Elendril

See, a lot of people are saying this and ignoring what I think is a key issue here. The fact that the BG grind exists - players feeling like they are forced to play BGs to get the PVP gear for arenas - means that there are more players who are playing not because they want to, but because they have to. As I've mentioned many times before, I played tons of BGs pre-TBC for *fun*, and they were fun then, and it's not some massive flaw in their design that has lead to them being unfun now. It is the fact that I feel forced to play them so much that leads to my frustration and boredom, and the fact that the BGs are filled with people in a similar mindset - whether AFK'ers or people saying "just lose fast so we can get our marks" in BG chat.

If there weren't honor gear, I'd still do BGs, and I'm sure lots of people would as well, because there was still a lot of BG activity before the big 2.0 honor change when very few people could realistically see any rewards. I'd do them less, but I'd be doing them because I *want* to do them, and I certainly wouldn't AFK or even half-ass my participation. The same could be said of BGs having a way to gain rewards that wasn't based on pure grinding - like a rated league - or even just reducing the grind to a managable and distributed level while encouraging winning - like a high-value daily quest.

So yes, reducing the grind *will* make BGs fun again for a lot of people. Even something that's fun gets boring the hundredth time you're forced to do it.

 

Keline

When they announced that the daily quest will only give 400 honor on monday (last AV Weekend) I AFKed through AV for 6 hours because I was so pissed. I've never AFKed in AV before, probably earning around 400 marks in it. This was the last time I could get decent honor from it, so I certainly didn't feel like passing on it - however I also wasn't in the mood to play after having played so much AV during the weekend already.

I don't think the BGs can be made fun anymore currently. They're all more than 2 years old (EOTS doesn't count because nobody likes it to begin with in my pvppool), they just need to get over it and delete them and replace them with new BGs with NEW ideas.

 

Efreet

I think this is more a case of you personally getting bored with your class in 10 man + PvP combat, not an inherent flaw in the game. Yes, you can overplay BGs until they're boring as hell, but you don't have to and you should just as well get bored doing the same instance over and over, the only thing that seems to consistently stay interesting no matter how much you do of it is arenas, but to make BGs ranked would seriously screw casuals/new people. They could come out with 3 or 4 more BGs, and delete the ones we have now, but you'd probably be bored of them in a couple of months anywho.

 

Elendril

See, that's actually the point - if you want to get the honor reward gear, you *DO* have to overplay battlegrounds well beyond the point of boredom. And to do it as efficiently as possible, you have to play the same battleground over and over in the same weekend.

My vision for fixing BGs involves a 1k or so honor BG daily quest along with a ranked BG option - matching premade teams against each other for weekly/monthly honor rewards/titles/whatever. The dailies would drive people to the different battlegrounds with the desire to win, giving them incentive to play on a regular basis and spread things out rather than the mind numbing monotony of bonus honor weekends, while the ranked BGs would revitalize competitive BG play among competitive players. Everyone wins.

 

Efreet

I don't contend that 1k honor would be nice so AV specifically doesn't get overplayed and the other BGs are played for more than just marks and on their respective weekends. But that doesn't mean you can't spread out your accruement of gear over the entire season, you having minus 1 or 2 boots (like back a season or two) will not harm you that much, and for S2 in particular, you had 5 months to get your veteran gear, you didn't have to get it in the first week, you don't have to play one BG over and over and over in a short span in order to make sure you have maximal gear.

PvP (and PvE too, though that's unrelated) is more skill based than gear based (I mean, there is a gear wall, its just not so unscalable that you not having 2 or 3 pieces from the current season will screw you over, albeit missing 7 or 8 pieces probably will, but skill/not having the right combination will doom you much worse than that), as long as you have some sort of "resilience" extraneous slots, you should be fine regardless of what season they come from.

In other words, spread out your grinds or you will burnout yourself or take a borderline illegal measure to improve your gear. I suppose if competitive BGs didn't offer more rewards other than titles/mounts/tabards it wouldn't really mess up casuals, so it'd be okay in that sense.

