At one time maybe. Now it's gone so far that most new people don't even know you can summon ram/wolf riders and have no idea what the druid or primalist are even for. I'm sure that I wasn't the only one that saw what the original designers saw: Aeon of Strife (which as the precursor to DOTA) brought down to the level of WoW. It never really happened. There were no waves of spawning troops that you supported other than an occasional spearhead of riders. It was really just a cluttered version of today's AV with a bunch of other stuff thrown in if they could get it to work (siege weapons under development mirite?). It was overly ambitious and never lived up to what the designers wanted it to be, and at some point they just gave up on making it a better battleground. I too believe there's great potential that is untapped in AV but with the constant emphasis on moving forward to new content and no new level 70 rewards in any of the old battlegrounds, I'm not even really sure what the point would be.

In a thread in which people are clamoring for turning the zone into DOTA, multiplying the amount of NPCs, eliminating all NPCs, pointing out that any game is a stalemate between pugs/stalemate between organized team/race won by the team with the less vulnerable base, and near unanimous agreement that AV has never worked, that opinion is just as constructive as any other.

Coming from a healer who knows how to do his job and actually does it, saying that you did AV every day because you had a lot of fun isn't saying a whole lot (plus you came back after you hit exalted because you wanted to see what the zone was like when you were doing something besides shift clicking corpses!) A competent healer is arguably the most potent force in that zone, worth something like 5-10 dps classes. How many of those would you say are in any given AV? Maybe 2. Anything else is an exercise in frustration as you see bears and dual-wielding shaman and shadow priests running around you. Is that problem present in AB and WSG? Yes, but at least you aren't stuck in those zones for hours on end.

The limitations on the concept are just too great, be they technical, player intelligence, or incentive based. Large group PVP just doesn't work in wow. We all know it, and Blizzard knows it, which is blindingly obvious judging from the direction they've gone in the expansion. All of the "wouldn't be cool if" pipedreams about AV are a gigantic waste in time when what we've got coming is so much better in every way.

Every single feature in AV screams band-aid. Read up on the old preview for Blizzard's plans for the zone; it is nothing like it. Those grand ideas for a non-instanced zone that slowly rebuilt itself after a side lost didn't work. What we ended up with was the lowest bidder version: a cobbled together mess of crap that was just good enough to keep us busy until Blackwing Lair launched and the rest of the playerbase busy until -- well that's all they ever got.

Further, I really believe that AV set a horrible precedent for the grind for rewards, winning be damned mentality that every person you come across in a battleground has. In this and many other ways, I think that WoW would have been much better off had the zone never been put in the game.

I used to be the 'wolf guy' in AV. My proudest moment was ending a 4-hour stalemate by single-handedly summoning reavers and wolf riders at the same time, followed by training a squad of gnolls into Lokholar to feed him and start his rampage just as the riders ran by. It was like an unstoppable train of NPC destruction.

In some ways I miss the old NPC-heavy AV and the long grueling matches, but then I remember what it was like to toss one heal on somebody and get an entire tower full of guards chasing me halfway across the battleground.

Personally i think that AV just needs to have its honor system reworked. Something like:

1) Having certain towers / objectives will give you a 1.2/1.4/1.6/2.0 whatever modification to the amount of honor you get from killing PC's, and have that honor be the only source of honor. These are non destroyable and recap-able. Perhaps they also effect how often van/drek will give you that bg wide buff, or effect which buff you get.

2) Having certain objectives destroyable will net you no honor, but make a win easier, much like the marshals work now. Reverse it however, make it that destroying a tower will take away that factions 'winning objective' defenders, and perhaps others NPC in and around the base as well.

3) A bonus incentive for actually winning a game, to stop people make AV about just farming HK's. Perhaps winning gives you token and loosing not? That might work with how buying equipment is set up.

I think that would bring the focus more on organized PVP rather than just a race or a grind, and reward you for the time you spent in the BG even if that is 5 hours, and hopefully discourage people from just stalling for HK's.



