WotLK Petition to remove Alterac Valley (and maybe Isle of Conquest)

[AllMyNamesTaken]

I mean, really, I genuinely can't see any upside to AV being part of the bg pool in it's current state.

If you're winning it's very boring.
If you're losing it's incredibly frustrating and very boring.
It's worse Honor/min than smaller bgs no matter whether you're winning or losing because it takes forever.

I genuinely can't recall having played an enjoyable AV for a long time now.

Can anyone bring forth some arguments that justify it being part of the pool for random bgs except for "because it always was"?
I would really like to understand why it's still part of the roster and I would like to know whether anyone with the power to make this decision has been regularly playing battlegrounds within the last year.

And as to Isle: It's in my opinion also an unfun battleground that takes way too long, but I can see how it's something different and not nearly as terrible as AV since the META is not to abuse a mechanic that was never intended to work the way it does to trap and farm the enemy players in a purposefully uncapped graveyard for the rest of the BG because that optimizes the sub-par honor gain.

Edit: Since I originally did a bad job of pointing out exactly WHY I think AV on specifically this server is a problem that I think needs to be dealt with, here is a later post I made expanding on that for context:

I understand that Alterac Valley might not be enjoyable for you, but asking for it to be removed entirely from the battleground pool just because you find it boring is not a reasonable solution. Everyone has different preferences. Some people dislike Arathi Basin, others don't enjoy Eye of the Storm, and there are even people who avoid Warsong Gulch. If we started removing content every time someone found it boring, we would quickly run out of battlegrounds altogether.

Alterac Valley serves a different purpose in the game. It's designed for large-scale strategy and longer engagements. It is not supposed to feel like the smaller, fast-paced battlegrounds. Yes, sometimes it drags on or the outcome feels frustrating, especially if people are exploiting mechanics or not playing objectives, but that comes down to how players are approaching it, not the map itself.

The truth is, nobody is forcing anyone to queue for random battlegrounds. If a certain map annoys you that much, you can always queue specifically for the ones you enjoy. Or take a break from PvP for a while. The solution is not to ask developers to delete something that other players still enjoy.

You are free to express your opinion, of course. But personal frustration should not be the standard by which we decide what stays in the game. What you consider boring might be exactly what another player looks forward to. The game needs variety, and that means not everything will always be tailored to your preferences.

You're making a great point there, pointing out that the battleground is designed to appeal to a different kind of fun than the smaller battlegrounds.

I want to emphasize, that I agree with what AV is designed to be and that I encourage it to be that.
What I failed to emphasize in my original post is how far from it's intended design the battleground is being played in this community.
It is for example completely standard for 20-30 people of the winning faction to camp a graveyard with respawning enemies while NOT capping the graveyard (and shouting abuse at people who do what the designers intended, i.e. capping the graveyard for their faction), so it stays in enemy control and will be the closest respawn for the aoe farmed enemies.

I have strong doubt, that it is an intended mechanic to gather up 30 people in order to AoE farm 10-20 unbuffed enemy players in a deathtrap funnel for 10-15 minutes.
I find this to be very unfun and I strongly encourage anyone making a genuine argument that AV should stay in the game in it's current form to go play 4-5 AVs and report on their experience.
It is a very common occurance in AVs to see people on the losing side advocate for everyone to just "die faster", because the winning side has no intention of finishing the game the intended way (i.e. capping towers and killing the boss), but will instead focus purely on achieving a graveyard lock and depleting the enemy teams respawns by AoE farming fresh respawns.
It's a miserable experience when on the losing team, and when on the winning team you sometimes can't even convince enough people to come kill the boss with you and capping towers is seen as "a waste of 100 respawns that could have been free kills". I'm not kidding, someone told me how stupid I was for capping an enemy tower.

I want to say that I think almost everyone has brought up some good points about AVs design intentions, which I wholeheartedly support.
I used to like playing AV on retail, the problem is really just the increadibly toxic META that has evolved on this server.

Also, not queing for random BG has great downsides of very notably longer ques and drastically diminished honor rewards, since often times the entire available player pool will be stuck in / funneled into an ongoing AV and you have to wait for it to finish, since you can only queue for 2 of the 6 battlegrounds.

To pick up the very deeply thought out analogy of Shred:
I am rolling a dice and every time the dice hits 5, the dice explodes.
I am however also aware, that fixing what makes it explode is difficult and time intensive.
I am thus proposing to remove the number 5 to avoid explosions until it has been fixed.