 

Zaphid

Arenas are fun because you have to seriously cooperate with your mates. BGs don't force you to do anything, you get honor even if you just run forward and press 2 buttons (leave AFKing out for now). They should promote class balance for BGs, so we don't get teams like 5 warlocks, 2 rogues and 3 warrior. I've been playing a lot of Quake Wars lately and i really like the secondary objective system, example:

Healer running around the middle of WSG, when your FC gets out of the enemy base, a window pops out saying: "Heal FC to full, you get 20 honor". For dps it could be: "kill player xxx who is attacking your FC, kill enemy FC etc etc."

It would definitely keep your attention and it would also result in overall honor gain increase and more coordinated games.

 

◊ Lord BEEF

Should battleground weekends even really exist anymore?

When you think about it, they were put in place when battlegrounds were single server, and done to get people to play a battleground that was otherwise going unused since the player pool was such that you could really only get one or two AVs, OR a few warsongs.

With battlegroups there are enough players that you can get into any type you want.

I think getting rid of weekends entirely, making that level of bonus honor be the standard, and putting higher bonus on dailies is the way to go until a full overhaul can be made with the next expansion

 

• alcaras

I'd love to see the honor earnings rate of nerf of December 2006 undone.

As for 'arena charters' (or something similar) for rated BGs, I'd be against it. Quoting myself from Making Arenas More Popular / Alcaras' Blog / Subcreation
Summary: I'd rather see automatic arranged teams rankings based on who you play with, rather than forcing you to limit who you can play with. (I'd love for this to be the case in arena, but if rated BGs come out, their larger size really makes me not want to see fixed team rosters).

--

Edit: I should also add that the grind is pretty terrible if you've switched mains and are trying to gear up a fresh 70 for arena play. I'm currently going through this and am just suffering in pain... heck, I'd love for an arena->honor point conversion, because typically there's an overflow of arena points at the end of the season, and I'm really tired of the existing battlegrounds as it is. The worst part is that currently, AV is better honor/hour than anything else available solo, even if doesn't bother to kill anyone.

And it's comparative honor/hour to a full 15 man premade in AB/EotS since the new matching system means you're more likely to run into another premade, which does not make for quick wins, but instead just drags out the games (and makes them more challenging and fun, which I enjoy), but the honor reward doesn't scale correspondingly with the difficulty of the battle. It's always bittersweet to come out of an exciting premade v. premade 25 minute down to the wire AB and then realize that I could have gotten more honor in AV in that time. It's even worse in WSG on the weekend, since WSG can last well past any point of efficiency.

I'd love to see some sort of higher honor reward for 'tough fights' between premades, but I don't want to see charters for BG teams because I think it would limit their appeal and restrict who people can play with. Thus the chunk of my 'arranged teams' in WoW idea above.

--

Edit 2: I'd love to see rested honor as well. I was so happy when I thought the daily was 4000 honor per day, because it meant I would do a battleground until I won it and have a solid chunk of honor without too much stress. I could get more if desired, but that low-hanging fruit was very appealing. The 400 honor as is nice, but not enough to really make that much of a dent in the massive grind (it only works out to 2800 honor/week,
which is currently about 3 hours of AVfk).

--

Edit 3: I am curious what will be the most efficient honor/hour come 2.3, since as I understand it AV took some serious nerfs in honor/hour. Anyone have any concrete information on that topic?

 

Siddown

I think another good idea would be to have like Rested Honor, much like Rested XP. The dilemma I believe Blizzard is faced with is that they have no system expect for Time = Epics to prevent people from having every single Honor item within a week.

Say if you got quadruple the honor for the first one or two wins for each BG a day, then just normal after that. So if you really wanted an item you could still grind it out, but it'd also not "force" people to have to spend so many hours in BGs to compete. It's still take weeks to get your Bracers, Boots and Belt, but the number of hours would be greatly reduced, leaving time to do other things.

I don't think the BGs themselves are that flawed (although I know many that would argue that EoTS is), people just don't like playing them for 20+ hrs a week.

 

◊ Anias

The honor system is horribly mistuned compared to other content in TBC.

