Alterac Valley

[Bolty]

How would you fix Alterac Valley?

Don't know what I mean? I'll fill you in in case you don't PvP much or in case you play on a bizarre battlegroup where this doesn't happen, although from what I understand it's pretty universal. Basically, Horde always loses, and it's to their benefit.

"Huh?"

Alterac Valley bonus honor weekend throws this a tad, but in general it's much faster honor for Horde to lose in the Alterac Valley (AV) battleground. This is a combination of two factors.

Factor 1: you can't queue as a group to AV, and even if you could, finding a group of 40 people is pretty tough - so you will have PuGs in there with you.

The PuG factor is significant. PuG Horde players in AV expect to lose, just as PuG Alliance players in the other battlegrounds expect to lose. Interestingly enough, this becomes self-fulfilling and leads to poor play. If you play Horde and wonder why all the Alliance players jump to the middle in Eye of the Storm instead of grabbing/defending towers, it's because they expect to lose so they're looking to grab as much honor as they can by scoring HKs. In Warsong Gulch, the moment the Horde caps a flag, half the Alliance players leave. In Arathi Basin, so many Alliance players just expect to get 4 or 5 capped that they do incredibly stupid things. This extends to AV, where finally the coin flips. Horde expects to lose, so seeing 5-10 Horde players camping out in their initial starting cave /dancing or just generally doing nothing is common. Since they're not helping, the expectation of losing becomes self-fulfilling, and leads other Horde to just give up and do the same.

Factor 2: the queue time for Alliance during non-AV bonus honor times varies between one to two hours, while Horde gets in virtually instantaneously.

Even during bonus weekend, Alliance has to wait 15 to 20 minutes to get in while Horde gets in instantly. Simply put, if you have to wait 1.5 hours to get into an Alterac Valley match, you're going to try to get the most out of it possible. Meanwhile, if you can waltz into an AV game any time you want with no wait, it's "meh." If people on either side leave, they're replaced, sure - but on the Alliance side it's "man! I waited 2 hours for only half an AV! Better get the most out of this I can." On the Horde side it's "haha, yet another losing AV, time to /dance for 10 minutes and get my token or jump out into some other battleground."

Here's the real kicker: because the population imbalances in battlegroups cause this situation, it's better for Horde to quickly lose in AV than to put up a fight, if you consider it from a pure honor-gaining perspective. Run in there, kill Balinda, kill some lieutenants, destroy a bunker or two - but stay out of the Alliance's way as they plow down to Drek'thar. Eat a quick loss, then queue again. You get in instantly. Rinse, repeat.

What's the alternative for the Horde? Try to win? You pretty much just delay the inevitable due to the above listed factors, and in the long run extend the length of the game. Even if you manage to pull off the incredibly rare Horde AV win, you still lose - the time taken to run the game costs you more honor than if you had run in and lost three other AVs. If you get really close and still lose, the loss is even steeper - you still get just one AV mark, and all that time/honor loss from such an extended, long game.

I got to thinking about this when I lost an AV game this last weekend. A team of about 25 players from the Azgalor server queued up at exactly the same time and got in an AV together. They worked as a team, coordinated well, and won by about 30 seconds with a race to kill the generals at the end. It was perhaps my first AV loss in the last 30-40 times I'd been there. The Alliance players were pissed - not that they lost, but the extended game length and objectives destroyed by the Horde meant that they got only about a quarter of the usual honor they score. And I thought about the Horde players in that game who, despite the win, probably lost out in honor gain over time because the game took *forever* - you know how nasty it gets when Alliance starts defending hard in their own town. I personally enjoyed the game because it was fun to have an actual fight on my hands, but from a pure honor-farming perspective, it was a real bummer.

In short, it's better for the Horde to lose and lose quick. This is screwed up. It's really the only battleground where you can say it's better for one side to just hand the game to the other, although WSG is debateable at that.

Can it be fixed? Apparently not by Blizzard. They have had Blizzard developers publically state that "AV was a mistake," and they never plan to release a battleground like it ever again. The Azshara Crater battleground, which has been in the game files for years now, was never released. If you have a map viewer/editor, you can see that the place was styled to be like AV - it's just as huge, for one thing.

Blizzard's removal of all the NPCs and elements that made AV games the epic 10-hour battles they used to be was an admission that it was a flawed battleground, but it's *still* very flawed and Blizzard doesn't seem to mind. I'm sure they have statistics on win/loss ratios of AV games. Can't they do anything? What would you do?

-Bolty

[Jester]

I would probably just delete AV. It's worthless, and renders the PvP system a joke.

If I had to keep it, I would institute an honour-destroying debuff that triggers after 10 minutes of non-participation. Of course, then people would just go hunt rams or something, but at least they're not AFKing. I would also look to improving the honour rewards for defending. Perhaps a small honour bonus for every 5 minutes you hold your fortifications? Not sure, but something, perhaps with a cap past a certain point.

I'll fill you in in case you don't PvP much or in case you play on a bizarre battlegroup where this doesn't happen, although from what I understand it's pretty universal. Basically, Horde always loses, and it's to their benefit.

