WotLK State of PvP

[Megan77]

I identify 100% with you; Warmane needs to do something. If we keep expressing our dissatisfaction, it's just no longer fun to do PvP.

[Ethernasppke]

I feel like we started to missing the point here. FAP is a thing indeed but the battlegroup has way bigger problems which shouts for custom changes.

Btw lets limit it on 10-15m cd in battlegrounds maybe? That would make the cost whatever.

Bg brackets, faction inbalance, protected GY at IOC and AV for example and starter rele at blackrock needs consideration.

---->If its an AT server and you dont want to nerf full rele starter then why they are in the competitive part? Let them have their own competition. Dont force people to play against them in arenas (2s), making Lordaeron and Icecrown players to hate the PvP gearing process. The duty would be to make people want to do PvP more at those servers. Clearly they have way easier start and overallw ay higher skill ceilings which discourage PVE players and casuals to join arenas.

If PVE players and casuals are encouraged to come back and play PvP it would make money for the server also, buying wf heads and shoulders at least and it would heal and boost healthier population (then the usually toxic Blackrock players) at the PvP scene. -> Bgs, 3s and Soloq are another think because of the balancing in bgs, we should let Blackrock stay in, 3s is kinda not played or only the top 5% playing it so we need to boost population, SoloQ is whatever the more the better lets have Blackrock easy cap with soloQ.

You need to give Blackrock full furious starter with even bigger AP rates like 3x or completely cut them out from competitive 2s which is the easiest to play and the most played bracket in arena. --->Sorry Blackrock players I dont want to offend you at all, but thats my opinion.

The community and the long term players majority are at those servers (Lorda, Icecrown - Currently around 8k together, Blackrock: 375). We are the ones helping the server to breath on with our alts and donations not the Blackrock players creating a dk called "Asfagqwasfasf" facerolling your full furious alt down in full relentless. Protecting them with decisions vs a huge majority is somewhat questionable.

Mboxers are ruining Wintergrasps in Icecrown which was the only place to have fun lately. (Blocking 4 other people to join in aint fair)

You can disagree or agree with me. However back then PvP was way better, more wpvp, more pvp guilds, more teams in arenas. PvP need to be fixed. Glad to see we not ignored this time.

[Alcon434]

I agree with almost everything mentioned here. As a player who started four years ago and has participated in over 5,000 battlegrounds, I’ve noticed a significant difference in the level of enjoyment I experience now compared to when I first began. However, the battlegrounds on Icecrown have never matched the enjoyment I found on Frostmourne. On Frostmourne, everyone had similar gear, teams were balanced, and each fight was intense, requiring my best effort throughout the entire match.

The primary issue with battlegrounds on Icecrown is the "farm or be farmed" mentality. If I’m not in a premade group, the opposing team likely is, and I’m often paired with random newcomers to PvP. I find farming other players as frustrating as being farmed myself. It’s disheartening and makes me want to close the game immediately. Considering the time and effort I’ve dedicated to playing over 5,000 battlegrounds in less than four years, if I’m feeling this way, I can only imagine how discouraging it must be for someone trying battlegrounds for the first time. They likely won't want to participate again.

Another issue with the current pairing system is the frequent occurrence of two five-man premades being placed on the same team, even when one team is Horde and the other Alliance using the mercenary feature.

To address these issues, I suggest separating premades from casual players entirely. Premade groups should never face off against random teams. While this might result in longer queue times, it would enhance the overall experience, potentially attracting more players to PvP and eventually resolving the queue issue. Additionally, it's important to ensure that the number of healers, melee, and ranged DPS in each team is balanced and that the overall gearscore of both teams is comparable. Most importantly, give premades a reason to compete against other premades, encouraging them to seek out more challenging matches rather than farming inexperienced players. If battlegrounds offered better rewards, more players might be motivated to participate (though the primary focus should be on making the experience enjoyable first).

Regarding the issue with PvE players: Ranged DPS and healers are currently much stronger in battlegrounds when using PvE gear. This forces melee players to act as mere meatshields with over 1,500 resilience, just to survive the burst damage from PvE-geared arcane mages who can deal 40k damage in a single spell against a melee with 1.2k resilience.

The solution, as many have suggested, is to make resilience more effective. There may be other solutions, but none come to mind at the moment.

Lastly, the mercenary mode issue: Mercenary mode should be mandatory for all players, regardless of faction. Restricting it to Blackrock has significantly disrupted gameplay. Most battleground players are on Alliance Icecrown, where mercenary mode is optional. Even when these players queue solo without a premade, they often end up on the same team, giving the appearance of a premade group, which leads to unbalanced matches and graveyard farming.

