Some thoughts

[Delmania]

I remember reading an article from WotLK that the Blizzard design team was rethinking the desire to have the Arena be the be-all-end-all focus of PvP it had become, and that they were going to refocus on battlegrounds and the reignite the whole Horde vs. Alliance battle that had been the core of the game.  From what I can tell, the storyline in WotLK sets that situation up, in that the battle against the Lich King starts to chip away at the uneasy peace that had been forged between the 2.  So maybe this is the beginning?

[Xanthippe]

I'm not optimistic.

The way gear rewards are now structured, the game seems to me to be currently designed to only reward players who spend time in the arena.  The ones who just go to the battlegrounds are not privy to decent gear, hence their status as being sheep for the arena wolves ensured.

If the sheep never get to access the purples that make them a little more wolf-like, there is no reason to go to the battlegrounds.

What seems to me to be happening is that there is even less horde v. alliance pvp going on, except in Wintergrasp.

I suspect that battlegrounds are quite a bit less popular now than they were prior to launch of WOTLK.  I don't have numbers, but just basing this on my own experience.

The design of gear rewards is flawed, if the design is meant to make battlegrounds more popular.  Paying 60k honor for a piece of shitty blue pvp gear, with an honor cap of 75k (so there is no sense in trying to save it up in hopes of better gear later) seems terribly stupid to me.

[chargerrich]

I have always lamented the idea of arena being the core PvP... there is something so static, sterile and stale about it. Arena should ancillary and complimentary to a larger scale mechanic to PVP.

My ideas would include:

1. Collision detection in PvP

2. The ability to (at least on a PvP server) take over and control an entire city. Yes I know people would QQ that they could not get to the flight master or auction house or whatever, but thats part of a PvP Server.

One of the problems is that currently, when you see that "Org is under attack" most just ignore it and let the Alliance (or Horde if on the other side) do their thing because there is no risk. On PvP servers if you are in a capital city when it is attacked, everyone should be flagged and you either log, fight, run, die. I also thing there should be better rewards for capturing a city. Increased xp (like WG) and perhaps a small movement buff (5%).

3. Oh and can we please remove the fing nets from guards in BB and Gadget? Ridiculous.

[Fordel]

No, those would be silly with how WoW is designed. Collision detection alone would fuck over the entire system.


Things like Collision Detection and capital capturing need to be designed from the ground up, not patched into a 4 year old game.

[Delmania]

I'd imagine that the do such a refocus on Alliance vs. Horde conflict via BGs, they would need to change the cost and restriction of gear.  They'd probably piss off the people who want to be hardcore, but WoTLK seems to be a step in the direction of reducing the gear grind so more people can actually experience the endgame.

[Fordel]

It's just Blizzard bizarre vision of how people will 'progress' in PvP.


They are trying to create a "raid game" for PvP, with it's own tiered reward structure and advancement path. Except that is absolutely retarded in pretty much every conceivable way. Raid bosses don't get harder when someone else kills them before you.

In Blizzard's mind:

BG's are 5 man dungeons
Arena's are 10-25 man raids (with each tier of rating being the next dungeon, naxx to uludar to icecrown etc)
Wintergrasp is a open world BoE epic boss


It's all kinds of stupid.

[Delmania]

Again, they'd have to change that mentality for this to work.  From what I have read, the gear requirements are starting to become less than the TBC levels.

[kildorn]

Gear requirements are less than the TBC levels if you count the end of TBC when gear requirements went 31 flavors of retarded.

That said, the old system of "buy two season old arena gear for honor, one or two pieces of current season have ratings reqs" was far FAR better than the current system of "if you don't play arenas competitively, fuck off and die"

I currently have everything I could possibly get from BG/WG honor and marks. There's seriously no reason for me to keep going with the system, because I can no longer advance in it without joining an arena team. That didn't happen in pre lich king, really. There was always a new set of shit to save up for later, or you could join an arena insurance fraud team to slowly grind gear.