The queue structure that discourages or eliminates future developement is out of wack.
Time investment --> Reward is incorrect.
Rate at which returns are made on Time investment in a single session is erronious.


There are almost more things wrong with the battleground system than I can reasonably go into in a single post and hope to hold my audience's attention.

Let's hit the big three, and acknowledge that there are plenty of other problems.

First, the queue structure.

Right now you queue for a specific map. This is horrid. By queueing for a specific map, you inherently split the queues every time you want to add a new map. Change this to queueing for a type of gameplay, or to queueing for a size of gameplay - playtesting can tell you which works better - but the "queue for a map" has to go. Otherwise we will never see regular support of battlegrounds in the form of new maps. It would be completely reasonable to queue for CTF/Assault/Control/Campaign (using the TF2 Definitions) or for 10/15/20/40. This is a required change so that queue times stay low and variety can be added back to battlegrounds. If you like bgs, this is a very important issue and you should be pushing for this before you complain about the afk syndrome.


Secondly the Time investment.

The time it takes to aquire 200 000 honor, and what you get for 200 000 honor makes the honor grind one of the least rewarding in terms of actual upgraded ability per hour spent in wow. A large reason why players AFK is because it is giganticly more valuable to them to sleep through a cave loss and save themselves days of play in a repetitive enviroment that is best played in marathon sessions (on holiday weekends) in a supremely non-wow manner. The BG grind reminds me more of lineage (this is not a good thing) than wow. This isn't even addressing the opportunity cost from spending that much time in AV. (Another large reason for AFKing your way to honor - there's a lot of _fun_ things to do in wow that you give up chances to do to play AV). Many players feel their time is better spent on google for 15 minutes to figure out how to afk while they sleep, and then running a friend through steam vaults, than killing off the guards at iceblood. Can you gainsay them?

Running a full karazhan clear - almost certainly an epic for each player in the raid or a void crystal, all of which are going to be higher stats than the honor kit, takes a undergeared raid group 2 days with say 3 hours each night at it. Just a general estimate. You don't get nearly as much out of 6 hours of battlegrounds. Episodic battlegrounds is a laughable concept - they're pure grinds at the moment.

Lastly the rate of honor gains.

Lots of people looked at a 4k honor daily with some shock. I thought it was absolutely the best idea blizzard had had for honor in a _long_ time. At 4k honor/day, it will take the average player 50 days of play to cap out a season. Most of the non-hardcore (so most players) will do this over the course of far more than 50 contiguous days. Assuming the daily quest itself isn't a freebie (so no "zone into blah blah" quests, something like "win" or "control 4 points") you can reasonably expect the average player to take 3 to 4 games at 10-20 minutes each to knock it out, with some unfortunates having very long games or missing a daily here and there. That's a fine timetable.

If the players want to push on beyond that, at 250 honor a game, they can. They're not incentivized to though, so it's not "I should bot if I want to do this the most efficient way I can". If they prefer to just wait for tommorrow, they can do that too - and they recieve a slight reward in that overall it will take them less time played to knock out their honor commitments. If they want to queue their alt up and do his daily, great. By having a "one a day" honor reward that is signifigant, you pull people away from the marathon grind sessions that make bg's unfun and in turn drive them to bot them. Instead you give them a reason to play hard, and hopefully they'll have fun when it's a game with meaning as opposed to just another game in the endless sea of games that day.

Make no mistake - the players will game the system, so having a system which is optimally played in long stretches will force the players that don't have the intestinal fortitude to camp it out at the computer to teach their computer/cat/wife to do it for them. I think that's generally bad for the game. Personally, I wouldn't mind playing a set of 2 hours in wsg a day over playing 38 hours of av on a "weekend". This would also help queues for battlegrounds during the middle of the week, and would help draw the time investment-->reward ratio back towards competitive with the other options available.

In closing, I sincerely hope to hear more from blizzard regarding changes to their battleground system. I enjoy objective driven pvp. I don't enjoy blizzard's system for it.

Math is very easy, explaining math is quite difficult.