If you want to make av actually fun, THEN you need to redo the AV layout, so that it's not so easy to just walk into a base / cap GY's. I think this is where NPC's should be used.

Capping a GY should give you a strategic advantage to achieving a goal: giving you a fallback to take down an objective.

I am not so in favour of linear progression, but make it very hard for 5 people to cap a graveyard. Have wolves patrolling bases that can see through stealth. Basically make it so you can't wander into a base or even near it by yourself, without having done some serious ground work taking down defenders first.

For GY's: have the GY defenders immune to fear. Give them silencing abilities. Basically make it so you need a group of 5 good players or 10 bad ones to actually go about capping a GY.

I am not sure what to do with summon-able NPC's. I think setting them up defensively around objectives as outlined in point 1) and GY's would work best, and leave objectives outlined in point 2) to players only.


Lastly, flag capping needs some work. Do it how it is in TBC now (i think?), where you need to have more bodies standing around the flag to fill up a 'cap bar' faster than the opposing faction players can empty it by standing around the flag, or rather, fighting a pitched battle around the flag.

There might be other options which i haven't really given much thought to, but it is now way too easy to interrupt someone capping.


Lastly part 2: if all of this is done you can start adding some fun things like gathering materials to open a second way into an enemy base (tunnel underground?). Offer another way to victory with some hard work. Have officer auras mean something. And so on.


I think this post is long enough by now, so i'll just stop rambling.

While AV is the worst poorest excuse of a BG ever, totally deleting it seems like a waste... instead of just spending the time to make it a decent BG, move it down to 20-25 People add grp Qs, then force you to capture each flag before you can get the next one so the sides can't run past each other then Nerf the NPCs as needed. While blizzard is at it would also be nice if they converted AB/AV flags to the Eye of the Storm/EPL system.

Multiple ways into a base, multiple lanes to the base. No IB GY choke or bridge choke. Chokes result in turtles which aren't fun.

Have nodes turned by area domination like EPL, NOT by hiding behind a flagpole praying for 10 seconds. How many times have you been 1 second or less off a cap and been hit by some kind of AoE...

Either add dota style waves, or just strip out NPCs entirely with the final objective to cap the enemy base or break some object which doesn't have to be killed in 1 attempt or it resets.

Why try to fix AV? Just create new content. Leave AV as it is, and just move forward with the lessons learned.

One thing I've always thought would be fun in AV-type battles is limit Join as Group to 5 or 10 people, and force groups to come from different servers for each side. Make the objectives achievable by those groups.

The most fun I've had in AV is when a small group of us get into an AV. We just our own little group and go after various objectives while the rest of the raid does other stuff. In particular, spearheading the raid to Drek is always fun.

NPC mobs in a PvP instance is a pretty nice thing for a Protection warrior. I don't think it's much of a bad concept at all - a place where I can actually be of some use in tanking gear! I imagine anyone else with a pretty deep PvE spec would feel the same way.

The general execution of an AV game (at least in my battlegroup) is what ruins the gameplay, but adding some things to the game could increase the overall quality of the game, at least taking away from the overall "zerg node A, cap and zerg node B..." mentality.

Siege Weapons - It was announced previously, but probably proved too difficult to implement (or balance). Controlling a giant ballista or cannon under a player's control could turn the tide of a game pretty quickly, but also having smaller ones which you could set up at certain nodes and capture points would prove of some use as well. Perhaps make this tied to controlling a Mine, or capturing the opposing side's Blacksmith in such a fashion as the Windriders and Summons are now.

Increase in overall HP totals in AV - A zonewide buff applied upon entering AV, controlled by the health and condition of your NPC leader, so when the game is over, the buff goes away. Increases total amount of HP by 20-40%, applied to every player. This would stop giant zerg fests at nodes and hopefully force people to use some strategy. I imagine AV, at 70, when everyone has +Resilience and larger stamina pools, will be quite a different game than it is now.

