Sando

I haven't played the lower brackets (well i played 60 at 60 obviously, but i would assume it's changed a fair amount), but some things might be different.

Balinda vs Galv, i don't know how this would go, but Horde are now in the habit of killing Balinda very early, while Alliance have now kicked that habit for the most part. But if you're in a lower bracket you will have quite a few non-max ranked characters, and you're guaranteed to have worse gear for your level than 99% of 70 AVs. So i would imagine that these 'bosses' are much harder in these brackets, and maybe horde are getting caught up on them if they're using the same tactics as at 70. Are you losing Galv even with defence? Or are you losing IB with defence then alliance go back for Galv?

I know i said above that stereotypes suck, but i'd hazard a guess that it's not typical player who either comes up with the idea of getting honor in AV pre-70 or reads boards like these, so you could guess that while Alliance are having such a hard time getting honor on some BGs, it might be reasonable to guess that the better or smarter alliance are the ones with the idea of farming honor pre-70 on their alts. Obviously there will always be random alts in lower bracket BGs, but if you have a swath of 'good' players farming honor pre-70, you'll end up with better players on average. You're also much less likely to get AFKers i would guess, making the game automatically more equal, because really, when 2.3 came out and there were few AFKers, alliance probably won around 75% on BG9, now that they think it's pointless and AFK, they win less than 10% it seems. However your statement that there are similar queues (1-2 hours?) would indicate that just as many horde are doing it as alliance.

Towers could change it, but i would assume that if the towers were harder then it would benefit horde at IB alot more than alliance at SH. Other than those, i can't think of anything else that would change the result so drastically.

As to my previous comment, i guess i'm just a little frustrated, and Spatula i'm not just talking to you, the last few pages are full of people basically telling alliance to suck it up and learn to play. I have no problem if you want to tell me i'm wrong about the imbalances, but you need to actually say why you think it's wrong, not just come up with broad statements about an entire faction. Of course alliance could get 'some' honor, no horde pug defence could stop 40 alliance if they wanted to kill Galv, but that's not the point. That's i think 100 honor? To get a reasonable amount of honor you need to take and hold IB, the 2 towers, and kill Galv. If that is not achievable by the losing side, and that losing side is nearly always the same faction due to imbalances or what-not, you're not going to get people queueing. At the moment, Alliance are kept below 100 honor in nearly every AV i go into on BG9.

This is what i have a problem with, it completely ignores all the arguements put forward in a thoughtful manner by numerous people from both factions about the imbalances, and just assumes that the only reason horde win is because they're playing 'smarter'. And this was the post directly after mine.

 

Phantasmal

All of this is pretty much a moot point unless you have a solution for Alliance players to get the other Alliance players to not afk. Hell, some groups have figured out a method and have started doing AV premades, but that just means a lot of the Horde players will be getting steamrolled in their one AV every hour.

AFKs are always a half-explanation of the issue. People start AFKing en masse when they realize their effort doesn't make much of a difference for their personal goals. For the Horde in the past this was because honor gains for both teams were guaranteed so long as the Horde didn't play defense. Now it's because the Alliance have a huge difficulty getting any foothold in the midfield, which is essential both for reinforcements and honor gains. If you want to stop AFKing, it has to happen within the honor system and will likely require a major overhaul/trashing of AV.


I recently got my horde rogue out of the 51-60 bracket on Rampage, which seems to have the >hour queues at 61-70 and had the same experience with Alliance winning at the lower bracket. What I would attribute it to is a greater portion of the population being indifferent to honor gains and just PvPing for its own sake. Alliance would basically operate a meat grinder around Stonehearth and be competitive even with the loss of Belinda reinforcements. Towards the end, Alliance would sometimes finish off the game with a Galv kill or something that would devastate the Horde reinforcements. Rarely would the Alliance get a big payoff out of this strategy, but it did give them a number of wins.

 

SanSul

Any solution to AV at this point has to come from Blizzard. Asking alliance to come up with new strategies this late into the boycott/afk crisis is highly unrealistic. And unfortunately, changing AV now may cripple the battleground in other battlegroups currently spared the situation facing stormstrike.

Blizzard will likely implement some bandaid fixes. They have had more then enough time to overhaul AV and create mirror maps, but they have ultimately refused to do so. Alliance players really should not be expected to care for AV if the developers don't really care for it either.

Options I see potentially happening are...

1. Punishments for defending something for to long. Possibly strong auto spawn NPCs that will assist alliance and crush Horde and allow alliance to capture IB GY after 10 minutes and push horde back to Tower Point.