Oh, my hatred for arena, and what they've done to try and get people to play a part of the game that they do NOT enjoy. I like pug capture and hold as a way to waste time. Fuck you blizzard for telling me that's not the right way to play the system you built with it included. AB is freaking fun, I just don't like feeling like I'm wasting my time by playing it.

[Vash]

Pretty sure it was a blue post from a major Developer on the WoW general forums.

However, it was made shortly before the launch of WAR if I remember correctly and seemed like it was mostly a PR stunt to appease the masses and keep as many people playing WoW instead of bailing to try WAR as possible.

It talked about adding XP to battlegrounds (which would really piss off their dedicated twink crowd) creating more new battlegrounds and improving open world pvp stuff etc etc.

However most of the big changes they talked about were said to be way off in the future with a typical Blizzard Soon(TM) timeline.  Since WAR has all but flopped at this point I don't see them really being pressured very hard to make those changes in the near future.

A best case scenario would be after Icecrown has been out for a while and there is no more PvE treadmill to keep the masses busy so they add some of the changes to keep people playing until the next expansion launches, but if they make any significant changes before the next expansion I'd be shocked.

[Merusk]

The lead PVP designer hated the Honor-For-Arena-Gear method.  He was the one that coined the term "Welfare Epics" and instituted all of the rating requirements.  Until such time as he is gone, expect this system to continue along as it is.

 Yes, it's incredibly stupid.
 Yes, it goes against the grain of the game making things 'more accessible' on other fronts.
 No, I don't expect it to change before Kalgan is gone.

The guy is a 'hardcore' with the hardcore blinders on.   If you don't play like him you're just a noob who deserves to be food for the 'real players.' 

Xanthippie, its not just your perception that BGs are run less frequently.  There used to be 20-30 instances of each BG running prior to WOTLK coming out.  Now while I'll admit some of that was inflated by boredom after people had maxed-out toons, I shouldn't see only 3-4 WSG and a maximum of 15 ABs running on the weekend.  Not three months after launch and not after seeing those numbers in every BG PLUS 10-20 AVs running at a time during the 'middle period' of BC.

Nowadays I have to wait in queue for BGs to start up if I feel like running the daily.  That's a crazy turnaround from what it was. 

[Soulflame]

I remember seeing as many as 30 AVs running on the Nightfall group.  Nowadays, I see 3.  The falloff on other BGs has been about as bad, although it's more on the order of "16 ABs running was common" then down to the typical 2 or 3 that are going now.

I don't expect Wintergrasp to maintain any sort of popularity either.  We're already seeing people use tactics such as parachuting into the keep at the start to whack guns, or running vehicles through walls that aren't destroyed.  While the first is apparently an approved tactic (although I consider it to be cheese at best) I'm fairly certain the second is not.  At least, I'm fairly sure Blizzard didn't intend for siege to be driven through the narrow entries between the sections of the keep.

As has already been noted, but I'll repeat because goddamn does it fill me with rage, Arena is absolutely painful unless you are in the top... 30%?  Adding those level of requirements to BG gear was an absolutely stupid idea, one they're already scaling back.

The only reason I'm going in BGs at all is to earn tokens towards mounts, or maybe to run the daily, if I feel like bashing my skull against the Horde Nightfall (nightfail lol) complete and utter inability to maintain any sort of cohesion in a BG.  Once I have the final tokens, I probably won't have any reason to go into BGs... at all.  Because really, I have a very limited ability to enjoy how many different ways I can lose complete control of my character while being burned down.

[Fordel]

As long as WG still gives you 4-10k honor a game, it'll have lots of people. My current issue with WG, is when the Alliance is on the offense, there is roughly a 4 minute window of actual game-time before the ZergTrain shows up and bulldozes anything and everything in it's path.