Two entrances to each base - Having a back door or an alternate route to take would again, add some depth and spread players out (again stopping a zerg/bottleneck effect in some places)

Neutral NPCs or summons Adding additional summonable bosses like Icy wouldn't be a bad idea, as either side obtaining one of these summons changes the flow relatively fast.

Obviously adding all of these would make it a different game, but I think anyone who has been to AV, past or present, knows how bad a bottleneck or stalemate/zergfest can get.

I think the best of AV would come through if Blizzard did the next AV-style BG, as others have mentioned, by completely ripping off DOTA. And I mean completely and utterly.

The smartest aspect of DOTA is how a small initial advantage can swell into the complete domination of one side, which means a game can only under extraordinary circumstances last beyond an hour. It also makes every little skirmish matter; you don't have that incredibly lame sense of the last hour being wasted as the tide in AV turns and you're all back in the middle again. (Ninja capping should be impossible, it feels just as lame as backdooring in DOTA, and it's easy to do with a group of 5 on vent.)

AV's token system (armor scraps, blood, insignias, etc) should be expanded so that it provides a meaningful manner of progression within each individual battleground. Players would trade armor scraps and the like, not for tiny buffs, but huge but temporary (the duration of the BG) equipment upgrades, special trinkets, unique consumables, etcetera. The new TBC token-vendor system could be used to make this happen easily - buy items with the stuff you loot off pvp corpses, simple. Special tradein items could be obtained when specific objectives are completed, like mine captures, tower destructions, which give extra-powerful bling. What is important is that these tradeins provide huge benefits to players, allowing perceptible progress towards ultimate victory. Such a system would be similar to Lokholar etc, but a million times more fun, as it puts players in control rather than NPCs.

All tokens and temporary rewards would be stripped at the end of the game, of course; like in DOTA they are tools for victory and do not carry outside of the game itself. All sorts of stuff like this already exists in AV, like the shout buffs, but they're all under computer control, which is very stale.

Yeah, I'm not seriously expecting AV to be "fixed" and I think we all agree it has horrible problems. Dios, I'm not going to dispute any of your points, but I do think it's an exaggeration to say it was a worthless concept from the start. There is a kernel of something there that is worth salvaging, and that's my main motivation in discussing the topic. For all the bitching about AV, you can find a lot of real nostalgia for it, in this thread and elsewhere. I've had some pretty epic WSGs and ABs against good groups, but they all blur together. With AV, I have very distinct memories, from joining an AV where the Alliance had pushed us back practically to our base, and slowly turning the tide and organizing small groups of people, along with one or two guildmates who got into the game, until we won 4 hours later. I remember AV for the first time on the test server, teaming up with some guys from Nurfed and ninjaing Irondeep Mine and getting a warlock summon cycle going to get endless reavers to advance and win what I think was the first AV ever concluded, with a final time of like 30 hours. And so forth. Sure, there was a lot of frustration, but there was also unique enjoyment buried in that mess, which is what kept people coming back. I don't expect to ever see AV fixed, but there are lessons to be learned from it.

Of course, one thing that I think has been largely overlooked thus far is the effect of cross-server queues on AV. They're great for WSG and AB -- they get the queue moving quickly, and they give you a good variety of opponents instead of playing the same damn team over and over again all night because no one else is playing WSG at 3am. But for AV, they really kill the sense of community and broad-based teamwork that are necessary to have any semblance of a strategic approach. Also, in the golden days of AV during Summer 2005, AV was new and rewards like TUF were desireable to basically everyone. Almost everyone wanted at least one of the Exalted rewards, and so you had mains in guilds that did MC and were experienced, and ran CTRA and other such mods, queuing for AV. You also had a lot of people there that you knew from random 5-mans, from chatting in Org, from world bosses, and so forth. When a warrior with Sulfuras zoned in, everyone knew who he was and knew that they were about to make a big push. I think that was a big part of it. In the first months of AV, I could legitimately lead groups and have some semblance of people paying attention to what I was saying. Sure, there would always be some fuckwit who would send the riders at the worst possible time while I was spamming raid chat with "DON'T SEND RIDERS YET, WAIT FOR STORMPIKE TO CAP" but by and large, it was worlds different. When you throw together a collection of 40 players from different servers, who don't know each other and may go weeks without seeing a particular other player a second time, it's going to be chaos.