 

diotox

Something I would like to see is some kind of in-game indication that there is diminishing returns on honor from kills. One of the most frustrating things for me in BGs is watching people camp the zone-in graveyard in AB, or the graveyard in WSG, because they are "farming HKs." Sure, some of these people do it for amusement, knowing full well they don't get the full honor for each time they kill those rezzers. But a lot of others genuinely think they are boosting their overall honor income doing this, and it drives me crazy. And I'm not talking about massively one sided blowout games like 5 caps in AB, I'm talking about games that are a 3 node to 2 node game and people are sitting at the zone in fighting. That's just idiotic, and I may be naive for thinking that these people are just ignorant of diminishing returns on kills rather than doing it for fun, but damn. I'd be happy with any kind of indication of diminishing returns at this point.

 

Obligatory

I think a distinction needs to be made here: BGs are fun, the honor grind is not.

Personally, I've felt that the biggest problem with the current honor grind is that it encourages players to be ruthlessly efficient at gaining honor points. This results in chronic afking (right now, it really only happens in AV, but with blizzard gutting the honor gain of AV next patch, I'd expect to see it happening a lot in the other BGs as well), groups calling for their team to "hurry up and lose" because quick losses are more efficient than slow wins, etc.

The biggest problem is that competition is completely discouraged. Do you play defense in AV? Most of your team probably hates you, because you slow down their honor gains. When running an honor farming group, it is much better to scout games and afk out against any organized groups, because you will get more honor that way. And so on.

And yet, as the arena proves, competitive PvP matches are highly enjoyable. The current honor system is flawed because it actively discourages having fun. This isn't just some minor problem with the rate of honor gain, it is a fundamental flaw with the entire freaking system.

Honestly, I think the solution will have to involve some sort of rating system for battlegrounds. Personally, I favor BG teams, but something like what alcaras suggested would work fine as well. There will also have to be some re-working of other things (I think that they would probably have to re-tune all of the maps for one team size and just have a single BG queue in order to make queue times tolerable). But the core of the fix will have to include a system that promotes competition and rewards skill.

 

PSokar

I couldn't agree more. The occasional BG with friends can be fun. I however, spent countless hours in AV to get 75k honor for S3, and it was not fun.

When I saw that they were giving 2,000 honor for the daily pvp quests I thought two things. This is to good to be true, and man this is great. The BG's have been around for quite a long time and the "fix" of simply not requiring players to spend so much time in them was ingenious. I do not have a real strong opinion as to what the "ideal" honor to play time ratio should be, but I feel that the current 750-1500 is incredibly too low.

This was brought up a few posts ago as well, but can anybody really make the argument that the best way to get honor is to que with a small group with the intention of playing your best? I know in AV I hang out in the back field looking to pick off the 21 honor wandering alliance. All my friends afk. While I know nobody who scouts, it sounds like it could be effective.

I often feel like I am discouraged from playing intelligently (defending) as a healer (or dps really) because there is so much honor to be had from being near dying alliance.

Here is what I am suggesting.
-Remove honorable kill honor.
-Change the way honor is rewarded so that an intense 30 minute 1950/2000 AB earns the same amount of honor a 2000/0 blowout awards.
-Change the rate of honor gain so that it is much higher than it currently is.

 

Lookit

I'm not sure what you mean by the second suggestion. Just to clarify, are you saying that a team that loses a close match 1950/2000 should get the same amount of honor as a team that wins 2000/0? Since teams are awarded 20 honor for each 200 resources they acquire, I think that if you add in the bonus honor from HK's (which I realize you are suggesting be removed as well) the former would probably get more honor in the current system.


I like the idea of more PvP dailies. Picture being able to log in and do the following:

1) The "BG of the Day" daily, for 400 bonus honor (and some gold, which is nice)
2) A Halaa Daily (Capture/Successfully defend the town to complete the quest) for another 400 bonus honor. (This could be rotated with quests for the other world pvp objectives like HFC, Zangarmarsh, etc, or there could be dailies for each one.)
3) A "World PvP" daily, where you must get 10 (or more?) honorable kills in the day's randomly selected Outland zone. Another 400 bonus honor.

