Exactly. I actually think they should consider bumping up the number of badges available from some of the Heroics to encourage people to run them more often, since it has worked incredibly well with KZ. I'm not getting Season 1 gear because its better than the rest of my gear, because it isn't better. I'm getting it only for my druid, and I'm getting it to have a PvP Resto set (I'm Feral).

The problem is people are using BGs to get the gear to do heroics. Mindlessly running BGs for Kara-level gear is easier than running regular SV/BM/Arc/Mech/Bot for lesser quality gear. No waiting around for hours "LF Tank & Healer", only to find you tank isn't a tank, your healer is ret/shadow/feral, and the DPS is in S1 gear and can't control their aggro.

Hell, I'm seeing people with 7K health and zero resilience in Arenas. S2 gear is pretty cheap, even at 200 points a week.

There's no massive farming (e.g. herbs/enchants/reagents/etc) requirements for BGs. No requirement to be there for 4-6 hours per night for 4 nights a week. No massive repair bills for dying. No experience necessary, nothing. Just show up, and (in my battlegroup) grind out X EotS/AB/WSG games for tokens, and (Item Honor Cost/300) AV games for honor.

In my opinion, the problem is trying and losing nets the same as not trying and losing. So many people are just not trying. Give them a reason to PvP, and they will PvP. But as long as honor farming & not trying has the same rate of return as trying, expect honor farming and wretched battlegrounds.

Now that you can get punished for AFKing in BGs, hopefully they will continue to refine it and move onto the other top issues. The ones I can see are:

1) The honor grind sucks
2) Two teams playing at equal levels of each other are punished
2b) Premade queue skipping

1) The honor grind sucks
As everyone has provided the numbers for this. To go from zero to hero via BGs only takes a lot of time. I don't think it should be quite as easy as some people suggest, but the current pace is quite slow.

One solution I think would be to make the old level 70 blue PVP gear easily available in drop form. Have it drop from Drek and Vann? Make a new BG daily give out a random piece of level 70 PVP gear? Regardless of how they do it, the PVP blues aren't really that fantastic, but I could see it helping a lot with new blood trying to get into the Arena. And the level 70 PVP gear is hardly powerful in terms of PVE, so the PVE/PVP balance should not be upset.

Another solution would be to make the PVP gear available in more than one manner. One would be the current 10 token, 20X6 honor cost right now, as well as say, a 50 token with half the honor cost method.

2) Two teams playing at equal levels of each other are punished
2b) Premade queue skipping
There's no reason to ever try to play a competetive game other than for the sport of it. And most people playing are really going for max honor/hour ratio. But why should two teams playing a good game be gaining honor slower than a a premade who cross queues to avoid playing other premades? All it does is encourage a total bulldozing of pug groups to maximize honor gains as well as making PMs cross queue to avoid ever playing a competative game.

There should be a distinct difference between 2000-0 steamrolled game and 2000-1980 boy that was a close game. There should be a distinct difference between 3-0 but the other team had 30 flag returns than a 3-0 the other team just rolled over and died.

One halfbaked idea I had would be to give the winners bonus honor equal to what the current weekend BG bonus is. The losers would get a prorated honor bonus based on how much they "won" the game. So if you had 2/3 flag caps in WSG, you'd get 2/3 of the winning honor, while winners enjoy a full "bonus weekend" honor. And then of course, they'd tweak the bonus honor weekends to give additional honor.

I despise the people who go "Hurry up and lose the game so I can go get some honor" as much as the people who just AFK bot, but they do bring a valid point: there's no point in trying if it looks like you'll lose since you get nothing out of it. Always making a prize be available would help alleviate this attitude.

To solve the premade queue skipping, while mostly a symptom of bad honor rewards for equally matched games, perhaps make the queues for premades all linked to the leader. So the leader queues everyone for a game, as well as makes everyone join a game instead of individual people getting to go in and scout.

The BG punishment thread mentioned a matchmaking idea that I would like to poke at too. Instead of a rated arena style thing, how about just making each player have 4 additional ratings for each of the BGs. It starts the same as arena: everyone starts at 1500 and you gain or lose points based on a win/loss. The difference is how it's used. When you queue into a BG, the matchmaking systems references your rating rather than the highest ilevel of your gear, so it'll look for members and try to grab people so that the average rating of the teams are equal. This would make the games more fun since they're more evenly matched. It'd have to come in at the same time as the fix for punishing two equally matched teams for playing a good game of course.

End wall of text.

Copy pasted from my post in the AFK thread.

