diospadre

Alliance not queueing is based on thousands of games, of which I play an extremely small percentage. My behavior will have no noticeable effect whatsoever on the queueing of alliance as a whole on my battlegroups, so it is in my own best interest that every game i play in rewards me the maximum possible honor.

 

Kasi

Not really. Battlegrounds are fluid things and has been shown on this thread and in others, there is definite meta games that form on different battlegroups. You have battlegroups where certain strategies hold that are never used on other battlegroups. Like the poster earlier here who said that on their EU battlegroup, taking IBGY is frowned upon and going for FW right off the bat is the preferred behaviour. This is much different from my BG, where going for IBGY and Galv first is considered the best bet.

This makes sense because as people see one strategy working for them, as they zone into new BGs they work towards that strategy again. They see it work again, it spreads some more, and eventually everyone is doing it. And as the case in BGs 5 and 9, horde have very much seized upon the winning strategy of defend IB GY heavily and take SH and then force alliance into a 0 bonus honor game north of Icewing bunker. The strategy is very hard for alliance to counter due to the imbalanced nature of the center of the map.

Add in there that EJ is a very famous guild and anyone from top guilds promoting strategy in BGs will be followed because of their fame. This is shown quite easily by Gurg leading and organizing the AVs he plays in. So what you guys have done is promoted a winning strategy that seizes the central map imbalances and used them to create crushing wins for horde. I can only chuckle as that has in fact lowered your honor because your strat makes it pointless for alliance to zone in and has lengthened your queue times to huge values. Not many people are going to zone in to get 40 bonus honor and 60 from kills. So yes you and others like you are definitely responsible for the queueing of alliance on your bgs. Eventually it will get to the point where all you will fight is a few die hards, some clueless newbs, and afk'ers and it will continue until Blizzard fixes the map. Makes me very thankful that horde on my BG is happy to participate in the rush where they will still win 60% of the time, but at 400-300 lead in bonus honor and over in 15 minutes tops.

 

nataku

Which is fine, horde are entitled to play as they so choose. The horde on BG9 used to be notorious afk'ers in AV when they had instant queues, which created terrible play habits from Alliance pugs in the battlegroup as it allowed mindless zerging to Drek for fast games.

The situation is reversed now, as alliance have instant queues for all battlegrounds and the Horde must optimize their time in AV as they get to sit through 20-30 minute queues for their next game. Unfortunate, but if the horde puts up any type of resistance, the alliance offensive push sputters easily unless decent players and composition make it into that AV.

Thankfully, I can group queue with 2-3 people in WSG this past weekend and still get ~2k honor per hour since horde pugs there weren't as organized/geared/good.

 

Kasi

Simple fact, if you make the battleground unprofitable to zone in, players won't zone in. Our bg still has under 1 minute queue times for AV during the week, and horde now seem to glorify in winning the zerg 400-300 in 12 minute AVs. Smart move on their part, since getting 350-400 honor 5 times an hour beats getting 650-700 once.

 

Sando

This seems like a very circular argument. Since you win and keep alliance to 0 bonus honor, alliance have stopped queueing. Now since they've stopped queueing you have a long queue wait time, so you need to maximise your bonus honor, which means keeping Alliance to as close to 0 points as possible, thus making more alliance people fed up and stop queueing.

 

• Juice

I don't buy any claim that one side is smarter or less pubbie than the other. When the Alliance was dominating AVs on my BG (Mal Ganis) it was due to map design. Now that Horde is dominating AVs, it's due to map design. While there may be ways for each side to play brilliantly, the side most condusive to brilliant play from the pubbie scrum is the side which will win the most often. Right now we seem to be at a 80-90% horde win rate in the prime time games in which I participate. We only lose when we refuse to play defense. If I can muster 10 or 15 people at the Iceblood chokepoint, we will win. That's really the only challenge - get 10 or 15 people on defense standing like a wall at that point and we win because everything else falls into place (our towers stand, galv typically survives, SH/Icewing burn, Balinda dies, etc). Alliance are toying with different ways to overcome the challenge, from defending SH GY harshly to trying to zerg past IB GY - but it hasn't really taken hold yet in our BG.

