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

[Rendakor]

If they limit Wintergrasp battles by numbers on teams, they better take the timer off then.  I'm already having a hard time timing my playtime right to get in on at least one battle a session.  It will be nearly impossible to predict the battles if the matches only happen when the numbers add up right along with a 2 hour break between them.

I'd love to see them just start the battles everytime there are enough players willing to get it going.  Once a battle ends with a decision, the queue opens up and starts racking people up on both sides.  Once the requirements are met, the battle timer starts again...game on. 

This would work if there wasn't a raid encounter tied to control of WG. As it stands, there needs to be some downtime for people to form and do VoA before the battle starts again.

[Fordel]

Wintergrasp is just lame with only 40 or less.

[El Gallo]

It's retarded that WG and WG2.0 aren't just battlegrounds.  As an attempt to force world PvP, WG's an utter failure.  It's just a battleground that you have to wait 2 hours to get, and is boring a fuck to play because the sides aren't even.  The new one will be a battleground that you have to wait 2 hours to get if you are on the underpopulated side and 10+ hours to get if you're on the overpopulated side.

Best WoW design decision since meeting stones.

[Simond]

Blame all the people bitching about there being no world PVP any more.

[Fordel]

Population issues aren't a fault of the zone design.


The Downtime issue is though. They were banking on people wanting to farm Eternal Elementals like they did in TBC, but blizzard forgot they made them near useless when they limited the crafted recipes so drastically.

The WG dailies (and later weeklies) didn't provide a large enough window of opportunity. You basically have that little window before or after the round begins, as people want to turn in or finished off their quest.


There should have been some soft objectives during the downtime. Things that will run on just NPCs if no opposition shows up, but will escalate if/when they do.

Escort a courier from the keep to a southern base.
Find the enemy sniper picking off your guards.
Steal the vital war supplies from the enemy base.
Capture/Defend this staging point.

Blizzard has shown they can make NPC's "good enough" pvp'ers. They should use them in their world pvp zone, just to fill the gaps when you can't have perfect participation from the actual players.

[Simond]

That's probably why Tol Barad is going to be a PvE daily quests zone outside of battles.

[El Gallo]

Population issues aren't a fault of the zone design.

The fact that urine conducts electricity isn't a fault of zone design either.  However, designing a zone that requires players to piss into electrical sockets would still be shittastic zone design.

[koro]

That's probably why Tol Barad is going to be a PvE daily quests zone outside of battles.

Aren't the dailies only going to be doable by the faction that won Tol Barad? Or did they change that, because if you're on a faction that tends to blow at PvP on your realm then you're just straight-up fucked. That is, if they do the hard player caps for TB that they're doing for WG 2.0.

[Ragnoros]

Source

We're currently expecting both normal and rated battlegrounds to be cross-battlegroup (within a region) for the launch of Cataclysm. So, players queueing from anywhere in north america could play vs players on any north american battlegroup, etc.

 

[Dren]

Source

We're currently expecting both normal and rated battlegrounds to be cross-battlegroup (within a region) for the launch of Cataclysm. So, players queueing from anywhere in north america could play vs players on any north american battlegroup, etc.

 

I'm in favor of this.  It might give me a bit more variety to my BG experiences.  Right now, I get predictable 80% loss, 20% win.  If things could even out closer to 50/50, I'd be a happy camper.

[Fordel]

I'm already at 50/50 in my BattleGroup, so I am pessimistic! I don't want your shitty Alliance ruining my awesome Alliance dammit! 

[Rendakor]

I'm psyched for that change on grounds of queue times alone. Just looking at warcraftrealms.com shows a Alliance to Horde ratio of 1.1 : 1, while my server is 1 : 1.8.

[Simond]

Plus they're going to cap the world PvP zones to something close to parity.

[Merusk]

Source

We're currently expecting both normal and rated battlegrounds to be cross-battlegroup (within a region) for the launch of Cataclysm. So, players queueing from anywhere in north america could play vs players on any north american battlegroup, etc.

 

I'm in favor of this.  It might give me a bit more variety to my BG experiences.  Right now, I get predictable 80% loss, 20% win.  If things could even out closer to 50/50, I'd be a happy camper.

Ditto.. my battlegroup, Rampage, is rough for Alliance because we've got 3 of the oldschool, high-rated Horde-side PVP servers in it.