I agree; AV as theorized just doesn't work in practice. For each of the group queue calls, you can easily give theoretical counterexamples that would almost guarantee AV games will be even shorter than the current race (e.g. 25-30 mages/aoers with improved blizzard mages with coordinated frost nova dragon's breath teams and 10-15 healers...blah blah blah).

What I'm curious to hear from those calling for group queues, how would you address the obvious advantage the major raiding guilds would have over the non-raiding/casual playerbase? Is it reasonable to expect that a gear matching system will provide AV battles with reasonable queue times? Can you make the case that there's enough similarly progressed guilds that would be pvping at the same time to prevent collusion? Or broadening that further could how would these changes _not_ turn AV into an epic factory with no raid ids?

All the ideas on defensive/map/NPC changes and so on are really just show how much and many fundamental flaws exist in AV. At this point, is it really worth the investment of yet more designer's time to try and fix something that's undergone so many changes versus starting with a clean sheet design of a new bg?

After a certain point, you can only do so much surgery before there's too much scarring...

Agreed. Leave AV as it is, it appeals to a certain % of the player base. Create a new BG based on what has been learned, hell people have come up with some interesting ideas in only 60 posts in this thread.

It is very hard to mix PvE and PvP content in a BG, one of the problems with AV was the win condition was strictly PvE. Which has lead to it's current state of PvE rushes. Multiple winning conditions could have fixed this. 1 side wins if either they kill the other sides faction leader OR force X number of players to rez at GYs by looting their corpses before a rez happens (Battlefield style). Hopefully if they do another 40vs40 BG they go more along those lines.

That's because you are Alliance and Horde play no defense in AV currently. So it's very formulaic since it's the same meager NPC resistance every time. Alliance always has defense in every game I've seen, and it is impossible to communicate or organize anyone to anything whatsoever. I've been in 35min AVs where Horde never took Stormpike GY with ~10 defending it, because it was impossible to mount an organized attack. People would run in 3-4 at a time, or when someone would say for everyone to take the high road, 1/3 would go high, 1/3 would go straight, and 1/3 would stand around doing nothing. The strategy to counter what the Alliance does is simple, but it's dynamic, and there is no communication or the potential for communication whatsoever.

I'll grant that I've never played horde-AV, and yes it seems different.

Generally alliance has defense only by virtue of the fact that the horde rush to Balinda cuts off a few folk on slower mounts, or who were slow to log into the game. These folk *cannot* get past the bunker without corpse running to a forward capped GY and hence are defence out of necessity. It is not a superior strategy on the part of the alliance players, or an indication of more communication. It simply happens.

Oh gurgthock ;( you definately brought the nostalgia on me. My best memories include a gigantic orange hammer toting tauren leading many a horde push and him being seeming invicible... all the while having infinite rage and bringing the pain.

I may be crazy but I like when games get tough. The tougher the battle the more rewarding it is to win - or bittersweet to lose. I remember one game in particular (may be the same one that Gurgthock mentioned) where we were in the horde base for close to four hours... four bloody hours trying to gain an inch. Eventually the horde managed to farm up enough to summon riders and push us all the way back to Belinda... a game we went on to lose.

Maybe this is why now I do the best I can to defend because it is the only challenge left in AV. And while I miss days of having a ~10 shredder push or leading mage AoE tears... I really hope blizzard can learn from mistakes and improve the future of large scale battlegrounds for all of us.