It doesn't help the Horde to lose. Winning in 20 minutes is more honour than losing in 20 minutes. It just hurts them to delay games. If we can win quickly, we do. We just almost never can, because the Alliance usually uses their extra players (fewer cave-dwelling leeches) to defend, which slows us down.

What horde never, ever does, at least in my BG (from Terenas), is defend. That is simply counterproductive, from an honour perspective.

All of this means that Horde has two choices: Race with the alliance in PvE General-killing, which takes some measure of effort, or go AFK in the cave, which doesn't. The ideal for the General-killer is 40 people racing to the end; the ideal for the AFKer is 39 people racing to the end, with themselves in the cave.

Obviously, this leads to a 'tragedy of the commons', where the incentive to AFK increases as more people actually play. Usually, we end up with 10-15 people in the cave. Sometimes there's only 5, and we stand a chance. Sometimes there's 25, and we scarcely get any honour at all.

In short, it sucks.

-Jester

[Kevin]

I don't actually know what to do. This has actually been a somewhat hot topic on Terenas. Many of us take advantage of the honor fest that is AV weekend and we do understand that a fast loss is better honor per time, but well most of us like to PvP and get frustrated after a while from knowing that you are one of the few that are trying.

Oh and the AFK issue is worse. It's now generally 10-20 folks that don't even leave the cave. Though to their credit with all those valiant cave defenders I've yet to see alliance capture it. :)

We played about 6 games yesterday with 3-12 of us in the same AV. We won 2 in a row (the 2 where we had 10 plus) and got onto Vann in 2 more of them we got more honor than the alliance in one of the losses because of the objectives we took and the others we kept. But the losses were A LOT more fun with other Lurkers in there that you knew were trying even if we didn't win.


Some things that might help.

I would fix the map. While I admit that horde actually has some better choke points, if they use them, the horde side requires you coordinate. The terrain on the alliance side will naturally push you towards some of the objectives. If horde rezzes in the cave they have to decided to go to Frostwolf or head to the northern front. If alliance rezzes in the cave, they will run right by SP no matter where they are going as they head south so it's very easy for them to check if they can help keep that or if it's a lost cause and they should just get somewhere else. This is not a factor at all for coordinated groups, but even if you use mods and try hard you will have some PuGs and the PuG factor as you say matters folks who can't or won't coordinate and communicate.

The tower designs have issues. While all the alliance bunkers now have spots where can get at the flag without getting hit by archers (it wasn't always this way). Defending a bunker vs a tower is a very different story. I can live with the towers because at some point in time both alliance and horde will be looking to assault or defend. However when you factor in the NPC's alliance can simply run by them and not have to deal with them at all as part of the defense, in general. But it would be nice to make things a bit more even.

You could punish the horde AFK folks. I actually admit that pre TBC when I was pushing my warlock to rank 10, that I actually played two AV's where I was pretty much AFK. I was doing dishes and I would just come back and hit a key every now and then. But guilt made me stop. Yeah it was good for me, but people do still try to play this for fun (and yes I can still have fun in AV even with all PuGs even knowing that I'm going to lose) and it was simply abusing those folks who were actually getting a few of the other honor objectives or actually trying to play for a win. I've heard rumors from Blizzcon that there will be debuffs applied to folks that don't do any damage or heal or work on an objective for some amount of time. This won't fix it, but I would be happier if there were 10 folks AFK in SH bunker waiting for it to cap than in the cave. At least in SH bunker they might buy me enough time to kill the alliance that is trying to flip it back because the alliance person attacked them. At least they would act as a tiny HP buffer and time sink for me as opposed to being leachers.

And yeah I don't mind the fast losses, I like my epic candy, but if we are going to lose at least pick up the bunkers and Balinda. I was in a game with 20+ cave dwellers where we managed to get 2 of the LTs by SH bunker killed as far as bonus honor goes and that's it. Sure it was a 14 minute loss, but a 20 minute loss getting the bunkers, Balinda, the other LTs and SH GY would have been more honor per time. So even from an honor per time standpoint the horde that do NOTHING still can hurt themselves and it is annoying.

You could try a handicap system but I'm not sure that would work either.

And even if you manage to somehow make queue times on both sides the same it won't fix it. If both sides had instant queues and horde started to win a few you would start to see alliance cave dancers. But I really would like to see them get some AV monitors and just ban the cave dwellers for some time. They did that a couple of AV weekends back and horde started to actually win AV and try because you had only people that try. But you need to punish the AFK folks and/or get alliance into the BG's faster.

I'd actually be happy if they had a fair monitoring system that could track how much you actually participated in AV horde side (how long you were at an objective that was contested, how much damage or healing you did, but I couldn't design a fair system to do this and it wouldn't be worth the resources anyway). But if you get a good track and the folks who tried get pushed up in the queue. Make all the AFK folks sit in AV queue for an hour.


But again the idea of fast honor works against the horde in other BG's. Since they can get into any BG instantly many of them, even in EotS where I have like a 90% winning percentage I've seen many horde players just give up the few times things start to go bad. I see it in WSG a lot as well (it's part of the reason that I don't like WSG, that and I get annoyed at the game when the flags are both hidden for 10 minutes and people won't work together to go and get it), but I got used to horde just giving up a lot in WSG if the alliance got any caps at all they would just try and farm HK and not try to win.

