The modern Alterac Valley is a terrible game, a terrible battleground, and a terrible part of WoW's honor system. Here's why:

1) Player interaction is entirely optional. The victory conditions for each side are defined entirely by capturing towers and graveyards and killing NPCs that are much less important to the defending team than they are to you. The final victory condition is himself an NPC.

2) There is little motivation to defend objectives because the system is nowhere near zero-sum. If you lose an objective (specifically your lieutenants, captain, or commanders) that the other team is motivated to kill, you don't lose honor in the process. Only with the four towers is this the case. In contrast, in an Arathi Basin match you are fighting for control of the same nodes and they have equal meaning to each side.

3) Because of this lack of player interaction and motivation to defend your own resources, games turn into races to kill NPCs for honor. This is the only place in which Blizzard has introduced the ability to kill NPCs for honor outside of the rare faction leader kill.

4) Due to this racing style, the strategic elements that could be used by a wise raid leader are ignored and the potential that AV holds for strategic and tactical battles remains undeveloped. Additionally, the tactical elements (such as the commando strike, wolf riders, Lokholar, etc.) that remain a part of the AV reputation system are used rarely, if ever, and don't hold the same tactical impact that they might if objectives were contested by opposing groups of players (instead of players slaughtering weak NPCs.)

5) The ideal AV would be fought between two well-organized raid groups with decent tactical communication and direction abilities (i.e. Vent and a plan, at a minimum.) However, queueing as group is not allowed because of past history with win-trading between factions on the same server in order to abuse the honor and reputation systems. Despite the fact that the huge pool of groups and combatants on a battlegroup could be used to eliminate this problem, the ability to queue as a raid group has not been restored. Again, massive potential remains untouched.

6) The honor input of the battleground into the honor system is way out of whack for the effort required. A winning Arathi Basin match nets 140 honor points. A losing match in Alterac Valley still usually nets approximately 200 honor, often for less time investment. Also, the honor difference between a winning game and a losing game is often not that significant due to bonus honor being awarded by objectives killed/captured. You can earn a lot of honor not by winning or even playing well, but simply by being present. Arathi Basin matches that award nearly the same bonus honor to each team are hard-fought matches where the resources earned by both sides are nearly equal.

I think this pretty much sucks. I'd like to hear if other people agree or disagree, and some suggestions on what could be done to improve the battleground. My thoughts:

1) Immediately restore queue-as-group functionality. Attempt wherever possible to place pre-formed raid groups against one another. Also, institute a random 1-5 minute queue delay on the queue-as-group function to prevent opposing faction raid groups from queueing simultaneously to trade wins. With the immense pool (currently 60 AVs open on Battlegroup 8) of potential competitors, this shouldn't be an issue.

2) Restore Alterac Valley to it's original state, with many NPC guards that are essential elements of the defense...not a sidewalk to free honor for each side. Also restore the other NPCs (Korrak the Bloodrager!) and the old, larger map. Make it so that objectives are actually defensible in a way that they no longer are.

3) Fix numerous imbalances in the game while retaining uniqueness of faction. Among other problems, Drek'Thar is about five times more difficult to defeat as Vandarr. Frostwolf Keep is poorly laid out (tower archers cannot hit players tapping the Relief Hut flag) and doesn't have any defending NPCs (unlike Dun Baldar, in which the Horde must kill nearly every quest NPC before pulling marshals.) Iceblood Graveyard is pretty much an impassable bottleneck if it is well-defended, while the Alliance has nothing similar before the bridge to Dun Baldar (which the Horde matches with the tower-entrance to Frostwolf Keep.) These sorts of things need some tuning.

4) Increase honor earnings in the battleground significantly to reflect the much longer time investment required to take and hold objectives. Make these honor earnings reflected in a persistent "Alterac Points" score that is awarded to a player when he or she leaves the battleground. Make the system zero-sum -- losing a lieutenant or commander should deduct points from your "Alterac Points" as it adds to the opposing players on the team.

I think these four fixes would go a long way towards developing the potential that Alterac Valley holds as the "raiding man's battleground." Thoughts?

