a tower, or to any random out of the way spot in AV. Tether the honour bonus to a certain range and you fuck over the people legitimately defending things or capturing out of the way but vital objectives.

I often stay behind to defend snowfall against that random horde that goes to contest it, the only difference between the AFK Caver and myself is location 90% of the time, but if no one watches snowfall, some horde takes it then the alliance is all rezzing back at Stormpike. Same thing with towers, most of tower defense is standing around waiting, but if no one does it, your team is out 20 honour and has 1 extra Warmaster to deal with.

The best way to remove AFK'ing would be to reduce the cost of the Honour items 10 fold. They just cost *way* to much for what they're worth. 14k honour for some crappy PvP blue armor piece that is practically 'useless' outside of PvP/Arena's. Lets say Average Joe gets 1k honour a night, that's 2-4 AV games, that is roughly 1-2 hours of PvP. Two Hours a night, Two weeks later he gets his shitty item (assuming it uses AV tokens, that's another issue if it needs something like WSG tokens) hurrah! Now he needs another 14k for his next piece. Then again, and again. Average Joe is going to either tell the game to fuck off, or he's going to idle in the cave mashing the jump button every so often while watching Dancing with the Stars on TV.


 
You can farm them WITH the guards there if your stubborn enough  :-D

AV is broken, as other have said, because the Battleground concept as a whole is broken. People play them not to have fun but because they expect material return on the time they invest, and the time spent is to them simply a barrier between them and the new shiny.

With that mentality of course people are going to avoid spending more of their attention on it than they absolutely must. Why do you think the outdoor PVP objectives in Azeroth never caught on? Because the reward was minimal at best. The time spent versus reward ratio was just too small to satisfy WoW players who have become used to quick gratification.

Note that I'm not saying people should have to get used to working longer to get new stuff but the whole motivation that most people have when playing the game is just wildly off from the reason people play a lot of games - to have fun. I'm not sure that it's possible to work around this in any MMO game where character progression is important. GW was close to the idea but then you have people complaining that there wasn't enough advancement.

That's it in a nutshell, people are gaming the system. I'm sure the Dev's intended for us to trade towers for tokens with the horde in hellfire  :-P


Little incentive, combined with little reason and less actual fun. The only world PvP objective that might actually be PvP'ed with any regularity is Halaa, because bombing never gets old.  :-) That too has it's issues though, the wonderful 2:1 A/H ratio destroys the fun there pretty quick, at least on my server.


To be fair though, one paradox of the PvP system is while people play it to get the new shiny instead of having fun, you don't really have fun in the PvP system unless you have a fair bit of 'pvp shiny' to wear. Other wise, your just a target. I know my enjoyment goes up several levels when my actions in a BG include things other then "Being Two Shot" and "Farmed for Honor".


ps. In a Nutshell? What does that even mean!

Even in Guild Wars you had leeching in the objective-based scenarios. (That said, I liked the GW system where Faction gave you additional breadth, not depth of abilities.) If you allow people to get something for little to no work, they will. With the Veteran's pieces being on-par with anything pre-Prince for PvE it is definitely a case of something very nice for possibly little work.

The thing I don't understand though is the problem some people have with "the shiny" and PvP. Over in what has become the Diablo 3 thread (http://forums.f13.net/index.php?topic=10444.0), the important thing they use to differentiate WoW and Diablo is the speed of shiny acquisition. It doesn't make sense that you would want to remove something that people say the game is lacking in the first place though.

It's not a matter of whether there is shiny or not, it's a matter of whether the shiny compels people to play the game or to play the system. In WoW it compels you to play the system because playing the game isn't fast enough.

In my battlegroup, people (even high-end arena players) AFK in AV because they believe the outcome is already predetermined and/or they 'hate the battleground'. AV is really the only battleground you can AFK in and get good honor -- if you do the same in WSG/AB/EOTS, your team is going to lose, especially if you have more than one AFKer. And unlike AV, the other battlegrounds don't reward you for losing.

There used to be (http://youtube.com/watch?v=YEFToa2pyPY) a way to get rid of AFKers, Blizz patched it out though. :P


-- Z.

I think the thing is that it's both.  Clearly some people (like Xanthippe) like it for the game itself.  But with the shiny attached to it, even people who don't like it will play.  Those are the ones who will game the system if they are of low enough moral character and they think they can.

I'd play AV if there was no honor because I enjoy the pvp.

I'd be happy if Blizzard gave people honor for doing nothing - I don't care.  But I don't want them doing nothing in AV, because it screws up AV.

I enjoy AV, or did when I was 60, anyway. But it's also a pretty unpleasantly long grind to extract the shiny out of it.

So why is it bad to just kick them out if they haven't made a kill in the last 10 minutes, or healed somebody, or ...   There has to be a way they can at least make it harder on these lazy asses than just turning right constantly.

Force them into having to use a botting program and then you have the excuse to ban them.  It seems to me that if you haven't done damage or healed in the last 10 minutes, you aren't playing the game.

You can guard a grave yard or tower till it flips and not get attacked the whole time. That's 5 minutes. Then move up and guard different  tower or  grave yard and not get attacked for another 5 minutes. It's rare but it happens.

Just making the cave a no honor gain zone would fix the problem. Once the slackers moved outside the cave they could be farmed and thus be of some use.

If you solo an enemy player you get 21 points so killing a few is a nice boost to honor gained per AV.

That definitely seems like a good solution.  Conceptually, why should anyone gain honor from a position of perfect safety anywhere?

The main problem with AV - Horde-side at least - is that the map itself had a slight-but-significant bias in favour of the Alliance. So it's nearly as effecient for Horde players to idle in the entrance cave as to actually take part: if Horde manages to win - great! If not, well...you didn't waste any effort in actually fighting and you got almost the same honour anyway.

Having played as both (recently as Horde though) sides in AV about the only real advantage I can give the Alliance is bunker/archer layout only allows an easy solo-cap of say... Stonehearth versus almost all towers being solo-capable with a Fear. The valley right by Stormpike can be completely negated by the high-road out of their cave, but people rarely do that. Maybe that it's easier to zerg-defend Aid Station then Relief Hut, but that plays both ways if the Alliance has to zerg Drek.

On the other hand you can also contend that Stonehearth GY has significantly easier access to Lieutenants then Snowfall GY which is honestly a lot more important since they're the main drivers for raw Honor gain. A few games that we lose, Horde will come out with more Honor then Alliance simply because we actually killed all their Lts.


