AV Alliance Strike...

[Gort]

Funny that I went through every post and didn't see a mention of the mod that really caused the issue. Preform AV Enabler - it was coded by a Horde player with an attitude problem and contained checks that would specifically prevent this mod working for Alliance characters. Look it up on Curse if you don't believe me and see the original author's comments. It's had a few less-than-successful attempts to modify for Alliance use but as Alliance almost always won AV, seeing it (rightly or wrongly) as their "compensation" for Horde always winning the other BGs, it never really got much exposure.

Until the last couple of months, that is. Then, with the reinforcement-based changes, there was an explosion of use of this mod in the Stormstrike battlegroup and Alliance players suddenly began to run into Horde premades. The issue is the map layout and the "scorched earth" strategy that began to be used. The strategy worked something like this:

1) Horde send 20 people, hunters/warlocks and a few healers to disrupt the Alliance at Galv and the chokepoint leading to IB GY. Frost traps, massive tab-dotting and the attempt to ride through to FW or the Relief Hut would run aground. The Galv attack would be broken up via fears etc.

2) The other 20 people move forward, take Stonehearth and Icewing bunkers, then kill Balinda. Instantly the Alliance are down 300 reinforcements.

3) The Horde offence moves forward - if they take Stormpike, Dun Baldar North/South bunkers and the Aid Station, they finish the game there. If they run into a defence at Stormpike they simply fall back to Iceblood and grind out a reinforcement-based win by virtue of the lead gained killing 2 bunkers and Balinda.

Basically, before the reinforcement change, where the victory condition was to kill Vanndar or Drek'thar, the final chokepoint was the telling one. FW Keep's layout is a joke, the Dun Baldar bridge is far far more defensible - Alliance had a massive advantage before. Now, with player kills able to determine the outcome, that later chokepoint pales in significance in comparison to the earlier Horde choke, IB GY.

The combination of this strategy and the Horde using Preform AV Enabler to get their premades into AV against a guaranteed Alliance PuG is what caused the Stormstrike Alliance to drift away from AV, catapulting Horde queues into the 2-3hr stratosphere. What happened after that was an attitude formed among the Stormstrike (and copycat battlegroups) that "if I've had to wait 3 hours for this game, I'm damn well getting maximum honour out of it". Alliance players saw their honour return from AV drop way below that of the other 3 battlegrounds and modified their behaviour accordingly.

[oldmandennis]

Is that preform enabler that much better then Stinkyqueue (which was mentioned earlier)? Stinkyqueue worked pretty good with groups of up to 25 or so last I checked, though that was some months ago. It definitely works fine with groups of 5-6. Lua isn't that hard, I find it hard to believe that you can't change the preform enabler mod to allow the allies to use it too.

[Gort]

Is that preform enabler that much better then Stinkyqueue (which was mentioned earlier)? Stinkyqueue worked pretty good with groups of up to 25 or so last I checked, though that was some months ago. It definitely works fine with groups of 5-6. Lua isn't that hard, I find it hard to believe that you can't change the preform enabler mod to allow the allies to use it too.

Oh it's not that it can't be done, it's that until the last couple of months there's been no real "need" for it so any recodes didn't get any kind of exposure.

As for effectiveness, when stinkyqueue struggles to get 4 or 5 people into the same AV at times due to latency or the like, when you zone into an AV and see 39 Skullcrusher Horde waiting for you, that tells you how effective Preform AV Enabler is:)

[Pantalaimon]

Basically, before the reinforcement change, where the victory condition was to kill Vanndar or Drek'thar, the final chokepoint was the telling one. FW Keep's layout is a joke, the Dun Baldar bridge is far far more defensible - Alliance had a massive advantage before. Now, with player kills able to determine the outcome, that later chokepoint pales in significance in comparison to the earlier Horde choke, IB GY.

Very well put! My take is that even without Horde pre-mades, horde PuGs now know to defend the IB chokepoint, and how ridiculously easy it is to wipe alliance on galv compared to vice versa with balinda (an issue which I won't dwell on overmuch, as it's a well known fact.)

