heel

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.

 

Lookit

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.

 

Silver_Surfer

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.

 

Lookit

This is very similar to the first response in the thread - "BG's are boring, so the only way to improve them is to lessen the amount of time I must spend doing them".

I just don't think it has to be that way. Millions of hours are spent playing PvP games purely for fun; no one plays TF2 because they have to. How can Blizzard make WoW pvp more like that?

 

Silver_Surfer

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.

 

AriasImmortal

What if they changed it so instead of queuing up for a specific battleground, you queued up for the game type? And each game type could be fit into any of the existing maps? Would that be enough variety to make BGs fun again?

So if you queue up for CTF, you could potentially end up playing CTF in EoTS, AB, WSG, or perhaps even AV (though AV is significantly larger than the other ones). So while you're still playing CTF, you at least have different maps to choose from.

Modes would be CTF, Node Capture (ala AB, EotS), and perhaps Deathmatch, first team to a certain number of HKs wins. That way you can pick the game style you enjoy most and not be stuck with the same map over and over and over.

**edit** I'm not entirely sure what you'd do about honor returns, but I'd certainly have more fun playing different things on different maps than the same exact shit we've had for years.

 

Lookit

I agree. Here is something I posted in a different thread a couple weeks ago:


I think that in addition to making improvements to the BG's themselves, it's important to have a certain baseline viability available to all players. 4k honor dailies would have done this, and so would lowering the cost of honor gear. If the idea is to make games competitive, equal footing must be provided. That obviously goes against the entire foundation of an MMO, so the compromise is making honor gear readily available and leaving arena gear (perhaps including 'retired' arena gear that becomes available for purchase with honor points like S1) as the reward for the more dedicated player.

I don't see who loses out when the playing field is more level - players with currently below-average gear are no longer cannon-fodder, players with currently above average gear no longer steamroll the majority of opponents.

The most fundamental rule of competitive play, whether it is basketball, chess, or Counterstrike, is that an evenly matched opponent provides the most satisfying experience. WoW's battleground system currently eschews that most basic of principles, and I don't think it has to.

 

lazerpewpew

It is mostly the same thing with arena too.

In BG, you get far fewer (1 token as compared to 3 tokens, far fewer bonus honor points) "objectives" for losing the BG. you can still get the reward that you are going after, it is just taking a lot longer.

Same thing with arena. You can still get that arena reward you are going after, it is just taking a lot longer if your rating is 1400 not 2000.

Personally I think this system is excellent. It provides incentives for people to compete and win, and it doesn't penalize the loser too much.

 

Lookit

Yeah, regardless of whether you are queuing for a specific map and the gametype is randomly chosen, or vice versa, the end result is to play new things on different maps instead of the same thing we've been playing for years.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

The honor from the non-av battlegrounds is being increased in 2.3, it's in the patch notes. I have no idea how much though, does anyone have the numbers?



Well if you take a look at the loot acquisition of everything besides battlegrounds it comes down to the following:

Be pro, surround yourself with pros, and you'll get a lot of loot and get it very quickly


As a guild we raid 7 hours a week and come out with a truckload of epics. In arena at 2k rating you get an epic about every other week for just about an hour of play. Both provide a challenging experience in addition to being rewarding

In battlegrounds this is thrown out the window. The challenge is never right since you're not matched against equal opponents, and the rate at which you're rewarded doesn't change much depending on how well you play and who you team with

 

lazerpewpew

People often compare arena system to BG system, and praise arena system as great.

I don't understand, what is so different from BG and an arena? For both, you have an objective. In BG(excluding AV, which is more like a pve instance than pvp), it is either node taking or CTF; in arena, it is death match. And you have a very limited number of maps you play on in both arena and BG system. Both depend on the gears a lot. Arena has a much better matching system, so you don't end up banging your head against a wall all the time.

Are they so different after all?

Personally, the most fun I had in BG was in pre-TBC after AB just came out, and our guild team often had to battle other guild teams to "farm" reputations.

To Lord BEEF:

Yes I agree arena matching system is superb. And the length of the game is so much shorter it makes game fun and not-so-stressful as you are going to need tons of redbull as FC in the 2hours WSG.