Actually, that's what my guildies and I do all the time, a usual AV for us is:

• Cap Stonehearth Bunker and kite Commander to Stonehearth GY.
• If we have more then say, three people, a few will guard SH Bunker while the rest help kite Lts to SH GY.
• Cap and guard Icewing Bunker because no one ever takes it.
• Hopefully by this point, Stormpike GY is in transition... and we guard that.
• Once it's capped and Alliance aren't actively trying to take it back, we go harass the cave. Kiting the guards out you're able to take out quite a few guys if they don't have decent PvP gear :evil:. Surprisingly enough though we can usually provoke a decent fight out in front of their cave most days.

I'll play along with the zerg-the-general game once or twice, then I get bored and just charge my paly into groups of Horde and spam consecrate/shield throw/whatever's up until I croak.  I consistently have the most deaths of any player on the scoreboard :P

That will just make them move somewhere else, die once and then afk as ghosts.  Being farmable doesn't help their team in the least, and they were already helping the other team by being afk in the first place.  Theres no solution to afk botting that does not involve a complete redesign of the zone or a rule change followed by a massive enforcement campaign.

Well, since there's NO legitimate reason to be a ghost for more than a couple minutes, at most, just throw a 5 minute timer on you if you're a ghost.  Been a ghost for 5 minutes, you get booted from the zone.

But even that wouldn't help really, since they would just move to another safe location like Drek'thar's room.

In my opinion, the solution would be to make better use of NPC's.  Anyone who hasn't gotten an HK or died to an enemy within X amount of time (several minutes) gets a 1 minute debuff on them called something like 'Frostwolf Spirit Trackers' or 'Stormpike Nature Trackers'.  If they get an HK or die, then the debuff goes away, if they don't, a small group of NPC's spawn and attack.  The NPC's can only be seen by the person they came to kill, and they can be defeated solo with relative ease, if you fight back.  If you don't, and they kill you, then they materialize as full-strength NPC's and guard that point (or engage in combat with anyone else nearby, if there is anyone).  They could even add a counter in there too, making it so that if they kill you X number of times in a single game, you get dumped from the game.  2-3 would be enough.

As for AV's layout....Horde actually has the defensive advantage in terrain, however it requires intelligence and strategic thinking to take advantage of it.  A well-organized Horde team is much better at defending than a well-organized Alliance team because the terrain gives them far better advantages - more chokepoints and the like.  However, since the removal of the majority of the NPC's, the Horde has no one to defend these chokepoints, because players typically don't use these strategic locations.  Alliance locations have better 'automatic' defense, as in, their graveyards are placed at better points for people to spawn and charge in to defend from.

And for anyone who hasn't gone out there and done the quests, or read about them, I find the quest text from Wing Commander Ichman and Wing Commander Mulverick to be awesome on Netherwing Ledge.  Ichman: "Three years I spent in that hell hole. Three years a prisoner of war to the damnable Frostwolf Clan. Made to sit in their tower and listen to them endlessly whine about the bridge to Dun Baldar. About how it's "unfair" that blah, blah, blah, blah... War isn't fair! To hell with 'em all!"  Mulverick: "Three years of blood, sweat and tears. Mostly tears... The amount of crying that a hardened soldier does when it comes down to all-out war is amazing!  "They're jumping into our tower with their horses!" "Why is their base so well defended?" "They're taking our relief hut, I'm going A.W.O.L.!"  Wimps..."

Instead of penalizing and trying to kill off those that AFK, they need to add bonuses to those that play.

Track mutli-game accomplishments in a time frame, day / week / hours.  Then award extra honor.  It might even be done something like the arena, for those that only play one game then do something else.   Accomplishments per game, instead of per rate of time.

Capping flags, defending flags, time spent near a flag waiting for it to cap. There is a bunch of stuff you could track over many games then give a bonus.  Those that just stand in the tunnel won't get any bonus honor.  You could  then raise the prices of goods. 

That should cover the majority of the player base actively playing, people would just have to be aware that "yes" the can stand and watch that flag all game doing "nothing" but really helping defend, they just can't do it each and every game and still expect a bonus.

edit: grammar and stuff

They should just give us snowballs back to knock the fuckers out of the instance.

How about, not only having rewards for good behaviour, but being able to tag afk'ers.  Instead of the old snow ball routine, make an option that allows you to tag an opponent or somebody on your side through a menu pick.  If the tagged person doesn't get rid of that "tag" within something like 3 minutes, they get booted.

Make it so it is easy to get rid of, but difficult enough for a macro program to automatically get rid of.  Of course, you could only tag characters that are *AFK* so it couldn't be used as a way to screw you up during combat. 

This way even if you are in a protected spot, your own players could rat you out, basically.  Yes, macros could be made to fix this, but you are driving the lazy ones deeper into banning territory at that point.  Plus, 90% of the people out there are just not going to go to that extreme (total strawman of one --->me.)

If you actually go AFK you get booted.  Hence the term "afk out".

The macroers send a command once every few minutes so that afk does not kick in.

That would only get rid of the people who are really afk and using a bot to stay in the bg, and Blizzard already suspends/bans those so they are a minimal problem.  The problem is most of the afkers are actually at the computer, usually browsing the forums, if a GM shows up they talk to them and then go on their merry way since they are actually semi there even if they are not contributing.  This wouldn't do anything to get rid of those guys.

The worst ones are the assholes who sit in the cave and crititique the play.

Makes me wish for an open pvp server.

Essentially, it isn't against the rules to suck.

You had me up until the "raise the prices" part.  That stuff is already overpriced, in my opinion.  You'd have to give a lot more honor for that to make it worth it (since if my team has two towers and a graveyard going at once I'm only going to get the bonus honor for one, correct?  So each of those objectives would have to be worth a significant chunk of the price increase or else the increase in honor is not going to match the increase in item prices), and if you did that you'd be penalizing players who prever Arathi or something to Alterac, since they'll be getting the same honor they always have... you could just raise the honor for everyone, but why bother, when you could just lower the "base" honor for running Alterac?

I personally think the best solution (as others have mentioned) is to lower the honor cost of the items.  Keep the victory token cost; that way you've got some incentive to win, but the honor cost is the big reason you see so many people in AV: because it's the best Honor/Hour ratio of all the BGs by a long shot, and usually your Honor is the limiting factor in what items you can buy.  Take away either of those issues and people won't have a reason to camp AV anymore.

