State of PvP

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Originally Posted by Snoosnoo

Can you give some examples please? Because at this point you are showing me that we are either out of sync about the context or that you just like to hear yourself talk, because this makes little sense. As far as I can see I've followed my own reasoning to a tee adhering to only logical propositions to put the game in a state of balance.

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Can you log in to Icecrown and create a fully leveled and geared character right away, without having donated and used Coins for it?
No? Well, that's context in what the servers are. Just saying "oh but you get this herb and sell this to this person and get gold and whatever" is ridiculous. People don't just download the client, click to create a character and go do that, while on Blackrock they pretty much do. The effort it took for Icecrown players to get to the point where they can craft or buy some potions can't just be taken out of the context if you want to talk about "unfairness."

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Originally Posted by Brutone

But weren't the gear brackets implemented to make BGs more balanced?

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Not really. Otherwise they would be balanced and people wouldn't complain they keep getting camped by people with higher gear. It was just to reduce the gear disparity to a certain level, but the room for gear in each bracket still leaves plenty of room for imbalance if you're unlucky - which you even mention yourself.

The BGs are somewhat unbalanaced, but I don't think there's an obvious fix that won't have some major drawbacks like massively increasing queues. I'd rather just work around the premades, you can literally just go to another part of the map, and not engage with them, than wait 30 minutes for a BG pop.

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Originally Posted by Baartleby2

The BGs are somewhat unbalanaced, but I don't think there's an obvious fix that won't have some major drawbacks like massively increasing queues. I'd rather just work around the premades, you can literally just go to another part of the map, and not engage with them, than wait 30 minutes for a BG pop.

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Just to make sure there is an open discussion in here (not pointing you out personally). Why would long BG ques be a problem?

Years and years ago, before merc mode, ques were atrocious on ally. Not as bad as they would be if merc mode was disabled now (considering almost everyone in the PVP community has switched over) but sitting in a 15 minute que at peak was not at all unheard of. The flipside of that was that Horde was super vibrant. If you wanted instant pops you could have it any time of the day, all you had to do was not play ally. This in turn also lead to pretty vibrant WPVP because the more people went to horde for shorter ques the more people were out in the world ganking alliance players.

Im not saying a 15 minute que for everyone who chose to go alliance is preferable, but maybe it is an acceptable consequence when the alternative is just going Horde for instant pops? :)

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Originally Posted by Baartleby2

The BGs are somewhat unbalanaced, but I don't think there's an obvious fix that won't have some major drawbacks like massively increasing queues. I'd rather just work around the premades, you can literally just go to another part of the map, and not engage with them, than wait 30 minutes for a BG pop.

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Waiting time is not a big deal, since on IceCrown people do PvE most of the time even if its PvP server, if they can wait 30 minutes to fill up the group for ICC and spend 2 more hours to play, then why they can't wait 15-20min in queue for battlegrounds?

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Originally Posted by Ezrage

Waiting time is not a big deal, since on IceCrown people do PvE most of the time even if its PvP server, if they can wait 30 minutes to fill up the group for ICC and spend 2 more hours to play, then why they can't wait 15-20min in queue for battlegrounds?

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Because most people can't play 12 hours a day, and spend half of the time in queue, waiting to play.

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Originally Posted by Baartleby2

Because most people can't play 12 hours a day, and spend half of the time in queue, waiting to play.

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And the solution to this, if for instance there were changes to merc mode is to go Horde, then you can play and get instant pops! If merc mode is forced this also won't be an issue, more people will be quing for spots in every single team! :)

"These brackets need to be disabled and there needs to be a more well thought out way of incentivizing people to PvP that doesn't artificially make gearing something that you question doing. It's pretty counter intuitive that all my 7~ 6k+ gs characters feel weaker than my alts i barely know how to play that are 5k gs. There will always be gear disparities in an MMO and its generally an incentive to want to get better gear or donate, but instead I'd rather just stay in furious or relentless so I don't have to sit in a graveyard every single BG seeing half the enemies below with purple swirls around them with 3 healers on their team so you leave with 5 HKs for the entire bg and a whopping 500 honor. "

OP:

Yeah, people have been saying this for years. The PVP gearing process, is basically tabbing out and watching videos while you get farmed in quest gear VS a weapon that can hit you for 70% of your health pool in one global. Even in Relentless the gear disparity is still huge for PVP, and it will never be capped.

It's probably why people play Blackrock to begin with.

Even though you obviously want to play your own characters, I'd suggest making characters on Blackrock instead. There's more, and better, arena partners, and you actually start with some gear. Even then, in arena you're up against Shadowmourne Warr/Pals, which becomes extremely boring, and Warmane have no intention of capping the gear ilvl to make PVP take skill rather than actual 12k Mortal Strikes.

The last tournament I watched, the matches was 3 minutes long and consisted of switching to a Hpala, forcing bubble and then doing again. It was extremely boring, and that's the potential for all players in PVP on hc gear meta. I'd also add that this is why most of the competition players from AT and wow PVP in general don't play. It makes winning completely RNG, as it's just whoever crits with trinket procs randomly soloing a healer.