The world cap, not so much. We're 4.2:1 at cap and 5.2:1 10-80.  Our last Horde-side Raiding/ PVP guild just gave up the ghost due to population issues. Given the problems they had fielding a group, Alleria can only expect more Horde to leave the server.  WG already suffers from having maybe 10-15 Horde in the BG.  Capping the pop just means the next one will be a useless zone that never spawns.

[Dren]

I'm already at 50/50 in my BattleGroup, so I am pessimistic! I don't want your shitty Alliance ruining my awesome Alliance dammit! 

We are on our way to water down your PvP experience!  We just have too many people hitting BG's to get gems for their PvE equipment I think.  Plus I'm still getting into BG's that have sub 3000 GS people in it.  Like several of them.  I once had a sub 2000 lvl 80 warlock that didn't have boots.  Zero boots, let alone crappy boots.  He was bare-footed.

Right now I get 20% outright wins.  20% are even matched, which could go either way (these are actually my favorite.)  60% are just outright losses from start to finish.  Sure some of those last 15-20 minutes but that's just because we start going for HK's, which just slows down the obvious Horde win.  There is a good part of that 60% that are blow outs from premades.

For some reason it seems like premades are on the rise again.  Normally I'm on the barrel end of them, but got into one by accident over the weekend.  4 capped EotS almost immediately and held it.  Got the achievement for like under 6 minute win.  While it got me the arena points I wanted for the daily, I felt dirty.  Premades in open BG's are just plain weak.  I really wish they'd do two kinds of BG's.  One allows grouping.  The other has absolutely zero.  I'm not a fan of letting groups steamroll over generic random BG's.

As for WG:  Our server has the same problem of too little Horde.  They'll grab WG sometimes, but very rarely.  I'm also one that would hate a cap.  If they do, our server might have 1-2 fights a day.  It would all but become useless to me.

[Dren]

I'm in favor of this.  It might give me a bit more variety to my BG experiences.  Right now, I get predictable 80% loss, 20% win.  If things could even out closer to 50/50, I'd be a happy camper.

Ditto.. my battlegroup, Rampage, is rough for Alliance because we've got 3 of the oldschool, high-rated Horde-side PVP servers in it.

The world cap, not so much. We're 4.2:1 at cap and 5.2:1 10-80.  Our last Horde-side Raiding/ PVP guild just gave up the ghost due to population issues. Given the problems they had fielding a group, Alleria can only expect more Horde to leave the server.  WG already suffers from having maybe 10-15 Horde in the BG.  Capping the pop just means the next one will be a useless zone that never spawns.

We are talking about the same battlegroup. 

[Shrike]

I'm wondering. I'm on Whisperwind and Rampage BGs I'm normally in are usually Alliance dominated. Of course, I won't set foot in Strand or the other newish one, so maybe there's the difference... 

[Dren]

I'm wondering. I'm on Whisperwind and Rampage BGs I'm normally in are usually Alliance dominated. Of course, I won't set foot in Strand or the other newish one, so maybe there's the difference... 

I'm Whisperwind Alliance also.

I should start keeping track of my win/loss record in more detail.  I could maybe predict a pattern.

I've come to notice that time of day makes a difference.  Alliance seems to do much better the later you play.  If I only played from 10-12 p.m. each night, my perception would be much different.  I have to play earlier than that due to being on EST and getting up early for work.  So, I'm forced to get stomped most times and I beleive it is a large number of premades.  Perhaps the PvP Horde guilds are all active during that time?

I do randoms for all my BGs and get Strand more times than anything else for some reason.  I really do not like that BG and Alliance can't seem to figure out that you have to do pretty much everything BUT kill the other players.  CC them, but killing demos and gates takes highest priority.  Most stay at the beach and play whack-a-mole and wonder why we lost.  This stinks, but I get a guaranteed 2k honor at the finish with the bonus of random + hks.  Wins reap closer to 5k.  After the first win it is 1.2k loss and 2k wins. (approx.)  Plus I build up arena points for better upgrades down the line slooooooowly.

[Fordel]

Your BG record since WotLK started is kept on your achievements statistics tab.


http://www.wowarmory.com/character-statistics.xml?r=Doomhammer&cn=Sturmvogel&gn=Slap+in+the+Face

I think the only one where I am actually sub 50% is WSG, but like 3%.