I'd like to see performance-based que's implemented in all BG's.

Add a few new metrics to the character sheet, each associated with desirable actions by players in a given BG.

For the monkies in AB that run from node to node and never protect anything, we subtract points from their "AB Quotient" for lacking "time spent guarding capped/capping node that has 2 or less players of your faction within X distance of it".  Needs to be scored on a bell curve so that people dont spend TOO much time gaurding.

Score also on damage & healing done, nodes capped (or being present when capping begins), games won/lost ratio (only begin this metric after player has played X # of games).  Im sure developers who are getting payed for this shit could come up with more ideas.

Could do the same thing with AV, WSG, and EotS, with different metrics that compose the respective BG Quotient.  When queing, the system sorts people based on their respective bg quotient, resulting in all afker's being lumped together and getting virtually no honor (and remove ALL honor from simply losing, increase honor gained for various objectives in AV to compensate, just to really stick it to the maggots).

Your score for each of the respective BG's gets re-averaged daily (unless of course you dont play that bg that day), with one caveat.  Since the best way to "game" this new system would be to play very well one day, then afk the next, penalties for poor performance should be far greater then bonuses for positive.  Furthermore, if someone shows they are capable of a very high play level (which they use to dig themselves out of an afk or stupid-playing rutt), the resultant score penalties become worse, making it increasingly difficult to "dig" yourself out each time you do it.  I also like how this simultaneously screws people who buy the accounts of good players but suck, they will be stuck playing bg's with nothing but human refuse.

I really dont see why Blizzard can take the time to program and tune black temple but can't attach a few new BG scores to character sheets to improve the gameplay experience of PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY PLAY.  The most time-consuming part of this would be determining how much to weigh each of the metrics to encourage halfway competent gameplay, or in the case of AV gameplay period.

Simple, brute-force fix: Nerf the crap out of the winning/losing honour, boost all other AV honour gains through the roof.

Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of trying to gain/lose things in AV to win?

How about making AFK code a bit more intelligent? Exclude repetitive actions from AFK code - get a script that looks for repetitive action while characters remain at the same X,Y coordinate. Exclude all players with 0 damage done, 0 damage taken from getting any honor. Exclude all players that spend more than 5 minutes in a row dead from getting any honor while dead. Exclude all players that spend more than 5 minutes in a row at any given 'resurrection spot' or cave from getting honor until they move on from that spot.

Add valuable PvP loot - instead of 'gag' drops players should be able to loot tokens that can be redeemed for honor.

Allow Raid Leader to initiate 'ready check' every 10-15 minutes, if you miss 2 checks in a row you get booted as an AFK. Introduce individual honor bonuses for reaching objectives - honor bonus to players that captured or defended tower or graveyard, turned something in, summoned LOK/Forest Lord, rescued wingmaster or participated in killing elite NPC.

beefing up afk code is treating the symptoms. If you're forcing players into a situation where they need to afkbot to get to where they want to be, the shiny or whatever, you need to reexamine your reward path.

Exactly.

Yep, the problem was that when it started, HKs were the end all be all of gaining honor, so instead of focusing on objectives ppl would run amok killing everything. Then, they shifted back, beefed up bonus honor objectives, and then decided to make them divisable across the board. However that leads us to the problem of total inactivity that we have now. The pendulum swung too far.

The solution is rewarding bonus honor by guarding and capturing objectives instead of assigning them worldwide. For example, reward people for holding a point in AB or AV or EoS with a slow tick of honor. Reward more points for holding enemy objectives. Give small spike rewards for capture things. Give even more points in honor per tick when you own many objectives to encourage conquest. Make wins meaningless to bonus honor, but instead focus on more objectives making more points. That way points for winning will flow directly from the objectives rather than the "win." This will decrease the inequities of a 1900-2000 AB loss. Only award these points to those within 100 yards of the objective.

eh as a horde av has no balance whatsoever so its pointless to even play it 90% of the time unless its av weekend and half the alliance are retards or afk. Someone pointed out the bridge/tower thing. Thats just ONE aspect. One major one is Frostwolf GY vs Stormpike GY. one is spread out like a whore and one only has 2 avenues of entry, one very out of the way, funnelling players into one or two areas makes defense very easy and "automatic". Also, Alliance dont have to deal with our NPCs. They can calmly walk by our entire camp and cap the GY with very little fighting. Second a horde waltzes into the alliance base you have the blacksmith and every other npc running all over. This slows the horde down tremendously. There's a reason the alliance almost always beats the horde to the towers and the gy.

Someone in my guild dropped a hint that there are going to be changes to AFKValley that may put a big curb on the afk-to-victory going on in there coming relatively soon.  supposedly has something to do with changes already happening on chinese servers or something like that.

The only honor you get at the end of the game is either the bonus honor on the weekends which is the same across all BGs or for any of your objectives that you were able to defend at the end of the game (say the mines or the Horde controlling Iceblood GY). For EotS/AB the only honor you get at the end is the last 20 points from reaching 2k points. (A 1900 to 2000 loss is only a loss of 20 points.)

The vast majority of the honor in AV is gained from killing NPCs and destroying bunkers and that is gained as soon as that objective is completed.

We are talking about WoW here, grind is the only content and reward path. You reexamine it and there won't be anything left but log-in screen.

:roll:

I agree. I wouldn't choose to play again for shiny. I reserved a L29 rogue alt simply for 20-30 WSG. It was very fun and pure because many who were doing the BGs weren't twink alts.

Some good news from Blizz Con:


-edit-

The Whole Panel: http://www.wowinsider.com/2007/08/04/liveblog-world-of-warcraft-pvp-panel-at-blizzcon/

Why would people applause this? Though I imagine that the con-goer audience was made up of the sort of people who think they're hardcore for joining a battleground as a guild with teamspeak and rolling a PUG after cherrypicking instances. The lack of premades was one of the things that made AV palatable along with the best honor gains - even if your team got rolled. So now they're "fixing" AV by adding premades and moving most of the honor to the backend so you'll be forced to stick around in an instance for little or no honor if you're in a PUG fighting a premade.

Wow, what improvements those will be. They really seem intent on completely breaking the aspects of the game that are still casual and fun.

Also the AFK countermeasures are stupid and easily gamed.

