I look at the list of currently existing games when I queue. If a number comes up that wasn't on that list, I leave queue and try again. Spending 3 minutes to get into a game that's at least 10 minutes in is a net benefit in the amount of time it takes to farm 40 godamn marks for my Hunter alt's crossbow.

Given the current state of AV, wouldn't that strategy make joining a turtle even more likely? If you want marks, you'd want games that will be over one way or another in 5-10 minutes, not one where you zone in and see 35 Alliance between the Stormpike Aid Station and SP.

As far as I can tell, non-turtle games do not exist in my battlegroup (BG9), or at least rare enough that I have very little chance of getting into them. In every single game I've been in from the start, Horde have defended IB/Galv, and then recaped SF after the initial Alliance O fails miserably.

You don't think +80% damage and health warmasters will stop 5 minute games? Those whirlwinds would be nasty.

We've been running preform AV's all weekend on horde-side Doomhammer. We went something like 15-0 today, with each game resulting in about 550-650 bonus honor for the horde and 0-20 bonus honor for the alliance. The map definitely favors the horde, but the alliance in our battlegroup make huge mistakes which force them into a turtle in which they cannot win within the first 5 minutes of the game. The horde also make huge mistakes and generally want to use an outdated racing strategy, but it only takes a small group of people playing correctly to offset that because the alliance fail so completely almost every game.

In my opinion there is absolutely no reason for the alliance to attack anything except IB GY until it is under their control. I have no idea why a large chunk of their offense usually attacks Galvangar or any of the towers in the beginning. 10 horde defenders can annihilate 25 alliance on offense when they do this, because the alliance is going to lose SH GY. It doesn't matter if they kill 2 of our defenders for every 1 of them we kill, because we're respawning 20 seconds away while they're respawning 5 minutes away and they have to run through our offense to get back. If you control IB GY it's pretty much impossible for the horde to prevent you from killing Galvangar and destroying IB Tower and Tower Point soon after.

Send 20-25 on offense straight to IB GY(have someone click SF GY on the way) and 15-20 on defense to SH GY. The offense should ride right up to the flag, fight directly on it, and kill/CC people until someone gets off a cap. Don't fiddle with meaningless towers and Galvangars.

Similarly, I have no idea why the horde ever goes to Balinda or SH Tower before SH GY. They almost always do, but fortunately the alliance almost always makes the same mistakes, so it doesn't matter. The whole game revolves around IB and SH GY. By capping those you're basically destroying the nearby towers/captains for free and forcing the other side into a nearly unwinable turtle at the same time.

Alliance PUGs are convinced of two things...

Galv = Honour (= good!)
IBGY = Turtle (=bad!)

Try to get it through the collective Alliance's minds that not going for Galv straight away is the right thing is like teaching a cat to enjoy the shower. Just not going to happen.

I'm still trying to see what my fellow Alliance are thinking when they are fighting outside of bunkers while inside there's six horde capping it. I've even seen it happen with ten - fifteen Alliance in Dun Baldar, reluctant to go inside the freaking bunkers and prevent the minority of Hordies in there from destroying them.

On another note, simple knowledge would help a lot, as well.
People trying to pull Galv or Drek out of their base is pathetic, and I sometimes wish there was an option to switch teams like in some games, just so I could go kill people like that.

Also, I've recently had some strange wins consisting of Galv - ignore IB - cap FW and then on to the base.
(which is odd because it means you respawn very far back if you die before FW is capped - Alliance completely ignores SF every game unless they need it to get past SH)

One big issue with comments like "Zerg Galv = lose, take IB GY = win" is that at times you will be able to take Galv in a rush tactic before Horde bother to defend him on a lot of battlegroups, so when people see something work they will tend to do it. The best I have managed with the cat herding is to make them stop attacking him when he is defended.

Exactly.

However, I think valid tactics also vary greatly between battlegroups and factions.
Zerg Galv = lose and take IB GY = win is usually untrue on my battlegroup, for example.

