I know this has been brought up before, but after another boring weekend of watching 30 horde afk in AV tunnel I thought I'd try to see if there's any "new ideas" for trying to fix AV, or hopefully maybe if there is a decent amount of good ideas blizzard will implement them in AV or possibly add them to a new BG (Azshara crater?). Here's a few things people have suggested in the past and I've talked about with some friends.

-Possibly lower the Cap to 25->30 people per side

-Force you to take the Graveyards in Order.

-Change the flags to EoTS style

-Change how the NPC support works. Instead of basing it off crystals and armor turned in, remove all the stupid turn-ins and base the NPC support off of amount of kills gained by the team, 500 kills gives you the first unit upgrade, 750 gives you riders, 1000 2nd unit upgrade, 1250 slightly stronger Riders, 1500 Summoned bosses, 1750 3rd unit upgrade, 2000 enable the flight masters, Also change the flight masters instead of just unleashing a Wyvern/Gryphon add Halaa style bombing runs, 3-5 people can do bombing runs ala Halaa on the next GY you're trying to cap(route changes every time you cap a new GY).

-Lower the amount of honor you receive for the game itself.

-Reward honor based on Healing/Dmg done and flags cap'd(Flag cap honor rewarded to every1 within 30 yards of the flag)

-Allow grps of 5 possibly even 10 people to grp queue for AV.

-Balance the sides a little better, slight terrain changes like raising the horde walls and removing the shortcut that bypasses the NPCs, possibly make the middle tower cause you to dismount again and other various small changes that would be relatively easy to do.

-Cause the spawn points to rotate every day or week.



Also more along the lines of all Pvp and not just AV add new rewards to keep Pvping for, add more Pvp based epic gems, add new gear, possibly even add Old Gladiator gear to the CP system in a couple of seasons, IE add S1 gear when S3 or 4 starts.

Lowing the cap to 25-30 would make it harder on pugs without nerfing the power of NPCs it's already annoying having 10-15 people running around being generally useless since it just makes it harder to kill the WMs and Drek.

Forcing GY, this is a rumor in 2.1 but nobodies tested it last I heard, overall this wont change anything except give groups a better advantage, they'll just setup people to guard each GY and instead of losing in 11 minutes you'll lose in 23-26 minutes.

EoTS Style, no no no no no and no. EoTS style is the worst idea Blizzard ever came up with, it's horrible and all it does is force you to play the zerg game and removes all the tatics of Rogue/Druid goes and ninjas AS, or you try to ninja towers.

Rather interesting idea, could possibly work pretty well.

Again, could possibly work well.

No, terrible idea I don't think I need to explain why.

Would be rather amusing, but i'd much rather have to assault FW Keep then DB, (Hi pit-o-doom)

Adding Gladiator gear to honor points would make it worst, S2 gear isn't going to be amazing getting people easy S1 gear would just be bad chang.

You can't "bypass the NPCs" in the sense that you used to anymore, you can't climb up the waterfall or ride behind the fence. You can however ride upto the NPCs laugh at them and ride on by.

The hut of dismount was just stupid coupled with old NPCs it created a very strong bottleneck at the exit on the other side. Two well played horde could easily hold 20+ alliance because of it - you can argue if this should be intended, but the rest of the game will disagree, there was absolutely no way to hold DB with two people against ten times as much horde even with old NPCs and extremely cheesy tactics 90% of the playerbase wouldn't even know.

I like the idea of making it random which side you have to defend (so Allys protect Drek sometimes), and using that segway to allow Alliance vs. Alliance PvP games if there are significiantly more Alliance players than Horde players in the queue.

Who enjoys EoTS? Nobody, it's a stupid idea.

You confused which I was replying too, it's not hard to get a couple of people into the same AV, if you want to be 100% sure that you all get to play together, you have 3 other battlegrounds you can queue for.

No

It's passed it's used by date let it die, I hope they do not add updated items from honor rewards.

If they are adding updated honor rewards at some stage, make AV more like Unreal Tournament 1.0's assault except with a fixed time and heavily stacked in the offensive teams favor where the defensive team can delay the offenses progress quite a bit, team with the best offensive time wins. Make games last about 15-20min max.

I like EoTS. Not because of the game itself, but because it's the best battleground to get in some good small-scale fights.

Anyways, concerning AV, you really have to specify what you are trying to fix. Is it afkers? Is it map imbalances?

There's always going to be a background level of afkers. This is because people need to grind honor for gear. For starters, that gets to you after a while. You need a break. But afking is a way to maximize your honor in your downtime, while you watch a movie or do laundry. Unethical? Probably, but that's how the world turns. Or some people might not even be taking a break, they might be doing that all the time without ever playing. Again, it's unethical but that's the way the world turns.