Did you ever play AV before they removed queue as group?

It was a much better zone back then for a multitude of reasons.

They removed it because it was being "abused" by people who would use it to flush queues. Once they added the AFK debuff, the ability to use it in that fashion went away anyway. Even if they made it "group queued teams only play other group queued teams" it would still make the zone a more interesting place.

I don't play anymore, but you can be damn sure that if I did, myself and everyone I ever played with would cheer at group queues returning.

Group Queuing might be cool if its just that, a single 5 man group. So you can bring your buddies, but not dominate the zone. Bringing back the full pre-made raid groups rolling AV. That's just gonna suck for the PuG's.


I'm glad they seem to be doing something about the AFKing, but I doubt the effectiveness of the proposed changes. So instead of mashing the jump button every 5 mins, I mash my moonfire button to hit one of the horde ganking me in my graveyard. Might not even need to do that, if people attacking me counts as being 'in combat' for purposes of the debuff.

I feel this video is relevant to this thread : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2503943998711687883

That was like watching a postage stamp.

I played a lot of AV this weekend after having been away from it from a few years.   I too can report that it's a freaking joke now.

Tactics seem out the window in favor of a straight rush to the generals.  Since this favors the alliance, it means that the alliance always wins.  I never was in a winning AV out of probably 20-30, but the word on the street was that the horde won one all weekend in our battlegroup.  ONE, out of probably thousands, since the queues were seconds all weekend, with probably 20 concurrent ones going at any given time.

The AFKs didn't help, either. Hordeside seems a lot worse, probably because it seems a lot more pointless.  If you're only going to get one badge anyway, why work for it? A.B's overwrought angsty teen shtick aside, I do agree with him that the countermeasures seem easily gamed, but OTOH Blizzard's remedies usually work in my experience, even if they cause other side effects.  I guess we'll see, hopefully soon.

The problem isnt that AV favors alliance, the problem is that fast loses are a lot better for horde than slow hard fought wins.  Please tell me in how many of those games you played was horde actually playing any defense? i can guarantee you there was a pack of alliance defending stormpike at every single one.  Horde can choose between 4 500 honor loses an hour or 2 600 honor wins, while alliance is going to get only 2 games no matter what because their queues are not instant even during av weekend.

Exactly. My queue is 40 minutes for AV on a non-weekend. That means that even the fast AV games take an hour to give me honor. It hardly hurts my honor/hour to turn a 20 minute game into a 30 or even 40 minute game if that's what it takes to win. A 40 minute game for horde means they only completed half the games they could have. Go take a look at 59-60 AV. Horde win in my BG. Always. The reason they do is because honor is mostly meaningless at that point in the game. You don't have 10-15 experienced honor grinders per game deliberately losing/AFKing to lose fast, just people actually fighting and trying to win.

You could swap the maps around and it would still be the same, alliance would fight tooth and nail for a victory and horde would be like "/1 STOP FIGHTING THEM FFS LETS JUST LOSE QUICK". A new thing my BG does is hold EVERY point in the map. 10-15 alliance will hold SH and push the horde all the way back to the cave and farm them there, keeping the whole map blue. We'll have people yelling "don't let them get anything" "no honor for horde" "push them to the cave" in our /1. There's no map advantage there, the horde haven't reached the bridge or even the long narrow SH->SP road, and the alliance haven't been funneled to def by respawns. One side wants to win, one side wants the match to end fast. That's why horde lose.

EDIT: Also, I spend most of my AV games AFK while working. :evil:

Come to Stormstrike. I rarely wait more than 1 minute to get into an AV, even on weekdays.

I played on my Alliance character on Proudmoore this weekend for about 3 hours. I ended up making about 5k honor since I can tank and thus basically control the protection of certain towers and generals. Funny thing was though, we had one match where the Horde were behind, but two alliance guys were griefing the group by pulling the General out of the fortress everytime we got him to 50% by overaggro. The Kicker? The griefer was the Raid Leader in the group. We finally got four tanks in there set up in a line to catch it via taunts, but it still took about 20 minutes longer than it should have, and we almost lost to a team that was nowhere close.

Of course I reported him, but I doubt he'll get banned for being a giant dick. Blizzard isn't smart enough to do that.

Context: One of the various Goon Squad guilds decided to have some fun with AFKers in the Alliance cave, so they went up, killed the guards, then started mind-controlling AFKers out the exit portal.

And killing a lot of people. I think I had 450 or so HKs by the end, and since alliance kept AFKing out after getting spawncamped, we didn't hit diminishing returns on honor gains. It was glorious.

About the most that I see to that effect is whenever someone takes Snowfall GY. That said, the worst queue times I see for AV are around 3-4mins in the hours after Honor updates on AV weekend. Most of the time it's near instant; sometimes I can't even get the window back up fast enough after I queue to check if I'm getting into a new one :evil:.

From my last time playing Alliance, I remember the queues being around 20mins, but that was right before BC came out (and was about ready to shoot myself). 40 minutes though? I really don't blame the Alliance for trying to make the most of that wait, God.

40 min AV queue times? That sucks.


The Nightfall battlegroup considers 4 mins AV queue times to be abnormally long  :-), there is probably a 60-40 alliance/horde win split, Nightfall horde are annoyingly good at delaying our offense long enough for them to burn our towers and VanSploit, of course there are games where we return the favor and don't lose a single tower while burning their entire side (both sides have jackasses that love to retake towers/GY's  :-D)

The Average AV round is 25 mins long either way. Maybe 1 out of every 10 degenerates into an hour+ long turtle fest. When the horde wipes the offense on Galv with SH assaulted and SF uncapped? The alliance will respawn back in their cave/SP and then instead of the alliance and horde running past each other in the field of strife, they have to run through each other along SP road. Those several hundred HK games are a nice change up to the 20 min general race, as long as they are spaced out enough.

There's still BGs with long waits? Fuck that sucks.  Rampage I waited MAYBE 5 mins for an AV this weekend.... it was in the 50-60 bracket and we got rolled fast because Horde got in all at once, and Alliance did it's ususal "peter-in for five minutes" routine.  I got in as the first 5 folks hit Galvanger then got rolled.  We lost the game about 10 mins later.