The thing that tends to work at the start on my battle group is main group goto Galv, a smaller group to IB GY, ninja groups for TP and IB towers. Once Galv is dead you reinforce those other three points and the rest push on to frostwolf. The aim of the defense is to slow down the horde rather than stop them getting SH, IW and Balinda, so the horde ends up with points even after the get stopped at DB.

It's a simplified statement, of course, and not a 100% guaranteed win.

The thing is, that once IB GY is secured and the "heat" has moved elsewhere, you can go back and kill Galv with three people uncontested, while at the beginning he's usually well defended and even five Horde + Galv can wipe 20 unorganized Alliance.

MY UD mage is 63 now, on Ysondre, and I have 20k honor just from AV over the past few days. The queues are so long I can quest for a solid hour plus, then do an AV,and it works out well because it is about time to turn in a bunch of quests and empty my bags and repair.

To the point. What is taking place in Av in this BG is simply unfair for the alliance. They, quite honestly, have no chance. 15 or so horde rush sh bunker and sh gy, a few wander all over the place, a team goes to Galv, a bnch guard the road by ib tower, and some more back up IB GY. The alliance get massacred every time. Because I am 63 and get a lot of resists, I have basically been standing at the crossroads in between IB GY and IB tower, and I just chain sheep and snowball all alliance that try to just rush through so they are dismounted and can be dealt with by everyone else.

The amazing thing is- no one even really discusses it. At most, someone will say "Play tough D at the start." The horde just do it systematically. Should something freakish happen and the alliance actually take IB Gy, the horde just dutifully send ten people there, wipe them out, and the game is now over. After the alliance initial rush is over, it is time to take snowfall (which is still two minutes from capping), and then get to the business of humiliating and demoralizing the Allies as we slowly push to Stormpike. It really is amazing, and I can't think of anything the alliance can really do to stop it. I am just glad the horde have not figured it out in the battlegroup where my alliance mage is situated.

A small side note, and I really hate making sweeping generalizations like this because there are always exceptions, but my experiences so far have been that the horde players not only have a map advantage, but they are just better. I think I have already received more healing in the past two weeks as a horde mage than I have in two years as an alliance mage. They don't break sheep. They focus fire. The target healers first, rather than having nine people beat on the warriors. They don't bicker about defense. They move as a unit. I have every possible buff before the gates open (this is never the case on my alliance toon- getting fort or kings is a once every 20 bg experience). It is night and day from my pvp experiences as an alliance mage. Again, I hate making sweeping generalizations, and I am sure it is not true everywhere, but it is certainly what I have experienced so far. I don't hate mage pvp so much anymore (on my alliance toon, I spend every BG running for my life focus fired and never get any support or healing. Not so as horde.) . I didn't suddenly become a better player, and on my main I have 10k hp and 440 resilience, on the ud toon, 5k with buffs and 7 resilience, and I live three-four times as long. And not just in AV, but every BG. I don't know what else can explain the difference other than that the people around me are better or the opposition is worse. I know I am not any better than I was two weeks ago.

I've been thinking about it a little more recently, and other than fixing imbalances I think they need to complete the changes to AV they were trying to make this patch and just kill off the rush strat completely. Make the generals worth a decent amount of reinforcements so they're worth shooting for if you can, but they don't encourage rush tactics. Part of alliance's problem in the battlegroups with long queues is that there's so many people wanting to rush because it is obviously the best strategy when it works. 10-15 minute games for half the honor of 45 minute games is perfect and it plays into the alliance advantage that is our better backfield defences and forced alliance defenders.

Honestly I want the action we had back in the 9-24 hour BGs of the beginning. The times were excessive but the action was furious, constant, and fun. They have the reinforcements to stop the excessive times, now they need to encourage games that require the reinforcements. I'd like to see 100% of the loser's bonus honor being in ticks that everyone gets every few minutes, and the winner just gets a set amount of bonus honor at the end, make this maybe 20-30% of the honor you'd expect to gain from honor ticks. Now everyone can settle down to a hard slog in the middle fighting over objectives and field position without watching the clock, and the winners can be rewarded without gutting the losers. That's a BG I might join and play just because it would be fun to play occasionally. Rush games are never fun, in the same way that speed running a PVE instance over and over for 40 hours on a weekend would not be fun.