[Obnoxious]

I feel like we started to missing the point here.

No, the point isn't being missed, things are just discussed over time. Two things that have been mentioned now and in the past were addressed, one of them even being something we have declined from changing many times. Maybe more will come, it will depend on internal discussions.

I'll disagree on a couple things being posted myself, though.

"Encouraging" PvErs to do PvP is awful. The only way to do that is by having desirable exclusive rewards in PvP, forcing unwilling people to take part only for the sake of those rewards, then ditching the millisecond they are done. I'm strictly a PvEr and loathe PvP, and that's how people like me feel. If we wanted to do PvP we would be doing PvP, there's no "encouraging" us to do something we have no interest in, period. Holding rewards hostage behind something we don't want to do won't increase PvP activity, it will just add disgruntled players who will do the bare minimum and put no effort into it, being as close to AFK'g the whole thing as possible.

Balancing the amount of roles and gear on each side is bull**** for me as well. Let's not forget this is still meant to be a random Battleground. Part of it is the roll of the dice of who you will be grouped with and who will be against you. It's not meant to be balanced, nor was it ever so. Got one healer while the other side got four? Tough luck, roll with it, better luck next time. Even aside that, trying to filter and swap groups around like that would definitely increase queue times.

[Snoosnoo]

A fix for an exploit some people were using to get gear they weren't supposed to in a certain bracket (like having Shadowmourne on the lowest bracket), as well as a change to the cost of Free Action Potions on Blackrock to 5000 honor each, are live.

I'll go over the new posts a bit later.

In my opinion the repricing of free action potions on blackrock was a good idea, but it seems you went from one extreme to the other (both 100 honor and 5000 honor seem to be values that were picked without much thought behind it).
Pricing a free action potion at 5000 honor would be a reduction in ‘FAP/LAP buying power’ of a blackrock player by a factor of 50 (A blackrock player could have bought 50 faps before the nerf for the price of 1 fap now). A more balanced ratio would be 10, which equates 1 fap to the use of 1 sapper charge (1000 honor).

I’m using sapper charges specifically because I’ve heard players complain about how they are too expensive and therefore need to be attentive to when to use it and when to save them up. Which ideally would be the same for FAPs and LAPs.

If a fap costs 1k honor we can say there is a fap replacement ratio of 1, given the average bg gets like 1k honor per BG, since you have to take into account the people who queue specific bgs, and overall bad bgs that net you 800 honor after draining your soul irl. This ratio just means that you can use 1 fap in the bg and then replace that 1 fap with the honor you’ve gotten from that same BG. In other words, it’s an economical way of putting fap on a 20 min/1 BG cooldown.

The bigger issue however is that this solution just nerfs blackrock players when there is at least the same amount of people who abuse FAPs/LAPs (popping them whenever it is off cd) on Icecrown. So how is it then fair that these players (who tend to also premade) are still allowed to pop them like Tictacs, while blackrock people aren’t? Because you must consider that these same icecrown players are mostly on the alliance side and these blackrock players are mostly forced on the horde side. This means you have handicapped the presumably (already) losing side even more.

Therefore, it’s just logical to nerf the item itself as opposed to the way it is obtained. Either everyone gets nerfed, or nobody does (after a more balanced price adjustment).

Personally, I’d love to see faps removed altogether but I play a lot of rogue and mage so I’m biased.

Secondly, Warmane's setup to incentivize people to play to win bgs after obtaining BiS gear is... Just not there? The easiest solution to this is simply creating something right?

For example: let bg wins generate a win token which makes the person eligible to gain certain rewards for different amounts of tokens, for example 30 bg wins aka 30 tokens makes the person eligible to buy a transmog scroll as a way of bad luck protection, moreover 200-500 tokens make them eligible to get a legendary transmog scroll (yes it has to be a lot, it’s a donation item after all).

I'm using consumable rewards here simply to keep the incentive going indefinitely, you could add transmog items, mounts or titles w/e you think might work.

This is just a random idea to promote a 'We need to win battlegrounds' mentality, I’m not saying this is the best/only way.

Thirdly, we need to fix the disconnect reconnect to avoid dying exploit. However satisfying it might be to bully a person into doing this is, it starts ruining the flow of the game when new people catch on to it. I’m not joking, the population of people doing this has been steadily growing, to a point it might become a problem later on.