As Gurg indicated, I think alliance has to put their attention on defending SH GY. If you defend that point you'll have nearby reinforcements and you'll be able to defend Balinda and recap SH bunker easily when the initial push is put down. Even if you never get IB GY (which is clearly easier to defend than SH GY, just like SP GY is easier to defend than FW GY - and the shift is that now SP GY matters less than SH GY so the balance of the map has shifted to Horde favor, imo) you can now play on even reinforcement footing. Beat the horde man on man, and you'll win the race. Get them to get sloppy and you can take advantage of it and break past the IB chokepoint and route them.

I think it comes down to where the battle is now won or lost. Back when alliance won more than it lost in my BG, it was due to our inability to capture SP GY and the comparative difficulty in defending FW GY or our base. Now the games are often won before SP GY is capped, so the defensive advantage doesn't matter in nearly as many games.

 

• Juice

Yea....who cares? You aren't offering a practical solution to the problem. You seem to be suggesting is we'd only stop wrecking the alliance so badly they'd come to more games and we'd get more honor. I don't really see any of us doing that once the gate to the cave rises and it's time to get it on. I want to see a scoreboard with 0 alliance bonus honor.

What we can do is speak frankly about how the situation can be improved. No intelligent poster believes the battlegrounds should favor one side over the other. We've often argued for a randomly switching side solution to AV (Horde starts in the north 50% of the time, for example), which would render imbalances in map design less detrimental overall.

 

Kasi

The practical solution is that battlegrounds suck, no one likes doing them to get 70k or more honor, especially when one has to do it for multiple characters. It's not pvp after the 500th time, its grinding. And people who grind care about maximizing their reward per time spend grinding. If you want to see an alliance scoreboard with 0 bonus honor, than you obviously enjoy battlegrounds more than people who've gotten sick of them.

So your choice comes down to a 0 alliance win once an hour that takes 30 minutes with a 30 minute queue. You got 700, maybe 800 honor out of that win. Horde on other BGs have decided that they don't like grinding either and have gone back to the race. In an hour you can do 5 races since queues are virtually instant still because alliance are still queueing. Horde on my bg win about 60% of the time, so they get 450 or so 3 times and 350 2 times. Which comes out to 2000 honor, or nearly triple the crappy amount of honor you are getting now.

So enjoy your winning. I'll enjoy getting over twice the honor that you do, even though I am only winning 40% of the time.

Btw, please stop saying that alliance should defend SH. This has been explained so many times in this thread why this doesn't work. Alliance has to defend 3 seperate areas. Horde has to defend 1 much more defensible area. At best alliance will come out of this with a 30-40 minute loss where they manage to hold Icewing bunker and SH gy but probably lose the other 2 middle objectives while taking nothing in the south. More likely is that they get pushed back north of SH GY and it turns into a brawl on the SP/IW road.

Edit: Even if alliance knew the horde would have 10-15 at IBGY I still think it is in their best interest to try to use everyone at once to take it. If you don't contest it at the start, IBGY is pretty much untakable from the alliance side. The chokepoint pretty much kills you if you let it get setup. You can't get by it in any numbers (as compared to SH GY which you can ride right by) and you have to take it first, even if taking it means you don't contest SH. (I do however think that there should be 5-7 defenders at SH, mainly to just whittle the horde offence down a bit, kill a few and then fall back to a much more defensible SP. Hopefully with SH not capped yet and alliance at IBGY, the horde rezzing are stuck in the south for the moment and it gives the alliance up north more of a chance to hold out)

If the central was equal (in geography and difficulty of commanders) AV would be pretty good. If SH was like IB it would promote big melees in the middle. Most games would end in reinforcement wins for either side (as long as SH bunker was actually moved to be defensible like IB tower). If IB was made like SH it would actually promote more rushing because the GYs and areas much favor the attacker. But right now we have it that the map favors horde if they defend at IB and alliance if they defend at SP. Which leads to 200 bonus honor or more for horde if alliance wins, and basically 0 bonus honor for alliance if horde wins.