That only happens after the alliance assault has been broken up. The point is to not let that happen. Generally what I see going wrong is that even when alliance do take IB GY, they don't defend it with enough people - part of the assault goes to Galv, part to IB tower, part to TP, and most of the rest start fighting horde on the road south from IB. A horde group runs up the west edge of the chokepoint, takes back IB tower, defends Galv if he needs it, goes back & wipes the few defending the flag (directly behind the people on the road...) and it's mop-up time.

However, if all the alliance hit IB GY at once (without dicking around with Galv or whatever), and sits there until it caps, there's nothing 15 or even 20 people can do to stop it. Depends on the number of afkers alliance has to deal with, though. I've seen this kind of rush work in the afternoon games (where horde defense also tends to be lighter) but never in evening matches, where I think afkers tend to be more common. If half of your team is not participating, no strategy or map change is going to help.

Oh and Cwealm, there's plenty of terrible pvpers on both sides. Longtime horde pvpers probably have more experience though, from the old HWL honor farming group days. One thing I noticed pvping on my NE druid at level 60 is that (a) most alliance pvpers didn't even know how to win any given battleground (aside from AV, where they just zerged south), and (b) it's hard to learn when you're constantly getting rolled by premades. Also, when it comes to world pvp as horde you learn to deal with being constantly outnumbered (at least on pve realms), which teaches you the importance of healing & teamwork. You don't learn much from zerging down the other side, which is generally how alliance (or whichever side has the pop advantage, I presume) wins world pvp objectives.

The easiest way to do that would be to.....link the graveyards.

You could still leave the towers the same allowing back-caping, but linking the Graveyards would force progression through the front, which may or may not be a bad thing.

On BG9 this tactic is the only one that's come close to winning a game for me. We'd zerg Galv down, rush straight past the towers and IB to FW, cap that and then cap RH/towers. Then a few people would go back and try to take out the IB towers. The only reason this didn't work was because some idiot managed to convince everyone to attack Drek with 4 warmarshals up, the idea is to attack when there's 2, 4 is instant wipe.

I think horde can still counter this quite easily if they just destroy the alliance as they go through the chokepoint at IB, even if 10 or so get through, the horde will have taken SH and so the dead will be at SP, and the horde can easily back-cap.

Admittedly i absolutely refuse to go into AV anymore, i gave it 2 games on the weekend when i had the daily, but gave up after that, so i haven't seen the tactic used more than once.

I kind of agree with Cwealm in that I think Horde ability in PvP probably slightly edges out Alliance, in pure pick-up situations (although, obviously, no one has the stats to back it up and it probably varies by battlegroup). But I also agree that there are lousy PvPers on both sides and in any case any difference, if it exists, is probably not so large.

I think, though, that you've hit upon the reason that pickup WSG/AB/EotS is about a 90% win rate for Horde, though (at least on Ruin, in my experience). I don't do pickups with any degree of frequency, but I agree solidly with your contention that most Alliance players simply can't distinguish between strategy that leads to victory and that which doesn't. More than that, they're simply not curious about how to win. That said, I don't think Horde players, on average, possess these qualities in meaningfully greater amounts, either.

I don't think the majority of players are curious about the game in general, whichever faction they're in - as an example, look how long it took for the AV rush to percolate through the Alliance general consciousness in the old AV where the rush strat definitely favoured Alliance (and, on the flip side, how long it's taking for the rush strat to percolate out now that it doesn't work nearly as well). On Ruin, Horde are still AV rushing, as well - obviously this isn't universal, from other posts in this thread, but it's clear that there's some mental inertia involved for all players.

Winning is almost incidental. I've actually won several games of new AV in non-rush situations, but those are few, far between, show no signs of increasing in frequency, and the lessons those games might teach are rarely learned. The same description applies to all my PuG WSG/AB/EotS wins - people just do what they always do. Now, players are taught behaviours in PvP from the moment they start, mostly by a process of osmosis. New players zone into WSG (for example) and see the other nine players doing something, and they repeat the behaviour next game and consequently teach it to other new players. It's just that the Horde experience is a very basic strategy to win the battleground, and the Alliance experience is kamikaze dashes into heavy defenses, solo-cowboy flag run attempts, and a lot of pointless clashing in areas of minimal consequence.