I want to see some kind of ranked battleground system. I would love it so that you can either queue solo and grind your way up, as it is now, with say the average honor from pugging any battleground being buffed to be between 1-2k an hour, and the competitive, ranked battlegrounds, where you play 10 games a week and get say, 10k honor with a 1500 rating. For Johnny Retard, the time investment would be about the same either way, but the more hardcore pvpers would gain gear at a faster rate. It's not like this would be particularly overpowered, given the fact that the majority of PvP gear is two seasons behind already, and there'd still be the whole token grind thing to contend with.

This would take care of so many issues in one fell swoop, including the whole premade versus pug thing. Obviously some of the battlegrounds would have to be tweaked for this, and honor/token costs would have to be adjusted somewhat, but I know that playing competitively with 14 (or 9) other players in battlegrounds would be a ton of fun compared to the long, hard slog that it is now.

This is actually almost exactly how it works now. In AB and EotS, you get honor for every 200 resources that you accumulate, so there is a big difference between losing 2000-0 and 2000-1800. In AV, I've seen the losing team earn the same amount of bonus honor as the winning team, due to the number of towers and GY's they had control of at the end. In WSG, you get honor for each flag capture, so losing 3-0 is zero bonus honor while losing 3-2 still gets you some.

I would personally like to see an increase in honor per game done on an increasing returns basis.
e.g. first 200 EotS points = 20 honor, next 200 EotS points gets 30 honor, next 200 points gets 40 honor etc.

I'm not sure if it will actually wor but the increase in honor means that a well faught game will pay of relatively well compared to a quick AV game (maybe 300 honor per side on average) and it should reward the team that goes down fighting moreso than the one that rolls over and dies straight away. Increased honor gains also make the honor grind (and it is a huge annoying grind) far less painful and speeds things up for teams (or individuals) that are prepared to do well.

This is especially the case during WSG weekend where it's currently much better honor to lose 3-0 fast than it is to slug it out and lose 3-1 over 30 mins which tends to cause players to just give up quickly when the think a long match is likely.

All I need is a timer on WSG and an option to never face a preform, ever. It makes half my team go afk.

The problem with ranked WSG/AB is that they are horrendously imbalanced, WSG expecially. If they made some rated WSG's, expect some cheese teams the likes of which you never even imagined before - literally a shitload of PI priests to keep the flag carrier up, a bunch of pom pyro mages to blow up the flag carrier, and maybe one warrior to put MS on. It would literally become a completely retarded game of turtling.

I guess I must be in the minority, because I actually think the current battlegrounds, with the exception of the new AV, are fun. I like WSG- an evenly matched pug v. pug WSG or a premade v. premade WSG is a great time. What makes the battlegrounds "unfun" for me is when they are horribly unbalanced games or your side is filled with folks who don't know the objectives or are horribly undergeared.

It is no fun to go into any of these on a premade team and steamroll a pug. It just isn't. Likewise, it is no fun entering a battleground and facing a coordinated premade when your team consists of a PUG composed of newly dinged 70's in of the monkey and of the sorcerer greens doing the daily quest. But the games themselves are fun. There are definite strategies, definite objectives, and when you do it right, it is a blast.

I think many people are falsely conflating the amount of honor required to purchase gear with whether the battleground itself is fun. My own personal solution would be to increase the honor gains (or reduce the honor required to purchase gear) and remove group queues. IMO, the battlegrounds themselves are fun, though. I love doing a couple BG's right after raiding, and I do it just for fun. No other reason at this point, as I am almost honor capped and have everything I could want to purchase anyway.

The problem you'll find is that the more you reward losing, the less incentive there is to win. If someone can sit afk (assuming they aren't deterred by the prospect of being banned and stripped of honor gear) and get virtually the same amount of honor as if they had won, while their team struggles to a near victory, then they will.

I like the idea of rewarding hard-fought close matches, but it's a difficult balancing act between doing that and incentivising losing.

Just to restate, my fear is that if you get nearly the same reward for getting 1700 resources as you would for actually winning, then who cares about winning? Might as well just half-ass your way to the epics.

I'd like to say that BGs are generally fun (imo), its really fun to unwind and just crack a few skulls after a nice raid. What I really object to is the honor grind that is really really really unfun, boring, unimaginative which is probably why the incentive to AFK is so strong, especially since about 150 resilience is really nice to have when starting arena. Whether it's required I'm not so sure but I can say that as a warrior I can really notice the difference between smashing a 0 resilience target and a S1 geared target.