They even tried making the honor from winning be a larger part of the total honor people got (they lowered the amount of honor you got per kill however long ago). That still doesn't really help. It just makes it an even better idea to bail on a BG if you see a premade in there because you won't get any honor for the loss at all. So you just screw PuGs even more.


I've debated if you can tie rewards more into stuff you get from getting objectives or loot. If you kill Balinda all the horde get some token. If you don't the horde doesn't. If you take down SH bunker you get the token. If someone loots a corpse everyone gets another token (that can stack to like 5000). And you make all the purchases tie into that stuff. That will still give you a you will get the rewards if you put in enough time, but like arenas you will get the rewards a lot faster if you win. But that system isn't really different enough for making stuff cost honor and tokens and you only get the tokens for winning. And if you tie it into a range thing (if you aren't close enough to Balinda when she dies you don't get that token) then you screw up the game even more.



But since my concern is having fun, and having fun is playing a good game while trying to win, the best solution is to punish the horde AFK folks. This won't change the fact that it will still be better for horde to play fast games (and FYI a 10 minute win is going to be better honor than a 10 minute loss and I've been involved in a 10 minute win though that was pre TBC and yeah even north and south bunkers flipped) the problem is that as mentioned generally if 40 horde are actually playing and trying to win, since the 40 alliance are playing and trying to win the game ends up getting into the 20-30 minute range.

But yeah I wouldn't mind if they just dumped AV either. It has pretty much always felt like PvE with a bit of PvP thrown in. It can be fun at times, but it's generally just a grind. AB and EotS you are pretty much assured the game will be done in 30 minutes at the longest (flags spending a lot of time in contention). But you figure they will be done in less than 20 most of the time. With the other changes to the reward system, with BG specific rewards being gone so you don't have to play a BG you don't like, I would be fine with them fixing AV so that it does last 2 hours or more on average again. Before when the games would go that long but there were rewards for AV that you couldn't get anywhere else you were "forced" to play it if one of the rewards was just better than what you could get anywhere else. Now you aren't since the rewards are more generic. That works for me. I have no problem with them making it a different style and some days I would still want to do that. Others I wouldn't, so if I didn't I would just play EotS or AB or WSG. It's what I do now. Since I don't have long queues I just grab the toon I want and play the style of game I want to play. This may mean that I'm not optimizing my honor per time but I am having the fun that I want (and even though I ragged on WSG earlier, sometimes that is really the BG I want to play) and I'm not going to lose ground getting my rewards. I might not get them faster but I won't fall back like the old rank system (which sucked) would make me do.

[NiteFox]

Weeell... As it stands in my battlegroup, (EU Misery), pretty much all the players from both sides (ie, not anyone AFK in the cave or the first-timers working to get their trinkets, though there's not many of those in the upper bracket) rushes for Iceblood Garrison and Stonehearth Bunker to slay Galvangar and Belinda, and then work from there.

Usually the Alliance just heads straight into the Horde base, exploiting the rather poor layout of it, a handful hangs back on the Frostwolf field to take out any stragglers trying to run back to the Horde base to defend (Often taking Frostwolf and Iceblood graveyards to make things a lot more complicated, essentially isolating anyone spawning in the cave). Horde on the other hand winds their way up the path, sometimes taking Stonehearth GY, but for the most part anyone caught lagging at Stonehearth gets yelled at. Generally, the best tactic for the Horde is to behave like a horde - A rolling mass of bodies crushing everything. The layout of the south field makes it viable for "lone wolf" teams of two to four to roll on by and gather at the Frostwolf base gate, but the valley pass in the north makes this damn near impossible to do - Evenly matched groups will always go the way of the "home" side, especially with those bloody rams wandering about.

The benefit of the valley pass in the north is that it does make battles pretty spectacular and entertaining. If both sides decide to mass there, then it makes it so much more interesting to watch and be involved in. I remember being in the middle of a pretty slow Horde advance, simply racking up Honorable Kills as we slowly crunched our way through an Alliance defence, the line shifted a few times, but it was fun. The problem with being snagged up in such shenanigans is that while you're trying to munch your way through that defence, a small group of Alliance rogues has already destroyed both Frostwolf towers and are working on the Relief Hut.

So how to fix this? Well, battlegroup faction imbalance isn't that much of an issue - Okay, it does hurt the Alliance requeue time, but to be honest that's down to so many people rolling Alliance; it's a self-inflicted injury. If more people rolled according to server balance as opposed to "bah, I dun wanna be in teh stinky Horde", faction balance would be better, and queues would be shorter. The main problem is that the terrain is imbalanced.

Now, every time an AV whine thread pops up on the official boards, this subject almost always comes up, and always the Horde whines that the terrain is in the Alliance favour, the Alliance whines that even though it is they have to queue for 25 minutes to get in so it balances out, and then a few Horde wags chip in with "terrain is fine, l2p nubs". The fact is, the terrain layout is not fine, and AV would be a hell of a lot better if the south had a similar layout to the north.

