Mercenary Mode on Icecrown, Lordaeron and Blackrock

yeah there is also the problem of commitment with the faction. so we are now using people that do not have any sympathy with any faction, added into a faction that does care, against a faction that does care entirely.
what i mean is, when the pvp scene involves people that are limited to belonging only on one side, they tend to try and change their position in order to win. like building pvp guilds etc. this was fine until the faction ratio went down for horde and up for alliance, resulting into 10 minutes queues on alliance making it impossible to make any sort of pvp guild what so ever.
so if we only solve the queue times with blackrock players, the horde faction results into a group of individuals with no interest in common. so there is no competition in the long run. hence, alliance will always win in this scenario.
maybe we should just do the mercenary mode for all realms. cause only for blackrock ended up being damaging.
again, given that some people are really against this, we could perhaps study the possibility of being optional? like a configuration in the account menu with a checkbox: "do you wish to participate in mercenary mode? blah blah blah [ ] ". So if people care more about queue times on alliance, they will have to enable this feature, and be grouped with Horde players.
Eventually if queue times go back to 10 minutes on alliance, i can see how many people would turn this feature on, in order to be able to fight. which is the base element of fun, as in the bottom necessary layer of fun. you can build on top of that the RPG elements etc. but if you are waiting longer than what you play, the fun element cant sustain itself any longer.

i also think that the players are changing, and more and more "custom" tweaks are being added. i personally think that is fine for any commercial entity in order to succeed, it needs to adapt. and lets be fair here, there can only be so many months until the game becomes old again, and some features that are from the original expansion just do not make any more sense anymore. for example, increasing the difficulty of ICC, the mercenary mode, etc.
So if given the option, would you rather keep the server "blizzlike" (this world should die) or for it to stay alive and healthy?
What i mean is that if it was up to me, i would add an NPC where people can enable features that are not "blizzlike" that were designed to maintain the server health, for instance, enabling or disabling mercenary mode on your character.

I could live with making mercenary mode optional for Icecrown alliance, but I think that would require changing something in the actual game client (there's no option for that in the current client). I'm not real tech saavy, but that seems like a much greater coding challenge than doing something at Warmane's end, i.e. server end like just selecting the better-geared Blackrock players or giving them a stats buff when serving as mercenaries. So I think the server-side solutions are better ones.

But at the end of the day, we're just talking with ourselves here. It's been a while since we heard from Proterean or some other dev about what their numbers show re: faction balance and how satisfied they are with the current system. Would be nice to get some input from them.

no, its backend code. nothing needs to be changed in the client if you do something like an NPC or a website toggle .

Still no any staff comment.
Whatever.

I like the idea of a factionless que. Everyone ques and random rumber generator decideds whos horde and whos alliance. I play horde and while it is fun the alliance are very dominant and if that those players are filtered in it would feel like every match is kind of even player skill/gear

Mercenary mode makes ques better and it contributes to the popularity of PvP and especially battlegrounds on this server.
Battlegrounds keep intrigue and battles enrich with interesting confrontations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa6Y0FsrBM0 [/url]

Keep queuing more from both factions

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chalyena

Mercenary mode makes ques better and it contributes to the popularity of PvP and especially battlegrounds on this server.
Battlegrounds keep intrigue and battles enrich with interesting confrontations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa6Y0FsrBM0 [/url]

Keep queuing more from both factions

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SKillcapped nuffsaid.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chalyena

Mercenary mode makes ques better and it contributes to the popularity of PvP and especially battlegrounds on this server.
Battlegrounds keep intrigue and battles enrich with interesting confrontations.
Keep queuing more from both factions

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What's your point ?
In 70% AV games you are afking or leaving the bg due to complete alliance domination.

Contesty games have been shown in your vid are not common.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Chalyena

Mercenary mode makes ques better and it contributes to the popularity of PvP and especially battlegrounds on this server.
Battlegrounds keep intrigue and battles enrich with interesting confrontations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa6Y0FsrBM0 [/url]

Keep queuing more from both factions

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GG, nice video, keep going!
Alliance gonna hate you

My two cents:

Introduce a new "random bg" into the qeue interface - another call to arms - that has factionless matchmaking.

- people that only want to play amongst their own faction can qeue for BG's normally, others can use the new call to bounty or whatever...

both qeue times would still be fast if the "pure" sides could face the "mercenary" sides


Ideally, seperate pvp on the realms again as they aim towards completely different gameplay experiences - the qeue times should be fast enough, not instant - (2-5min perhaps)... but the resulting quality should be well worth it.

Cheers

Ok if u dont care about sentimental reasons ill give u one practical why this is bad. For example what will u think if tauren shadomelds in front of u? Maybe he left game,go further,and than when u go away he take ur flag. Thats an example how this is game breaking. True pvp players predict what other class - race can do to them and when. For heal could be real problem if he gets arcane torment from draenei... This is one example of game breaking. All this ppl that cry about it are same one that u see in bg with no gear at all crying how their faction always lose...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by miloshj

Ok if u dont care about sentimental reasons ill give u one practical why this is bad. For example what will u think if tauren shadomelds in front of u? Maybe he left game,go further,and than when u go away he take ur flag. Thats an example how this is game breaking. True pvp players predict what other class - race can do to them and when. For heal could be real problem if he gets arcane torment from draenei... This is one example of game breaking. All this ppl that cry about it are same one that u see in bg with no gear at all crying how their faction always lose...

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What would you do if you were on a progressive server and the next patch had cows shadowmelding? Would you freak out and complain it's "game breaking" or would you adapt and learn to deal with that change?

These are BG's though- so faction and playerbase balance are more important; individual encounters become irrelevant when the raid composition is screwed. Besides, I don't know how minor abilities such as false racials can be gamebreaking in a BG - while other morph items are allowed too.

People will always complain about something, a change was needed though: Horde/Alliance numbers on the server are actually pretty balanced, the activity in pvp however was heavily alliance leaning...

Naturally people would start changing faction, due to the high number of humans with 2 BiS trinkets however the incentive just isn't there even with free transfers.
Then, here is the begin of a new solution.
I transfered my ally toon to horde before the mercenary poll came up so I can't talk for the current ally experience right now but so far the change has brought inconsistency.
The qeue time on horde hasn't changed, but you will qeue into a couple of "filler BG's" and just spawn into a graveyard and get farmed, then you'll get into a BG that's 50/50 winable or one where you just steamroll the win.

Before that the struggle was more consistent - The loss rate is higher now, but the losses are a lot faster.

Over all I'd say it's an improvement to the server - just not a finished one.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Obnoxious

What would you do if you were on a progressive server and the next patch had cows shadowmelding? Would you freak out and complain it's "game breaking" or would you adapt and learn to deal with that change?

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Are jou joking xD? You think people came here to "progress" into imagination land? To progress into some imagenary patches ? People came here for authentic wotlk expieriance and that alone! Dont try to make some ridiculous excuse for your terrible design idea. People want wotlk, not some fun server crap.

On a side note, to this day Blizzard as ******ed as they are did not make "Cows shadowneld", "Draenai arcane torrent".
When someone gives you an amaizing feedback that combines reason and emotion, DONT try to put them down with some ridiculous hypothetical fandom answer.