(Sorry, can not stop making fun of the epic WSG matches)

And yes, 2 hours WSG sucks.

 

Silver_Surfer

That's another thing. The honor in AB and WSG suck for the amount of time you spend in them. If I didn't need the marks, I wouldn't even go in them at all.

 

Lookit

Yes, they are extremely different.

In the arena, you are *punished* for losing. You lose rating. You do not simply get a third of the reward you would have gotten for a win.

In BG's, if you lose, you still get honor. You still get a token. Combined with how stale and old the BG's are to most players, it creates apathy. Who cares about trying your hardest and winning when you can get almost as much honor for losing? Tokens don't even matter - by the time you have enough honor for a piece of gear, you'll have more than enough tokens even if you lost every match.


The other key difference between BG's and arena is that arena is pure, undistilled PvP combat. Combat in WoW has tremendous depth - there are numerous strategies to use, and in a well-played match you are forced to constantly make game-changing decisions. Furthermore, you know that if there are 2 of you, there will be 2 opponents, no more and no less.

BG's have none of this.

AV is PvE of the most basic type - it's essentially two separate tank & spank instances, with "victory" going to the side that completes it first.

AB is 75% standing around guarding a stupid pole, waiting for someone to attack. When there is combat, it's usually not decided by who plays the best, but by who happens to have 4 people and who happens to have 2 people with them at the moment.

WSG is either sitting in your base waiting for attackers, or running from one end of the map to the other, with some combat mainly occuring in the middle of the map.


This applies mainly to Pugs, where there is usually not an overall cohesive strategy. Playing in a pre-made is a blast, but queueing solo is pretty much as described above.

 

• Nisu

On this topic, one way to do that would be to reduce the honor cost of the blue pvp sets, and keep them available alongside Gladiator gear. Set them to maybe 5k honor per piece, maybe even less, such that in say 2 weeks of casual BGing (say an hour a day), you can get a decent starting pvp kit to cover slots. On that same level, the Terokkar and Halaa items are a good idea, but who on earth thought it would be smart to make them iLvL 100 epics? You can armory me, and see I've got a basic PvP kit together without any honor epics, but imagine how much better it would be if I my helm/legs were iLvL 115 blues, and I could afford say the blue pvp gloves/ring easily?

edit: this is in conjunction with making it possible to spend arena points on the epic honor pieces, so people gearing or those on low ranked teams can do BGs to supplement their PvP kit without forcing those who don't need to be in BGs to go there.

 

Aphyrax

Well said. I would take it a step further. Anything where time invested is the primary or even exclusive driver of success (where success could be rating, epics or anything else) sucks and has no place in a modern MMO. This is not 1999. I expect better than an EQ 1 for my dollars.

If I were a game designer and had my customers describe major parts of my game as a "grind" I would cringe.

 

telcontar

I think the general consensus is that Arenas are pretty cool and Battlegrounds (as they currently stand) are not. What makes Arenas cool?

1) The "grind" is kept to 2 hours (10 games) a week. This can be divided into very small chunks of 10 minutes at a time. Everything past this only nets you more rewards based on your skill.

2) You are matched up evenly in Arenas. For all the complaints about Rock/Paper/Scissors in 2v2, it is fairly balanced. You will be going up against the same number of players, who have a similar win-loss ratio. If they are stronger than you, you will get more for winning and lose less if you lose.

Compare this to Battlegrounds:

1) The grind is unlimited.

2) You might meet players with T6 who just went 10-0 in their last 10 games, while you went 0-10 in your 70 blues. The skirmishes within battlegrounds tend to be unbalanced in numbers, with the victory going to the side with numbers.


I love the OP suggestions for new battlegrounds and adding new games to the old ones. However, there are only 3 arena maps and you play the same game on each. On paper that sounds really boring, but in practice, it has been pretty successful.

 

Lookit

I think that is because the Arena strips away all the superflous stuff (flags, cap points, NPC's) and leaves everything to the actual combat itself. Each class has dozens of abilities, 3 fairly different talent trees out of which many combinations are possible, and many different possible strategies.

There are only so many ways you can make clicking a flagpole exciting. The biggest reason Battlegrounds get so boring in my mind is because the focus is taken off actual PvP combat. In every BG, killing your opponent is a secondary objective.