 

◊ zeidrich

I disagree on your point on SH though Karnadas. I just don't think it's a hard and fast rule. Occasionally I think the best strategy would be to defend SH. Most of the time I think the best strategy would be to hit SH hard with a team for recapture. Last weekend, the way the horde was playing, it was best to ignore SH altogether. It is entirely dependent on how the horde decides to play. And therein lies the metagame.

There's definite trends in strategy and tactics used by the masses on each battlegroup. If you play a number of games, you can see them develop, as players successful in one match bark orders to others. (Most utter retardation in my opinion).

My last anecdotal story about last weekends AVs on my mage, it would have been stupid and pointless to guard SHGY. The horde had 40 people on offense. Unless you were to match, or nearly match that, you wouldn't be able to defend it anyways. And regardless of that, by putting some people on defense able to slow the horde on their way from SH->SP, and capping forward graveyards very fast, all of the horde was respawning as far back as RH or their tunnel. By the time SP was taken, SF was near capping, as was IB. Since there was no retro defense, we had no reason to worry about what they were doing in our towns, just cap the towers, kill galv, kill drek and collect honor.

Maybe the way you're playing, defending SH is a good idea. It sounds like you have a solid defense and strong control over midfield. In our BG I've rarely seen more than a token horde defense. And I bet that the difference in strategy is largely due to your queue times. On an unbalanced BG, the side with a long queue will probably fight hard to win. The side with a short queue will probably not care too much, and just want games to end quickly.

I am assuming (though I don't know) that whirlwind is pretty even in terms of queue length, because both sides are rushing. If horde was having incredible queue times, there would be a bigger struggle for them to hold more points per game.

 

Ngita

The interesting part is alliance in 60's AV on BG9 do play that way, The invariable result over perhaps a dozen games in a scrap in the middle where either side rarely cap more then 1-2 towers and it typically plays out over 40-50 mins. We did get 1 succesful defence of SH last night, Their were only about 15 Horde attacking SH GY rest stayed at IB. 53 Min Game, Horde capped SH Tower and finished with snowfall GY and won by 40 or so reinforcements.

 

Kasi

Oh I certainly agree you should retake SH, or more important imo the bunkers around it. This is what turns a horde rush win into an alliance rush win. Just recapping one of those bunkers makes Vandar a 3 pull which is something most pugs can't do. My point is that you want horde to be on the road to SP, unless of course you didn't take IBGY, at which point you're going to lose badly.

I do think there is no point to defending SH GY initially (well other than a token force), because due to geography the horde has better chance of coming out of the GY assaults with SH taken than alliance has of coming out with IB taken. Alliance's best chance really is to send 1 to take the mines in the north, 1-2 to prevent a ninja cap of SP, 1-2 to defend DB against rushers and then the remaining 35 to IBGY. Once IBGY is falling, then size things up. 3-4 each to the towers, if no defence in the middle take Galv, 5-10 hold the GY, rest push south. Anyone who dies defends SP GY. Add in there a group of 5 from the initial rush to backtrack and recap SH bunker and maybe IW bunker is the best recipe for success I've seen alliance have in post 2.3 AV. One of the biggest wins I've had was alliance holding everything to the north of IB and not losing any of the 4 northern bunkers. But this was from wiping horde north of IW while at the same time retaking SH and making them respawn at relief hut, since we had taken FW already.

SH defence still fails for the same reason it always has. If you wipe horde there, they will recap IBGY from you 90%+ of the time. If that happens it turns into a battle for the Field of Strife, and horde usually wins that. Now if you can hold SH but take IB GY, then it can be a crushing win. I've never seen it happen though. It will only happen if alliance has better players or if alliance splits their forces just right. Like if horde sends 30 at SH and 10 to IBGY but alliance sends 20 both ways, manages to wipe SH and then get down in time to help the other 20 hold IB. But for that to happen alliance needs to get lucky.

 

• Juice

What a ridiculous thing to say. I like BGs and PvP. I don't PvP to PvE better, I do it cause I like it. If you don't like it, do something else. I'm not going to argue the benefits of BGs or the blizzard honor grind system.