Lookit: I think it's not so much about how much you get compared to fighting and losing by a small margin that determines BG participation, but it's when you can lose fast and earn more/the same as you do with fighting a close game and winning (which is the case at the moment, especially in WSG weekend) that you create an environment that favours AFK leeching behaviour. If you get almost the same honor for losing 2000-1750 as you do for winning, but you get a much smaller amount (see my post above) for losing 2000-100 then it should at least encourage people to fight and win a lot more since there is a honor incentive for doing so. Best outcome will be that it actually encourages people to raise their game - AV is a prime example where IMO the general community has improved its tactics a lot since the great zerg days.

Just pointing out something...

But nearly all suggestions done in here boil down to pretty much one thing:
The honour costs for gear are too high.

There's precious few people suggesting any actual changes to the battlegrounds themselves. Only to the cost of items, or the honour gain from the BGs.

Might it not just simply be that Blizzard got the actual BGs themselves 'pretty much right' ?

One of my first posts here on the forum, I hope it hasn't been covered.

With the knowledge that at the very least we will be getting 1 new battleground with the next expansion (whenever they decide to release that), there are some improvements myself and guildmates have talked about. Implementing a new items rewards system based upon damage done/effective healing/killing blows in either arena or battlegrounds (preferably both in some form) could be a good way to bring more players back into the game, and also keep afkers from being rewarded.

I think these 2 ideas appeal to me the most. Have the honor gained on a curve related to the level of that match. A game filled with players in the 1500ish ratings bracket would award 200 honor for a win while a game filled with players in the 2000 rating bracket would earn 450 for a win. This way there's more incentive to play well than just for being paired up with better players.

As for your second point, you could simply have rated Battlegrounds. You would be awarded arena points and not honor points. This way there's no barriers to entry on BGs, but they have a second level of difficulty.

In terms of adding appeal to the same old crap we run over and over, something even as simple as several different sets of skins could go a long way. EoS could have one map in its current Netherstorm theme, one map with an Azshara theme, a map with a Winterspring theme etc. Wouldn't really take long for the devs to create, add mountains on the sides of the map instead of Twisting Nether, replace Outland themed structures with ones more suited to those zones... you get the idea.

One of the main things that needs to be done is to retune ALL of them BGs to award similar honor/hour for PuGs. Maybe they only away you 167 honor for winning AB since premades can steamroll it in 5 minutes? Who cares though, they shouldn't be balancing it around that. If an AB win was worth maybe 350 honor, it would be far more in line with AV. And so what if a premade could farm several thousand honor per hour? That's the benefit of grouping up. Blizzard has made it abundantly clear with the Arena points ratios and raid zones that the more people you have organized together, the better your rewards should be. BGs should be the same.

Finally... please let us queue with groups of 5 or 10 into AV. It's fun playing with your buddies in there and defending bunkers/whatever.

Both of you make very valid points.

Heroic gear gets entirely DE'd these days almost without exception. Some of the end boss epics are alright, that's about it. However, I am a big fan of the Badge of Justice mechanic that they've implemented and do agree that heroics need to award more badges. Running 15-20 heroics just to buy the new epic legs is a little ridiculous, let alone all the other new badge gear introduced.

I'd say the easiest solution is simply make all heroics timed. Completing it slowly nets you the same badges as it would now. Completing it within the time frame spawns a chest when you kill the final boss. The chest has epics which range from Karazhan ilevel to ZA/Badge ilevel as well as having 5 badges in the chest. Maybe some monetary rewards as well since farming instances is no longer really a profitable use of time like it used to be back in 1.0. It should be challenging enough so that a Kara/Badge geared group can accomplish the task if they work efficiently.

Think along the lines of the timed Shattered Halls event except the executioner at the end would drop 5 badges instead of 1 and there would be a chest behind him with some honest to god useful loot.

I'm not saying to necessarily reward losing, but just to not penalize trying to win when the game looks like it's not going in your favor. Currently, to gain honor, it goes something like:
Winning fast > Losing fast > Winning a close game > Losing a close game


I'd like to see winning always provide more honor than losing. The whole attitude of "let's just lose fast so I can get my bonus honor" is absolutely appalling. This would need to be implemented at the same time as a fix for matchmaking so that premades don't get to cherry pick pugs to steamroll so as not to totally discourage pugs from playing.

Honor costs may be too high, but that's just one of the issues at hand. The BGs are more or less ok, but the way people are playing them is not: Losing fast gives you better rewards than winning close games. Premades who cherry pick games for pugs are rewarded, while the people who join their abandoned games are punished. If you made the honor cost free, these problems would still remain and you rarely would get good games in BGs.

