Lookit

This is inspired by the discussion currently going on in the Season 3 Date & Discussion thread, which has branched from the original topic considerably and is worthy in my opinion of its own discussion.

How can Blizzard make battlegrounds more fun? How can they make the honor grind enjoyable, with honor gear being a reward for participating in a fun and engaging system instead of, for some, a dreaded necessity?

There are two main approaches to this in my mind:

1) Changes to the honor system, including the method by which honor is gained. Daily quests, ELO systems for BG's, etc.

2) Added variety to the BG's themselves. Additional BG's (one of which is of course already in development), new maps for existing gametypes, etc.

While I am very much in favor of changes to option 1, let me focus for the moment on number 2. Specifically, let me talk about variety.

Looking at other online PvP games, there are typically a wide variety of maps (10+) and a variety of gametypes (5+). These can then be combined to create numerous different alternatives. Capture the flag takes on very different flavors depending on the map, which adds greatly to the replay value. To make a tenuous comparison, imagine if Halo 2 had only one map for CTF, one for Territories, and one for Big Team Battle Assault - it would getting boring incredibly quickly. Would adding new gametypes to the existing WoW maps add value to the BG system? What if when you queued up for AB, you would randomly get one of the following variants:

- Neutral CTF, with a neutral flag at the blacksmith. Victory requires 5 captures. Similar to EotS but without any "resource" locations to control
- Traditional AB
- Traditional CTF, with flags at both bases. Victory requires 3 captures. Essentially WSG with the AB map. This would definitely have a different flavor than traditional WSG due to the different routes available to flag carriers. Base defense would be much more important.
- Traditional AB with the addition of combat NPC's at all nodes. These NPC's must be defeated to capture a node (unlike AV, a flag cannot be clicked until all its defensive NPC's are defeated) and once captured, NPC's of the appropriate faction will spawn to help protect the node alongside players. This emphasizes teamwork more than the current AB because capping a node will require coordination and players won't be able to run around solo and find unguarded nodes. Capping a node will be much more significant, unlike the "hot potato" syndrome you see in many PuG AB's.

This addition seems like it would make an afternoon of queueing up for AB much more fun and lively. It's difficult to make a case that the current BG's aren't a little stale at this point; almost 3 years of the exact same 3 BG's would get boring in any game.

WSG variants could be along the lines of:

- Speed match: All players granted a passive 20% movement speed buff.
- Beserker flag: Holding the flag decreases your health by 1% every 3 seconds, but increases damage done by 25%.
- Assault: Take your flag into your opponent's base to score.
- Annihilation: First team to 150 HK's wins. No flags.


Would this be an improvement? What do you think Blizzard could do to make you look forward to queueing up for BG's?

 

• sadris

I think putting a 20minute timer on BGs would help. As it stands if I zone into a non-preform BG, if we aren't in the lead, I will AFK for the remainder of the match as attempting to win would prolong the game. Right now you are penalized for participation by nerfing your tokens/hour gains.

'[The main argument against gay-marriage] always revolves around ... "the gay agenda"... Apparently all these gays only want to get married so they can adopt children, turn the children gay (probably using their mystic gay voodoo, passed gayly down from one gay generation to the next), and perpetuate their gayness.'
-- rantingkitten

 

Lookit

That seems to be somewhat like "BG's are an unfun necessity, so the way to improve them is to make sure I never have to play a game for longer than 20 minutes." While most players would definitely appreciate such a timer, I think the ideal solution would be to make BG's enjoyable to the point that players enjoy the time they spend playing.

 

Aphyrax

Make them competitive. Everything else is just icing.

I would be happy to trade AV, WSG, EoTS and any future BG they might add for AB with arena style ranking and honor acquisition.

 

Sedina

Honestly, the only BG that really needs a timer is WSG. All of the others are usually going to end after 30 minutes max spent in there, with the exception of Alterac, which can vary so much from 10-15 mins to 2 hours or more, which is fine for a BG the size and scope of AV.

WSG itself, put a timer on it, say 30 mins. Team with most flag captures at the end of 30 minutes wins, or first team to capture 3 flags.