I think it's actually quite a waste for Blizzard to have created such a compelling array of classes and abilities, only to shy away from making all-out carnage the goal of any of the BG's.

 

Reubarb

Make Badges of Justice purchasable by Marks/Honor. It'll show a good blend between PVE and PVP and let those of us who have been capped, well, forever, get something for PvPing although we already have 75k honor.

 

Efreet

This is an okay idear, but it'll just make heroics even more dead than they are now. Primal Nethers are becoming more and more useless, and now badges are gainable through ZA and Karazhan, and a great number of badges at that. There are only a few drops which seem to have no alternate equally accessible drops such as the Fel Barrier, but badges becoming purchasable will kill them for all except those strange people that can find 4 friends to make a guild with, but can't find 9, but even they will just have to grind for a bit in BGs to get gear.

 

Ngita

Guilds dont exactly form perfect 10 man groups all available at say 7:30 either, Heroics will still be run , But primal nethers are indeed rapidly approaching their end of usefulness as 90% of the nether based gear is replacable through honor or badges. The heroic quests should be enough to keep heroics in use.

When the honor system came out I swiftly decided that if i tried for the rank reward it would become not fun. I had allready got my 1st 60 Av exalted and then not played a single AV for 6 months becasue I had become so sick of it. It was obvious to me that the rewards werent worth the time invested if I stil wanted to enjoy battlegounds.

Despite that somehow with Season 3 approaching the feeling has developed that we must have that 15 ilvl increase in every slot and we all need to grind that 85k honor or whatever is needed.

A few games a week in battlegrouds with friends is fun, Grinding out 85+ hours every 4 months is not.

Their are a few things that would breath a bit of fresh air into bg's, probably the foremost is allowing the starting positions to be randomly swapped. But no battleground should ever come to the point its a complete stalemate and people should have the feeling they can allways contribute. That one of things that ruined AV for me in its first few months, Our method of winning was mainly to keep playing till enough opposition logged off and went to bed or stopped contributing that we could get the win.

 

Efreet

Oh I know that "10 people" can't necessarily do Karazhan without some sort of Cookie Cutter, I was just saying that if you can make it to 70 there's no way you're "too casual" to do Karazhan, or alternatively Zul'Aman. Unless you really can't stomach X person or your guild isn't content with being unambitious by mission statement (as opposed to the random BS new guilds put forth like "we want to make progress and be significant on our server"), you should be able to get 10 legitimate people who will come online 2 or 3 times a week, maybe you need 15 to get a full clear every week. People will still run heroics for badges between runs, but I imagine they'll eventually figure out 75 Badges = 20-30 heroics or alternatively 5-10 Karazhans and ZA's and most will probably just give up on the badge grind through heroics.

There are some times you just can't contribute that much to the team. As a protection warrior in BGs getting more gear for arenas (for arms obviously), the most I could ever do is shield wall and hold off a mass number of people for a short time, or carry the flag instead of a druid (and do quite well). I'm generally better served by running away from solo fights unless its a warrior or a rogue, simply because I'm almost certain to lose and I'd be serving the team better by protecting a point in dire straits or some such.

I can tank in AV, but so can anyone else and my disarming the mob for some other tank who's recently taunted off me without a second thought is probably more useful than me tanking it in the first place. I have tanked 90% of the elites in a single BG before, and I suppose that makes me more useful than most anyone else, but its fairly tiresome and dull over time compared to going around with a 2 hander and demolishing people. WSG stalemates are much more dull than AV stalemates in my opinion.

 

Neeklus

People enter the BG's for different reason's of course, mainly these days for honor gains. What I really miss though is the actual player versus player element. Long before the honor system came in people would battle daily at southshore and tarren mill purely for the fun of it. Indeed when AV came matches could last hours and you could rack up hundreds, thousands of kills.

Perhaps an inefficient means of gaining gear it was still hella fun. I am always secretly happen when someone takes Snowfall during AV now (I am horde) simply because the match isn't going to be some boring race between 80 people to see who can kill the same NPC's faster than the other.