2. Complete revert of all recent AV changes and returning to the AV of alliance majority wins with horde gaining 60-80% of the honour.

3. Losing team in AV will automatically be given 50% of the honour of the winning team regardless of what you control.

Obviously these are just quick solutions that might get alliance queing again, but I really don't expect any signifigant AV changes before Northrend, and unless the boycott spreads to other servers, I don't think Blizzard will consider dramatic changes to the battleground.

 

Chulak

I'm not ignoring the posts about imbalances, but there are fair points about imbalances from both sides. For me to say "that's not what I see" is not to invalidate the points that have been made, but simply to say that regardless of how some Battlegroups may be doing ours is pretty balanced. My statement was taken out of context for the purpose of your quote...wins/losses are about balanced for Nightfall, and the deciding factor in AV matches is who plays smarter.

I think the biggest reason for the differences in people's experiences is that we are all on different battlegroups. I've been playing a tremendous amount of AV for the last few weeks, I'd say in excess of 100 games, and on Nightfall the Alliance wins maybe a bit less often than it loses. I've seen one game in which the Alliance got zero honor, and one in which Horde got Zero honor.

By and large the losing team walks away with about 200-300 honor, and the Horde loses plenty. This is the issue I have with broad generalizations about win/loss ratios and problems with a particular aspect of AV...they can't necessarily be supported across everyone's experiences because not all battlegroups are created equal. Anything done to "balance" AV for the Alliance on some Battlegroups will imabalance it in others, likewise for Horde. If anything, perhaps Blizz could try to balance the Battlegroups better. I just had a game earlier in which the Alliance took Galv and both Frostwolf towers, didn't get Iceblood or Tower Point, and still killed Drek and won.

One thing that I have noticed is that wins/losses tend to come in streaks. Perhaps that's just due to having basically the same groups going against each other repeatedly, but overall I see Horde losing as often as we win. There are imbalances in the map as well as huge imbalances in the strongholds. The Alliance stronghold is many times more defensible than Frostwolf Keep. Alliance has a disadvantage at midfield and a huge advantage at both their home base and ours. Since I simply don't see the same sort of Alliance failure that some do, I cannot agree that the game "must" change to pacify one faction on one or two battlegroups. By the same token, I don't care if they mirror the field from top to bottom, if we can have the same stronghold layout that the Alliance does.

 

Calantus

The balance issues would involve taking away the horde early defence strategy that your battlegroup doesn't use anyway. I've yet to hear from anyone who says AV is 50/50 on their BG and the games are typically midfield defence-fests so I'm not seeing breaking those kinds of games destorying balance in those battlegroups.

 

Spatula

4. They buff Balinda further (or weaken Galvanger) and call it good.

 

lazerpewpew

After you do the charge->hamstring->MS->WW 100 times later, it is no longer fun.

I think the problem with AV is its size. It is just too damn hard to get any complicated strategy into 40 stranger's mind. Blizzard should release more small sized BG in WotK.

Visit my blog @ http://ataxian.blogspot.com

 

frber

What I don't understand at all is why they couldn't let gamemasters actively look at a few AV games/day and identify people who obviously aren't playing and give them a debuff that prevents honor gains, and even entering BGs, for a week or so?

Not checking if the players are AFK or anything, since thats probably hard to prove, but just checking for players that aren't contributing. Possibly looking into a game late and marking people with 0's across the board and following them in one or two more BGs to see if they are leeching.

I can't imagine leeching beeing hard to sort out if wanting to. I also can't understand why a solution would have to be an automated system when it seems to be much easier to have live GM's monitoring the games.

Sure I realise that it would take massive effort to fix things at once but would assume that something minor like one GM spending an hour occasionally to identify a few Leechers and prevent them from entering BGs for the next week would end up stopping the whole thing pretty quickly. Possibly resetting current honor as well when a leecher is identified.

Is it unreasonable to expect Blizzard to use GM's to identify people who are leeching?

 

lazerpewpew

That would be a huge number of new GMs blizzard needs to hire. And it would be a very stressful and boring job too, you need to stare at those numbers and be ready to issue a "live" ban before the 50 or so AVs are finished, on AV weekend.

Visit my blog @ http://ataxian.blogspot.com

 

frber

Why do you think that? Any system don't need to catch everything. Just need to catch a little and make the punishment severe enough so that AFK leeching become less attractive.

Assuming good monitoring tools are developed it wouldn't have to be anything more fancy than say a way for a GM to get a list of players with the lowest contribution (like dmg done + healing done) in all the on going battle grounds. From said list they could mark a few players for tracking and get sent a message whenever the player enters a new battle ground instance. Could then chose to enter the BG instance and look at what goes on a few times before deciding its an AFK leecher or not.

