Cracks starting to show?

[Paelos]

Yeah it's a separate issue, but it does mean that incentivizing one side over the other is meaningless. Once they get the mechanics sorted out, rewards on both sides will NEED to be more or less equal or else the win trading will just continue.

Which will cause people not to show up for defense, which means people don't get in, which means 1 dude goes roaming around alone in a world of shit.

[Sjofn]

I think it is a band aid 'fix' til whatever the real solution is shows up.

Carpet bomb the world pvp idea?

I really wish they would, it's goddamn stupid. YOU SUCK AT IT BLIZZARD, AND THAT'S OKAY, JUST STOP DOING IT.

[Fordel]

They could also do something with the current "encourages win trading" solution like making the honor value for offense ramp up per failed offense. Succeed immediately, 180 honor. Succeed after 10 failed attempts in a row, 1800 honor or something.

Automated population balancing. Offense can give infinity honor while defense gives a kick in the balls, and all that will do is increase the number of people who can't get in because no defenders showed up. You must have missed the tales of 5v5 Wintergrasps at the end of WOTLK.

Doesn't happen on our server, but I kind of feel like that sort of thing is a separate problem that you're not going to fix through any tweaking of TB's win conditions. Regardless of population issues, TB needs mechanical changes.

Yes it does, it's just 15 v 15 instead of 5v5. :P


-edit-

I should add it's 15 v 15 untill a horde raid guild decides to all queue up, then it's their 25 man raid squad against our random puggers.

[Ingmar]

The crappy ones where I've been ported in late are like 25-40ish on a side.

[Fordel]

And all the ones where you don't get chosen for battle? 

[apocrypha]

I queue for TB every single time I'm on, got in once. Utterly pointless zone and I agree 100% with WUA.

I'll repeat that. I agree 100% with WUA. Proof that something is terribly, terribly wrong.

[Azuredream]

Speaking from the side that is horribly outnumbered, I love the 1:1 enforced ratio. I get in every time I queue, and it's never anything less than 30+ on each side. If they changed it back to tenacity I would never go to the zone, ever.

[Selby]

I queue for TB every single time I'm on, got in once. Utterly pointless zone and I agree 100% with WUA.

My guild agrees.  The one time someone got in it was a "stand around and lose" session since apparently the next time you get 1800 honor or somesuch.  I fail to see the point of such a zone.

[WindupAtheist]

PVP has never really been Blizzard's strong suit when it comes to this game, and that's fine. It's a PVE game with some PVP bits tacked on, we all know this. The problem is that they seem to be getting progressively worse at it all the time.

People didn't seem to like Strand of the Ancients very much. They liked Isle of Conquest even less. Wintergrasp worked as a game but was crippled by population imbalances. Tol Barad doesn't even function on the most basic level, and their solution to population issues seems to be to strangle the game with a 1:1 player ratio until everyone gets fed up and sorts it out themselves by purchasing transfers.

Now there's a blue post talking about how they disapprove of win-trading and you do it at your own risk. It's meaningless noise, of course, and just something that had to be said with all the "WAAH WIN TRADING!" talk on the forums. But I do have to wonder if they really wanted to free up the PVE instance by winkingly encouraging this behavior, or if they just looked at their data, realized nobody was queueing for offense since it never wins, and decided to take a hammer to the problem. I feel like they COULD seriously be that out of touch.

Anyway it's not the end of the world, blah blah usual "I am not doomcasting WoW" disclaimer, but this is a pretty spectacular fuckup and not the sort of thing one expects from Blizzard. Static about how the B-team is fucking up the game will be less easily ignored. They're just lucky that their competition consists of utter hapless dipshits whose triumphs are usually less fun than a Blizzard fumble.

[Ingmar]

There's certainly an outside chance that the current TB design is Kalgan's untouchable baby right now and it will take a while longer for it to sink in that it just doesn't work. I don't know that I'd say things are getting worse on a clear curve, though. Halaa/Zangarmarsh/Hellfire pvp objectives come to mind as worse than TB, for example.

I can't speak to BG popularity, really. I think Isle of Conquest suffers a bit from having too many different objectives for a PUG to figure out what the right thing to do is. I always liked Strand and Eye the most of any of them, personally.

[WindupAtheist]

Before random BG queues I used to see 4-5 Alteracs running on Whirlwind, then click over to Isle and see anywhere from 0 to 2 at most. And those towers you could cap in different zones, nobody ever did those but they were never anything but a sideshow anyway. This was supposedly a major feature of Cata PVP.

[Paelos]

People were less inclined to queue for Isle because it was unforgiving to the zerg mentality. You had to at least run together in order to win, and you couldn't just fuck around all over the place and make tons of honor. In AV you can basically do whatever you want and still have a W/L huge honor bump if neither side turtled. It was all about the most efficient zone to farm honor, and had almost nothing to do with the fun of the instance.

WSG suffered the same way because matches took forever. People simply hated waiting for them to finish because they didn't want to win. They wanted their points and to requeue.

[kildorn]

Isle is annoying because most of the time it winds up involving just running back and forth to doors with bombs for 15 minutes.