I miss just killing people, heh. I miss standoff's between 40 people as they both vie for mere yards of ground.

Anyway, how I'd improve BGs would be to impose a time limit on WSG for starters. This could either be a total timelimit or have the flags on a timer whereby if they are not returned after say 5 minutes, they are automatically returned to their bases.

AV - kill off the leachers, make it more pvp orientated.

Really like the idea of having rankings and such, though I would be reluctant to see so many premades as we used to do in the old honor grind.

 

Bnol

A lot of people are talking about what makes the BGs not fun, which is the grind. But obviously it is a grind. or work because the BGs are not inherently fun. If they were fun, you wouldn't care how many times you did them, you would just want to do more like Arenas.

I really agree that a lot of what makes Arena fun is just the deathmatch gameplay, and the fact there are no other objectives than killing the opponent. Another draw is the quick games, which they could do for a BGs as well (granted not to the extent of Arenas, but the games could ba a bit shorter). Another big thing is the competitive aspect of the arenas. I really think they could heighten the competitive nature of the BGs by giving a lot bigger rewards for winning and possibly reduce/remove the gains you get even if you lose.

They could easily make a 10-man BG where you just fight in a pit (or something closed like the arenas) and rack up points for your side however long you stay alive in the pit or maybe make it an HK race. Or have a king of the hill type match, and the longer you stay on the hill the further away you rez (to try to balance things out and allow the opposing side to catch up).

The BGs can be fun, I have had many fun BG experiences in almost all of the BGs (although the most fun AV experiences are actually pvping and not getting objectives). Yes anything that is repetitive gets boring after a while, but there are many suggestions to spice up the BGs so that they can be fun again.

 

Neeklus

There is a flip side to this coin. For some people, especially those just starting out in the arena, it can be incredibly frustrating. Considering it costs gold (albeit a small stipend), and is very...unbalanced in certain aspects (2vs2 especially) it is very disheartening to play and see your rating go up a fraction when you beat a team and go down massively when you get owned.

This has probably more to do with the rating system but I personally find it deplorable that I can gain so little after 10 wins and then lose it all in 5 losses. Fair enough, if I'm getting beaten by lower ranked people I should lose more than I gain if I am beating low ranked people. This is fine, all is equal, cats and dogs living together etc etc.

What isn't equal is when I'm paired against people in full s2 who have just started a new team for the crack of it, or want to beef up a pal's arena rating. This is especially pronounced in 5vs5 I think. Every other rated match my team faces in this bracket is against people vastly out-gearing us. Ergo it's frustrating, we all get pissed off with each other and we wonder why we waste our time. The strong get stronger, and the weak just get owned. Dull.

BG's offer us an almost unbeatable solution to this simply because if we win, we gain, if we lose we gain. I do agree it creates a sense of apathy, but that's probably because the rewards aren't worthwhile anymore.

Perhaps by looking at what other games are doing we can see what would improve the BG's. I think it would be good for each player to have a personal BG record. In this record we can see their best moments (such as most healed, most HK's, most KB's etc), along with accurate notes on winning streaks etc. Perhaps an honor bonus could be applied to people who break their records? The longer your winning streak, the more bonus honor you get. This could be tied into a more global record (on the armory or something) akin to the arena rankings.

Team Fortress 2 has instituted this sort of approach whereby you are set mini goals and notified when you beat your previous records.

Ultimately it will be down to the players. Some will still see it as a grind to grind. Some won't give a damn about beating records. But I do think many will see it as a positive change. We all like having goals and we all like fulfilling them. At the moment the only goal anyone cares about in BG's is reaching that glorious 70k honor cap.

 

telcontar

Definitely! Saying that "the grind" is the problem isn't right. While Blizzard could just give us all the honor rewards for free and solve the boringness of BGs, it wouldn't be a very good solution.

I agree with quick games/competition. I'm not so sure that Deathmatch is the best format. I actually think that side objectives are really interesting. They allow for a meta-game to go on, beyond the tactical skirmishes that break out.

I believe that Battlegrounds have the potential to be more interesting and complex than Arenas. It's a shame it's not this way right now. Seems to me that 1) Creating a league and 2) Giving out Arena points for league teams would tap into the creativity of the playerbase.