Would just give the current GM's who may want to take a break from processing tickets to ban a few leechers now and then instead. Of course if banning is sporadic just a 15 minute debuff wont do much good since players are back leeching again soon enough,

However with a debuff that takes prevents entering BGs for a week at least, and resetting current honor/arena points to zero, would quickly tip the scales against AFK leeching I bet. Even with pretty minor personel cost.

 

Duilliath

So AFK bots go farm harpies instead. My wee shammy hit the most damage done in all of AV (as level 67) just by fighting her way to the banner. Did she contribute in any way ? Probably only by merit of not getting herself killed by horde.

So healer AFK bots just spam Flash of Light or a similar spell on themselves. It's hardly more technical than using the Recall Trinket every 20-30 seconds.

 

frber

Do you really think its hard to find some decent measure that catch most leechers? I don't mean catch them as in collecting proof that can be used for banning directly. Just enough to put them on a list of likely candidates for live GM follow-up?

Besides you would never need to tell any botter how its done. Only an initial screening would need to be automated.

 

Duilliath

Some decent measure ? Probably not.

But I don't think 0 damage / 0 healing / 0 kills is the one you should be looking for.

 

Kasi

Add in the cliff that drops north of the spawn point for IBGY not being a cliff but instead being a hill, thus having two access points to IBGY would likely be enough to help equalize things.

 

Spatula

No, that just swings AV into being alliance-dominated instead of horde-dominated. Go back and read previous posts about the map imbalances - the whole map, not just the midfield. It's also a map change, which I would be very, very shocked to see. Their people are busy creating new stuff for WotLK. They've had 2.5 years to fix obvious imbalances with the map. They've done next to nothing about it. Rule patches are much easier to accomplish.

But if there was going to be a map change, I imagine it would most likely have to do with the starting cave entrances.

 

Thud00

This would simply allow alliance to ride straight into horde base. Removing the single horde advantage whilst retaining alliance advantages isnt a good idea. You would also have to fix the slope in horde base to force allies to agro the NPC's and move the bases towers so they can actualy hit something. Then you would have to fix FW gy so that is funnels attackers like SP GY. Would also like to see the towers changed so that you cant just run in and cap. Make it so you have to kill archers like the horde has to do.

A totaly open map reachs its logical conclusion in a flat plain. There are no strategic points then and it simply becomes a frag fest in the middle. I prefer a more wargame type where you can choose the ground on which to fight to confer some advantage. Fighting someone defending higher ground or a forest should give them an advantage just like it does in RL.

 

Kasi

The problem with the map right now is that alliance don't have a choke point in the middle and horde do have one. I guess if we could find a way to make FW more defendable at the same time that would work. But right now it is the IB choke point that is leading to crushing wins for horde on every server that has adopted the tactic. So what if you make it that IB GY can't be choked and you get a 600-0 win every time there? Well it goes back to rush games more often and both sides get honor, queues get shorter.

 

Zraknul

It's kind of funny, we have horde on our bg yelling for no defense so we don't end up with hour queues. Horde defense is mostly a delay than a hard block for us.

 

Chulak

The Alliance don't have a choke point in the middle of the map, but Dun Baldar has major choke points both leading up to Stormpike graveyard and on the bridge. Additionally, the defending archers can pelt whoever is on the half of the bridge nearest the stronghold. You can't remove the only viable horde choke point on the map, still allow the Alliance to dominate Frostwolf keep without dealing with a single NPC, and call it balance. I agree that a change could happen here, but it would have to include a change to Frostwolf Keep as well. Make that just as defensible at both the graveyard and main keep, then remove the IB choke point.

 

monkorn

The problem with the map is that you can easily defend against 25 with 10 people at a flag, or 20 defend against 40 due to the survivability buffs that came with BC. Thus horde can take up defense at IBGY/IB tower, and then put up a defense at SHB while it caps and the alliance has no chance to punch through even one of them.

One of the reasons I believe SP is such a strong GY to take while FW isn't has nothing to do with the GY area, but because the horde split up, some take the high path, some go under the bridge, some drop in to the GY, while most just go straight on the main path. This means that horde can and will get picked off one by one greatly slowing progress. Even worse is that the people weakening the overall raid force are the ones that think they are doing the smart thing. While it can be effective, it is completely shut down by just 2-3 defenders in between the rez zones.