The ironic thing is that we rolled alliance because I predicted (correctly) that we would be outnumbered by horde and thus have fast queues in the BGs. That's the only reason we're alliance. Fast forward to battlegrounds and now we are still outnumbered heavily in the world but have long queue times to go with it. :cry:

Up until today (I didn't play this weekend though) my battlegroup has had about a minute wait time for AV.  It's AV weekend now, and the queue is 15 minutes.  I don't know why the sudden change.

Weekend queues see an influx of casual pvpers, usually on the winning side. If you happen to be on said side, queue times go up.

Go away for a year and things change rapidly. I played on Sargeras a while back, and horde owned AV. Even if both sides were fighting tooth and nail. Sure it took awhile, but the alliance won like once a month maybe. Oi. What happened?

Cross-server BGs + A:H pop imbalance = Zero queue time for Horde (in most battlegroups). Then someone figured out Horde get more honour from 4 quick losses than 1 slow win, so if Horde don't win within 10 minutes people give up.

I think the two major things was the removal of Korrak from the middle map graveyard and the removal / nerf of the majority of the NPC's in the zone.  The horde side design of the AV map is just so horrible to defend in comparison to the alliance side, and the removal of the npc's that helped with the defense was probably the proverbial straw that broke the cammel's back.

I have to agree with this.  I mentioned it earlier but the consensus appears to be that the map does not favor alliance. Consider this, though:

For horde to attack alliance base, you have to travel up a road with a graveyard at the elbow, that's in a ravine from which hunters and mages can shoot down upon you.  Then you have to cross a bridge on which you are exposed from three sides, while super long range npc archers are shooting you from the tower.  Also, even if you have the graveyard, the alliance spawn in their cave behind you anyway.

Compare this to horde, where you can trot right through a village full of NPCs that just stare at you and do nothing, through an empty tower that doesn't even dismount you, into a wide open area with a few guardian NPCs that are easily sorted.  The Horde cave is far away, and if you take the graveyard, any defensive characteristics of the Horde base actually serve to help you.

Something was screwy for all the BGs last night.  People were complaining about queues for every battleground, and the authorization server was borked.  My AV queue ended up being 45 minutes, and my AB queue ended up being 15.  I haven't seen queues like that since before they instituted battlegroups.

Since in my BG horde exploit pull Vann each and every game (I fear bomb as a hobby so I know) I really don't want to hear horde whining about minor geographical differences.

It's cheap, but then again in an even pug vs pug game if the horde doesn't do that the alliance will win by a large margin - the horde base is that much easier to capture.

Oh please, Horde loses because its better for them to lose, period.  If horde put as much effort into defense as the alliance does they would win every-single-game, map imbalances be damned.  The problem is once the alliance offense stalls they slowly start trikling back to defense and it becomes a two hour long game, which is horrible for honor compared to a string of quick loses.  Horde didnt stop trying because the map may be slightly biased towards alliance, they quit trying after they realized wiping alliance at galvangar guarantees a win but also an hour and a half of throwing themselves at the 30 people defending stormpike.

Yep, we had a Horde group who was coordinated steamroll our Alliance group once because they did the unthinkable. They actually went to Captain Galv with 6 ppl and played stunlock defense. Then, they played defense at IB GY, then they recapped towers after we left them underdefended. They played shadowgames the entire time, slowing us up enough to where we only just had control of FW GY by the time the game was over. The key point was, they didn't bother advancing at all after they took the first GY. They just waited for everyone they killed at Galvanger to go on by while they held the towers, and then they rushed the base.

That happens almost every time horde wins on my server.  The other times are when horde bugs/bypasses the marshalls to kill Vann directly.

I'm a little tired of hearing how the horde are better at pvp but the AV map is stacked against them.  It's no more stacked than the AB map is.

The chokepoints hurt the Alliance as much as they help on defense. A Horde group who really hated the Alliance could fuck everyone over by stalemating at the IW Tower and just never moving. Nobody from the Alliance would be able to do a damn thing on Offense at all. There's nothing more frustrating than trying to get by that point and always getting jacked up, only to have to run back along that stupid path.

Meh. I'm alliance and I think the map is pretty stacked against horde. I've done enough O and D to see how easy/difficult it is to get into the bases for the two sides. Alliance can bypass most of the chokepoint by taking the high east road up to the bunker and flag near Balinda and making a mad 500m sprint. Hell, I get past the danger zone regularly with 15-sec-on-foot mage invis.

I just hope I can get my last bits of gear before they change the system again to let people get into AV as premades. With that change I can see the end of casual PVP for many alliance, especially as the Season 1 arena gear, as shiny and nice as it may be, will cost an incredible amount of honor.

Hunh?  While i can see how that might work, they most certainly didnt do it with just six people (and if they did, it was probably a coordianted small group from a single guild / server or something).  I have tried doing defense on galvanger, and 6 people against the alliance zerg that rolls down on him most games would be a speedbump at best, a fly on the window at worst.

They were coordinated, and it was mostly warlocks and mages. They basically just kept us CC'd, feared, and jacked up the melee.

To be honest, I have a fucking blast defending when the Horde are actually winning. I've found no one seems to notice a hunter in the mess. Not quite as much fun as ganking drinking clothies behind the lines as a rogue, but pretty fun nonetheless.

Goon Squad defends it quite handily with 10. I could see more dedicated premades doing it with 6 easily. Pugs don't know how to assist or heal, so a coordinated group has a massive advantage.

Which is, IMO, as it should be.  If a social game doesn't reward coordination, that's sort of stupid.

I'll take having my casual ass handed to me frequently over a system contrived to group me with some guaranteed percentage of retards any day.

I don't think anyone was contesting the notion.

A performance based reward system would help cure the AFK Valley.

The biggest reason people afk valley is that it rewards them quickly enough without requiring any effort.
Territorial control would help prolong the battle, instead of just cap and burn.
(i.e: strengthening the General directly when you have control over towers/territory)

The most important part though is to reward player's contribution/participitation instead of the final outcome.

The problem with that is that Alterac Valley (the way it is now) isn't designed to allow ALL 40 people to get "active" credit for everything because they cant ALL be doing EVERYTHING at once.  A perfect example is the quests to capture a Graveyard / Tower.  Back in the early, non AFK days, it took me 3 games to get that quest done due to the fact that it often was not possible for me to be close enough to a tower or a graveyard when the tap occurred.   

Yes, but it would even out if you reward the participate for defending/holding a tower instead of "cap".