Neither the Horde or the Alliance player sees it in the way that I've described; they're just both "playing WSG" in the way they know how. The typical Horde WSG strategy on Ruin is riding as a group to the Alliance base, seizing the flag, forcing it back to the base, and then sending eight or nine players to reclaim their own if it's been taken. It's got all kinds of flaws and a sufficiently organized group can break it with trivial effort. And the Horde players consequently lose, because just like the Alliance players, they can't figure out the difference between what will help them win and what won't, and they're not really curious about it. So they do what they usually do and lose. But they do it again next game, because it's what they know.

Alliance is really no different, except that instead of a strategy being spread virally, the absence of one has spread. And with players who aren't curious about how to win and who can't figure it out on their own, the taught-behaviour on Alliance is just to kill as many people as you can, to just cap stables, or to just hold one tower. People can intellectually realize that holding one node or one tower or not capping the flag is going to lead to defeat, but the train of thought goes from "We're losing" to "I could do something about it" and stalls there. The leap over the intellectual gulf between "I could do something about it" and "This is what I should do" is one that most players of the game fail to make (I think the Game Difficulty thread in Public Discussion is basically about solving this problem).

I'd argue that this at least partially explains what's going on in AV right now, as well as Horde dominance in WSG/EotS (maps without terrain imbalance) basically from the moment of introduction. People are just doing what they've always done, and this applies as much to the fractious Horde offense that hits SHB/SHGY/Balinda simultaneously (as Sebudai points out, a tactical error) as to the Alliance running themselves into the Galvangar meatgrinder. There's clearly a map imbalance, but it's equally clear that Alliance is making it harder on themselves than it has to be. The map is what makes Horde dominance on any battlegroup where they choose to do so decisive: only a small proportion of the Horde needs to learn the correct behaviour (defend IB/Galv) whereas a small proportion of the Alliance cannot embark on any equally effective action because SH/Balinda is not as defensible. Moreover, a successful Alliance strategy requires that 25 Alliance correctly learn a new attack target, IBGY, and that the other 15 correctly learn to defend; in other words, 40/40 Alliance need to learn a new behaviour. A successful Horde strategy requires only that 15 Horde correctly learn to defend their front line - the other 25 need learn no new behaviour and may continue as before under the rush strat. Only 15/40 Horde need learn a new behaviour. I think this, more than anything else, is what's leading to 600-0 AV games.

About making rushes impossible, linking graveyards (such as in Unreal Tournament's Onslaught (UT2004) or Warfare (UT3) modes) would indeed be a very good idea, and it could also help in the endless debate of what graveyard to take and what to defend.

If they are linked, there is no debate on what you attack and what you defend. You defend your most forward graveyard, and attack the nearest enemy graveyard. Enforce the newly aquired graveyard, and head for the next.

I also found the idea of making the Drek / Vann spawn related to destroying towers interesting. While this surely prevents people from dumb rushes that are bound to fail, it also prevents them from "last second saves" if you will.

Yesterday we had some of these games, where our attacking force was unusually large, but our defensive force was also doing a great job (the snowballs seem great for ninja-recapping bunkers, which is kind of sad).

Hence, instead of the usual 'let them win' we decided a suicidal attempt at Drek, with Hut being ours and both FW towers at about 30 seconds away of being capped. Thus, with both warmasters whirling away at our raid, we downed Drek before Horde could cap our bunkers and bring our reinforcements to zero.

Then again, and this might seem indifferent of me, I don't really care if we win or not. What I care about is a productive match (losing with no enemy towers destroyed is very sad and a waste of your time honor-wise) and a fun match. I've had losses where I happily talked about afterwards, because I successfully defended or attacked a bunker/tower for example (one of the best "in your face" feelings by the way, defending an enemy tower long enough until it burns), or because we did destroy all towers and did get a shot at Drek, but just didn't do it fast enough to win. Don't get me wrong - I play to win, and I don't go all emotional if things go bad at the start, but I won't be devastated if we lost, either.

