08-06-2007, 07:52 PM
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
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
Quote:Considering the mods here are generally liberals who seem to have a soft spot for fascism and white supremacy (despite them saying otherwise), me being perma-banned at some point is probably not out of the question.