For those who don’t know: This is when a (presumably mentally ill) person plays a bg and when they are about to die they alt+f4 or login on another client with the same account. This causes them to vanish from the bg, and spawn at their respective faction base when they log back in, and thus avoiding death in a bg. These people do this over and over throughout the bg, until it finishes. Yes, I’m not joking, me and a friend even have a clip where we force the same person in an AB to do this multiple times as we slowly make our way to their base, where he finally decides to just leave the bg to avoid dying when he had nowhere to run.

Warmane has tried fixing this issue by flipflopping between kicking them from the BG and giving them a deserter penalty, this however also punished people who genuinely DC/crash during a BG. And letting people log back in to the same bg while safeguarding their character, this however opens the possibility for it to be exploited.

The solution is extremely simple, but somehow eluded Warmane devs to this day because they have no clue about the exploiter’s incentive: Just keep it as it is but have them die when they reconnect (even +1 death on the scoreboard is fine). These people will now either take the death or default back to leaving the battleground and eat the 15m deserter.

[Obnoxious]

So how is it then fair that these players (who tend to also premade) are still allowed to pop them like Tictacs, while blackrock people aren’t?

One is acquired the legitimate way, requiring gold, professions, ingredients that aren't common and compete in use on other potions, based on a supply that can be reduced and prices that can fluctuate; the other is essentially free by just doing some PvP in a server that gives you a fully leveled and geared character right out of the gate to do that PvP. It's only unfair if you pretend context doesn't exist.

[Snoosnoo]

One is acquired the legitimate way, requiring gold, professions, ingredients that aren't common and compete in use on other potions, based on a supply that can be reduced and prices that can fluctuate; the other is essentially free by just doing some PvP in a server that gives you a fully leveled and geared character right out of the gate to do that PvP. It's only unfair if you pretend context doesn't exist.

Well yes and no, I can't argue with you about how the materials for the faps were obtained. But the gold made to acquire them from the people who make them most of the time comes from their alchemy accounts where they have X lvl 68 characters that generate X amount of ruby crystals and C.O.D. them to their favorite gem buyer, while it is still a bit of a hassle (if not automated) it doesn't really paint a picture of the hard-working fisherman who works days to be able to blow a stack of faps in a BG.

I've been around the forums I know you have little love for blackrock, and you do have a technically correct point, but all I'm trying say is that at the end it needs to be balanced and that's about it. If you view it as a blackbox it would need to be same for blackrock or icecrown, honestly I'm fine with it if faps were removed from the vendor and instead generated by fishing and herbs. I will not using them anyway, but at least people can chug em evenly.

[Obnoxious]

If it's that much better on Icecrown or Lordaeron, I'd invite Blackrock players to create, level, gear, skill, profession, and fund a "quick" new character there and get all the Free Actions they want. Something tells me none will, which just proves the point that getting some potion easier doesn't beat all the immense advantages they have over normal characters. People still can "chug them evenly," the change just makes it so Blackrock characters have to gather and hoard them over time if they want to drink them on-cooldown.

[Baartleby2]

In my opinion the repricing of free action potions on blackrock was a good idea, but it seems you went from one extreme to the other (both 100 honor and 5000 honor seem to be values that were picked without much thought behind it).
Pricing a free action potion at 5000 honor would be a reduction in ‘FAP/LAP buying power’ of a blackrock player by a factor of 50 (A blackrock player could have bought 50 faps before the nerf for the price of 1 fap now). A more balanced ratio would be 10, which equates 1 fap to the use of 1 sapper charge (1000 honor).

I’m using sapper charges specifically because I’ve heard players complain about how they are too expensive and therefore need to be attentive to when to use it and when to save them up. Which ideally would be the same for FAPs and LAPs.

If a fap costs 1k honor we can say there is a fap replacement ratio of 1, given the average bg gets like 1k honor per BG, since you have to take into account the people who queue specific bgs, and overall bad bgs that net you 800 honor after draining your soul irl. This ratio just means that you can use 1 fap in the bg and then replace that 1 fap with the honor you’ve gotten from that same BG. In other words, it’s an economical way of putting fap on a 20 min/1 BG cooldown.

The bigger issue however is that this solution just nerfs blackrock players when there is at least the same amount of people who abuse FAPs/LAPs (popping them whenever it is off cd) on Icecrown. So how is it then fair that these players (who tend to also premade) are still allowed to pop them like Tictacs, while blackrock people aren’t? Because you must consider that these same icecrown players are mostly on the alliance side and these blackrock players are mostly forced on the horde side. This means you have handicapped the presumably (already) losing side even more.

Therefore, it’s just logical to nerf the item itself as opposed to the way it is obtained. Either everyone gets nerfed, or nobody does (after a more balanced price adjustment).

Personally, I’d love to see faps removed altogether but I play a lot of rogue and mage so I’m biased.