[Merusk]

Naw man.. we just had a level 84 Dk in the isle I did on my priest who had it all figured out.  You see, we're idiots for trying to kill the boss because he's unkillable.  That's right, there's no possible way to kill him.. you have to zerg the workshop and then you'll win.  Whoever owns the workshop wins.   

[Sheepherder]

I always liked Strand and Eye the most of any of them, personally.

Strand is pretty cool.  It's Assault mode from UT, if they tightened it up a little it would be great.

[Fordel]

Isle is a clear example of Blizzard not being able to design buildings with PvP in mind. Nothing about the keeps actually helps the defenders at all.


Shit, the Alliance keep is so badly put together, the Horde can drive the demos up to our door and be out of LoS of our own cannons due to the geometry of the keep. At least the horde can hop down onto their own walls (not by design either, just happy coincidence) to attack anything outside of them.



Blizzard doesn't devote any priority to PvP on a world/art asset level. It goes all the way back to AV, those buildings were just random Orc and Dwarf towers taken from the PvE zones. Neither was built with the intention of players actually fighting in or around them.


Or the trees in WSG that don't actually block LoS, or the Blacksmith and Stables roof that is climbable due to shitty terrain and doodad placement.





TB has the added bonus of Kalgan logic attached to it though, so not only do you get terrible world design, you get terrible game mechanics attached to it as well.



fake edit - sometimes the Isle bosses DO bug out now, they get stuck in their anti-kite mode and just one shot everything they touch.

[kildorn]

That's a feature, fordel. They're just popping their boss cooldowns.

[Sheepherder]

That's a feature, fordel. They're just popping enrage.

Gotta love the classics.

[sinij]

Blizzard doesn't devote any priority to PvP on any level. This is rather strange considering they have substantial PvP community, enough people to support MMORPG title on its own.

[K9]

I have no data beyond my own observations, but I'd say that the proportion of the population which is purely interested in PvP is pretty tiny. I guess it depends what you mean by PvP community.

[Threash]

Best part about the new TB: if you cross the bridge as it ends you get full honor/rep/tokens.  Now we have about 10 people who actually get in for offense and hundreds sitting on the bridge waiting for the reward.

[Rendakor]

No one bothered to do that at 180 honor a win. But at 1800...

[SurfD]

Well, you can kiss win trading in Tol Barad goodbye.   They bitchslapped the honor that the assaulting team gets for a win down from ~1800 to ~400.  Not that anyone with half a brain in their head didnt see that coming from a mile away.  Don't think they fixed the whole bridge camping thing, but now there is a hell of a lot less incentive to do it.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Bridge camping is unreliable if you're the attacking side, especially since the attackers are more likely to be the lower numbered faction and it would just let you into the battle.

Personally, I do the bridge camping because I "Want" to get into TB and fight but only 15 alliance regularly queue up for it, I've even gotten 10v10 in there. I consider the bridge honor my reward for waiting around on their sorry asses.

[Ingmar]

Getting let into the battle isn't exactly a problem when they're just win trading anyway though.

[Threash]

Getting let into the battle isn't exactly a problem when they're just win trading anyway though.

Yes it is, people don't queue for defense.

[Ingmar]

Getting let into the battle isn't exactly a problem when they're just win trading anyway though.

Yes it is, people don't queue for defense.

I was responding to Lakov's statement that actually getting into the battle while trying to bridge camp was apparently undesirable, not saying it wasn't hard to get into the fight (it can be).

[Fordel]

I only managed to cheese like 2 pieces of honor gear out of the 1800 :(

[Lakov_Sanite]

Win trading was a joke. It happened once on our server when the horde thought it was a brilliant idea. Then the alliance got TB and decided they "would rather have the dailies so fuck you." That was the end of the trading on BWR

[Fordel]

We had it going for a few days on Doomhammer, more or less. You had to bridge hump to actually get any honor though, since we have like 3x's as many alliance as horde on our server.

[Rendakor]

We win-traded every TB on Andorhal since the 1800 change went live.

[WindupAtheist]

So how are rated battlegrounds? Anyone doing them? Forum baww is that there are no trade pugs forming and it's all just 15 man arena teams nobody can be bothered with.

Edit: Tol Barad offense honor reduced to 360 due to win trading. Meaning they really are just trying to incentivize one side in a population-capped battle. Clueless.

[Ingmar]

I'm not, because Fordel and I can easily cap our conquest points for the week with arena. Organizing rated BG groups is on par with organizing raids logistically, with the extra "benefit" that the size of the team changes every week. Not interested personally until they figure out 'rated BG implementation version 2.0'.

Honestly I think I enjoy 2v2 arena the most out of the pvp stuff I've done in WoW anyway, which I wouldn't have guessed before I tried it all.

[Hawkbit]

I thought 2v2 didn't award points anymore... did they bring that back?  I know 2v2 was exempt from something at some point... If they're back to awarding points I might join a 2v2. 

[Threash]

You can't get the rating required shoulders or weapons or gladiator titles from 2v2, that is all.