Random thoughts:

-Make capping a GY require having the previous GY on your side. No more 40 people running past 40 people to race to Relief Hut / Aid Station. You have to actually fight the other side and take one point at a time.
-Award honor in some way based on time spent. A 3h stalemate AV with very equal teams and long 40v40s moving back and forth is very, very unrewarding compared to a 10 minute blitz to the Generals and a race for the kill.

AV should be the epic all-out-war battleground it once was (although other things were wrong then, eg. random NPCs being too strong), where summoning Lok-Holar is actually a viable strategy if you want to push forward for the win.

Of course, AV mark requirements for different PvP rewards should be reduced accordingly (cut in half).

AV never worked in practice at any point. You either had 15 hr turtle matches, or 15min zerg fests. And the solutions you suggest aren't really going to change any of that.

AV is the only remaining refuge for people who just want to PuG PvP and not play against made groups. That is one reason it is so popular. Most people who love organize PvP hate AV, but those who want casual PvP or just skirmishes rather than objective-driven BGs love it. The moment you allow groups again, that's going to be destroyed, unless you only allow made teams to play each other.

Of course in that case, you hit the other problem, which is that there is no advantage in playing difficult opponents in BGs. You get less honor because it takes you longer. The arena matching system is the counter to this, but I doubt we will ever see it in existing BGs.

The problem with virtually all of this is it is so easy to defend objectives in AV, that with NPCs it just became a turtlefest. How many times have you seen 10 people hold off a 40 person offense at chokepoints? Pretty often, even without NPCs. Thus you get 5 hours battles. Yes, the tactical objectives exist to counter this, but the problem is they don't even work half the time - and once they don't you're hosed for several hours until new NPCs spawn and you can try again.


"Fixing" AV, by which I mean making it a competitive battleground where objectives matter, fighting players matter, and so on, would take some serious work. You have to make it so that the honor is worthwhile even if the game takes longer (like you said in #3), and you need a plethora of "turtle-breakers" that are fairly easy to repeat and execute. Introducing bombing runs (like in Halaa in TBC) would be another cool one.

As we've seen in the past 18 months, it's really difficult to get any of this to work right in practice.

I actually like the current AV. Its a lot more fun than the 13 hour attrition-fest it used to be. If they were to require you to have graveyards in chains to get to the destination, there would have to be 2-3 different 'lanes' (dota style) of graveyards from one point to another, or you would just end up with the huge wall of people like you had before. People say the new AV sucks, but at least you can win or lose in 1-2 hours, and not have them last all day and then some.

It sounds like you want a return to the 36 hour+ fights that the first iteration of this zone showed us. I remember on multiple occasions Battlegrounds that I joined in the afternoon still raging at night and well into the next day.

WoW is extremely unequipped to handle mass pvp (Read:mage pvp). Every premade AV that I was in where there was a serious horde competition inevitably turned into a contest of who had more mages. Games were over in record time, and there was nothing whatsover that anyone could do to stop them except another 40 man team queued up against them. Pug stomping would be much, much worse in AV then it is in the other two battle grounds.

I do recognize the main offenders of mass pvp have been cut down tremendously - Mage AoE nerf, and Intimidating shout nerf, but they remain a serious problem.

Av is a zone with great intentions and a complete lack of any semblance of idea on how to make it work. Either way is unappealing. The sheer scale of the zone is problematic no matter which way you go. Having a longer BG is made even worse with the deserter debuff in place, as you have no choice, you must continue or take a 15 minute break. This leads to people that feel trapped inside the instance, begging for it to be over.

All of the quest obtainable npcs have been nerfed into oblivion - as a bear i can solo cap a point by killing all the guards and the captain without much trouble. They still retain their ridiculous lack of anti-kiting abilities or programming, rendering all of them but the flying guys moot. I can't even count the amount of times I've seen an hours worth of work put into gathering mats for ivus or the wolf riders wasted by a single competent hunter on the other side that taps them and runs them all the way back to drek to be slaughtered.