As a counter-counterpoint, in the pre-race, pre-cross-realm AVs, Kargath Alliance pretty much ran itself to inevitable victory with the unvarying strategy of SF->capt->IB tower->IB GY (could i get a few more hypens in this sentence--yup, i guess so). As soon as IB fell, the Horde resistence began to crumble. (Once the RH went, you'd pretty much just find fishing horde if you bothered to go outside the base.) Occasionally you'd get the variance of taking IB GY before the capt/tower, but overall the strategy never really changed. Every now and again there'd be a dip in quality as various pvp leaders got exalted and/or retired, but with the nature of the honor grind, there were always up and comers that would take over.

edit: argh it's late i should go to bed, fixed for clarity

The early days AV is definitly by far the best pvp experience I have had. I remember at 28 hour one which I was part of for 20 hours in 2 sessions, I loved every minute of it. Part of a 2-man rogue team taking out named npcs all over the map. Stealthsquads for towers, mines and quest resources.

It was PvE working against another team more that I really enjoyed and the things I have heard from beta I think sounds really promising.

I do think its to late to save AV, even though I still think its the most fun BG atm. I wouldnt mind if going back to oldschool AV but I cant see that happening and it would mean a serious drop in popularity.

Premade vs. pickup groups is what kills what's left of PvP in World of Warcraft for me and my friends. So we're forced into AV where we can actually enjoy ourselves if we manage to get into the same instance.

I agree with the OP that the objectives in AV are flawed. "Don't tag Stonehearth Graveyard!" (because we want them to spawn there and not in their tunnel), 10 horde riding past 10 alliance each on their way to their honor giving objectives.

It's still better than being 5-0 in AB with them camping our last graveyard for honor scraps before they tick 2000 or being camped at the WSG graveyard. And that's just sad.

1) Battlegrounds (ALL battlegrounds) should have a 50/50 chance of starting with the teams at one starting location or the other. In a stroke the vast majority of complaints about terrain favouring one side or the other are abolished.

2) AV should be a last-man-standing war. When you kill the general, you destroy the starting cave - i.e. no replacements for people zoning out, and no ressing there. To win the battle requires you to take all graveyards and kill all opponents. I guess there would also have to be some nerf to stealthing when your general is killed, to stop one or two lone rogues turtling and preventing the other side winning.

One thing to remember about old AV is that you spawned on the flags. This contributed a great deal to the dead-lock of guild groups - I doubt any ab point would ever be contended after the first wave if it used the same system. With linked graveyards, new res system, less npcs and guild vs guild signup option, I can't help but think it could be a lot of fun again.

Slighty off-topic, but what are your current AV stats looking like? I'm currently at an 88% win rate in AV(43-6) and would be interested in hearing if it's really that bad for horde everywhere.

It really is sad now, old school AV was awesome in my opinion, and by far my favourite battleground. The satisfaction of ending a stalemate by getting together an elite 5 man stealth team and ninjaing and keeping IB/FW/FAS until reinforcements arrived was unmatched. I could happily play for 5 hours in these matches and not get bored, where as now I get bored playing 3 matches in an hour (instant queues) earning honour on my alt.

I like the requiring the previous GY idea, but I don't think ~80% of the people pvping (purely farming honour) will agree with it.

The only time horde win when i've been there is when there's an at least slightly organised horde defense. If it's a pure zerg both ways the Alliance win every time - but hey what does it matter? You get what, 28 more honour for winning? I guess marks could be a problem for people who have long queues.

Well I think to improve it, they should make the win conditions a bit more linear, and like a lot of people have said, require certain points to be capped before you can assault the final NPCs.

I also think when you cap a bunker, your own guards then spawn at that bunker, so that there is more incentive to actually cap the bunkers on the way.

Overall, I didn't mind AV being seriously lengthy like it was back in the day, but there needs to be a smaller version, somewhere between AB size and AV size, with some NPCs, and some cappable points, just like an AV junior that takes maybe 20-30 mins. That would fill a niche really nicely in my opinion.