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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

I would have the game use less resources in AV, allowing for smoother streaming of The Office.

In all seriousness, I don't think that there is much of a problem with battlegrounds. The problem is with the honor system. Absolutely nothing is fun the thousandth time you do it, especially if you feel as though you are forced. There's this situation where arenas are really just spectacular, a great system with very broad appeal. And in order to really compete in arenas, you need to do battlegrounds, which maybe aren't as fun. And the requirements are such that you can't just do one battleground, or ten, or twenty - no, you have to do three hundred. There's a word for something repetitive that you do just so you can do something else later that's more fun. That word is "work". Battlegrounds are work, because the arena system is so awesome. Ninety percent of the time that I feel like pvping, I want to do arenas, and battlegrounds are mandatory bullshit that happen to be the price of admission. Now, the other ten percent of the time, when battleground play might be what I'm looking for, I'm in no mood to do them because of the other ninety percent of the time when those same battlegrounds were work.

It doesn't matter how neat or innovative or fun the battlegrounds themselves are, unless they eclipse arenas in general fun level (which will not happen). As long as huge amounts of battleground play is required for arena play, and as long as arena play is generally preferred to battleground play, battlegrounds will be work, psychologically and in actuality. I hope that all this is clear. This is really basic human nature. The battlegrounds themselves aren't the problem. The problem is the honor system, and all that system encompasses.

How to fix the honor system? Hm, well, how about an application of the same principles that were applied to make other areas of the game so great? What's that?

Did someone say independent paths of parallel advancement?
What about a system of scheduled incentives to disincentivize grinds?
What about regular release of new content?
How about some unique and flavorful items and events?
And so on.

All of this is undoubtably up on a whiteboard or a plaque or a giant stone tablet somewhere at Blizzard HQ. If you step back and really look at the game, this stuff is World of Warcraft 101. The one and only thing that has to happen to "make BGs fun" is for WoW's very talented designers to rip the honor system apart and apply the basics that are already a part of just about every other aspect of the game. I have no doubt that it will happen - eventually. Until it does, though, battlegrounds aren't WoW. They're work. I will continue to catch up on reruns while I stand in the tunnel in AV and not feel bad about it at all.

I should have been more specific in the OP - I meant that players would simply queue for "AB" and then when enough players were found to start the game, the gametype would be randomly decided. Players would not know which variant they were playing until they zoned into AB, at which point the ruleset would be announced in both /bg chat and in a /rw "center of screen" message. In other words, similar to Halo 2's matchmaking system. This way there is no direct effect on queue times.


And to Heel, it sounds to me like you choose AV because it is the best honor per hour of the BG's, and then you AFK in it because it is so repetitive and lacks the dynamic of actual PvP. As an example of how little actual PvP occurs in AV, my rogue is exalted probably 3 times over with AV, and yet only has 4,000 lifetime HK's.

To me, the solution would be to make a BG where actual PvP combat is the focus be the one that yields the best honor. Imagine a 10v10 Annihilation BG, where the first team to score 200 HK's is the winner. Honor is based on healing & damage done - would you AFK then? Or would you be in the thick of battle trying to maximize your honor per hour, and having fun to boot?

Blizzard has played it very conservatively with the BG's, focusing on "purity" rather than variety. But now with the addition of the arena, I think they can loosen up a bit with the BG's and start trying new things since the arena is now the venue for "pure" PvP. The BG system is stale, but it also no longer has the constraints it used to because of being the "sole" source of competitive PvP in WoW. If you want a fun and relaxed PvP experience, queue for a BG; if you want a hardcore essential experience, queue for the arena.

The only way they could make the BGs fun is to increase the amount of honor received. Grinding honor, especially if you need 3 sets of gear, is absolutely NO FUN.

I personally believe that much like the kara ring, we should be able to trade our gear for the equivalent gear when we respec.

IE: If I am feral and have a S2 feral set and Veteran's feral set, for a small price I should be able to trade my gear for a S2 resto set and Veteran's resto set.

The BGs are boring and repetitous, much like instances and grinding them for gear is what is making the BGs no fun.

The major problem seems to be gear and the lack thereof. Teams that win in the arena and in the BGs are usually the ones with the best gear.

Grinding BGs for honor is silly simply because some of us have a life and can't spend 12 hours a day grinding honor. If gear was easier to obtain for those who can not grind so often, that would make the game as a whole more enjoyable.

I play WOW simply for small PVP groups (WSG for example and the arena). What I don't like are large BGs like AV and EoS where for the most part you as a player are ganged upon by 4+ players and have no fighting chance to survive.

That's game mechanics though and I have the choice of not playing them. In fact, the only reason I play ANY BGs whatsoever is for the honor and marks so I can get my pvp gear.