Think about it: The south is practically a wide open field while the north is a single winding pass with a field down below filled with harpies and rams wandering around. Occasionally, I've hopped down there trying to find a way up when the path is busy, only to find out that I probably would have been better sticking to the path. That path encourages conflict, it practically forces people to fight, or spend the next five minutes getting chewed on by harpies at the bottom of some pit. The Frostwolf field allows players from both sides to run, and running isn't exciting. Holding the line in the north pass is vital for both sides, while no such mechanic exists in the south. Small groups can filter through, gather at the gates, then storm their way to Drek'thar. For the Horde to mount an effective defence requires them to sacrifice men at the front line, making progress harder for an assault.

The second thing is the positioning of the entrance caves: For the Alliance, holding Stormpike Graveyard is vital. If the Horde holds it, you're pretty much isolated from Dun Baldar, since you'll get ganked by the Horde players defending the graveyard, and the Horde has to defend it (Again sacrificing players from assault and defence), while only in rare situations have I seen more than a single Alliance member defending Frostwolf Graveyard, since it's tucked out of the way: Alliance running back into Dun Baldar has to go through SP, Horde running back to Frostwolf Hold can avoid it if they really have to.

Now, and bear in mind that this is coming from a hardline Horde player, the best way to make AV better is to balance the terrain so that both halves are like the north. The reason most Horde players don't defend is because the Alliance can literally run rings around them, and also there needs to be a bigger mass of bodies up north to push the assault ahead. Now for the hard truth: I'd rather be in AV as Horde than Alliance, purely because fighting along the valley pass is fun, and it is epic. Sometimes, the Horde fight their way all the way from Stonehearth Bunker to Stormpike Graveyard without stopping for breath, leaving a pile of bodies underfoot. How many Alliance players can say the same thing? And, be honest, what would you rather play: Running across an open field while dodging the odd wolf, or a huge running battle against a deeply entrenched defensive force?

Another change I'd like to make is for the "trinket to safety" thing to actually mean something. As it stands, the trinkets dump you right outside the door to the general's bunker, if the enemy force is preparing to assault the general, where are they massing? Exactly. Unless the attacking force has failed to reach the base yet, or is occupied elsewhere in the base (And let's face it, that's unlikely to be true since the towers, RH/AS, and bunker are all placed around the spawn point for trinketers) then using your trinket is a form of suicide. Suicide with a 10 second cast. So, if you want more people equipping their trinkets and using them, if you want more people trinketing back into base and staging a heroic defence, drop them somewhere where they can allow the teleport lag to catch up with them before they face the enemy. It's simple, folks. Make a separate chamber behind the generals where trinketers appear so that they are at least safe for a few moments. Of course, when either side is attacking the general this can still make trinketing back a messy death, but it'll help immensely for when the Relief Hut/Aid Station, or the two towers/bunkers need defending.

Truth is, Misery seems a fairly balanced battlegroup. On good days (ie, when fully half the raid isn't AFK in the damn cave) both sides have a fairly equal win ratio, the problem is that Alliance victories tend to be very easy and Horde victories tend to be harder. It's a lot easier for Alliance to constrict arteries vital to the Horde defence (Take IB and FW GY, keep a team of two or so to instantly gank anyone trinketing back to the base before they've even caught up) while it's harder for Horde to do the same for the Alliance defence.

AV needs fixing, but not due to faction imbalance. I agree and wholeheartedly sympathise that the imbalance is harsh on the Alliance, it's simply the price you pay for rolling that faction. AV is hard enough for the Horde as it is, so the "quick blaze of glory" tactic seems to yield the best returns considering if the Alliance has taken out both towers and Relief Hut before we've slogged our way through gnome entrails to Stormpike Graveyard. There seems to be little value in the loot turn-ins too, especially considering that in order to turn them in you (from a Horde perspective again) have to retreat from an assault that needs every man, woman and zombie it can get only to be snagged up in the midfield on your way back to the fray. If there was a reliable method of travel back to the opposing side's territory from your base (Like, oh, I don't know, hiring a gryphon or a wyvern to fly you back up there) then more people might be interested in trinketing back, clearing their inventory of pickups, and maybe just bringing that kickass summon into play. As it stands, if I trinket back into Frostwolf, I know I'm going to be south of Winterax until the game finishes, and that's just not fun.

And now considering that Marks of Honor are currency now, it would be stupid as hell to revert AV back into the old "ten hour game minimum" way it was.

[Kevin]

What horde never, ever does, at least in my BG (from Terenas), is defend. That is simply counterproductive, from an honour perspective.

Yeah, that is something that I didn't touch on in my huge post. I used to be a nasty defender in AV. On my hunter or my warlock, me even just 3 others could really halt the alliance progression and there would be days that I would go in there and just love defending everything. I remember games where the 5 of us at Galv did so well that the alliance just gave up him and tried to sneak by to FW GY instead where we could go smash them again. It was a lot of fun. Other days I wouldn't want to play D so I would join the offense and have fun doing that. I didn't play my shaman that much before AV was already getting destroyed and just turning into the PvE general killing race but I did play Treesh's and it was great provding that healing for the front or the defense.

I had fun in games where we got Lok summoned and/or the wolf riders. And on the days when I couldn't be as attentive as others but needed to play so that I wouldn't lose ranking I would collect wolves and still be helping the team.