[fadeway]

I don't do BGs. I like world PvP, I just am not geared for BG/Arena. I queued a couple BGs last week to farm a battlemaster trinket and enjoyed AV the most. Why? It's a big messy melee so I can join the swarm, do a couple stuns/intervenes/spell reflects and feel like I'm contributing.

By the same token, WSG was the worst and I even abandoned it once. In a small 10v10 you can't really blend into the crowd as a PvE-geared 4k GS player who can be soloed by anyone.

[Shred]

They are part of the roster of random battlegrounds because they are battlegrounds. It's like asking why getting 5 is a possibility when you roll a dice.

[AllMyNamesTaken]

They are part of the roster of random battlegrounds because they are battlegrounds. It's like asking why getting 5 is a possibility when you roll a dice.

"Mr. Politician, I think eggs are too expensive, we can't afford these prices."
"You have to pay these prices because it's what it says on the sticker, don't you understand how price stickers work?"

[fdbsfhe4rfar]

Battlegrounds, or frontiers, needs new thinking. forget about the quick win, 5min battleground bug squashing battle. alterac and isle of conquest could easily become very great, if we do the following :
-no timer.
-unlimited players can join (or at least we need more than a few hundreds)
-more vehiculs
-no more cappin cemeteries or bases obviously. just raw damage and killing spree
that's it. infact all battleground should be ready to join at all time on instant (no queue) and never ever yield victory points. instead grind a never ending battle with random for hours and hours. tha't the only way to make battleground great again...

[Ezrage]

I understand that Alterac Valley might not be enjoyable for you, but asking for it to be removed entirely from the battleground pool just because you find it boring is not a reasonable solution. Everyone has different preferences. Some people dislike Arathi Basin, others don't enjoy Eye of the Storm, and there are even people who avoid Warsong Gulch. If we started removing content every time someone found it boring, we would quickly run out of battlegrounds altogether.

Alterac Valley serves a different purpose in the game. It's designed for large-scale strategy and longer engagements. It is not supposed to feel like the smaller, fast-paced battlegrounds. Yes, sometimes it drags on or the outcome feels frustrating, especially if people are exploiting mechanics or not playing objectives, but that comes down to how players are approaching it, not the map itself.

The truth is, nobody is forcing anyone to queue for random battlegrounds. If a certain map annoys you that much, you can always queue specifically for the ones you enjoy. Or take a break from PvP for a while. The solution is not to ask developers to delete something that other players still enjoy.

You are free to express your opinion, of course. But personal frustration should not be the standard by which we decide what stays in the game. What you consider boring might be exactly what another player looks forward to. The game needs variety, and that means not everything will always be tailored to your preferences.

[AllMyNamesTaken]

I understand that Alterac Valley might not be enjoyable for you, but asking for it to be removed entirely from the battleground pool just because you find it boring is not a reasonable solution. Everyone has different preferences. Some people dislike Arathi Basin, others don't enjoy Eye of the Storm, and there are even people who avoid Warsong Gulch. If we started removing content every time someone found it boring, we would quickly run out of battlegrounds altogether.

Alterac Valley serves a different purpose in the game. It's designed for large-scale strategy and longer engagements. It is not supposed to feel like the smaller, fast-paced battlegrounds. Yes, sometimes it drags on or the outcome feels frustrating, especially if people are exploiting mechanics or not playing objectives, but that comes down to how players are approaching it, not the map itself.

The truth is, nobody is forcing anyone to queue for random battlegrounds. If a certain map annoys you that much, you can always queue specifically for the ones you enjoy. Or take a break from PvP for a while. The solution is not to ask developers to delete something that other players still enjoy.

You are free to express your opinion, of course. But personal frustration should not be the standard by which we decide what stays in the game. What you consider boring might be exactly what another player looks forward to. The game needs variety, and that means not everything will always be tailored to your preferences.

You're making a great point there, pointing out that the battleground is designed to appeal to a different kind of fun than the smaller battlegrounds.

I want to emphasize, that I agree with what AV is designed to be and that I encourage it to be that.
What I failed to emphasize in my original post is how far from it's intended design the battleground is being played in this community.
It is for example completely standard for 20-30 people of the winning faction to camp a graveyard with respawning enemies while NOT capping the graveyard (and shouting abuse at people who do what the designers intended, i.e. capping the graveyard for their faction), so it stays in enemy control and will be the closest respawn for the aoe farmed enemies.