We'll never get Against the Odds but just about all my high level alts have Within Our Grasp 

[Hindenburg]

The lead PVP designer hated the Honor-For-Arena-Gear method.  He was the one that coined the term "Welfare Epics" and instituted all of the rating requirements.  Until such time as he is gone, expect this system to continue along as it is.

 Yes, it's incredibly stupid.
 Yes, it goes against the grain of the game making things 'more accessible' on other fronts.
 No, I don't expect it to change before Kalgan is gone.

The guy is a 'hardcore' with the hardcore blinders on.   If you don't play like him you're just a noob who deserves to be food for the 'real players.' 

There were rumors going around in EJ that Kalgan wanted the game to keep focusing on arenas, and then Tigule pointed that, y'know, people simply prefer bg's, so kalgan went STFU, and tigule went NO U.

But yes, kalgan must die in a car fire.

[Soulflame]

As long as WG still gives you 4-10k honor a game, it'll have lots of people. My current issue with WG, is when the Alliance is on the offense, there is roughly a 4 minute window of actual game-time before the ZergTrain shows up and bulldozes anything and everything in it's path.

I sort of disagree with the first part.  I currently have probably close to 70k honor, and nothing to spend it on.  The pvp gear obtainable via honor only is distinctly inferior to ... well... everything.  I could put that on, which will reduce my damage/healing, while extending my lifespan by entire seconds.  Maybe.  Probably not, as a matter of fact.

No thanks.  In fact, when it comes down to it, I am mostly doing WG in order to give a whack at the dailies.  I need shards, dammit.  Plus the crazy (to me) goal of amassing something north of 40k gold.  To buy three mounts.  Stupid 100 mount achievement.

We'll never get Against the Odds but just about all my high level alts have Within Our Grasp 

Oddly enough, I got the first achievement the first time I ran Wintergrasp, and... after checking armory, I see that I managed to get the second one almost two months ago.  Whoops.

[Fordel]

I think our fastest capture time was like... 3-4 minutes? Most of that was the actual siege tank travel time. Someone managed to get max rank right off the bat (no idea how exactly, tenacity reward lag probably), and was cranking out Siege tanks for the Zerg to drive. It's amazing how fast the walls crumble when 16 siege tanks pile into the same point.

[Soulflame]

The last assault I tried on WG, we were cruising along with about 9 minutes to go, doing ok... then the match instantly ended after alliance capped the last tower.     As I've already alluded to, Horde is particularly failboat on Nightfall, so there's little point to protecting the towers, as no one else will move with you to protect them, and alliance moves in groups of two or more when they go after a goal.

It's really baffling to me the organizational differences.

[Nevermore]

There were rumors going around in EJ that Kalgan wanted the game to keep focusing on arenas, and then Tigule pointed that, y'know, people simply prefer bg's, so kalgan went STFU, and tigule went NO U.

But yes, kalgan must die in a car fire.

If I wanted to play 'arena style' pvp, I'd do it in Soul Calibur or Guild Wars.

[kildorn]

Seriously, the arena alterations scream "manager's pet project" because it's metrics blow, and all the changes being made are to drive people into forced participation. It's kalgan's own little perfect game type, and nobody seems to be able to tell him it's just not working out, and we should see other people.

[Fordel]

Well WG is server specific. On Doomhammer, the Horde is on average probably more organized in WG, if only out of necessity and circumstance.

"Guys, we're ONLY outnumbered 2:1 this game, we can totally do this!"



The Alliance is decently organized itself, but there are just so many of us, it doesn't matter most of the time.

"Ok Guys, I'll fly out back and parachute into the left Courtyard to clear the guns... the zerg already cleared the outer wall? All of it? Even the... k."

The next member of the Alliance should be a faction of Sithilidss or Nerubians 



Kild: Remember Retard rocks? 

[kildorn]

Kild: Remember Retard rocks? 

No? Unless this is a vague reference to that years old guild drama from me not being sensitive about word usage when ranting about pugs <3

[Fordel]

Meeting stones!