Yeah it would be nice if defending got you something. But yeah, like you, as I mentioned, if they deleted AV tomorrow, I wouldn't really care. AV as it is now isn't remotely like it was before and it's something you endure because it's faster honor on AV weekends (and can be on non AV weekends as well) than the other options. Even when we played with other Lurkers yesterday we still just raced better than the alliance (though we did ninja back a few towers at times which never happens horde side usually). But it was still a lot more fun. The battleground could still be fun, but right now? No even close.

[Delc]

I spent all day saturday farming honor in AV (about 15k on the day), and I think I was in maybe 5 winning games. It seemed there were just as many alliance AFK as there were horde (games with 20+ afk excluded) so I don't think thats the issue. Terrain could be part of it, but if people were actually trying I don't think it would be an issue (most of the terrain problems are related to how easy it is to do the wrong thing). People spawning at SP, and in the alliance cave are practically forced to defend. People spawning at IB can't even tell if its being attacked, and can ride the other way. At frostwolf you can at least see if its under attack, but its easy enough to ride away. All of these problems would be a non-issue if people were playing to win.


The problem I see is a lack of any real incentive to win. Winning gets you 2 more tokens to destroy, and maybe 25% more honor at best. Honestly I didn't even try to win. I just went in and started killing lieutenants, and once they were dead farmed some HKs. Sure I could have joined the 2-3 other people on defense and slowed the alliance down, but why?


Also a note to the alliance players. Don't take stonehearth back from the horde. It practically forces them to turtle. I had one game go for over an hour, with most of that time spent as a stalemate between frostwolf and iceblood because the we couldn't get past the alliance to do anything else.

[Skandranon]

I pretty much have to agree with Blizzard and Jester. The place is irreparable.

Yeah, the problem that Horde losing swiftly is in their interest is a design issue. That said, it only arose because the original AV had two even larger design issues.

1) Stalemate. It was a much bigger issue in the original AV, but it crops up now and again in the current AV when both sides decide to fight. Of all the battlegrounds, AV is the only one which results in a natural stalemate when both sides are trying hard. AB and EotS have a time limit set by the points scored from holding nodes. WSG can stalemate a little, but stalemates are more easily broken. After a couple minutes, flag holder locations appear on the map, and an attacking force's objective is only to kill the flag holder and click the flag.

In AV, due to the flag capping mechanic, you have to essentially eradicate all the defenders at a graveyard to capture it. At anything approaching even numbers, this is a draw. The defenders simply spawn back too rapidly to secure the objective, and they have the assistance of NPCs (which, again, is far less than it was).

None of this explanation is really necessary, of course. I think the words "Field of Strife" sum it up for any player who's ever been involved in a non-rush AV game.

The problem is that any solution that encourages fighting it out leads right back to this. Points for time-in-BG, removal of diminishing returns, basically every solution I've ever heard proposed winds up at stalemate. Whereas in WSG you can have one person sneak around back to snap up the flag (there's no foolproof one-on-one defence against it), one person can defend any objective in AV against one other player. Encouraging fighting directly discourages ending the game, which is a dynamic not present anywhere else. It's no surprise that the current AV "strategy" involves as little PvP as possible.

Mass-nerfing of NPCs, while removing one source of stalemate, simply reintroduced another by nerfing the commando, cavalry and summoned-elemental mechanics which were clearly intended as stalemate breakers. Their terrible AI certainly doesn't help. Even then, stalemate breakers serve as a diversion. Getting crates, hides, and animals isn't worth honor and so the typical player isn't incentivized to do these things. Even the easiest one, looting and turning in the items for the elemental, is hampered by the fact that being in your base is a disadvantage (against a full offensive, all it means is that you'll be trapped in your base until the game ends) and that the summoning requirement is prohibitive (trying to get ten people all to do the same thing is futile in just about any pick-up context).

But in the end it comes down to: fighting in AV doesn't shorten the length of the game. It increases it. However, if you make fighting shorten the game, then there's no point to capturing objectives or playing the map at all.

2) Balance. There are a couple of ways to interpret balance, and the one Blizzard has employed for AV is what one might call...counterintuitive to most. Balance can be read as making sure Horde and Alliance have a fair shot. On the other hand, balance can also be read as making sure the entire playerbase has a roughly equivalent return on honor for time.

They didn't pull queue as group from AV because groups were rolling PUGs - that happens in every BG. They pulled it so that Alliance would actually win a BG. I believe the high Alliance win rates in AV are intentional, specifically to balance the Horde win rates elsewhere. Sure, I agree with Bolty in that it's become a self-fulfilling prophecy by now, but the only reason it started that way was because Alliance does get beaten, a lot. The majority of Alliance players are, not to put it lightly, very casual and rather stupid. The Horde have a significantly lower proportion of morons.

And it's all well and good for Horde players to say, well, BGs should be fair, skill versus skill, and if you lose because you're stupid, too bad. And in an ideal world, that's how it works. But Blizzard, as the corporation serving nine million customers, sees a situation where 70% of its playerbase is losing nearly 100% of the time and having no fun in PvP, whereas 30% of the playerbase is winning all the time and having a lot of fun. From that perspective, it's very reasonable to throw the 70% a bone, and they did.