One observation of mine though, is that faction imbalances lead to more AFKers. I don't know if you guys remember the very old AVs with more guards. But in those days Horde used to win an overwhelming majority of the time. In those days, it was the alliance who were afking. The lake on the road to Stormpike was full of alliance fishing. There were still Horde afkers of course, but they were far fewer in numbers.

The modern AV hugely favors the alliance, and that observation is reversed. You probably have 10-15 horde on average that are afk in the tunnel, while the alliance have much fewer.

So my point is that faction imbalances engender even more afking. I think the historical beating that the Horde layed on the Alliance has been more than rectified, and now it's time to push for greater parity. Most of it is geography, natural chokepoints, and how you funnel unorganized masses of horde into a natural defense like the alliance have at Stormpike Graveyard.

Some of the ideas that immediately pop into my head:
-Change the location of the Iceblood Graveyard flag so the horde have to pass it on their way out. That creates a natural defense using unorganized players.
-Same for Frostwolf, though it's not nearly as bad here.
-Make the tower in the horde base dismount people again.
-Move the horde towers so they actually do something. As it stands, people get shot like twice on their way to the relief hut and that's it. Horde get pelted by numerous archers for 800 a hit (on cloth) and that lasts pretty much indefinitely.
-Move horde NPCs so that they aggro alliance as they rush the GY. It's pretty gay that I have to fight Lana Thunderbrew, the Stablemaster, etc. etc. while the alliance get a free run through our base.

Alternatively, you can just do the reverse to the alliance resources. Things like moving Lana Thunderbrew and her gang of 5 friends away from the path leading to the Aid Station. In fact, that might be a preferable option because fast games discourage AFKers as well.

- Give AV group queue back. I remember one of the reasons they did that initially was to stop people from queueing their level 40 friends in. That's been fixed, and the BG itself has changed so much since than that group queueing wouldn't be as powerful as before. As it is, AV is fairly "organized" in that, people rush to take over a GY together, they rush to kill a Captain together, and than they rush to kill the leader together. A group will just do these things more efficiently. As it is there is always four people who ninja cap the back two Horde GY's at the start of every game, this is something that most organized groups would do anyways.

- Change the flow of battle. The landscape dictates the flow of battle, and right now the initial start of the AV has 30 Alliance charging Galv and 30 Horde charging Stonehearth. Neither side crosses each other's pass, and the first Alliance tower is completely skipped. If I stay on defense, I don't even see Horde until they capture Stonehearth and start making their way up the narrow trail leading to Stormpike. This isn't news to anyone so I'll stop repeating AV babble here, but I think terrain plays a huge part in making AV lame. Most Horde players just don't fight back.

- Realize this isn't an FPS. Very few people have "favorite maps" in MMORPGS. We have favorite style of play, and sometimes a favorite instance, but very few people *really* love a particular BG, and if they do, it's almost certainly negated by the idiots that end up in their BG. So, we like old stuff for it's novelty, not for it's actual gameplay. Give up on AV. Make it more playable, but stop trying to push it. I'd love to see a new BG come out, and have that BG replace AV for the honor weekend. Even starting a different "epic" type BG like AV would be fine, as long as there is new artwork, new mobs, new terrain, and new content. Oooh, new PvP content.

So, mixed opinions from me. I'd like to see AV get fixed. I'd also like to see another BG over it.

You get small-scale fights in AB too, and you still can ninja nodes with 1-2 people, EoTs encourages zerging.

AFKing only became a big problem when the currency system came in, obviously it was still an issue before that but it was on a far smaller scale and they weren't rewarded for it as much.

You can capture bunkers in AV as Horde and the bowman despawn, and theres a place you can stand specifically where you wont get them in combat, so stealth into DB, capture it and they're all gone by the time your teammates make it there.


My understanding was the group queue fix was actually due to win trading, queue 40 people on Horde and Alliance, trade wins all day and you would get mass honor because of Alliancce queue times being 40-80 minutes for WSG while you could trade wins/loses in 25-35 minutes.

How is that a new trick? I have seen Mages put portals up a while back to try to remove people in AV. I think it is a mean, but people should watch what they click.

Also with the new soulwell graphic (it looks like a green Mage portal), more people may fall for the trick thinking that a healthstone is coming.

The av map is still based around the alliance is defensive(paladins) and Horde is offensive(shamans).

Random sides would help a fair bit with expectations and indeed that would help with AB and WSG as well.

But the map imbalances themselves are relativiy small. The "How to win Horde AV" has been published many times, its just slow, just as the alliance wins are slow if Horde put up any sort of resistance. To this day their is still a group from Proudmoore Horde that play the occasional group AV with 5-10 Guildies in the game. If I see them I know straight off I am in for a 2+ hour game win or lose. But it is the honor system itself ,not av that means a fast game(win or lose) is better than a slow win. This again applies to WSG and AB but the Horde gain the benefit their.