It's impossible to gain every possible "point" but if it evens out so that attackers/defenders/quester have a balance reward for their contribution, it should make people more inclined to go out and help contribute to a fight instead of waiting for a cap/kill in a cave.

Not to mention, you can make it so towers could be rebuilt/recap even after burning it down. This of course would drag out a single match but to me, it gives a lot more gratification for winning a match instead of the AV race style game we have today.

Of course, token rewards would have to be rebalanced to accomadate a slower match and a good deal of elements have to be reviewed (aka gathering war materials, sending out war-rider).

They should give AV tokens and honor bonuses to people who do the handins. Say "hey you handed in x number of armor scraps, here is a token with which you can combine like a mote/primal to get an honor token".

I hand in that stuff anyways, mostly because you get minor amounts of rep for it -- I havent' played AV much since they sent the rep through the roof on quests, but at the time I was grinding Darnassus rep AND honor with one toon, and found I could get 25 Darnassus rep per 5 crystal turnins, when looting a pair of bodies tended to get me 5 crystals.

(What? My dwarf wants to ride a kitty).

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29471

Yeah, I know. However, for reasons that can be chalked up to "Stupid Hunter Reasons", I kinda of want a white one. (It'll match the Snow Leopard pet I've had since level 10).

Depends on how fast the Darnassus grind goes -- I have a few days this week when my wife won't be playing (we've been duoing our way through Outland) and rather than work on my alts, I figured I'd just take the Hunter through the Darnassus starting areas through Darkshore and see how much Rep that gets me. I'm already almost revered, so not that far to go.

I haven't played in a while, but when I did play, I noticed that there was a fair amount of competition over the corpses already, since there's no loot distribution system in BGs (anyone can loot the corpses, whether they did anything in combat or not), so tying epic loot to that seems like it's going to generate no end of bitching.  Also, actually hauling your ass back to your base to turn the things in is a pain in the second half of the game, since the emblem drops you right into the middle of the enemy Zerg, and when they kill you, you'll probably end up ressurecting at the cave.  I haven't played AV as Alliance, so I don't know for sure, but wouldn't the Horde have to slaughter all your turnin guys to get to the base?  Since the blood and armor scraps all vanish into thin air at the end of the match, I can see this causing some frustration...

Ya I don't think that's the answer either. People already ninja them right and left all the time. I've had people run up when I was fighting enemies and loot the corpses right in front of me. Unless they put some sort of loot distribution scheme in like LoTR has, where opening the corpse distributes the loot tokens fairly, I wouldn't like it. It would be fine if they could get tokens spread out to everyone in range of a kill. Could be the same radius they use for looting in a group, where if you are too far away you don't get loot.

 
Usually in our AV, the npc's are mostly gone by mid fight. Someone always seems to send out the flying patrols and the druids have all wandered off to do what they do, so half the stuff you take back is pretty useless at that point.

Going back to the original AV - with all the NPCs to slow progress and make matches take 5-25 hours - would be a good start in fixing it.  Then rebalancing the way rewards are distributed to make it so people get something for showing up and doing stuff for a short period of time - maybe the length of a match now.  That prevents the whole 'race to win' and turns it back into a battle where you must meet the enemy forces head on and push the front lines back and forth.

Second, a territorial control system as someone mentioned where not only does controlling more territory give you the tactical advantage, it also strengthens 'home base' NPC's.  This makes a ninja cap of your home graveyard nearly impossible, so a small group sneaking past the main battle can't cap your home graveyard.  Other objectives may be available to such a group, though.  A bunker, mine, or lieutenant should be capturable in such a method, it just shouldn't be usable to bypass the battle.  Also, each friendly tower/bunker, lieutenant, commander, and captain could increase the General's damage and HP by 50% of base, so if you tried to attack Drek'thar with half the Horde defensive emplacements still standing, he'd be effectively indestructible due to his damage and HP.

Next, change bunkers and towers.  Instead of being destroyed, they should be capturable.  That makes it possible to recapture them, and gives more opportunity for rewarding people.  Them being destroyable only once was one of the problems with the long matches - once the objectives were completed, the rest of the match was worth very little until the win.  If you can instead capture them and they become populated with friendly NPC's, it gives the side that captured them an advantage, and it allows the enemy to re-capture them if they are left poorly defended.  Furthermore, let's link all lieutenants, commanders, and captains to a location.  If they're killed and the location is taken by the enemy, but later the location is recaptured, they respawn shortly after the recap.

Now, let's give people better options for defense - and at the same time, better options for rewards.  Five people can 'attach' themselves to a defense location - a bunker, graveyard, or tower flag.  In addition to the connected Lieutenant or Commander of this location, the five attached people must be dead before the flag can be captured.  The people can't wander more than a certain distance from the flag (25-50 yards?) or they become unattached.  Every X amount of time (1 minute?  5 minutes?) that they remain attached to a flag that is 'threatened' they gain honor and marks.  Perhaps some special token that can be combined as suggested above, and can then be turned in for either an honor reward, or marks of honor.

That leads us to: what is 'threatened'?  Well, much like Planetside's lines where bases are connected to each other, if graveyards, towers, and bunkers were connected by lines, a threatened graveyard/tower/bunker would be one that the enemy holds a connected location.  So if Snowfall Graveyard is connected to Iceblood Tower, Stonehearth Graveyard, Stonehearth Bunker, and Iceblood Graveyard as well as the two Captains' bunkers, if the Alliance holds Snowfall, it remains 'threatened' until Iceblood Tower, Graveyard, and Captain Galvangar have all been defeated.  Plus, if any defender NPC is killed near a defense point (even one in the rear, such as some guard being killed near Stormpike Graveyard, that location becomes 'threatened' for a certain period of time (5-15 minutes) and an alert is given so that people can come to defend it.

Finally, have some of those special tokens auto-distribute each time you kill an enemy player or guard.  Just like honor, everyone within exp range of the kill would get them.  Only, instead of quickly going to 0 like diminishing returns on honor, the tokens would continue throughout the match, so that fighting at the front lines remains rewarding even long after you've killed every single enemy player enough times to get 0 honor for them for today.

All together, these changes would probably make a single AV match last anywhere from hours to days before someone claims final victory.  But, as long as the rewards are balanced properly, it could be just as rewarding to go in, take part for an hour, and leave, as it is to run a single short AV 'race' now.  Except in an AV like this, the fighting would be what matters, rather than racing past each other to try to kill the enemy general as quickly as possible.  And the people in the cave?  They'd get nothing at all.