I'm not saying that the map has to favour Alliance forever. I am saying, however, that any change to AV has to correct the currently highly unbalanced situations present particularly in WSG and AB, where PUG Alliance groups are regularly smashed into a fine paste in a games that might take up to 15 minutes, and yet score little or no honor for the experience. Any repair to AV that makes it "fair" but doesn't drop us right back into the situation where Alliance as a whole basically gets no honor at all will never, ever happen.

If I were to fix AV, I'd need to solve these two issues as well as the Horde loss issue. So far, it's been very hard to think of one that does all three.

[q4m]

The problem I see is a lack of any real incentive to win. Winning gets you 2 more tokens to destroy, and maybe 25% more honor at best.

I couldn't agree more. I'm in AV for honor. While it's fun to win, 3 20 minutes losses = more honor than a single 1 hour win. The other day we had a group of lurkers on TS running AV together. I think we might have won once, but even the losses were fun because we were chatting on TS and just enjoying a little bit of PvP together:)

I also agree that Blizzard is probably aware of the terrain imbalance, but they are throwing the alliance the proverbial bone.

All that being said, horde can win Av and quickly...but it requires a LOT more coordination than it does for alliance (I've ground 2 toons to exhausted on each side, been there plenty).

I agree that AV is broken from a "both sides have an equal chance of winning" standpoint, but overall I like the way it is because let's face it...win or lose, it's fast honor. Some of the other bgs can go fast but let's use wsg as an example...you can go in there and get rolled and you get a token and virtually zero honor...that's no fun.

[oldmandennis]

The original post is far too dire about the horde's chances. I'd say on Nightfall the horde win 30-40% of the time. We also have cave dwellers on the Ally side - maybe our BG is a bit more balanced and the queues are shorter.

In it's current incarnation, AV could easily be dumped. I believe WoW needs epic combat though, to compete with Conan and Warhammer. Blizzard appears to believe that too, which is why they announced new BG's and siege engines for Wrath. True they did specifically say that the engines were for the outdoor zone, but I would be surprised if they weren't used in a new BG, especially since on many relms the outdoor zone will have about as much PvP as Goldshire. If they do intend to continue with epic BG's, testing their ideas out on AV would be much better then scrapping it, and giving the new BG the aura of failure when they don't get it totally right the first time.

I don't believe terrain is a major factor. SP might be more defensible then FW, but IB is probably tougher to crack then SH. If they fixed everything else and terrain was still a problem maybe they could tweak it a bit, but even if they made the map a mirror (ignoring the fact that it's boring) would that really solve the existential problems AV has? Also, there are 2 ways around the canyon by SP - running through the harpies and under the bridge is usually the route my guild takes when we get 10 or so people in a game.

I believe the only answer to the AFK issue is to make a rating system similar to arena ratings. You can have one personally, and compare it to the average rating of the other side. This does a ton of things. It no longer gets you anywhere to AFK - you are causing your team to lose and dragging your own rating down. It rewards skill and not time. It throttles the rate of point gain - it is entirely possible to get all of your honor items in a rather short period of time. By removing the value of HK's you focus everybody on winning the game. This also works towards fixing the meta game issue Skan mentioned (if it's in Blizzard's considerations, I'm not sure I buy it) - you can make AV balanced and fun because all the helpless ally puggies will drop in rating and play the horde puggies.

Once you have everybody playing, you have to make the combat epic. I believe the best way to do that is to return NPC's to their previous strength. To break turtles, increase the strength and rate of respawn for the summons - reavers and riders. To bash the last two towers, you can summon catapults. These can only be summoned by resources from the other sides mine. You can tweak the relative strength of defensive units and offensive units until you get a game of the desired average length. I would say for epic combat, it's got to be at least 1 hr and maybe 2.

[Xame]

Some basic suggests to fix the game:

1. Zero honor for a loss. Both sides get a pool of honor that is announced at the start of the BG if you win. If you lose, that honor goes back into the pool for the next winning team of that side. I would believe that Horde would really start trying to fight if they see 20,000 honor for a win. Same for alliance in other BGs.

2. A quick and fast way to report cave dwellers / afk'ers. If you are reported, and a GM agrees that you are not trying, you lose all of your honor and 2-3 pieces of BG gear. Caught a second time kiss your arena epics good bye. It won't take more then one week to stop all the afk'ers. Worked for spammers in less then a week after patch. One crying person who lost their gear/honor would be more then enough fear to keep afk'ers out of BGs.

3. Make the summonable creatures truly epic. One shot everything but a prot-tank. Make them clear a path to the enemy base at a good speed and then despawn. Creatures can be summoned mulitiple times. Need this to break true ties. Should be close to first one to summon wins the match, if you have any brains on your team. Makes 1-1 fights more interesting as people are running the quests to bring up the super creatures become more important then just honor kills.

4. Remove Relief Hut/Aid Station. Trinket takes you back to the cave. Defense is a mid-field / graveyard thing. No more turtling with 20 people for a stalemate. You die, you are no longer part of the defense. Thus Alliance cann't just use 5-7 defenders to slow down Horde to a lose in a speed race or turtle for a 1-2hr game until horde afk's.