Basically, it comes down to choices:

Do I want AV to be :

5+ hours long, with no option to leave
or
15 minutes long with no sense of epic conflict.

Do I want AV to focus around:

Killing NPCs
or
Killing players


Honestly, I think they should just completely rip off DOTA, which they were trying to do in the first place, and make it just like that. Give us 2-3 lanes in which spawns charge each other, and go from there. Knock out the tower at one and, knock out its spawns. Put snowfall in the dead middle as a mountain like it is and have good ole korrak up there to protect the strategically superior position.

The problem with AV is the people who play it, and the incentive system in place. The shitfest AVs today are a product of a player pool that only cares about game turnover, and would rather have a 15-minute loss where they still kill Balinda and the lieutenants, than a 40-minute victory. Incentives need to be recalibrated so that they are aligned with the winning condition of the battleground. This has always been a problem back in AV. When people needed rep in order to get their Lobotomizers and Unstoppable Forces and Don Julio's, players would bitch about fast games. They'd actively try to hold back in order to keep a stalemate at Stonehearth or Stormpike, in order to allow for more turn-ins and thus more rep. When people would call for a charge, players would respond "STFU if you want honor play WSG/AB the only reason to do AV is rep." Today, if you call for defense or anything that might, heaven forbid, cause the Alliance to "turtle," you're told that the only reason to do AV is for quick honor and, again, to STFU noob.

Get 40 players thinking along the lines of killing Vanndar being the single most important goal, and removing any sort of reward for someone who isn't participating in the battle (e.g., afk in the tunnel), and a lot of the problems will sort themselves out. Part of the problem is that the zone layout isn't optimal, and part of it is the playerbase being stupid, but I think most of it is the skewed incentives.

I think Blizzard has basically given up on AV, though. They keep making it simpler and simpler, and it's sad. I miss the days of ninja'ing Irondeep mine in order to get more effective supplies turn-ins in order to get faster dragoons to break the enemy lines. Anyone remember Goblin Shredders? :(

I didn't read the above so forgive me, but all I got to say about AV is the OLD av, way back in the day, were some of my best memories of WoW.

Ninja looting corpses for factoin across the map... training NPCs all the way onto the alliance GY, and truly epic struggles to get anywhere. But a good team really shined. Now adays the entire zone is a travesty, and its totally broken when its pug on pug - leading to alliance wins every time. The same breakdown for the same game because of basic map imbalances (unless you truly believe alliance are smarter and better players overall, every time, every game).

AV was fixed so many times its hard to keep track of it, but I really do miss the way it used to work - that was good times.

How about just throwing away the tapping system and putting the Battlefield 194-I mean, Eastern Plagueland Tower system into place for capping flags? It'd at least slow the game down considerably because you'd have to leave a group of people to consolidate your gains, plus it would make defending easier as well since you basically just need to stay alive near the flag.

That's when you go and start stealing Irondeep supplies and send in the stalemate breakers.

Edit: Also, I fondly remember kiting Korrak into the Alliance zerg. wru Korrak? You never write back. :<

This would be an improvement. It works pretty well in UT2004 Onslaught games, if people are familiar with that (and probably lots of other games that predate Onslaught, but with which I am not familiar).

And yes, it'd make AV long, but I'd much rather have a long and "epic" AV, provided that the system is changed to reward participation in a segment of the whole. You shouldn't have to stay for the end to get the major benefit. The problem with 5hr AVs is not that they're 5hrs. It's that people were forced to stay for the whole thing or miss out on the vast majority of the reward. Working for 2 hours to turn the tide and start pushing back into the enemy base, only to have to leave, was a pain in the ass. But if an AV is a 5hr epic battle that a player can join, participate in for 30 minutes, and leave with some honor and an AV token or two to show for it, then what would be so bad about it?

When the queue for AV was 3hrs and was only up on AV weekend, i WANTED to win. Every game i was in, i was in the top 5 for kbs at the very least. When it wasnt up as often as it was now and you wanted rep you were either really motivated to win or didnt queue. Atleast thats how it felt for malganis horde a long time ago. It was also a bit more personal because all the names were relatively familiar.

