08-06-2007, 10:54 PM
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.
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.