5. Both caves are moved to mid-field. Players need to decided if they want to defend or attack.

Pick any one or all and you would improve the current game without a lot of game rework.

[Zarathustra]

I would fix the map. While I admit that horde actually has some better choke points, if they use them, the horde side requires you coordinate. The terrain on the alliance side will naturally push you towards some of the objectives. If horde rezzes in the cave they have to decided to go to Frostwolf or head to the northern front. If alliance rezzes in the cave, they will run right by SP no matter where they are going as they head south so it's very easy for them to check if they can help keep that or if it's a lost cause and they should just get somewhere else.

I think this point stands out because it strikes me as one of the "easy" fixes. Moving the starting area for the Horde to the west side, making them pass FWGY, would immediately address that discrepancy between factions. If anything, move the mine over to the east side and a bit further south than the starting cave is right now. That's not exactly the same situation as the Alliance have, but at least they're passing graveyard #2 on their side on the way out to wherever.

[Trien]

I probably have more unknowns/questions than answers, but...

Some balancing changes to the map could be done for sure. I guess for myself though, as much as I want to get honor points like the next guy, I really miss the big epic battles of AV of yesteryear, which were not a PvE race. Ones where the elementals get summoned, when you released the cavalry or commmandos and somehow manage to turn the tide. Yes, those fights can get drawn out for a long time... hours and hours... and not everyone's going to be able to stay for the entire duration. To try to manage both the long games and honor gain though, would require some major reworking of how honor points are rewarded, so that those who are fighting do get points for fighting, even if they can't stay to the end of the battle.

Off the top of my head I can't think of a good method to do this though. Basing it on the amount of map controlled wouldn't be fair, especially for the poor soul who joins 5 hours into a losing battle (which may yet take another 2 hours before it ends). Some kind of measure of effort would have to be put in... with certain bonuses if you managed to push the opposing side to certain points, perhaps. Something that would allow a player to join at their leisure, put in some fighting time for some reward still, and then if they have to run, they can leave and still have gained some points or whatever even though they didn't stay for the conclusion of the battleground. And if they happened to help push them back and take over a tower or whatever, bonus points would be in order. How to manage the in-progress point gains though, is the real trick though...

As to AFK'ers, whether in the cave or elsewhere... my preliminary thoughts were to track whether a player had engaged in combat with an opposing player/NPC/quest mob (but not creep mobs) or achieved any quest objectives, and if none of that has occured within a given timeframe (something like the 'honorless target' countdown, which gets reset by combat actions), deal a penalty (whether loss of BG bonus honor, etc.). However, how would you account for those who had perhaps a legitimate reason to be 'idle' for some time defending a particular location? An appropriate timeframe would have to be established (eg. if you're waiting on the other side of the map for reinforcements to stealth over, you're going to be sitting still for a while)...

Argh, this is getting too complicated

/headspin

In hindsight, the old honor gain system (which unfortunately favoured the fastest looters though), did at least give more incentive for people to actually be involved in the battle...

[Artega]

Blizzard's already on it, for those of you that haven't seen the videos of the PvP Panel discussion at Blizzcon (they're on YouTube.)

They're adding a new function akin to the "Report for Spam" recently added; simply right click on a player's dot on the minimap and report them for AFKing. If enough people do this, they get a countdown debuff; if they do not enter combat (presumably with players) within the alloted time, they receive a second debuff that halts all honor gain until they enter combat (again, presumably with players.) Obviously, someone could just run to Frostwolf GY and get mauled by the handful of Allies camping there and go back to AFKing, but it's a fairly innovate response to a noticeable problem, and it's not nearly as draconian as some other suggestions you see.

As for the terrain imbalances (and there are glaring imbalances in the AV terrain), the caves will no longer be spawnpoints until your team literally has no other spawnpoints left. Most noticeably, this will help fix the stupid situation at Stormpike GY; since Alliance players will no longer come pouring out of their cave (which happens to lead directly to SPGY), Horde players won't have nearly as hard a time holding SPGY while pushing for Aid Station. No word on if they fixed the horrific imbalances between Frostwolf Village (where you can neatly bypass the majority of the NPCs, either by running by them or leashing them) and Dun Baldar (where you have to kill the majority of the NPCs - including the vendors - while defending the towers, Aid Station, and groups handling Marshals from defending Allies.)

EDIT: Blizzard also mentioned something about modifying the method in which bonus honor is gained: you gain more towards the end of a BG, and less at the beginning; this should hopefully push people to actually finish a battleground instead of turtling on their flagpost for two hours. I'd recommend watching the PvP panel videos from Blizzcon. Besides mentioning what I've listed in much better detail, they also talk about the evolution of the Arena system, their plans for other BGs (and how current ones came about and evolved), and even crack a few pretty funny jokes. They're posted by Lemonsoon; I only watched the first four, so I'm not sure what the other three contain.

[Quark]

As for the terrain imbalances (and there are glaring imbalances in the AV terrain)

Grass is always greener ...