I myself usually tend to only go to WSG if I need the tokens, and then only if it's WSG weekend, otherwise I avoid the place like the plague. Spent far too many nights in that place for hours in a game, because a team with 5 healers is sitting in thier Graveyard with the flag, with little attempt to get back the opposing teams flag.


The ideas for AB seem interesting, but I'm really not for the PVE combat mobs in an AB. If I want that, off to AV I go.

 

Lookit

There are two possible approaches that I see to giving an arena style ranking to AB (to use your example):

1) Each player has a personal rating. Wins increase your rating and losses decrease it. Teams are averaged by their ranking (just like Halo 2) so that losing to a team of all 1500-rated players would cost more points than losing to a team of three 1300-ranked players and 12 1700-rated players. The obvious drawback to this is that if you PuG you are somewhat at the mercy of the RNG in deciding if your teammates suck or not. Sure, the system could attempt to match only players with similar rankings, but there will still be frustrating times when your team blows and there isn't much you can do about it. The bright side to this is that with ranked matches, people would try harder to win (one hopes) and thereby the overall average caliber of AB pugs would steadily improve.

2) You must form teams, similar to the arena. The major drawback to this is that what makes BG's as popular as they are is mainly their accessibility. It is the one group activity that you can just log in and immediately participate in without spending large amounts of time forming your own group.

The obvious compromise I guess is to have personal ratings, which then encourages serious players to always play in pre-mades. There will be complaints about "Now I *have* to group up if I want to succeed, I loved BG's because I could solo queue!" but overall they will perhaps just have to deal.

 

Aphyrax

As I said in the other thread, the solution is simple. Keep the current BGs but also make team based BGs where you have to have a BG team and get honor based on your end-of-week rating. Honor is awarded every week instead of daily. If your solo BG honor exceeds the team BG honor then you get that. Otherwise you get the team honor. You never get both.

That way, nobody is forced to group and nobody is forced to PuG. You can chose to grind it out or you can do it arena style.

 

• Juice

Turn in your balls at the next substation.

Am I the only guy who joins BG to punch people in the junk? Win or lose, my fist is going to ram it's way into someone's junk, and it's going to bring a smile to my face. I don't get the whole: Join game, see we're losing, stand and do nothing until the next game crap. Maybe it's because I don't play with a TV next to me or something.

I think BGs are fun right now, but clearly variety is the spice of life. Switch starting positions in AV (suggested a hundred times by others), put in ridiculous power ups ala quake on special weekends, add cannons like the darkmoon faire one in Shatt right now that allow you to launch yourself into enemy territory.

All sorts of fun shit Blizzard could do to spice it up.

 

• sadris

I play Unreal Tournament. CTF is pretty fun. CTF for 2 hours isn't.

Similarly, WSG for 2 hours isn't fun.

 

Nite_Moogle

CTF is lots of fun for a lot more than 2 hours at a time -- as long as you change the map. I suspect the lack of variance in maps is more than a bit of what causes boredom.

 

Elendril

I don't think the BGs themselves are massively flawed - it's the honor reward structure that is the problem. Competitive BGs are some of the most fun I've had in WoW - I participated in the BG9 WSG league pre-TBC, and I did tons of preform AB and even AV back when those were popular. The problem is that I can queue up with a team for WSG or AB and all I'll face is pugs, and it will be a complete slaughter and not at all enjoyable. If there were legitimately competitive BGs - if I could queue with a team and reasonably expect to do something other than steamroll people grinding for marks one at a time to get their PVP gear - I'd play BGs all the time. I don't think WSG or AB are really fundamentally flawed - I *love* two hour WSG games, so long as they're that way because of still competition and not just incompetant pugs on both sides who refuse to leave the roof. Case in point - one of the most fun BGs I ever played, back from the BG9 WSG league:



Ranked WSG/AB with any sort of rewards - be it gear, tabards, titles, mounts, whatever - is really all that is needed to reinvigorate BG PVP, as far as I'm concerned.

 

s[orc]ery

if only there were custom maps for WoW bg's

i always thought they could modify an actual bg and make it a theme for whatever brewfest/festivus seasonal event they have going on. Snowballing in AV was a perfect example of this.

 

heel

Alterac Valley is awesome.

