AFK-Valley

[Chenghiz]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Drifting DarkAngel]

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.

[SurfD]

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.

[caladein]

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

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

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.

[sinij]

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.

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.

[bhodi]

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.

[cmlancas]

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.

[Fordel]

Some good news from Blizz Con:

4:04pm: Tigole will talk about process of development. Asks how many people are actually playing AV right now, just AFK (tons of hands raise haha). AV was originally supposed to be a non-instanced zone, and hopefully Lake Wintergrasp will be that. Quests and NPCs were to provide content even when there were no players around. Eventually, it had to be instanced.

4:06pm: What they learned from AV: Map differences are cool but they put balance into question (Alliance bridge is an example). Players can be AFK, and Honor is given away for just being there. And while NPCs are cool, they're also quirky. We're making a lot of corrections, more on that in a bit. AFK "is going to be fixed." Applause from the crowd.

4:15pm: The future of Battlegrounds. In AV, players won't spawn in the cave until there's nowhere else to spawn. Anti-AFK measures gets applause from the crowd. What we're going to do is give the players ability to report other players for being AFK, like the spam reports. Once enough players have reported that person, and a debuff appears that only goes away when they show up in combat. If they don't get into combat, no honor gain.

4:18pm: Honor distribution will change-- more honor gain near end of the BG, which should push people forward. Reintroducing queueing as a group for AV (lots of applause). We're considering going toward a model where players can choose different sizes of the same battleground-- 15v15 or 20v20.

4:20pm: Also thinking about Guild Battlegrounds-- letting guilds challenge each other, and joining up a battlegroun as a guild, even tracking a rating for the guild in a certain BG. Siege weapons and destroyable buildings are coming as well, of course. Thinking about bringing those to old battlegrounds as well. Example of an Undead Meatwagon that throws Corpses, or a catapult that damages buildings.

-edit-

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

[angry.bob]

Reintroducing queueing as a group for AV (lots of applause).

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.

[Chimpy]

Reintroducing queueing as a group for AV (lots of applause).

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.

[Fordel]

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.

[Shavnir]

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

[angry.bob]

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

That was like watching a postage stamp.

[Jayce]

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.

[Threash]

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.

[Calantus]

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.

[Arrrgh]

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

[Paelos]

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.

[Simond]

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

That was like watching a postage stamp.

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.

[Chenghiz]

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

That was like watching a postage stamp.

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.

[caladein]

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".

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 .

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.

[Fordel]

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.

[Merusk]

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.

[Calantus]

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.

[Xanthippe]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[TheWalrus]

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?

[Simond]

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.

[SurfD]

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?

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.

[Jayce]

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?

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.

[Xanthippe]

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.

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.

[Arrrgh]

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.

[Chenghiz]

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.

[Threash]

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.