Nowadays, its just queue and who cares who wins or loses because it isnt fun. Dealing with the retards who queue is the icing on the cake; "GG U TOOK SNOWFALL DO U WANT A TURTLE??" (Oh no, a 25 minute game turned into a 35 minute game).

Requiring the previous graveyard to take the next graveyard would be an interesting change but i can already imagine the forum threads; blizzard screws casual gamers yet again, games which potentially span over an hour not fair??

My view's of Alterac Valley are perhaps slightly different to your own and are in fairness based pretty much entirely on observation. Nothing I could heavily back up with quotations from Blizzard etc, but I hope you can appreciate some validity in the perspective none the less.

AV is the only current large scale battleground and I think in a lot of ways it was really just a way of testing the possibilities for the ideas they wanted to try and ideally wanted to work in eventually.

Originally AV was proposed to possibly one day host siege weapons and be a truly epic pvp scenario. I, like many other player's thought this would be a fantastic opportunity to do some guild pvp, great for both a day of blowing off some steam from raiding and also for building some good teamwork up. However the queuing system was never really upto this since guilds organised farming of it and they removed the group queuing swiftly.

What we saw it become was a farming fest, where people were just eager to stay inside farming honour or reputation all day long. Now it's just a token / honour rush for victory, since reputation is not accounted for by the current system, whenever I enter AV now I simply focus on the PvE element's of it such as tower's and their guards to try and get the tokens I need. If I want to PvP I can go to WSG, AB or even a practice arena game.

I personally, do not think they'll provide much more support for AV. They're simply likely to take what they've learn from it and try to use it within a new and much more successful large scale BG (perhaps they may just avoid large scale BG's as they plan to avoid raid content of such size), it's a lot like raiding design in that Molten core is very static and basic with Naxxramas being a much more advanced instance in what it offers to the player.

I don't know about other players but when I used to think of battlegrounds I conjured up images of war-like scenario's. Not pleasant fields with a few people fighting on and the odd flag to take down. They're getting a lot better at raid content design, I'm sure people can agree on that and I'm sure people will agree that Blizzard will produce better pvp scenario's over time.

Which is unfortunate, because there's so much potential. I've been doing AV on and off (I played AV every single day when it first came out, for a month or two -- I got Exalted in a week and kept coming back because it was just really fun) for a year and a half now, and I've still never had a chance to do an organized guild vs. guild match, and the way queues work now, I don't see how I ever will. If you stop for a moment and imagine how an old-school AV would play out with 40 people on Vent working together on each side of the field, is there really anything in WoW right now (or ever) that could offer that sort of experience? There's definitely untapped potential, and I'd love to see Blizzard revisit the concept some day, whether it's in the sidelined Azshara Crater, or elsewhere.

Gearing up alts, off-spec PvP items, etc.... the same reason everyone is PvPing these days? It was a general point, not a personal request.

Quoted for truth. This is exactly the sentiment that motivated my original post. I've only been playing WoW since December of 2005 (gg noob) and Alterac Valley is my best love/hate relationship in the game due to that untapped potential. When our guild group plays a difficult, hard-fought match in Arathi Basin against another skilled and well-equipped raid, I feel like I've been challenged and we have improved as a raid group. THAT is rewarding, whether we win or lose. Then I take 20 or 25 guild members to AV via StinkyQueue. We romp through the zone with reckless abandon, and I'm forced to contemplate how it would be to have a game of the aforementioned style and challenge with 40 people all working together in the unique scenario that AV could provide.

Best I recall, the reason why they removed queue as group functionality was that one group in the queue could 'clog' the queue for everyone behind them.

And in regards to your "ideal AV", it's not that ideal at all. Fought fifteen months ago now, if two teams on Vent would stalemate. You'd get one fight over Snowfall and then it's a staring match. Once, with the other team turtled at Iceblood graveyard, we managed to take out the Garrison. But people are back in the fight too fast to dislodge 40 organized people sitting on a graveyard.