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Maynard

Competitive BGs back in the day were fantastic. While I never grinded GM myself (I was alliance at the time), I was often invited along to the premades of players grinding GM, and when the dice landed properly and you faced an equal team it was a lot of fun. Lots of advanced strategy often went on - forming an all-stealth flag recovery team on WSG, or playing divide and conquer on AB. As Elindril said there is nothing fundamentally wrong with any battleground, with the possible exception of GY turtling on WSG.

More maps would certainly not go astray, but further developments to their matchup system will probably fix 90% of the issues.

 

Lookit

That's great. How would you improve it?

 

Whiteknight

The biggest problem with BGs is you get rewarded for losing. This has always been a major issue - you can lose *very* fast if you put your mind to it. There are many examples of inversion where your honor/hour is higher if you lose on purpose than if you play to win. This is why so many people simply don't care or put in any effort.

One of the main things they got right with Arenas is you lose something you actually care about (rating) for losing the game.


The best approach to making BGs fun is to change the scoring system to something very similar to Arenas - you have a guild/team rating and you get honor at the end of the week based on your rating. If you lose a BG your rating goes *DOWN*. It could be adjusted to work for PUGs by using a personal/average rating matching system or whatever, but the key is if you lose, your benefit is negative.

The next significant improvement would be matching players/groups of similar skill. The single biggest improvement in this area is to simply stop matching PUGs with teams. Change the user interface so that Join-as-a-group requires a full group, and you get no pickups if people drop. And make the games separate pools - PUGs never get matched against group games.
All the rest is gravy - matching folk with similar ratings in groups and such.


As to the Dailies, I don't see why PvP dailies should reward honor. I'm pretty sure if the PvP dailies gave, say 12g for winning WSG, there'd be a lot of people interested. Or maybe give gold and honor.

 

Narkan

Not being forced to endlessly grind the same out dated battlegrounds for gear, so that you don't even want to play battlegrounds for fun would probably be a pretty good idea.

 

Efreet

Well making a ranked AV would probably be too cumbersome to accomplish, unless you had entire guilds devoted to this sort of PvP, as you tend to just get a random mass of zerglings/hydralisks with the occasional ultralisk tossed in to spice up the fun. Perhaps revert everyone to "hated" but not hostile to the actual faction and make rewards at each ranking above from there, or introducing a different reputation system with something along these lines. Remove the IBS questline and all meaningless NPCs, introducing a new fortress where these were before, with reputation gains coming for defending said fortresses or capturing them, but gaining no reputation for not being present at said locales. I realize reputation grinds aren't fun, so make it more interesting, make it possible to lose reputation for losing objectives or for not being amongst the top 5 in damage/healing/damage taken or some such.

 

Bnol

The BGs are old. They should invest some time to make some new maps, even if they have the same game. And I liked the idea of different rule sets, but I would think it would be difficult to implement and would have a lot of problems with queuing and matching people up. I mean right now queue times are good, and it took a long time for it to get that way.

Really another CTF map, maybe completely indoor with lots of various rooms and pathways, or the flip side larger and allow the flag carrier to mount, maybe get some teleporters involved. Then add another capture and hold, maybe have a set-up where nodes are weighted differently to add a bit of strategy. That would really bring some change to the BGs, and then when we get tired of those there will still be the old ones.

I wouldn't switch honor over to an arena like system, I like being able to get a piece every couple days, and really the BGs and honor are tailored to the casual player, and I doubt they will change that. However, I do think they should adjust the honor you get from winning and losing a match, and they could lower the honor per kill, to encourage people to want to win, instead of HK farm. They also need to adjust the BGs bonus honor to bring it closer to AV or to reduce the honor AV gives (maybe because I hate AV and if I wanted to do basic PVE the whole rest of the game is available). I would prefer the former, so that I can still get decent honor gains, while doing a BG I can tolerate.