Secondly, Warmane's setup to incentivize people to play to win bgs after obtaining BiS gear is... Just not there? The easiest solution to this is simply creating something right?

For example: let bg wins generate a win token which makes the person eligible to gain certain rewards for different amounts of tokens, for example 30 bg wins aka 30 tokens makes the person eligible to buy a transmog scroll as a way of bad luck protection, moreover 200-500 tokens make them eligible to get a legendary transmog scroll (yes it has to be a lot, it’s a donation item after all).

I'm using consumable rewards here simply to keep the incentive going indefinitely, you could add transmog items, mounts or titles w/e you think might work.

This is just a random idea to promote a 'We need to win battlegrounds' mentality, I’m not saying this is the best/only way.

Thirdly, we need to fix the disconnect reconnect to avoid dying exploit. However satisfying it might be to bully a person into doing this is, it starts ruining the flow of the game when new people catch on to it. I’m not joking, the population of people doing this has been steadily growing, to a point it might become a problem later on.

For those who don’t know: This is when a (presumably mentally ill) person plays a bg and when they are about to die they alt+f4 or login on another client with the same account. This causes them to vanish from the bg, and spawn at their respective faction base when they log back in, and thus avoiding death in a bg. These people do this over and over throughout the bg, until it finishes. Yes, I’m not joking, me and a friend even have a clip where we force the same person in an AB to do this multiple times as we slowly make our way to their base, where he finally decides to just leave the bg to avoid dying when he had nowhere to run.

Warmane has tried fixing this issue by flipflopping between kicking them from the BG and giving them a deserter penalty, this however also punished people who genuinely DC/crash during a BG. And letting people log back in to the same bg while safeguarding their character, this however opens the possibility for it to be exploited.

The solution is extremely simple, but somehow eluded Warmane devs to this day because they have no clue about the exploiter’s incentive: Just keep it as it is but have them die when they reconnect (even +1 death on the scoreboard is fine). These people will now either take the death or default back to leaving the battleground and eat the 15m deserter.

The price for a fap is now roughly twice what it is on Icecrown. It used to be over 10 times cheaper, so I think Blackrock players just have to suck it up. This is what the other servers had to deal with for years. Before it was even cheaper, at 100 honor. You still get other consumables at a very low prices, so I don't think you have a lot to complain about.

A FAP was basically just a "I win" button for Blackrock players, and it was abused constantly. It's a game breaking pot for a lot of classes, and now we'll finally have some parity.

This is one of the best changes Warmane has made concerning BGs imo, and it does not impact the PvE aspect of the game at all.

[Ethernasppke]

No, the point isn't being missed, things are just discussed over time. Two things that have been mentioned now and in the past were addressed, one of them even being something we have declined from changing many times. Maybe more will come, it will depend on internal discussions.

I'll disagree on a couple things being posted myself, though.

"Encouraging" PvErs to do PvP is awful. The only way to do that is by having desirable exclusive rewards in PvP, forcing unwilling people to take part only for the sake of those rewards, then ditching the millisecond they are done. I'm strictly a PvEr and loathe PvP, and that's how people like me feel. If we wanted to do PvP we would be doing PvP, there's no "encouraging" us to do something we have no interest in, period. Holding rewards hostage behind something we don't want to do won't increase PvP activity, it will just add disgruntled players who will do the bare minimum and put no effort into it, being as close to AFK'g the whole thing as possible.

Balancing the amount of roles and gear on each side is bull**** for me as well. Let's not forget this is still meant to be a random Battleground. Part of it is the roll of the dice of who you will be grouped with and who will be against you. It's not meant to be balanced, nor was it ever so. Got one healer while the other side got four? Tough luck, roll with it, better luck next time. Even aside that, trying to filter and swap groups around like that would definitely increase queue times.

I dont think the majority of hardore PVE-rs would join tbh, i didnt mean that. I think because the population is huge there are a lot of people out there who would play PvP at least casually if the existing and repaireable problems would be solved.

[Snoosnoo]

Before I got off track, I wanted to write about a way to greatly improve bgs at least in the higher tier bracket. Which could easily be done in the following way. Well, I say easily, but it would take about a two days’ work to make.

We’d overhaul the random battleground in the following way:

First, we enable forced merc mode (both sides) to ensure balanced gameplay when combined with the second part. One difference would be to keep the original character model, personally I’ve never heard people complain about playing for the other faction, outside of the forums (and let’s face it those are pve players who do a bg once a month). But every time I ask if merc mode is fine at least someone must complain about how their character model will be so ugly as horde, to a point where they keep several stacks of that fish to transform them.