Play Warmane, and enjoy Warr/Pal Smourne spam, or don't PVP is my suggestion to everyone looking for PVP on WoTLK.

Would also add that the perfect PVP changes would have been(probs too late now):
- An ilevel cap in all PVP. if people buy Smourne put them against each other - enjoy
- Free hateful or deadly (whichever is pre furious) upon hitting 80, or Q chain leading to it
- Create a way for PVPers to get PVE gear through PVP, instead of doing irrelevant content that takes too long
- Fix to meleeing through pillars, it ****s rogues and makes Warriors even more OP (I was a Warrior main before Smourne meta)
- Removal of Human Racial - most PVPers actually want to play different races, but on Rele+ it's just not valuable, double trinket Human healer is just way more mana regen
- Mana cost increase of Pala Blessings, for 2's (this balances Warr/Pal) - may not be necessary with human changes
- 10% nerf to LS/x damage in 3's
- Probably the least likely to happen, but would be the best change: add ramps to Z-axis maps

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Originally Posted by Obnoxious

Can you log in to Icecrown and create a fully leveled and geared character right away, without having donated and used Coins for it?
No? Well, that's context in what the servers are. Just saying "oh but you get this herb and sell this to this person and get gold and whatever" is ridiculous. People don't just download the client, click to create a character and go do that, while on Blackrock they pretty much do. The effort it took for Icecrown players to get to the point where they can craft or buy some potions can't just be taken out of the context if you want to talk about "unfairness."

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First, I find it very entertaining that I have to defend free action potions, an item that I despised for years. It's actually enjoyable given the circumstances.

Second, I'm going to go over my reasoning very slowly, to both ensure you that I understand the full context, but to also show you how you should reason when it comes to it.

Alright, let me address your comment. Do the insta-leveled blackrock players have access to even 10% of the items a character has access to on the other realms? No. Are blackrock players even allowed to use the crafting system given by professions so they can earn their items? No. Are they helplessly constrained to what a vendor can supply and their respective price? Yes. Do these vendors supply all the strong potions/items other servers can use (tracking food, camo pots, invis,...)? No.

But hey, everything has its constraints, you get some and you lose some. As long as once you are in a battleground (in the same bracket) the games from a resource point of view are balanced enough, then who can complain. As I said before, PvP is all about balancing the actual battlegrounds and arenas themselves, you view everything else as if it's a blackbox.

A blackbox doesn't mean 'ignore that', because apparently I need to explain that. It means you just look at what comes out plain and simple, the how and why are of no concern until you detected the imbalance and want to fix it. If you want to balance a balance sheet, you look at the numbers of both sides. When you finally detected the imbalance, then you want to look at the how and why of those numbers and act accordingly.

This is why I was happy to see that FAPs/LAPs were made more expensive, 100 honor per FAP was just ridiculous. Even a gearing blackrock player could just refresh his faps as he went on gearing his character. Not even mentioning the luckily unskilled people in that 'DONT RUN I HAVE CANDY' guild who just chugged them when they came off CD; just a huge balancing issue.

Notice how I mention the how and why for context, but the actual imbalance was just that the average blackrock player had an insane amount of free action potions to burn as opposed to the average non-blackrock player. We fixed it by looking why it was that way and then adjusted the price of the items, which simply was set too low.

Now, however, because you were fixated on a small portion of the blackrock population you have not balanced a situation, you just have unbalanced it the other way around for everyone but them. Sure, that small population will start swinging towards the balance point over time but it'll swing right past it, so we just change the sides of the problem. People who aren't part of that small population are immediately disadvantaged, so there is no need to wait for that.

This is because the equivalent icecrown player who also abused free action potions can now out chug that same blackrock player due to the catch-up/replacement ratio you have put in place.
To top it off, your excuse for allowing this imbalance is related to something people on blackrock literally can't even do if they wanted to?

That reasoning also becomes murky if you look at the icecrown extremes, just like people complain about the blackrock extremes. The same extreme variant of the icecrown player, a profile that includes some of my buddies are people who have 100 alchemy characters that output 100 cardinal rubies per day, fully automated in logging, transmuting, sending the items, and buying the resources. Part of these profits are used to buy guild banks full of free action potions, another chunk is eventually sold to get coins to do whatever. These alchemy characters more often than not still stem from the multiboxing days and required 2 hours to level in batches of 25 and 30 minutes to train. When these people quit the game, they are also 'gifted' off (you know what I mean) to the person 'who wants it most'. Luckily, people are also very friendly and kindly hand out stacks of these faps to all their friends and guild mates. But hey, sure it required effort to start it up initially, no doubt about it.

It's also a lot of effort to play soul draining battlegrounds versus such people, just like it was soul draining to face blackrock potion abusers.
Which ultimately brings me to my point that in the higher bracket, the average blackrock player will have to grind these bgs vs the icecrown premade pot abuser just to have 1 free action potion vs these people for 1 in 5 of those bgs. Sure, the people who have been abusing the items and have some stored will be able to match them for a while, they might even abuse them some more vs people who just wanted to play a quick bg. But over time it'll be all be depleted out by the restrictions set, if they use more than 1 fap per 5 bgs (that's 30 seconds in 1 hour of actual pvp). The only other solution is dodging them and running across the map to fight other people and ultimately throwing the bg because you're running more vs playing, not to mention that it also means less honor in their pockets, so it could be 1 in 6 bgs.