Players could log in and get a nice chunk of honor this way without having to queue up for AV ad nauseum. World PvP is reinvigorated. Most importantly, players are rewarded for steady and consistent play over time rather than marathon AV-weekend binges.

 

PSokar

I guess I was a bit vague. What I was trying to get at is make the amount of honor gained more of a function of time spent in the BG, instead of farming efficiency. Right now pre-mades that scout to avoid any challenge are the quickest way to farm honor. They shouldn't be rewarded for that (and in a way pugs are randomly "punished" by facing them).

Probably the worst possible way to gain honor currently is to have a close AB game; its almost as if a good game is just an opportunity lost. I guess the system would look something like this. Base of 25 honor per minute when inside the BG; bonus 5 honor per minute (30) if your team is in the lead. I haven't really thought out how exactly it would work, but I hope what I meant is more clear.

I also really like the idea of more PvP dailies. Not a huge fan of world pvp, but I do like honor, and some people seem to like world pvp a lot. Sounds like everybody could win.

 

panny

I posted this in the 2.3 discussion thread about BG dailies:

One thing i liked while leveling my alt were the Battlegrounds quests. For example, when you hit Revered (I think it was), there was a quest to cap all five nodes in a single AB game. I'm really surprised that they don't make these daily quests.

They could, for example, have three BG quests per day. One for getting any win, one for a significant win (4 node captures/only 1 opposing flag cap/etc), and one for a "perfect" game, all for the same BG in a single day. Then you'd get alot of people actually attempting to play well.

You could have different levels of rewards for the quests too. For example,

Easy win: 600 honour
Good win: 400 honour
Perfect win: 300 honour with extra marks/gold/potions.

You could even attach vanity items are a reward for the perfect win (tabards/mounts/titles/etc). Or letting the perfect win act as a gateway to purchase items for cheap (5% discount voucher for honour gear). The rewards decrease slightly as you go up to reduce the disparity between haves and have-nots.

The good players would quickly accomplish all their quests, before stopping (to get the most efficient honour/time). The less skilled/geared people would quite quickly get their easy win, but would have to keep playing (and trying to play well) to get the other quests competed. As time progresses, the better PvPers stop playing as they accomplish their goals, leaving the dregs to continue trying to get that overwhelming victory. Essentially, it would be a self balancing skill system.

This encourages people to play, not just to win, but win well. It has the benefits of encouraging people to play more than once to keep trying to complete all their quests, but discourages farming at the same time.

As a last point: my friend that quit WoW mentions that he misses AB most of all and regularly comes into my room to watch me play. The battlegrounds themselves are mostly fine, it's the honour system that needs work.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

Zanath

Battlegrounds aren't "fun" for two reasons. The battlegrounds are stale and the play experince in the BGs aren't "fun". I really think that the grind aspect of the current honor system is what birngs down the battlegrounds as a whole thought. It has been mentioned earlier, but the current honor system requires a huge time investment to get gear that makes one somewhat competitive.

I've had the recent experience of leveling and bringing to BGs a newly 70 mage alt. It has been both fun and terrible. The trip to 70 and instances at 70 prepare no new player for pvp. Entering a BG "fresh off the boat" one is ill prepared and unequiped. It is not much fun to battle players who have twice as much health with half the damage. Now this would not be nearly a problem if players were able to gear up to relative parity quickly, but this is just not the case. This makes BG into a long and extended pain, where one is, as another poster earlier put it, cannon fodder. This is no fun and has no place in WoW. This is what makes the grind so painful. When one only needs honor for 2-3 pieces it isn't too bad, but for an entire set?

This could be fixed rather easily I think. Make the honor gain quicker or put true pvp items into pve instances. For example, maybe I could go trade my kara helm token in for s1 pvp helm?

 

Lookit

Wouldn't that simply encourage people to queue up and sit around for hours, jumping every few minutes while watching TV?

I can't really think of many things that would do more to promote AFKing than that.

 

Silver_Surfer

Absolutely, positively, PREMADES needs to be banned. Nothing worse than not being able to form a premade than to be facing one and get ZERO honor.