[Xanthippe]

There were rumors going around in EJ that Kalgan wanted the game to keep focusing on arenas, and then Tigule pointed that, y'know, people simply prefer bg's, so kalgan went STFU, and tigule went NO U.

But yes, kalgan must die in a car fire.

If I wanted to play 'arena style' pvp, I'd do it in Soul Calibur or Guild Wars.

Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.

[Sheepherder]

I really don't understand why they don't just have a flat reduction in damage in pvp, possibly a scaled reduction based on how many people are currently raping you (like tenacity), scrap resilience, and hand out tier gear for top-level arena play (because raiding is so hardcore the top 10% of pvp'ers don't deserve the epics ).

[Ingmar]

I really don't understand why they don't just have a flat reduction in damage in pvp, possibly a scaled reduction based on how many people are currently raping you (like tenacity), scrap resilience, and hand out tier gear for top-level arena play (because raiding is so hardcore the top 10% of pvp'ers don't deserve the epics ).

Apparently because healers become unkillable very quickly - see late season arena in TBC.

[Delmania]

The real question is why the hell do you give out the best gear to the top PvPers?  It's like telling baseball teams that one team can use aluminum bats, while the other uses wiffle bats.  It's your aim is to create a fair balanced PvP playing field, this is kind of a no brainer.

[Ingmar]

It's your aim is to create a fair balanced PvP playing field, this is kind of a no brainer.

Well, yes. It is in fact so obvious and has been the other way around for so long in WoW, that the only conclusion I can come to is they don't WANT a balanced PVP playing field, for whatever reason.

[Delmania]

It's your aim is to create a fair balanced PvP playing field, this is kind of a no brainer.

Well, yes. It is in fact so obvious and has been the other way around for so long in WoW, that the only conclusion I can come to is they don't WANT a balanced PVP playing field, for whatever reason.

Oh that's easy.  Kalgan is hardcore and wants to award players for skill!

[Gobbeldygook]

possibly a scaled reduction based on how many people are currently raping you (like tenacity)

STOP FOCUS FIRING YOU GODDAMN NOOBS

hand out tier gear for top-level arena play (because raiding is so hardcore the top 10% of pvp'ers don't deserve the epics ).

Because PVP gear and PVE gear are different in ways other than just resilience.

-They have different set bonuses, some of which are meaningful.
-I shit all over stamina when it's on PVE DPS gear, but PVP gear has stamina in spades and that's OK.
-PVP gear has very little hit rating because the +hit cap is much lower in pvp because using the same +hit table for pvp and pve would make any level differences in world pvp retardedly lopsided.

I currently have everything I could possibly get from BG/WG honor and marks. There's seriously no reason for me to keep going with the system, because I can no longer advance in it without joining an arena team.

Why is this a bad thing?  PVE works the exact same way.  At a certain point you run out of ways to advance by repeatedly grinding Nexus, so you either focus on achievements, move up to raiding, or roll up an alt.  You can even run out of upgrades in raiding pretty quickly depending on class/spec, leaving you to work on achievements until the next content patch - Which, conveniently, will also be when everyone can go back to afking in the cave for epics.

The real question is why the hell do you give out the best gear to the top PvPers?

1. Gear doesn't make as much a difference in PVP as people like to tell themselves it does.  Being in full deadly gladiator gear isn't going to give you automatic 2.2k rating.

2. If there is no tangible reward for doing something, no-one will do it.  Witness people in this thread saying they're going to stop doing BGs because there is no more shiny.

3. You're not going to face them in the arenas unless you're already on their level.

[kildorn]

I currently have everything I could possibly get from BG/WG honor and marks. There's seriously no reason for me to keep going with the system, because I can no longer advance in it without joining an arena team.

Why is this a bad thing?  PVE works the exact same way.  At a certain point you run out of ways to advance by repeatedly grinding Nexus, so you either focus on achievements, move up to raiding, or roll up an alt.  You can even run out of upgrades in raiding pretty quickly depending on class/spec, leaving you to work on achievements until the next content patch - Which, conveniently, will also be when everyone can go back to afking in the cave for epics.