Now that horde PuGs are adopting this strategy, even without the complication of the mod, alliance have ceased to win the majority, or even a worthwhile minority, of matches. And the horde strategy isn't even terribly difficult - the chokepoint is, admittedly from an alliance POV, but trying to be objective, nearly as good as the bridge, perhaps even better because you can get strange healer (dwarf? lol) LOS issues from the hill near Galv's entrance. And it's worlds better than the alliance equivalent near SH GY. Our bridge is just too bloody far back to be of much use these days, when most AV wins are not from general killing but reinforcement attrition, AND the horde can usually reach "our" first tower before we can, giving them an instant head start on reinforcements even if we don't wipe on galv.

Edit: Also, a phenomena I don't quite understand and perhaps someone could explain to me; but why do the number of AFKers increase when the apparently likelyhood of losing increases? It was formerly the horde that would /afk in AV, and now that horde win most of the time there's 10-15 alliance AFKers... it becomes one of those infamous "self fulfilling prophecies". Not only that, but with horde often shutting out alliance, the AFKer is quite literally wasting their time in terms of honor per hour, so there's *actually* no purpose!

[Lissa]

Edit: Also, a phenomena I don't quite understand and perhaps someone could explain to me; but why do the number of AFKers increase when the apparently likelyhood of losing increases? It was formerly the horde that would /afk in AV, and now that horde win most of the time there's 10-15 alliance AFKers... it becomes one of those infamous "self fulfilling prophecies". Not only that, but with horde often shutting out alliance, the AFKer is quite literally wasting their time in terms of honor per hour, so there's *actually* no purpose!

Marks. It's the same reason Horde afk'd before, they needed the marks to buy gear, so they'd afk, wander off, and wait for the marks to be gained.

[Trien]

Is that preform enabler that much better then Stinkyqueue (which was mentioned earlier)? Stinkyqueue worked pretty good with groups of up to 25 or so last I checked, though that was some months ago. It definitely works fine with groups of 5-6. Lua isn't that hard, I find it hard to believe that you can't change the preform enabler mod to allow the allies to use it too.

Out of interest's sake, I went and downloaded the PreformAVEnabler code to see what it was all about. Apparently the author went and did some obfuscation of the code... replacing variable and function names with meaningless names (eg. Ill1lI111lIi -- they're all combinations of i, I, l, and 1), and then removing all formatting, whitespace and newlines so that the entire file ends up on one line. Spent some time reformatting it and then looking through it to see what it does. I haven't managed to figure out the faction lock yet... there's checks of different types all over and some look like they're decoys... and some strange function reassignments. Not really sure if I'm going to bother trying to break it, since I can't see myself ever using it. So it doesn't look trivial to remove the faction lock, though given enough time going through the logic of it, it shouldn't be *too* too hard to figure out either.

Oh it's not that it can't be done, it's that until the last couple of months there's been no real "need" for it so any recodes didn't get any kind of exposure.

As for effectiveness, when stinkyqueue struggles to get 4 or 5 people into the same AV at times due to latency or the like, when you zone into an AV and see 39 Skullcrusher Horde waiting for you, that tells you how effective Preform AV Enabler is:)

Anyhow, looking through what PAVE does, it's exactly the same as what StinkyQueue and others do. The only difference that I've seen is that when the BG join opens up, everyone reports on which AV# they have, and if not enough people have the same #, it drops everyone's queues and requeues. Just a bit of extra automation for something that most people (at least the ones that I know) do already.

As to there being no 'need' for it before... *shrug*. Almost everyone I know has been using a sync queuing addon since they got rid of the group queue option for AV and people decided to automate it instead of timing it on vent...

[Concillian]

Marks. It's the same reason Horde afk'd before, they needed the marks to buy gear, so they'd afk, wander off, and wait for the marks to be gained.

Before, horde could generally AFK in AV and gain honor faster than participating in AB, WSG or EotS. At least up until there were so many AFKers that horde couldn't even kill lieutenants and such.