Which would be absolute fucking shit. No one wants to sit and, for their entire gaming session, not move forward or backwards at all -- people want a victory or loss, not a meat grinder where you are stuck at the bridge for 4 hours.

Well, I know a lot of people that would prefer a battle where we actually fight each other.  Although it's probably true - there are more that prefer the current 'race to win' attitude.

As comared to the current state of av?  Which to most of us is absolutely boring and dishartening fucking shit.  No one wants to try to carry the fight, while 70% of their team sits afk, not moving from the cave at all, because they would rather lose then win since it is more efficient "according to them" then actually, you know, putting up a fight in the battleground.

Blizzard didn't change av on a whim, they changed it to shut up the huge number of people who said it was too damn long. I never played it back then but I think 22 hrs is pretty nuts too.

They changed AV (removed the NPCs etc.) because the zone was never designed to be instanced and limited to 40 per side. It was just supposed to be a regular zone, with WAY more people inside of it. Hence all the PvE mobs and quests and all the spaced out objectives. With the way it stands now, keeping the game to an hour or less is best. Going through the "meat grinder" for 5 hours to only have it washed away the next instance will do far more damage to the zone. If the zone was persistent and not instanced, then yes, you could slap all those NPCs back in and increase the game length. Instead of making it so your side wins the match, they win the day.





The AFK changes aren't going to really help *that* much in the end I don't think. Instead of idling in the cave, they idle at a graveyard or tower to be farmed. It doesn't do anything to address why people feel the 'need' to AFK. The Honour rewards cost to much honour. They aren't even that good to begin with, and are specialized towards PvP. Yet the amount of time required to get them is obscene.

For something i'd do for fun every couple nights i'd love a bg where we fight each other for every inch of territory, for grinding out the 80k or so honor i need every season for my arena team to stay at the top i much prefer the race to win approach.

Yes, but in the original (and current) AV, all rewards are concentrated in the beginning and end.  Originally the game went down something like this: Hour 1-2 consisted of killing lieutenants, commanders, capturing and destroying graveyards and bunkers.  If the game went one-sided and not back-and-forth, pretty much 70% or so of the winning side's honor was during this period.  Hour 3-5 on a one-sided game consisted of trying to break the enemy base's defenses.  In a back-and-forth game this time period generally consisted of holding the enemy at the gates to one base until you could push them back and eventually driving all the way back to their base.  Any objectives you didn't destroy in hours 1-2 you took now, but that's basically limited to deep enemy territory towers and the tough commanders.  Remainder of the game until the end, fighting back and forth or at the entrance to the enemy base.  By this time, anyone in the battlefield had long since reached the diminishing returns mark on honor, so you were getting absolutely nothing.  Finally, when you won the battleground, another load of honor and some marks.

Anyone that came into the game midway through and left before the end came out with very little reward.  There was also nothing for them to really accomplish - all objectives had already been achieved, all they could do was go into the 'meat grinder' and hope the game could be won before they had to leave.

On the other hand, a long battle with lesser objectives to achieve throughout the entire length of the battle would give those people a chance to gain honor and marks, as well as the chance to actually participate in the battle.  As long as rewards were balanced to roughly the same rate as you get them in the race to win matches, and as long as there were objectives to achieve besides total victory or losing, I'd think the game would seem more fun.  If you were in there for 45 minutes halfway through the battle, you probably didn't kill the enemy general, but maybe you killed a lieutenant and helped capture a bunker for your side.  You achieved something and helped shape the battle to some degree.

Directly rewarding defense in some manner or another is something that they really should add no matter what they do with the battleground as a whole, though.  It's also a lesson they need to take to any other PvP encounter.  Defense sucks in general because you get less rewarded for it.  Halaa, for example, is fun to take but shitty to defend cause all you can do while defending is wait an hour until the guards respawn.  Defending nodes in AB nets you no kill honor unless the node is being attacked.  So on and so forth, every battleground and pvp objective there is, defense is far less rewarding than offense most of the time.

Damn good point. But how do you reward defense in a non-exploitable way?

It's a good point, but out of place in a DIKU. You don't get rewarded for not-winning in any other part of the game. You don't get rewarded for letting mobs retreat. You don't get rewarded for not completing questions. It's a stretch for them to having rewarded losing teams at all.

Within the context of WoW, I feel the better thing to do is provide more incremental useful rewards for less point values, and provide better Honor Point bonuses to people based on how much combat they were in, based on how much damage or healing they did (real healing against depleted hit points, not what's cast).

I don't think you'll ever decompel AFKing though, in the same way that you'll never ever get everyone to love raiding the same content over and over. Can't solve the latter without more good dynamic content and a toss-out of conventions, but the former can at least be mitigated by that AFK-er reporting system in 2.2.0.

Well, at least in battlegrounds, if you could 'attach' yourself to a point and defend it, getting bonus honor for doing that, I think more people would be willing to defend.  Of course they would have to limit the number of people who can attach themselves to a point to something reasonable for that particular battleground.  In AV, I suggested 5, since given the number of points that would need to be defended at one time and the number of people in the battleground that seems reasonable.  In Arathi Basin that could go down to 3 or 2.  2 max in Warsong Gulch and Eye of the Storm.

World PVP objectives are harder to handle in a non-exploitable way.  Even if you require there to be an enemy present, they could just be standing there in a prearranged setup to give one person or another honor.  I'm not really sure how it would be possible to handle Halaa, Zangarmarsh, or the Hellfire Fortifications without making them exploitable.

Darniaq, I don't consider it exactly rewarding not-winning.  As soon as you get removed from the defense by the enemy you stop gaining rewards - you're only rewarded as long as you're defending the location.  That place needs to be defended, otherwise the enemy can take it easily.  Basing honor on damage or healing done would kill defense even more.  Take Arathi Basin, for example - defense is key to victory, but if you're Alliance standing at the stables and the Horde is only going after blacksmith, mine, and lumber mill at the moment, you're doing no damage and no healing.  But if you leave, you know someone, probably a stealther, will wander up and capture the stables.  Defending the stables leads to victory, but in the same match, assuming you win, those who were on offense will already get more honor, because they get all the HK honor from the fighting.