I have strong doubt, that it is an intended mechanic to gather up 30 people in order to AoE farm 10-20 unbuffed enemy players in a deathtrap funnel for 10-15 minutes.
I find this to be very unfun and I strongly encourage anyone making a genuine argument that AV should stay in the game in it's current form to go play 4-5 AVs and report on their experience.
It is a very common occurance in AVs to see people on the losing side advocate for everyone to just "die faster", because the winning side has no intention of finishing the game the intended way (i.e. capping towers and killing the boss), but will instead focus purely on achieving a graveyard lock and depleting the enemy teams respawns by AoE farming fresh respawns.
It's a miserable experience when on the losing team, and when on the winning team you sometimes can't even convince enough people to come kill the boss with you and capping towers is seen as "a waste of 100 respawns that could have been free kills". I'm not kidding, someone told me how stupid I was for capping an enemy tower.

I want to say that I think almost everyone has brought up some good points about AVs design intentions, which I wholeheartedly support.
I used to like playing AV on retail, the problem is really just the increadibly toxic META that has evolved on this server.

Also, not queing for random BG has great downsides of very notably longer ques and drastically diminished honor rewards, since often times the entire available player pool will be stuck in / funneled into an ongoing AV and you have to wait for it to finish, since you can only queue for 2 of the 6 battlegrounds.

To pick up the very deeply thought out analogy of Shred:
I am rolling a dice and every time the dice hits 5, the dice explodes.
I am however also aware, that fixing what makes it explode is difficult and time intensive.
I am thus proposing to remove the number 5 to avoid explosions until it has been fixed.

[Obnoxious]

No, that's not even a shallowly thought out analogy for what Shred said, and the previous one would get descriptors you definitely wouldn't like reading.

You are choosing to play something random, because of better rewards, that has a chance to end in something you dislike. You have multiple options, from deciding which is worse between lesser rewards and the chance of something you dislike, going through leaving and taking the associated Deserter debuff, to just sucking it up and dealing with doing what you dislike (bonus of being a great lesson for life). Getting us to remove it isn't one, though.

Feel free to discuss it further on a theoretical level, as long as it remains civil and respectful, but aware your "petition" won't go through. It simply isn't something we do.

[Shred]

I am rolling a dice and every time the dice hits 5, the dice explodes.
I am however also aware, that fixing what makes it explode is difficult and time intensive.
I am thus proposing to remove the number 5 to avoid explosions until it has been fixed.

It's more like you are playing a dice game, and you know if you roll the die and get a 5, you get in a very tough spot. Using a loaded die that makes it impossible for you to get a 5 wouldn't be fair.

[AllMyNamesTaken]

You are choosing to play something random, because of better rewards, that has a chance to end in something you dislike. You have multiple options, from deciding which is worse between lesser rewards and the chance of something you dislike, going through leaving and taking the associated Deserter debuff, to just sucking it up and dealing with doing what you dislike (bonus of being a great lesson for life). Getting us to remove it isn't one, though.

It's at least good to see that you agree with me on the point that there is no good option in the current system, especially considering that queing anything but random battleground will regularly end up in very long que times.

Feel free to discuss it further on a theoretical level, as long as it remains civil and respectful, but aware your "petition" won't go through. It simply isn't something we do.

Could you give me an example of things that you would do if a part of your game turned out to be in a state in which players are exploiting the mechanics to grief other players?

I would also like to point out that your argument is only looking at me as a singular individual, whereas this is a systemic problem.
Sure, I can leave the battleground and do something else. Good luck to the poor sucker who qued for battlegrounds 3 seconds later and got stuck in this one now.

I would personally be much happier with AV getting fixed and staying in the battleground pool, since it is a fun battleground when played the way it is intended and like two other players have pointed out, definitely has an existing target audience.

An optimal solution would be to have graveyards automatically swap ownership depending on the dominant faction in the region, but that would be very difficult to implement.

Another good solution would be to add a permanent locally bound invulnurability to players respawning on graveyards as we see it in wintergrasp. That would definitely get rid of the griefing behaviour, since it would disallow players from getting farmed literally on spawn and would heavily dissuade the griefing parties from doing so.

Edit: I just realized that it is actually intended for players to have a safe and invulnurable graveyard to respawn in, namely the battleground spawn with super overpowered guards. As I have said previously, it comes down to the unintended behaviour of the winning side not capping the graveyard they won, but instead abusing the game mechanic of leaving it in enemy hands and farming the respawn.