The only real fix to either of these issues is to switch the capping to a EotS based system, so that you can zerg a GY down and not be stopped for a minute due to a single blinking mage, or to always have a 'contested' GY. Cap SF as horde and SH gets contested, cap SH and SP gets contested. The only thing I can't quite think of is how you stop in the above example of alliance just recapping SH right after SF gets capped and vise-versa. A minute timer before SH is capturable maybe?

 

Melador

If they're going to bother to modify map geometry, they should clearly just mirror the entire thing and end map imbalance issues once and for all.

 

Calantus

But the game is won or lost in the midfield with the reinforcement rule, both sides can simply take the middle and then grind down reinforcements, the bases don't even need to come into it. The only time base balance comes into it is when both sides are trying to kill the general and how quickly you can take the base becomes relevant to that race of course. The horde base could be free-floating in space unreachable in a BG without flying mounts and the alliance base be in an open field with 0 NPCs and it wouldn't matter so long as nobody rushed. It's obvious that Blizzard want to get rid of the race-and-ignore-the-other-side strategies so I'm not sure that it becomes an issue when these strats are used is all that relevant a point. Also in every case that both bases become relevant both sides usually get decent honor, which to be honest is what I'm looking for.

I do agree, for the record, that the horde base should be buffed up if IB is weakened or SH strengthened and that mirroring the map would be the ultimate best solution to imbalances. It's just that it's definitely a case of best of 2 evils to my mind for one faction to have an endgame disadvantage so they lose more often but with decent honor than for one team to have a midfield disadvantage and thus be more easily shut out.

 

Goreshot

Unfortunately, this would also require a redesign of towers/bunkers so that they match each other completely. As it currently stands, bunkers are significantly better than towers even in their default stages, as no Horde can cap a bunker without killing at least one (more often two) archer, because he will be shot at by the NPC archer(s) the entire time he is trying to cap. A single Alliance player can run into a tower and cap it without getting hit by the NPCs.

And contrary to what some might say, a flag placed in a relatively open area with LoS obstacles and a multi-tiered interior which allows the top level to fire down into the lower levels is a huge advantage in terms of proactive defense. Not to mention having all the NPCs shooting at people both outside and inside the building the whole time. Horde have an extremely difficult time defending any tower because of the way they are designed. Once an Alliance player gets within the tower, the NPC guards basically do nothing useful. They also don't have the range of Alliance NPC archers because they are placed within a significantly smaller radius, so they do not cover the same range. Also, someone who is trying to defend the tower cannot watch the flag and keep himself alive at the same time - you are either running in circles around the top levels of the tower, or you are hitting people off the flag (and dying in about 2 seconds in the process). Should I even mention the fact that Alliance can hold one of the Frostwolf towers and then begin clearing the NPCs on the other side with only minimum (if any) healing required? The Horde can't even get from one bunker to the other without having to deal with 25 different NPCs in between them, while being pelted by archers from both bunkers the whole time. I'm not even going to mention the Bridge of Death (and the Triangle of Doom between the two bunkers and the Aid Station) vs. the 20-foot ramp where Horde archers will actually shoot at one guy before the entire Alliance force is inside one or the other tower.

Granted, some of these benefits "switch" once you cap a flag (i.e. Horde can more easily hold a bunker once they have channeled the flag), but that requires that they channel the bunker flag first. This is often easier said than done, as Alliance are given multiple ways to delay the Horde offense all the way up to, and including, the bunkers themselves.

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-Actual EJ Forums feedback concerning Goreshot.

 

Cwealm

Why are we arguing this again? The horde in the BG my UD mage is on (Ysondre, Mal'Ganis, etc.) are winning 550 to nothing without ever needing to cap either DM tower. Now, more often than not we do, as well as capping both mines and the whole map is red, but we can still win quite handily without ever laying eyes on Vann or going through the alliance choke point.

 

Chulak

Right. And what happens if the Horde mid field advantage is destroyed as so many people are asking, without addressing the imbalances in the strongholds? If the mid field issue changes the strongholds will be where the game is won or lost, and we're right back to an imbalanced game...which is slanted in the other direction. Saying "The map is broken mid field, fix it...but pay no attention to the Night Elf with his hand in your pocket" will just result in a reverse imbalance. So, if "balance" is what everyone really wants, let's talk about all the balance issues...not just about making one change that would give the Alliance an unfair advantage. If the Alliance wants to lend credence to their own arguments, they need to start addressing all the imbalance issues. Continually saying "shut up about everything but the change that would let us win every game" does nothing but produce fervent opponents on the Horde side, and rightfully so.