Apologies for the small wall of text there, that last paragaph has way too many side-notes I guess.

AV for alliance on BG9 is a lost cause. It's gone so far now that a typical game consists of 20+ afkers. The only people left playing are those that need marsk and people like me that like banging their head into the wall. It's still possible to win if you're lucky to not get too many afkers. What seems to work best is rushing IB gy and camping it, whoever dies stays on D at SP. Then after IB turns take the towers and Galvangar. The most common reason why this fails is people scattering after we get IB gy and they get singled out. If 20+ stay at IB until it turns then you have a fighting chance.

It isn't that they are incurious that drives me insane on the alliance side, it is that they are not only incurious, they are ignorant and belligerent. On my human in AV, if you say "Skip Galv if he is defended and hold IB GY," invariably you will have five folks (usually ne rogues rocking ceds carver and a complete "... of the bandit" wardrobe) say "NO WAI- GALV IS LOTS OF HONOR. DON'T SKIP HIM U NOOB!" And then two minutes later you find your entire team turtled at Dun Baldur with the entire map painted red.

It would be ok if that were a rare occurrence. But it isn't. It is a solid 80-90% of the games. It is why I am re-rolling horde.

As to what can be done to fix AV, I don't know. What I do know is that the Av problem in BG9 is starting to bring back something I have not seen since the days before cross-realm battlegrounds on my alliance toon. Back then, AV was the only honor you could really get for alliance on Eitrigg, and it was nothing to be winning a WSG or Ab and have half of your team disappear because their Av queue finally popped. It would not surprise me at all to see the alliance become slightly more dominant in WSG/Ab/EOTS in this BG over the next couple months, as the horde assume the role alliance had two years ago- the best honor for them was in AV. Just some speculation.

I just leveled my rogue to 70, so I needed AV marks. I've been hearing how bad AV was going for alliance on stormstrike these days, but nothing prepared me for what actually takes place.

I think on AV weekend, there being 40+ of all the other AVs open and on average 7 AVs is pretty damning.

And its not like the alliance who are dumb enough to queue up dont even try. I've seen them try to rush IB, rush further, Defend, etc. All eventually fail.

Soon I will have enough tokens for my stuff and I can be done with this mess.

In PUGs, "This is what I should do" is usually followed by "...and I know I will die if I try to do it by myself."

On my Horde Hunter, this is followed by "If I start moving, someone or someones will follow me because we need to stay together and we all know it." On my Alliance Hunter, this is followed by "If I start moving, someone or someones will disagree with what the best thing is to do, and I will die alone."

The Horde, in general and from my personal observations in-game, have a much stronger default team mentality than do the Alliance, and they have more faith in the competence of their fellow players. They will heal and cross-buff each other without asking if it's wanted or needed, and they are more than willing to take the lead or follow as the situation requires.

On the Alliance side, attempting to "take the lead" is nearly always (like 90% of the time or more) met with scorn and derision and "who do u think u r" responses from The Weakest Link™-style "lone-wolf hero" players. From there, it's a simple thing to not trust the ability of anyone else on your team, and then the whole thing degenerates into a mess of easily picked-off stragglers. And I can count on one hand the number of times I receive heals or buffs of any kind from any Alliance player that does not have an Arena prefix on their name.

I don't know why this is. It's like the Alliance PUGs just need to somehow come up with a raid leader or group leader they can all trust and listen to, and they will learn... but they just don't trust each other, and I cannot figure out why, since it seems pretty clear what the difference is between "good tactics" and "bad tactics."

This is the Rampage battlegroup, by the way, though it appears from the responses throughout this thread that these two mentalities are not unfamiliar to many.

Apologies for the sidetrack. For AV adjustments, I don't know... every time I look at the map I think "Man, if they just moved the Horde entrance back to be kind of southeast of FWGY and northeast of the relief hut, that would fix so much."