It's more like you are playing a dice game, and you know if you roll the die and get a 5, you get in a very tough spot. Using a loaded die that makes it impossible for you to get a 5 wouldn't be fair.

Also Shred, fair to whom?
I am not asking for a custom mod so only I can que for random battlegrounds without AV.
Everyone has to roll the same dice and when it lands on a 5 everyone except for people who like inflicting misery on others and happen to be on the right side of the 50/50 team pick get shafted.
I'm seeing this from the product designers side and if this was my dice, I'd not want it to get into customers hands in this state.

If you want to play for rewards, the optimal way is to make the game miserable for other players by griefing them: Not good.
If you want to play for fun, there's a good chance it will only be fun if you define fun as either griefing other players or alt-tabbing while getting griefed for 15 minutes. Also pretty not good.

[Obnoxious]

It's at least good to see that you agree with me on the point that there is no good option in the current system, especially considering that queing anything but random battleground will regularly end up in very long que times.

Don't try to twist my words, it won't do you any favors.

Could you give me an example of things that you would do if a part of your game turned out to be in a state in which players are exploiting the mechanics to grief other players?

No such thing is happening, there's no point in wasting time on that sort of hypotheticals.

[Shred]

Also Shred, fair to whom?

Fair to the team that wins.

Everyone has to roll the same dice and when it lands on a 5 everyone except for people who like inflicting misery on others and happen to be on the right side of the 50/50 team pick get shafted.

I would say that farming a graveyard thus draining the reinforcements of the other team is a strategy as valid as any other.

If you want to play for rewards, the optimal way is to make the game miserable for other players by griefing them: Not good.

80 players sign up to a battleground. They are sorted in two teams of 40. If 40 of them are much stronger than the other 40, them farming the other team is not griefing. They signed up to join the battleground, which means that they understand it's possible for them to lose. Getting farmed in a graveyard is bad, but losing in any other battleground is not fun either. Try to remember how pointless it was the last time you lost. Was it eots? You had to walk around in circles avoiding the other team, afking in bases to cap them and hoping not to run into the meat grinder. And so on and so forth.

Also, it's 2025: most people don't play for rewards. Nobody needs honor points for anything, and if you need arena points, call to arms is enabled for most of the week; if it's not coa today and you must play a random and then it turns out it's AV and then it turns out you are on the losing side, that is some really bad luck (although not impossible).

If you want to play for fun, there's a good chance it will only be fun if you define fun as either griefing other players or alt-tabbing while getting griefed for 15 minutes. Also pretty not good.

If you want to play for fun you don't queue AV, since it ****ing sucks. Your only options are either you sit in a tower and afk (which is stupid and boring) or you farm or get farmed in a graveyard (which is stupid and boring).

[pigusula]

Queue only for Eye of the Storm and Arathi Basin if you play in the higher gear bracket. These two battlegrounds give you the best chance against premades. The day of the week and time of the day will dictate when to turn on Mercenary Mode (for this to work well, you need to be Alliance).

If you don't care about PVE content and just want to play for fun, play only from Blackrock using free gear. When you see your character gets bumped consistently to higher gear bracket, delete and recreate character. This seems to be the strategy many streamers employ to dodge premades.

Unless you are extremely good with your spec, playing as a healer will generally give you a higher winrate.

If all else fails and you still end up in a game that is getting farmed, try to force a loss (delay respawning in Warsong Gultch to encourage the opposing team to cap and end the game; feed or waste tickets in IoC/AV... etc). If you find yourself on the team of farmers who will not do objectives, you can grief them by capping graveyards repeatedly while encouraging others to do the same; doing so tend to sour their moods and breakup the premades sooner so you are less likely to face them again later.

[Shred]

waste tickets in IoC/AV

What do you mean by this?

[Palutena]

I don't do BGs. I like world PvP, I just am not geared for BG/Arena. I queued a couple BGs last week to farm a battlemaster trinket and enjoyed AV the most. Why? It's a big messy melee so I can join the swarm, do a couple stuns/intervenes/spell reflects and feel like I'm contributing.

By the same token, WSG was the worst and I even abandoned it once. In a small 10v10 you can't really blend into the crowd as a PvE-geared 4k GS player who can be soloed by anyone.

I think exactly like you! Lol.