If you think the NPCs are the source of the problem, you've lost me. They're a complete joke now, for either side. The biggest difference always has been the same thing - running through the tower compared to running across the bridge. I would have argued that the tower was worse, but now you can ride through it mounted. They never made a change for the bridge.

this will help fix the stupid situation at Stormpike GY; since Alliance players will no longer come pouring out of their cave (which happens to lead directly to SPGY), Horde players won't have nearly as hard a time holding SPGY while pushing for Aid Station

Just like it'll no longer be hard to hold Iceblood for the same reasons?

[Concillian]

How would you fix Alterac Valley?

Don't know what I mean? I'll fill you in in case you don't PvP much or in case you play on a bizarre battlegroup where this doesn't happen, although from what I understand it's pretty universal. Basically, Horde always loses, and it's to their benefit.

I think the devs are on the right track based on the Blizzcon info:

1) Rezzing at cave only when no other GY --

This is HUGE. one of the main reasons for the map imbalance is that when horde die after IB is taken they have a choice of 3 places to go (Tower point D, FW GY D, IB to try to get O). The force is spread out and of no consequence to the alliance O.

If they rez back at FW they are all taking the same path as alliance and will be essentially be slaughtered while mounted trying to get back to O and forced to D just like alliance are now. Sure FW is no Stormpike, but forcing everyone to rez there is going to make things different. Also, I don't know if alliance realize it, but if you died more than about 20 yards from the cave side of teh FW GY flag you'd also rez back in the cave... highly annoying if you are trying to defend.

Also, it will create more heated battles at the towns themselves, which will make for longer games, which will mean the AFKers will have less incentive to play.

I think this was a very necessary step, and it removes a very significant map imbalance from AV. I'm not sure other people realize how significant it was that the cave for alliance is behind SP GY vs. the horde cave being in between FW and IB GYs.

2) greater inertia for AFKers

The self reporting and clearing AFK debuff is a method if increasing AFK inertia. It's not going to solve the problem, but it will make it more difficult, which I think is all that needs to be done. If there is no sound associated with the debuff, then the AFKers will have to check often for the debuff and at this point they may as well be actually playing.

3) Further incentivize NPC intervention (commandos, riders, air support)

Be this through extending the games (as the GY thing may do) or reduced turn-ins (mine turn-ins and wolf / ram taming both take WELL longer than they should). It's possible that #1 solves this problem all by itself. Once I spent an entire 20 minute game getting stuff in the mine, rotating people as fast as possible with a warlock summoning to the mine, then warping back. Didn't get the commandos summoned before the game was over. That needs to change.

4) balance town NPC dealings

This is one they aren't doing, but they need to add a wall or something to FW keep to force alliance near the bulk of te NPCs in FW keep. Horde have a very tough time avoiding the old racial foo turn-in NPCs. Make it equally difficult for alliance.

5) Create a time helper

Once games reach the 1 hour mark, auto release NPC help based on GY holdings or something to help move battles along. Increase the strength of player released NPCs, or perhaps reduce turn-in quantity and reduce time significantly between waves at some time limint... Something to help avoid issues of the AV of old like the AV where I went to sleep and joined the same AV again the next morning.

1 hour solid in a battleground you can't AFK in is a long time. 2 hours would make it more like an instance, but without the breaks. There needs to be a hard stop at 1.5-2 hours. My feeling is NPCs need to be tuned to support ~45 minute games on average and there has to be something to help move things along if a battle starts getting out of hand.

I don't know if the AFK solution is enough... time will tell. But when you make the rezzing similar on both sides, then make it so that you have pretty much even odds, well then the map is a lot more balanced.

[q4m]

There needs to be a hard stop at 1.5-2 hours...

I really, really like this idea. Nothing is worse than joining an AV and spending 1-2 hours but having to end up logging and losing all that bonus honor:(

[oldmandennis]

I predict failure for this reporting mechanism. There are too many iffs ands or buts. No damage or healing in the first 10 min of a game? What about somebody gathering wolves? Halfway through the grind is he going to have to head to the front in order to get his honor? What about players guarding the backfield in a game with a good defense at IB?

The only answer is to zero sum it, like arenas.

[Quark]

I predict failure for this reporting mechanism. There are too many iffs ands or buts. No damage or healing in the first 10 min of a game? What about somebody gathering wolves? Halfway through the grind is he going to have to head to the front in order to get his honor? What about players guarding the backfield in a game with a good defense at IB?

The only answer is to zero sum it, like arenas.

It sounds like you have to get X reports first to receive the honor debuff.

[Kevin]

It sounds like you have to get X reports first to receive the honor debuff.

yeah that's how I took it and hopefully people won't report folks who are doing things that actually help the team. But there are a lot of stupid horde, like 80% of the population of Nathrezim (I consistently see them fighting off the flag in AB and staying in midfield in WSG, they are the only server that seems to think that it's dumb to try and get 3 or more towers in EotS I will actually leave matches that have 5 or more of them in it, because we are likely to lose or if we win the game will be 5 to 10 minutes longer than it needed to be).

But yeah it does seem that it will be a deal where you need to be reported enough to trigger the debuff, but it does sound automated which means stupid people can still screw it up.

[oldmandennis]

It sounds like you have to get X reports first to receive the honor debuff.

And 5 minutes into the game, people are going to bring up the scoreboard and report anybody without any damage done.