Secondly, we enforce a maximum premade size of 3 people (anything larger would **** it up again) for a simple reason: large premades are now forced to break up into groups and be scattered by the merc mode system. Where there once were big premades with a lot of frontline, ranged dps and healers just steamrolling bgs and purposefully not doing objectives to prolong the farming. We now have them facing eachother creating more balanced teams for every soloqueue player. This will also create a more competitive environment while also generating fun situations.

It will also remove the HK-farming mentality from AV/IoC because these same HK farmers are scattered among the teams. Which means we’ll have fun AVs/IoCs for once, with actual nice fights instead of camping a graveyard. Sure HK-farmers can leave and try again on another character but nothing is perfect.

People in specific queue can easily be integrated into the system as before, while people who want to queue 15m premades can finally live up to the lie they tell themselves over and over: “we are trying to face other big premades”. Since they are kept in the other matchmaking system, pairing them up nicely for Guilds vs Guilds.

Yes there are some technicalities to work out but it's a good starting point to enable a balanced PvP mode for BGs without tapping into a rated system and mixing queue times, here queue times are just related to the premade size and if you want a specific bg. If you want it to be faster you can just add a stochastic component so sometimes the premades are all on one side, but that's statistically less likely

[Snoosnoo]

If it's that much better on Icecrown or Lordaeron, I'd invite Blackrock players to create, level, gear, skill, profession, and fund a "quick" new character there and get all the Free Actions they want. Something tells me none will, which just proves the point that getting some potion easier doesn't beat all the immense advantages they have over normal characters. People still can "chug them evenly," the change just makes it so Blackrock characters have to gather and hoard them over time if they want to drink them on-cooldown.

My point was just that the math points out that 5000 is overkill and that if you'd take the limit over a large number of bgs blackrock veterans will be at a strong disadvantage (but yes first it'll balance out), but people who start fresh now will be extremely disadvantaged when facing the equally relevent icecrown player equivalent. When you price something you take logic into account and nothing more imo.

The price for a fap is now roughly twice what it is on Icecrown. It used to be over 10 times cheaper, so I think Blackrock players just have to suck it up. This is what the other servers had to deal with for years. Before it was even cheaper, at 100 honor. You still get other consumables at a very low prices, so I don't think you have a lot to complain about.

A FAP was basically just a "I win" button for Blackrock players, and it was abused constantly. It's a game breaking pot for a lot of classes, and now we'll finally have some parity.

This is one of the best changes Warmane has made concerning BGs imo, and it does not impact the PvE aspect of the game at all.

All due respect, I've been playing both servers for an embarrassingly long time I felt the pain of blackrock fap abusers as much as you have if not more.
I have zero respect for those skillless fap abusers that you see in bgs, my issue however, is that a lot of the people complaining over here seem to have a limited view on the problem. I do not let my vindictive emotions against them ruin our game balance.

If you read my post it's all about creating a balanced system and nothing more, my end goal is just to make the nerf more global.
(-> **** free action potions in general <-)

Or just move every blackrock character with more than two weeks play time into icecrown and call it a day.

[Obnoxious]

My point was just that the math points out that 5000 is overkill and that if you'd take the limit over a large number of bgs blackrock veterans will be at a strong disadvantage (but yes first it'll balance out), but people who start fresh now will be extremely disadvantaged when facing the equally relevent icecrown player equivalent. When you price something you take logic into account and nothing more imo.

Logic isn't ignoring context. Quite the opposite, in fact.

To go even further, if we were to take "nothing more" into account, how it works in Icecrown or Lordaeron should be ignored as well, so you aren't even following what you're preaching. You want to use a microscopic slice of a much larger context to try to cry unfairness and that's not going to cut it.

[Snoosnoo]

Logic isn't ignoring context. Quite the opposite, in fact.

To go even further, if we were to take "nothing more" into account, how it works in Icecrown or Lordaeron should be ignored as well, so you aren't even following what you're preaching. You want to use a microscopic slice of a much larger context to try to cry unfairness and that's not going to cut it.

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.

[Brutone]

Balancing the amount of roles and gear on each side is bull**** for me as well. Let's not forget this is still meant to be a random Battleground. Part of it is the roll of the dice of who you will be grouped with and who will be against you. It's not meant to be balanced, nor was it ever so.

But weren't the gear brackets implemented to make BGs more balanced?
Maybe balancing the roles on each side is a bit over the top but I think the gear gap between 5,5k GS and 6,8k GS players is too big to place them together in a BG bracket.
With forced merc mode on all realms it would be possible to place all +6k GS players together in a BG while still maintaining short queue times.