Frostwolf BG situation and possible solutions
Hey, I'm a longterm Frostwolf player and I gotta admit that I don't enjoy playing bgs at all anymore. Therefore, I've thought about potential ways of fixing it:
Most of the bgs I play currently end up with one faction getting farmed at their graveyard. While farming can be fun for certain people for some time, I doubt even those people are able to enjoy it for more than 2-3 bgs in a row. I personally don't find it fun at all. No matter whether I'm on the recieving or giving end. It's just boring to stay there and farm those suicidal people who decided to keep ressing and jumping down and it's even less enjoyable to stay at GY and watch those die.
Problem: power disparity between teams.
Possible Solutions:
(i) Cross Faction bgs.
No matter which faction has the upper hand at one point, both sides in that bg have a chance to get geared people. Furthermore, this will surely lower que times.
(ii) Split premade groups and create teams that have similar ilvl averages.
Let's say there are 10 people queueing. P=(p1, ... ,p10) are the players that are in que. Let L=(L1, ... ,L10) be the vector that contains the ilvls (pi has ilvl Li for all i=1,...,10).
Example: P1,...,P4 happen to be Devastation members who like to que together in order to play with friends. All of them have ilvl 550. P5 is a lonely Myriad member (also 550) who decided to do a bg on his own. P6,...,P9 are alliance players who just hit 90. These alliance players all have ilvl 500 and P10 is another alliance player with 550 who is also queueing alone.
Without x-faction these people would end up in a bg together with one team having an average ilvl of 550 and the other team having an average ilvl of 510. No matter how skilled the alliance team is, their chance of winning is extremely small.
With x-faction a better way of putting those teams together is possible. The system could put the Myriad member into the alliance team and take one of the ilvl 500 alliance players and put it into the Devastation team. This would result in one team having an average of 540 and the other team having an average of 520. This doesn't sound too bad, but still puts the lower team into a really bad spot. Even if the 550 alliance player and the myriad member play really well, suboptimal gameplay by those 3 500s makes them lose that bg. The chances are not in their favor.
If we have x-faction bgs and split that Devastation premade up into 2 groups of 2, we could end up with teams that have 3x 550 and 2x 500. This is perfectly balanced. If we let people stay in 2 man premades, the worst case that can happen is 2x 550 and 3x low vs 5x low.
But how to decide which player gets into what team?
Create a vector K that has the components of L sorted such that K1<...<K5 (to make it well defined substitute 'less than' with 'less or equal than') and sort the vector P the same way (and call the sorted vector Q).
In our example: K=(L6, ..., L9, L1, ..., L4, L5, L10), Q=(p6, ..., p9, p1, ..., p4, p5, p10)
Now take the first and the last component and team them up:
(Team alliance) TA:=(p6, p10, 0, ..., 0) [Average ilvl: 525]
Now take the second and the second last and team them up:
(Team horde) TH:=(p7, p5, 0, ..., 0) [Average ilvl: 525]
Keep doing it this way...
TA=(p6, p10, p8, p4, 0) [Average ilvl: 525]
TH=(p7, p5, p9, p3, 0) [Average ilvl: 525]
Now we split the left over players (p1 and p2) and put one of them into TA and the other one into TH.
TA = (p6, p10, p8, p4, p1) [Average ilvl: 530]
TH=(p7, p5, p9, p3, p2) [Average ilvl: 530]
In order to keep 2 man premades you could always take pairs of people instead of single players and put them together. Example: instead of taking p6 and p10 first, it could take p6, p7 and p5, p10 and put them into a group and so on.
(iii) ilvl scaling for low gear.
Another way of changing the situation for the better would be the scaling of gear that is above ilvl 416, but below 512, to itemlvl 512.
In wotlk for example, you're able to deal damage even in low gear. There's a chance of beating that bad warrior who just charged you. In mop you'll never chew through Second wind. Other classes have heals aswell and you can just forget killing them unless you're at a specific ilvl. This makes MoP gearing feel absolutely bad and getting teamed up with those 300k people in a bg makes geared players feel just as bad. Getting crafted pvp gear helps, but it's not a solution. Therefore, scaling the ilvl of mop items to ilvl 512 seems like a better solution. Having your Dreadful crafted set upscaled to 512 still puts you ahead to those who don't have one, because it has the set bonus and better stats in general than contender or those blue dungeon and green quest items.
Ilvl scaling adds items to the list of viable gear for low geared people but doesn't make them viable for end game pvp.
I'd love to hear your opinion.