I guess if I was measuring my fun by honor per hour I would care enough to wonder if I alone could somehow sway the nature of AV in my battlegroup. It so happens that I like pvp and winning in ridiculous fashion more than I care about an extra 50% honor. Additionally, as Dios points out, I'm 100% certain that I won't significantly change the nature of AV on my BG through my actions, so I'm certainly not going to play like a gimp so the alliance can have a chance. I'll play to win - just like the Alliance did when AV favored them - and wait for Blizzard to fix it (and make suggestions to fix it when I believe it to be unequitable).



I don't accept any of those feeble explanations in the context of my battlegroup. Right now the alliance get rolled like an old pair up jeans up the SP road, where we break their will to fight, overpower SP, burn the north bunkers, and either finish them in reinforcements or kill vann with <50 reinforcements left on the alliance side with 400+ on the horde side. I'm pretty sure alliance could do something to improve their performance instead of just coming here and QQing about it. I do accept that map imbalances are to blame. The horde isn't inherently smarter or more coordinated, just as the alliance wasn't smarter/coordinated when they won AVs due to map design.

IB defense is easier than SH defense - no question. But that doesn't mean you can't defend and win. I've seen the alliance win on my BG, and it's when the horde fail to defend in significant numbers. The alliance steamroll IB GY first, put 5 men at each tower/node till it caps, and move methodically over the map. When it's a pve race, the alliance win in my BG.

Yep. It's a similar problem to what we previously encountered when the alliance defense of SP and AS was significantly easier than it was for the horde. In fact, it was only the solo Vann pull trick which allowed the matches to be relatively 50/50 decisions in my battlegroup. Prior to that, Alliance won AVs due to map imbalances. I hope for your sake it doesn't take Blizzard another year or two to tune it so alliance have a fair chance.

 

Touf

Take your 30 and rush the relief hut. Do not take Iceblood, that just causes respawns at FW which will murder you. Once you get there, just sit there until it caps. Unless they bring a force of 20 people, they're not going to wipe you, especially if you rezz people. Once it's being capped, get a couple teams to go cap towers. Watch for people teleporting back and running back from FW. Don't touch Drek until it's capped. At the very least you should get East and West FW towers down, which should be enough.

Yeah, it fails if you meet an organized defense, but that was going to wipe you at Iceblood anyway.

As for BG9...I don't know, I have a 80% win rate on those dailies, and it's not me, I'm going as prot.

 

Kasi

I don't think you can equate how alliance played pre 2.3 to how horde is now. Honestly in pre 2.3 we didn't care a whit about what horde did. We just rushed your base. If you wanted to rush ours than thats fine. This led to alliance winning a lot, but horde in losing got almost as much honor. Now on some BGs horde take a strat that purposely leads to alliance getting virtually nil out of the game. If alliance had wanted to pre 2.3 we could have done the same thing to you that you are now doing to alliance on BG5. We knew you have more afk'ers than us and we could on most BGs have crushed horde on offence and steamrolled them. But we didn't. All we cared about was getting our honor and getting out. Because after doing AV so many times, it really does get old.

About personal responsibility for BGs, I would again disagree with both you and Dios. On the first AV weekend after 2.3 you could see the same thing happening on our BGs. On friday and saturday alliance would go back to pre 2.3 ways and try to rush Galv. This despite people saying that it wouldn't work and taking IBGY is far more important. After a few losses and much mocking from the people saying "this is what happens when you idiots take Galv first without securing the GY" people started learning. By the end of the weekend more often than not if someone said "Rush Galv" people would go "shut up, don't listen to him, in 2.3 go for IBGY first". Leaders taking charge and promoting strategy attracts the masses like sheep. They follow the strat, win in crushing fashion, and it spreads. Now everyone does it there. In a way I hope this happens on every AV battlegroup just so Blizzard can realize how much they fucked up the battleground.