It's bad enough we have to grind honor, even worse when you face premades all day and hardly receive any. ZIP, ZERO, NADA for AB and WSG.

And people wonder why the honor grind sucks?

Get no honor all day fighting in PUGS and it's pretty easy to realize why....

 

Silver_Surfer

I also think you should be able to switch your Arena Gear and PVP rewards if you respec. For instance I have a complete S2 Feral Set and Veteran's gear. Now I am resto for my arena team and guild and that gear is worthless.

I think we should be able to pay 100 gold and swap our gear to whatever spec we change to. At least that way we don't have to grind 3 freaking sets of arena and veteran's gear.

 

Silver_Surfer

Oh and one other thing.

Screw the "Report player AFK" button. Flat out in AV if they don't engage in combat (be it healing or damage) within 5 minutes of the game starting, automatically mark them AFK until they do. In AB and WSG, the time would be 2 minutes.

It solves the problems of "players" having the responsibility of reporting people AFK and putting it on the game itself. Half the time I am too busy fighting to notice who is AFK. (Mainly because we're fighting premades and getting our butts handed to us).

 

panny

People have already posted saying that they do enjoy BGs so stop spouting your opinions as if they're gospel thanks.

Fix Spirit Wolves not responding to commands.
DK/Rogue

 

Obligatory

Was going through my old screenshots when I came across this one. This was one of two WSG matches that we played against the (then) top guild on stormscale. I can't find the SS for the second one, but I remember it being a much closer 3-2 game that lasted over an hour. I'm sure any serious PvPer can dig up a few screenshots like this (or at least memories of the actual battles). These were the fights that most PvPers hoped for when they queued up, a chance to really test your skill and teamwork. Who cares if it took an hour to win, because you were having a blast for that entire hour.

I don't think I've had even 1/10th as much fun in a battleground since BC came out. Premade vs. Pug is only fun if you find entertaining distractions (playing stupid songs on vent whenever you 5-cap in AB was a common one for us) and Pug vs. Pug is just an exercise in frustration.

Anyway, I was thinking about a solution a bit more, and it hit me: What if blizzard were to award, say, triple the honor for games in which two organized groups faced each other? I don't think it would completely solve the problem, but it would be a nice stopgap fix imo.

 

Carbide

I've seen a lot of comments about TF2 in this thread but didn't see (or at least dozed off and missed) someone mentioning something that TF2 has done well: the game rewards momentum. In TF2, dropped flags don't return to the flag room for 30 or 40 seconds, capture progress is not interrupted when it is stopped, it just starts counting down, and that sort of thing. The WoW battlegrounds do the opposite, it rewards stonewalling and turtling. Two easy changes could make the actual gameplay of the existing battlegrounds much more enjoyable.

-Flags in WSG/EotS return to their starting point after a predetermined amount of time. This way the defense must deny ground, it would produce a more dynamic defense, and help avoid turtles.

-Capture progress for Bunkers/Graveyards/etc is not eliminated on successful defense. Instead, count down the progress after the defense of a point. It forces the defense to be much more coordinated and rewards a persistent offense.

Making it so that offensive momentum is encouraged instead of easily broken would lead to faster games that would feel much more energetic and lively. These little changes in TF2 from the orthodox approach to FPS design took an already solid game design and really, really made it tremendous fun. I think it would have an equally invigorating effect on the BGs.

 

Melador

Fundamentally, they need to decouple Arenas and BGs. Get all the people out of BGs that only are doing it so that they can Arena competitively. Then you're left with only the people that want to be in BGs. See what they want, and go from there.

Of course, at this point, with how interrelated the rewards are, that's pretty much an impossibility.

But yes, as others have said, it kills me that I have -- at best -- a 70 hour grind to do to get gear for Arena per character per role. I'd like to Arena competitively with my rogue, and as moonkin in a 5v5 team. But that's 140 hours or more of grinding BGs that I absolutely despise. That's ridiculous.

Heel put it most succinctly earlier in the thread: BGs are work, pure and simple, because people feel forced to do them so that they can Arena.