 

Symbul

One of the big factors of how BGs end up being so un-fun is that they're a part of this massive grind that we're forced to do. 70.000+ honor for a Season's worth of gear - this number can get much higher - is f*cking shit. Earning 1k honor per hour this will take you, and I know this comes as a shock, 70 hours. 3 days /played. That alone is a huge disincentive to starting. Might as well throw some popsicles into the ocean to keep the icecaps from melting, right? (No, let's not get into a discussion on global warming)

Whiteknight: I get what you're proposing but that's just so far from what the majority of the people in the BGs are after (those people being the pugs we like to rant about). They would hate it, and wouldn't play. Another thing to note is that the BGs are a starting point for PvPing. A player won't succeed in an Arena with a team in greens. But he can play BGs and inevitably be rewarded for just being there even if he doesn't do well, and get some gear so he can make progress in Arenas.

A seperate system for grouping where skill really matters and honor gain is accelerated would be great though. AB and WSG aren't bad BGs by themselves (EotS and AV are). A competitive system can be enough by itself to rekindle some interest in BGs.

Honor for winning(/losing) non-AV BGs needs to go up. Winning them in 25+mins isn't competitive with even losing AV most of the time. But honor for kills absolutely shouldn't go down. It's already down to almost nothing after it's divided between all the puggies leeching off my awesomeness. 20 honor doesn't add up very fast when you're splitting it between at least 7 people (at a contested AB node for example).

 

Efreet

How is AV bad by default? I can see that EotS is mostly just regurgitation of previous concepts, but AV is more a victim of the system than anything else. The base idea of 40 on 40 combat is interesting in and of itself, adding objectives and capture-able graveyards and making a boss character at the end to make your team win are not bad concepts. You could make the players start in a central location very close to each other in order to force competitive combat, but apart from the start locations I can't see why initially AV is "bad." Yes, honor farming and/or doing the same strategy over and over and over is dull and uninteresting, but that applies to the entire game, its not really fair to single out AV, when there are alternative measures to make it more interesting set in place that the battlegroup crowd is unwilling to organize to do in most situations. A specific server - server BG would be nice to solve the unorganized mass problems, or at least increase your familiarity with both your opponents and your teammates.

 

Redpath

I like those ideas. The Arena aspect of WoW is pretty much the focal point of "complete balanced, competitive e-sport" type of mentality, battlegrounds taking a different direction (even if only once a week) would be healthy for it.

 

Grogzor

Dynamic Environments could make it more interesting. Like in WSG, the longer the match goes the more lightning comes striking down from the sky and if you happen to get hit by it it would do like 1-2k damage or something.

Imagine if you will a WSG sized match with a hill that tapers up and your side gets points the longer more people on this hill that are alive. So ten people alive on the hill gives you X points over Y seconds. Now as the time goes on (lets say over 20 minutes) a lake of lava slowly creeps up the hill forcing you into a smaller and smaller fighting zone. When the lava gets to the top the match is done and whoever has the most points wins.

Fun = Fast + Dynamic + Clear Oriented Goal + Mass Killings

For me anyway, WSG is fun...if you ignore the whole Flag thing. AB is NOT fun because half the time you are standing around defending a place that isn't being attacked. AV not really fun because either you don't really fight anyone or if you are, it makes it a hassle to get anywhere near your Clear Defined Goal.

But when it comes time for me to remove your wings, and you, you must try to fly...

Click Here to see what makes me tic(k).

What Are You Going to Roll for Warhammer Online?

 

Symbul

That's where we disagree. I think that's bad. It used to play like it was "40v40 combat" and it sucked even more than now. Rushing to kill some boring PvE mobs (as Horde this is even worse because you have to kill 37 pointless mobs in DB) is also bad BG gameplay.

What fun I do have in AV is when I actively go against my better judgement and farm kills in the middle(ish), sometimes with my 5s team.

 

Efreet

Well, I can see where the mass of random people standing back and taking pot shots at the other side while 2 or 3 people charge in and get massacred is unappealing so I suppose an overall terrain change would be called for to lower the concentration in the early stages of the game, with the "paths" eventually converging on a central locale. This would probably function better in an "Assault or Defend" style instead of an "Assault and Defend" style. Even so, this is still just a tendency of a general mass, not an overall incompatibility of the game with large scale combat, so I'm thinking even a minor terrain fix not splitting the population would work decently provided you were functioning with premades/semi-intelligent PvPers. Of course, a few Protection warriors charging in and popping shield wall will still reign supreme for fun purposes!