If enough people said "look, lets rush down, take the 4 bunkers and take out Vandarr, but not crush alliance to 0 honor, and if we do this enough maybe we'll get 2 minute queues again and 2-3 times the honor per hour", some would listen. I'm sure there are many horde who would like to be able to reliably get honor without massive queues, but the people promoting and leading the new strategy stop that" But once the meta game of the battlegroup has moved in a certain direction, it is very hard to move it back.

As for BGs, most people here do it for honor so they can improve their arena play. Some do it for PVE upgrades. I think you're wrong on something though. Horde is better at pvp, and I believe that is shown by their winning rate on the other 3 BGs. In the old AV even with the map imbalance, it wasn't like alliance was overwhelmingly winning. Yet you have accounts of people like Calantus and others who have a 5% winning rate in AV now. Pugging the other 3 bgs was already worthless. Now AV on select battlegroups is too. How is he going to get his honor for multiple characters? Join premades I guess, but thats not an option for everyone. So that ties into your point on defending SH. Defending SH only works if your group is better than the horde group. In about 98% of AVs that will not be the case.

As for alliance doing so pathetically on your bg, I'm guessing that has to do with the fact that feeling so futile in face of overwhelming wins has led most of the good alliance to stop queuing for AV there. They realize that doing partial premades on AB or WSG will give them more honor, so there they have gone. Very few players actually like doing BGs repeatedly. They bear it because they need the honor. I'm fine doing each one a few times a week, but once it goes into grind mode I just want my honor and to get the heck out of there as quickly as I can.

 

diospadre

Kasi I don't think you understand that spurring on horde to allow alliance to win would not produce results fast enough to make up for throwing away 500 honor every game. It would take weeks of queueing in every game, yelling at everyone not to defend. I'd have better luck getting faster queues by standing in Org spamming trade chat with "don't join av it will get you keylogged" to discourage horde from joining. Game theory (prisoner's dilemma, etc.) explains pretty well why an optimal hour per honor won't be achieved given the current incentives. When there are tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of people playing, a small handful won't have any effect. The rewards for crushing the alliance are much more tangible than the extremely small decrease in queue times that one alliance win will provide.

And for the record people listen to Gurg because he is a shaman decked out in T6 riding a bug that will heal you. Warrior #824455 is not someone you naturally follow into battle.

As for the other battlegrounds, alliance have it pretty good on stormstrike. Any game is almost guaranteed to start 15 alliance to 8ish horde, guaranteeing a win for pug v. pug and making it still very difficult to pull one out when you have anything less than 4 of your better geared friends with you.

I do agree with you about the motives people have for playing and the general imbalances of the map.

 

Sando

I've said throughout this thread what i think could be done to improve the situation... I've also stated that i think the main problem is not the win/loss ratio, as with decent play that should be relatively even, but the fact that when Alliance win, Horde invariably get 200+ points for losing, when Horde win, Alliance typically get <100. The reason for this is that Horde have the advantage early game, Alliance have the advantage late game.

The map needs to be brought closer to a mirror map, the SH bunker should be brought back closer to SH, Balinda should be brought up to the level of Galv. Then to balance that out, FW should be made more defensible, or DB made less defensible. I've offered this solution earlier in the thread, and what you've quoted is me just pointing out the downward spiral of horde dominance, that as they win, less alliance play, which creates queues, which means horde feel they need to get the most out of the BG, which means less alliance play, and the circle continues. I'm not saying that you should play worse, i'm saying the map should be changed.

I'm sorry what?! On the one hand, you agree that IB is easier to defend than SH (and it's not just the GY defensiveness that is the problem) and yet you still think it a great idea for alliance to get bogged down in the middle trying to take IB while keeping SH? If alliance lose SH without taking IB, they've lost, plain and simple, and i guess the same goes for Horde, so why should we take that risk when the odds are against us? That would just be stupid.

Easily the most effective winning strategy i've seen from Alliance is to push heavily into IB, with 30+ people, overwhelm the defence, and secure the towers/galv. If horde defended with 10-15, probably say 5-10 of ours died, and they now spawn back at SP with the 5-10 (depending on AFKers) that slowed the Horde down at SH/towers. Now we have 15-20 defending SP and 20-25 on O, and since FW/RH is much easier to take than SP/RH, Alliance are in a very strong position at this point. And if horde didn't defend IB, then it turns into a race, which invariably ends with an Alliance win.