Because I can have a purple in every slot from pve, and it will eventually end until new content.

I can get 4-5 of them (because healer rings: STILL NOT LIVE) via BG PVP.

There's a pretty large difference in how long you can play the raid game and still have progression, and how long you can play the BG game and still have progression.

Heck, if you want to just use crafting/heroics, there's STILL far more progression for that over the 4-5 items you can get from non arena PVP. Hell, you can't even get a blue weapon from pvp.

edit: the hidden rating system screws the "only fight people on your level" thing, plus matchmaking is Best Effort. If it can't find someone at your level, but there's a 2200 team looking who can't find anyone, you two fight. And gear doesn't matter, except it does. Someone with 0 resil and pve dps gear (low stam) versus someone with a few hundred resil, the person with the dps gear is likely fucked, barring flat out playing quite a few levels above them. So on an even skill basis, gear very much matters.

[Delmania]

1. Gear doesn't make as much a difference in PVP as people like to tell themselves it does.  Being in full deadly gladiator gear isn't going to give you automatic 2.2k rating.

That's true, however, the imbalance still exists.  Take two teams equally competent, and place 1 in hateful, and 1 in deadly, watch who wins.

2. If there is no tangible reward for doing something, no-one will do it.  Witness how much harder it was to get 5 man groups towards the end of BC than it is in Wrath because the gear you could get by afking in the AV cave was better than what you could get in heroics or even raids in many cases.

Allow me to correct you.  That would be "not enough people would do it".  If the Arena had no gear benefits, you would have people doing it: the people who enjoy highly competitive, small group combat.  Forcing people to it as Blizzard has done is a sign that the Arena isn't quite working out as they had hoped, so rather then simple let is become the niche it really is, they are forcing everyone to do it if they want to enjoy the PvP combat in general.  Kind of the like ward system in WAR is cockblock to force people to either PvE or grind keeps incessantly.

3. You're not going to face them in the arenas unless you're already on their level.

Which is why you have a rating system.

[Hindenburg]

1. Gear doesn't make as much a difference in PVP as people like to tell themselves it does.  Being in full deadly gladiator gear isn't going to give you automatic 2.2k rating.

Not being in that sure as fuck will make it a lot harder.

[kildorn]

The other reason to force people into Arenas is that the rating system does not function properly without large amounts of participation, neither does the matching system.

If only the hardest of the hardcore played arena, half of them would have shit ratings, because half the people must have shit ratings. This doesn't work, as they'll stop playing with no actual reward. And then people's ratings slide down, the cycle repeats, and eventually you run out of people willing to play. It needs an influx of BAD players. Not players, just people who are supposed to occupy the shitty ratings levels, and essentially boost other people's ratings by moving the middle point of "skill".

This isn't a sustainable model if there's nothing in it for the people at the bottom of the barrel. You already see this being adjusted by lowering the ratings requirements on some of the items.

[Ingmar]

Yes, ELO is great for chess. It tells you very accurately who the better player is. It is iffy for games like, say, MtG where the game isn't the same every time, and downright stupid to use for something like WoW.

[Delmania]

I feel stupid: ELO? MtG?  I assume ELO refers to the ratings system, but not MtG.

[Fordel]

1. Gear doesn't make as much a difference in PVP as people like to tell themselves it does.  Being in full deadly gladiator gear isn't going to give you automatic 2.2k rating.

Not being in that sure as fuck will make it a lot harder.

This was always my major bitch of the system.

I'm 1500 and the other dude is 2000 whatever. He's already proved he's better then me at Arena's, so we are going to increase his already superior skill artificially through superior gear? Wat?  

To say nothing that now this dude can wafflestomp me in PvP that isn't Arena.


MtG: Magic the Gathering I assume