A private server crumbles by a rate of one ignorant decision/change at a time. Rome wasn't built in one day, but neither did it fall in one day.

Ultimately making faps cost 50 times more (5000 honor) was not a good idea, making faps/laps cost 2500 instead of 5000 while also raising all other pot prices by 500% is still a much better balancing act than what you've done now. But it's wishful thinking to assume the person at the balancing dials actually plays/understands pvp themselves.

I know it is hard to properly balance a pvp system, at first fresh blackrock people were placed in the upper gear bracket to serve as cannon fodder for BiS geared Icecrown people. They cried and complained, and after a while they got their own bracket, which now serves as one of the dynamic gear brackets. As a consequence, you now have people who buy 264 ILvL items on the auction house and then get paired vs full 245-251 iLvL gear fresh blackrock characters. Now those people feel shortchanged, because they have a hard time dealing with them, but due to the dynamic brackets you can't put them down anymore because then the ilvl 200-232 people would start complaining. You could put blackrock people at 232 ilvl but that might shift the dynamic brackets again causing literally the same problem, because they'll be a dominant mass.
That's 100% an annoying puzzle to balance, I'd hate to be that guy.

What is not an annoying puzzle to balance is simply changing the number of the price of items to ensure balance (statistically) across a bracket.

No way I'm reading all that, when I can tell from the first paragraph or two that it's just a more verbose repetition of what you said before, still trying to pick and choose out of a much larger context. The game, and even the PvP side activity, is much bigger than this potion.

But I'll refer you to a previous thing I said: if Icecrown and Lordaeron are so much better because they get this single potion "easier," I'll expect a lot of Blackrock players to be starting characters there. Still, I don't see that happening... for some bizarre reason.

What do you think about a cross-realm Wpvp Zone for all wotlk realms?
Maybe Blackrocks Isle of Queldanas could be made cross-realm with decent rewards.

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Originally Posted by Obnoxious

No way I'm reading all that, when I can tell from the first paragraph or two that it's just a more verbose repetition of what you said before, still trying to pick and choose out of a much larger context. The game, and even the PvP side activity, is much bigger than this potion.

But I'll refer you to a previous thing I said: if Icecrown and Lordaeron are so much better because they get this single potion "easier," I'll expect a lot of Blackrock players to be starting characters there. Still, I don't see that happening... for some bizarre reason.

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Haha :D.

Totally understood btw. When i said before "we start to missing the point" was exactly this. The dude has written 50 pages about FAP.

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Originally Posted by Brutone

What do you think about a cross-realm Wpvp Zone for all wotlk realms?
Maybe Blackrocks Isle of Queldanas could be made cross-realm with decent rewards.

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I wouldn't have anything against something like that at first glance (except the vague concept of "decent rewards," perhaps), but I'm not sure how viable and/or worth the effort and resources it would be to create something custom like that. I could easily picture it being more work than it's worth and quickly becoming a headache that requires constant maintenance and updates as players go on to find ways to exploit things in the design to just create new "bridge farming" scenarios.

It's just my opinion, though, maybe other Staff would like the idea. Just generally something that custom is more what we use for limited events.

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Originally Posted by Obnoxious

No way I'm reading all that, when I can tell from the first paragraph or two that it's just a more verbose repetition of what you said before, still trying to pick and choose out of a much larger context. The game, and even the PvP side activity, is much bigger than this potion.

But I'll refer you to a previous thing I said: if Icecrown and Lordaeron are so much better because they get this single potion "easier," I'll expect a lot of Blackrock players to be starting characters there. Still, I don't see that happening... for some bizarre reason.

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And once again you prove to be a person who likes to talk but refuses to listen, understand, and reason.

I'm only here to help the server become better, but somehow moderators who seem to have the ability to make changes think it's all about never being proven wrong. Maybe in the future try to have self-reflection, it helps now and then.

On the plus side, I can redirect part of my focus back to my actual job which is coincidently also using maths and models to predict future risks/behavior, it's not like those skills can be used 1:1 to balance gam...oh wait.

That last part was a brag I know, but it's just to reply with arrogance to arrogance. Because yes, I am also deeply flawed.

Either way I wish you nothing but the best, maybe until someone links me a forum post about pvp again

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Originally Posted by Obnoxious

(except the vague concept of "decent rewards," perhaps)

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Only cosmetics I guess.
Also Tmog models could serve as a reward. Like a item which can only be used to change the appearance of your gear.

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Originally Posted by Snoosnoo

I'm only here to help the server become better, but somehow moderators who seem to have the ability to make changes think it's all about never being proven wrong.

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His job is to moderate the forums and deal with the endless repetitive bull**** that gets spewed here, not balance the game.

Trashing the place isn't "helping the server".