 

Ngita

I tried every strategy I could think off. 9 games last night. Note as soon as we wiped to IB or got bogged down with 15 alliance 15 horde at IB I afk'ed out to try again on a different 70. Every single game their was a very strong defence next to IB tower. The worst case I tried bubbled and tried to count heads when we where down to 10 or so. 19 Horde defenders. Another game we tried the releif hut rush. I am sure the 30 odd alliance sitting entrapped while being aoe'ed was amusing for the horde but it didnt have a hope of succeeding.

On the other hand I did the av daily twice On horde, 61 Shadow priest in healing gear 2nd in healing.Their was no evidence of superior communication, it certainly wasnt buffs or heals. As horde on the offence we just ran through. Killed 5-8 or so at SH and ran through to fw and game won.

 

Touf

Hmm...weird. I guess that runs into the metagame problem. In most of the games I was in, I only defended with about 8 others, but the Alliance decided to take Iceblood first, which was suicide as everyone started rezzing at FW and running into the O, instead of rezzing at Iceblood and running off the cliff. When this happens, the alliance don't have the time and/or patience to wait for Snowfall to cap so every death just goes to SP and the O slowly grinds away, especially considering how PUGs tend to straggle. A couple times they even got the relief hut, as no one was bothering to come back, but it was too late as the delay from all the people at FW was fatal. The funniest one was where the relief hut was tagged 2 minutes in by the whole zerg, after which they proceeded to wipe to Drek + a few defenders since they couldn't rezz.

I did lose a game yesterday where too many Horde defended and the O was never able to get Stormpike and lost to the grind. Although that might just have been general incompetence.

 

• Juice

For the reasons that Dios indicated, that isn't going to happen. Or if it does happen, it won't be me doing it. Further, I don't believe it will impact the problem felt on Stormstrike BG.

I can't explain why, but the reason the queue times are slow on Stormstrike is because there are not enough Horde queuing. It's not the alliance, near as I can tell.

When I join any of the 3 non-AV Battlegrounds, I typically find a near capacity number of alliance and a roughly 50% number of horde. Not every time, of course, but it's frequent to log into a 13 on 8 AB map, where the number balance is not corrected for the first 4 minutes. Obviously the alliance win those games, as they have a nearly overwhelming early advantage that manifests itself in physical dominance and mental defeatism by the horde. In any case, this occurence suggests the alliance are queing up in greater number and the BG mechanism is waiting on the target number of horde to queue before the BG begins. I suppose the target number is someplace just over 50% - so an AB BG could begin with a 15 on 8 team balance - which is what we're seeing now.

I'm seeing the same thing in AV. I only really started paying attention to it last night - and noticed that the AVs typically began (gate opens) to 35-40 alliance and 25-30 horde. Again suggesting that it is the horde, not the alliance, who are causing the longer queue times on my battlegroup. I can't explain why, but I don't feel like failing to crush the alliance as soundly as I can will fix it. In case it comes up, the imbalance isn't nearly as large of a deal in AV as it is in AB where early node caps are hard to overcome. By the time AV begins and the alliance runs to IB, we have enough people in the game to field a sufficient defense until the game fills up completely - so we can still win even if we engage the enemy still outnumbered slightly.

 

malthrin

Having seen that same phenomenon on Bleeding Hollow (Alliance), I'm fairly sure it's a symptom of multi-queuing by the faction with longer queues. The faction with instant queues simply queues for the Battleground they want to play/need tokens for. The queued faction queues for 3 BGs; they join whatever pops first, start playing in it, then as the others pop up, they maybe jump ship if the first game is going badly - or maybe they click hide, leading to a player shortage in the game that they didn't join.

Travian - Resto Druid
Malthrin - Priest

 

diospadre

Yeah, that explains it pretty well, and also why what's been happening with AB etc. queues only started when AV queues started surpassing 10 minutes.

 

◊ Praetorian

It is definitely multi-queuing, and it's a problem with Blizzard's system to an extent.