As to your desire about bringing back NPCs, they were taken out exactly because people complained about them. They were saying exactly what you were except that the NPCs we were all fighting were the guards running around; you could never make it to the end bosses because there were too many NPCs in the way. AVs would last weeks because there were so many NPCs in the bases, you couldn't beat them even if there were only a handful of PC defenders.

They're fixing this in the expansion though. Appearently Halaa is a lot of fun and Eye of the Storm incorporates the best parts of AB and AV. And of course there's Arena which is what you want which is organized teams with no goal other than to kill the other side.

I think AV has been relegated to the state of a failed experiment that won't be removed because there are still a lot of people that like it. There are some extremely obvious problems with the map that have never been dealt with, and if the designers really cared about it being a balanced battleground we would have seen changes by now. It was far more ambitious than the engine or servers could handle and it's been slowly relegated to a red-headed stepchild of a pvp zone. I agree that there is still a great deal of potential that the zone holds, but I don't forsee them giving it a complete revamp anytime soon.

I'm not sure it's all that bad. It is an idea though, to increase the respawn time to 60 seconds so players can't rejoin the battle as quickly as they do. But I think the variety of targets to assault or ninja, combined with the "tactical nukes" available in the zone, make the possibility of a *real* turtle much less plausible.

I don't hold out a lot of hope for a zone revamp at this point, but I figured this was the only place that I could get a level-headed discussion where some dev might look at it someday.

Halaa's certainly a lot of fun, it's a different feel to the epic army versus army back and forth assualt feel that the old AV in particular captured though by its nature as a single town to go and siege or defend.

Eye of teh Storm I haven't personally played, impression I got though was that is was more a combination of WSG and AB rather than AV - last I heard it was point/flag control for points rather than base assualt with NPCs? Sides of 15 as well which creates a different feel of course too.

Edit: Would personally love to see the old style of AV revisted to capture that epic feel, my personal suggestion would be to incorporate as one of the possible victory conditions and points counter similar to that used in AB at present so that, after say 4 hours or whatever, the side that's been dominate will win by those criteria instead. Not as satisfying as a base assualt/general kill or equivalent but rewards map domination/could be tuned to penalise turtling the easy spots without sufficient defence and would only come into play if a game had already been long stagnant in terms of progress.

On the week of the patch I had started to give a little speach at the beginning of every AV I entered trying to get the Horde to win an AV for once, and I eventually created a macro for it. I don't like the race, but I'm pretty much forced to deal with the fact that AV is just a PvE race now, so I figured Horde should at least try to win for once. I was greeted with only a few people (usually around two, sometimes none at all) taking my advice in rushing to Stormpike GY instead of putzing around Stonehearth until it capped, and we generally failed miserably and ended up waiting for the rest of the raid to finish jerking off at SH bunker.

To top it off, I was eventually just getting responces along the lines of "No ones cares if we win, we get more honor if we just kill the NPCs and lose fast anyway."

It's pretty disgusting that this is the only Battleground where it doesn't matter if you lose, and the only difference is about 60 honor and two AV tokens between the victor and the loser.

I don't have a lot to add, but av is stupid and very broken. Right now if you are solo queueing av is by far the best honor and giving out the best honor for what breaks down into a who can pve faster battle is extremely wrong. On a separate note they need to change how much pvp items cost according to wait times. With 10m wsg 15m ab and 20m av wait times and instant horde queues our battle group's horde can get items at twice the rate (and then curb stomp the already terrible alliance pugs with a larger than ever gear gap).

There was a blizzard interview where one of the Devs/CMs (I think Tigole) said that AV was a horrible mistake on their part, and that Blizz has learned never to mix PvP and PvE again, due to the same problems listed above. We won't be seeing anything like this again in WoW.

Forced progressive GY capturing, and keeping the relatively weak NPCs, but making them respawn if your line goes 1-2 GY's ahead of them, would make for a much more interesting fight. After that it's just a matter of retuning time vs. honor, as the minimum time will be more "set", like wsg/ab's minimum times. Then put group queue back in.

Also, some layout changes so that it's not so ridiculously alliance favored.