[Paelos]

I'm apparently about 50-50 as well, which is quite shocking. Hell I'm 7/8 in WSG, and I hate the place.

[Zetor]

My alliance pvp character is apparently very, very lucky. 

(though to be fair I duo-queued with a feral druid guildie for quite a few of those BGs)

[Sjofn]

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-statistics.xml?r=Doomhammer&cn=Sofi&gn=Slap+in+the+Face

My DK is a PvP powerhouse. :o

[Soulflame]

You can't really trust those stats, sadly.  They're not entirely accurate, at least in my experience.

[Fordel]

The Individual BG stats are accurate, but the overall total isn't, the overall doesn't even factor in the Isle of Conquest. No one thought to update and include that into the overall tally. 

[Ingmar]

The Individual BG stats are accurate, but the overall total isn't, the overall doesn't even factor in the Isle of Conquest. No one thought to update and include that into the overall tally. 

At one point they were wildly incorrect - I used to list more victories in some BGs than I had matches played. They cleaned it up at some point though.

[Soulflame]

Yeah, I remember that.  I had won/lost some BG more times than I had even played it, according to the stats.  Good to hear they've cleaned it up.

[ezrast]

Mine showed me as having arena kills while (correctly) showing that I had never done any arenas.

[Dren]

Thanks for that tip.  Did some spreadsheet magic with the numbers I found on my top 5 BG chars (lvl80.)  Across all 5 my percentage is 45% wins.  That is much better than I perceived, which I suspected since losing always has a much stronger "feeling" to it than winning.  There really wasn't much differene in this percentage across the five by more than 5% one way or the other. 

I always felt my healing chars did better, but that doesn't seem to be the case.  Of course, it is silly to think that one player in a BG will make any difference over the long haul.  This just shoves it in my face.

I need to find a character from one of the pvp horde guilds on our battle server and see how it compares to my experience.  My whole outlook on BG's is going to be turned on its head if they come out to 55%.

I did think of a reason why my numbers are sub-50%.  The way I play, I hit the daily random BG until I get a win and then switch to another char.  So if I'm losing a lot, I keep losing.  If I win, I rack up that one win and stop.  I'm thinking that could be leading me towards more losses overall.

[Shrike]

I've never really been that concerned about winning particular BGs. It's nice, sure, but if I feel my character is performing well--namedly killing horde on job lots and still topping honor earned (or close) even if we lose--then I'm pretty happy with the outcome. Games where we win (AB, I"m looking at you), but I spend 80% of my time sitting on a flag watching distant fights (or rocks at the GM), those I feel a lot less satisfied with.

My bracket characters usually have very lopside win/loss ratios, but they're twinks and they do make a difference in individual BGs (especially the 79 bracket). My 80s are usually around 50%.

[Fordel]

I did think of a reason why my numbers are sub-50%.  The way I play, I hit the daily random BG until I get a win and then switch to another char.  So if I'm losing a lot, I keep losing.  If I win, I rack up that one win and stop.  I'm thinking that could be leading me towards more losses overall.

That's pretty much exactly why.



If you are only playing for the daily win, then you only get maximum 1 win per day, but any number of losses.

[WindupAtheist]

No.

If each battleground is a 50/50 affair, your chance of winning each one you participate in will be 50% regardless of when you decide to stop for the day. Occasions upon which you have to suck up a loss or two to get your daily win will be compensated for by periods during which you receive a win in your first and only game several days in a row.

Flip a coin. It has a 50/50 chance of coming up heads/tails each time regardless of when you tell it you plan to stop flipping.

[Koyasha]

It would, however, take a much longer time to reach that statistical average if you only play up to 1 winning game per day than if you play 10 games per day, win or lose.

[WindupAtheist]

Incidentally, I like how joining a trade pug for a rated BG is acceptable, but random queueing into them would not be. Idiots.

[Fordel]

Well even a Trade PUG will have an established leader and a willingness to follow a plan. Probably a better class/spec spread as well. You have a lot more options to keep everyone on the same page.


A random queue is far more limited in that regard.

[WindupAtheist]

They need to just award points for doing stuff and none for just being there and piss off already.