As Koyasha said, it's not rewarding not-winning, it's rewarding contributing to a victory in ways other than pure offense. Just like earlier PvP systems failed to reward healing and only rewarded damaging the enemy directly. I don't think attempting to tie your pvp to your pve system is particularly useful either, as there is nothing inherant in the diku design that covers (mostly) max level pvp anyway.

OMG 2 minute AV queues I love you.

Even if alliance loses every time because they are morons, I still like the being able to play more than one every 2 hours.

I haven't noticed a different in AV queues at all (my server has had no queues over 2 minutes), but I did play one game yesterday and EVERYBODY was playing.  What a difference.

Do you play horde or alliance?

On our server, Alliance queues have been 45m - 2hours since I came back in august.

But the everyone playing on horde thing made the alliance AV rush strategy as null and void as it should have been ages ago.

Stormstrike alliance AV times rarely exceed 1 minute. I recall hitting 3 minutes once in the last few months.

Nightfall alliance is the same, Queue's over 3 mins? Madness.

you know, i kind of feel sorry for the alliance.  Their gravy train has finally come derailed, and i know 70% of them are NEVER going to be able to cope with the change.

I did AV before BC dropped and we steamrolled the horde 90% of the time even when the whole Horde team was playing. Are other battlegroups that fucked up?

I'm actually hoping it happens, because some Horde players I know are going to have their heads explode.

Because let's trace the logic used on AV:

1) Horde dominates all three other battlegrounds, despite having a generally lower pool of players.
2) This is used as proof AV is imbalanced in favor of alliance.
3) If AV now goes to Horde dominance, then....
4) Alliance will start claiming there is a PvP imbalance in favor of Horde (racials, maps, whatever).
5) Given the Horde was winning 3, losing 1 (or at best winning 2, losing 1, tying one), the Alliance is going to have a pretty compelling case.
6) Alliance is more popular, PvP is popular, and people don't like to lose steadily. Alliance handled the routine ass-stompings in WSG and AB with stomping ass in AV, and vice versa. If it goes to "Allliance losing 75% of the time, everywhere" people will start bitching louder and louder and stop playing.
7) Which leads to Blizzard doing something about it. What, I have no idea.

And didn't I hear that one of the few decent Alliance racials (Fear Ward) is being moved to all priests?

Yes and no. The alliance has simply gotten used to only fighting 20 other players. Anecdotally on my server last night, we were raping them because they hadn't yet adapted to fighting a full team again.

This works the other way too. Too many of us on Horde got used to our own half-team tactics. Take SH and sit on your butts, because that's all you're gonna get. I had to beg and plead for people to come play defense a little, once I got a few, it picked up and we held them at FW the whole game. I figure it will rebalance out once both teams remember how to play properly.

I've done 9ish AVs since the patch and won 6 or so of them, alliance. This is with the horde exploit pulling Vann as usual. It will be interesting to see how horde does once they finally have to kill the marshals.

Nice part of no AFKs is that matches are much faster now.

With the new losing alliance queues are getting shorter. Ironically shorter queues + losing is better honor than longer queues and winning. In a BG full of 39 other random people that I have no control or influence over I don't CARE if we lose so long as my honor is better for it. So yeah... if this trend continues I'm going to be happy. The only damper on an otherwise brilliant move is that I can no longer full AFK, guess I'll have to "guard" towers every time.

Also, Galv is broken when defended. Broken. Alliance will eventually learn to leave him alone (maybe), and don't care that we lose because of it right now anyway, but I feel like calling a spade a spade.

Reckoning Alliance queues used to be over an hour on non-AV holidays. I guess the horde AFK phenom was just that bad.

Did finally win one earlier because there were about 20 people with a clue in there who realized that a strong 10-15 person solid defense around the SH/Icewing area, along with a "let the next GY down the way cap before you leave the last one undefended" strategy worked great. Took 50 minutes, but I got a total of 710 estimated honor for less time than an old "plow" AV would have let me in and finished, and then I would have gotten only about 400 honor.

Even in losing last night I was pulling down 400 or so honor. I also like the game better when people are actually playing instead of the OMGZ RUSH DA BASEZ NOWZ!!ONE111111 mentality they had before.

I dont know if this is happening horde side but it is now impossible to defend the alliance base.  When stormpike gets taken you get put in the tunnel as normal, but if you try to ghost run into the base the gy there kicks you back out to the tunnel.  This is incredibly retarded as it makes it incredibly easy for the horde to just walk in and cap the aid station as soon as they take SP leading to a win minutes later.

Ghost running was made impossible long before BC came out. I assume they made it possible again and then re-fixed it?

And the tunnel should always be the GY of last resort, kinda like the spawn point in EoTS, and the tunnels in AB, regardless of the ghost-running thing.

The biggest problem with the tunnel spawn is that there's a lot of region where it's the closest graveyard, and you get sent there even if another one is held by your side.  This is a good thing if you're defending and the only graveyard your side holds is on the other side of the map, but it's a bad thing when you're defending Frostwolf Graveyard or Stormpike Graveyard, because you get sent to the tunnel instead of the relief hut/aid station where you need to be.  If you ghost run to the relief hut/aid station, you sometimes won't even make it before the enemy caps it, since all the defenders got bumped to the tunnel.

You've been able to run between GYs in AV (like say, the Alliance are taking IB and you spawn at the cave, you can just ghost run up to SH and wait for it to cap) for as long as I can remember.

I remember Ghost running down from the tunnel to FW last fall to help on offense and having it spawn me back at the cave when I rezzed at the spirit healer at FW.

Maybe it was just me?

My guess is the GY snapped contested just as you were about to res, so you got bounced to the cave.  Unless there was some serious lag.  I can death run/res fine.

Korgath alliance.  It's a pvp server.  No queues for anything.

Must just be my battlegroup that sucked.

Rampage Alliance was always 30-45 minutes unless it was AV weekend.  AV weekend was still 2-5 minutes unless you just got out of a game.

Before the AFK patch, Horde/Alliance win ratio was roughly 50/50 on nightfall, after the AFK patch Horde/Alliance ratio is still roughly 50/50. Did they fix vansploiting yet? That is probably the only thing that would drop the horde win rate in my battle group at this point. Something like 90% of our "losses" in AV are with the alliance having burned all the towers and having killed all the Lt's to only lose while clearing warmasters via a vansploit. Half the time we end up with more honour then the horde on our 'loss', due to the horde having not burned everything.