Actually, now that I think about it, I don't think its the honor cost that's necessarily too high, but the entry barrier. If you had full S2 stuff when upgrading to S3(even though that really doesn't give you much), sure it'd take you 78094 honor for the belts/boots/bracers/ring/necklace, but you could easily accumulate that from the previous season. I wouldn't mind seeing it lower, but its not that far out of line. I'd say the problem is for new players to the PVP game.

I think the BGs themselves are fine (with perhaps the exception of WSG's potential to go on forever), but they're getting real stale. We've been doing these for years now, and even EotS is getting tiresome.

Blizzard's afraid of the damage a new BG might do to queue times. But they never mention the possibility of new maps for pre-existing BGs. Rather than queue up for a place, queue up for a ruleset: CTF, Land Grab, EotS Hybrid or "Warzones" like AV. We still have four queues, and the maps should be something easily put in every new season or patch. They had no issue churning out maps for their RTS games (War3 has quite a library), so I don't understand the reluctance to do it for WoW.

Both my 70s are Alliance, so I'm used to seeing the battlegrounds from that perspective.

Leveling up a Blood Elf mage to 29 and hopping into AB was mind-blowing for me. After playing a few games, it became clear that the Horde has a superior starting point relative to Alliance. The path to the blacksmith (the most important node) is shorter and more linear.

Now I hardly think this is a decisive factor in most games, but it makes Alliance pugs shy away from contesting the blacksmith, which is a serious error in my eyes. The central GY is advantageous for quick zerg switches or moving defense around.

Both Horde and Alliance complain about being shafted on AV from time to time.

To remedy this, I would like to see randomized starting locations.

Let's not go over this again, please?
Yes, BS is a bit farther away for Alliance, but at level 70 it's about one second. Which is, by the way, the same time advantage Alliance has on tagging stables compared to Horde tagging farm.
Yes, at levels < 60 or even <40 this is longer due to no (epic) riding available, but still not gamebreaking.

BTW: I'd love to check how much time a smart alliance druid would take to get to BS. By jumping across half the river and then switching to seal form and then to travel form I bet he could get there quite a bit faster. Same may be true for shaman and water walking now that I think about it or anybody willing to chug a faster swimming potion.

If this is the *sole* reason to not go for BS, nobody will be able to help the Alliance.

I think this idea is something most posters here have come up by themselves and it has been posted many times also. But I can understand why Blizzard hasn't done it yet and that they're probably reluctant to do it.

I'm basically just arguing this because I can, not because I care, but the horde do have "significant" advantage in AB. It's just the kind of "significant" advantage that doesn't matter at lower levels of skill. If AB ever became as competitive as arena is now you can bet alliance are going to bitch with a vengeance over their start and with good reason. Farm->BS->LM is the best 3 nodes to hold and it's much easier for horde to hold them than alliance. But as I said it's mostly academic to point it out at the moment because the skill level in AB is not high enough for it to really become much of a factor.

It really depends on how you look at it:

Killing 1 player 10 times is worth ~115 honor. You get nothing more for killing a player 11+ times. So there is a hard-cap of 4600 honor for killing all 40 members of the opposing faction 10+ times.

On the other hand, TWO tower caps are 60x2 honor (IIRC, 3 kills), for a total of 120 honor. Compound this with the fact that the honor for objectives are not split among players, that's 4800 honor. 9600 for 4 tower caps.

So either the honor costs are too high, or the objective of battlegrounds is completely skewed.

So we need to ask the fundamental question: "What is the purpose of Battlegrounds?"

- Player vs. Player? DR and less honor for kills than objectives makes this unlikely.
- PvE? Why have the opposing faction in the "battleground"
- Just a time sink for no purpose, other than countless hours farming so you can do the enjoyable activities? This seems to be where Blizzard is heading. But do they want it that way?

Yesterday I tried doing the daily (EotS) on my mage. 4k honor later I gave up. Every game was a premade. With my whooping 50 resilience I was unable to get into a decent premade myself, so the whole thing was just an exercise in futility. Luckily AV queues are back down to 25-30 minutes for Horde on BG9, which is why I walked away with decent honor.

I have come to the realization that before doing anything else, Blizzard must address the premade vs PuG issue. I cannot believe that after such a long time the situation is still so bad. How much longer can you frustrate the casual gamer who is unable or unwilling to join a premade by making him lose literally 95% of all games?