To use the simplest example: Let's say my group of 10 queues for WSG and AB at the same time. WSG pops first, and we join. Now AB pops. WSG is going well so we don't want to leave. We all click Hide. However the queue system holds those 10 slots for the full 2 minutes. As a result, that AB is going to start with a maximum of 5 Horde players before the queue system even starts trying to find players to fill the remaining slots. By the time enough Horde filter into the game, it's likely too late. Every time someone multi-queues, they create empty slots in every BG except for the one they joined. People with short queue times don't do this because they can just pick which game they want to play. People with long queue times do it, in order to minimize their waiting time and give themselves an easy "out" if their 10min wait to get into an AB lands them in a 1500-400 loss in the making.

Add to this the fact that if queues are instant or very short, you'll queue and immediately join. The longer they get, the higher the odds of afk players. I know for a fact I've missed queues for things like the AB daily before, when I queue, get a 15-minute estimated time, then alt-tab or go make a sandwich or something and lose track of time and come back to find that the queue already popped. Again, my doing so created a vacant slot in that game.

 

Design1stCode2nd

I played AV straight for the past 3 nights 2-3 hours per night and almost all have been all out zerg tapping what you can on the way north. As we hit Belinda you can see the alliance doing the exact same thing on the way down.

The queues for me are usually withing 10-15 seconds. Got approx. 5k honor last night alone.

 

Humbaba

You're in a different battlegroup, presumably. On Ruin, for example, I have no more than 30s queues for anything and AV is usually instant. Nearly all games start with equal or close to equal numbers of horde and alliance. Alliance is now winning more than half of the AVs I play because horde doesn't believe in playing defense. Sadly my resto druid alt doesn't quite have the same perceived authority as a tier 6 shaman on a bug.

 

◊ zeidrich

I take this to heart. I like to PvP when it helps me PvP better. I PvP on my mage. Here's the thing. On my Battlegroup I have the following options.

1) WSG - Typically a 25-30 minute 0/3 loss
2) AB - Typically a 1400/2000 loss
3) EotS - Utter retardation resulting in a headache, and a 25 minute loss
4) AV - 300+ honor for 10-15 minutes.

Now, AV being the best honor of them all for me pugging, is also the least fun PvP wise. I have the option to a) Attack the horde offense, 30 v 1. or b) follow the alliance zerg killing horde 30 v 1.

In my last AVs the top players had 6 honor kills. Topping the KB charts was a warrior with 2 KBs.

You may play AV to PvP, but when you're in a battlegroup where 39 players don't care about pvp, and want to just get the maximum honor per hour, what are you supposed to do? When nobody wants to wait for objectives to cap because waiting 4 minutes for IB, then 5 to turn FW, then 4 minutes to cap FW, then 5 minutes to turn RH and 4 minutes to cap it turns a 11 minute win or loss into a 22+ minute "whine-about-turtles" fest.

I ask you, if you want to PvP, and the near entirety of the horde rushes deep into the alliance base, and the near entirety of the alliance charges deep into the horde base, what do you do?

I normally go and try and retake objectives that our zerg has tapped and passed over. Occasionally I come up against a solo resister or a duo. But typically what happens is if I die on one of those excursions, I end up back at the aid station or in the tunnel, and spend the rest of my time trying to bust through the horde zerg. Again, since the alliance is all on offense, and there's no horde defense, there's nobody else really dying on our side, so our defense is minute. So it's 1 vs 35 if I want to stay and fight, otherwise I just cast invis and jump down the wall. But getting back typically takes me 3-4 minutes, and as the game finishes in 10-12 minutes, I maybe get to fight 2-3 people in the course of a game.

Don't think that anyone will listen to an undergeared mage either, especially when asking for ridiculous things like "defense" or help "backcapping" Most of the time I get yelled at for retaking SHGY before it goes red because it will "force a turtle" despite the fact that, the way horde is playing it will "guarantee us the game". At least in the games I've played, nobody cares about winning. They only care about finishing the game in as little time as possible. And unless the mechanics of the map or honor rewards change, I don't see that changing for my battlegroup any time soon.