Taantric

You are just treating the symptoms and not the cause. Let me clue you in on what is happening here since you have obviously not read the thread but just started posting in at the end. Blizzard has mucked up AV (the main honor grind mill) by making it imbalanced in the favor of the horde and making it possible for the alliance to not only loose vast majority of the time but also to get no honor for the loss. Losing morale and faced with no rewards the Alliance have stopped queuing AV and consequently greatly inflated the queue time for the Horde. This is your first sympton.

Another side effect has been an explosion of trade channel premades (even more so for premades that have no resilience requrements). Faced with a MASSIVE honor grind, players have started making a lot more premades as they will naturally flow to whichever solution offers the most efficient honor gain method (which AV was for most solo players). And all these new premade groups are taking advantage of the BG queuing rules. Rules that were put in place to offer flexibility to players and not restrict them due to playing time constraints. Do you even remember the sheer agony that was BG's before multi-queuing? With the premades doing all this queue jumping to avoid facing other premades gives us the second symptom.

The easiest way to fix this and restore balance is fix AV map and MAYBE remove or lower the marks requirements for honor gear. And of course above all, they need to lower the honor cost of gear.

 

SanSul

A half hour que would not be an improvement for anyone except those looking for tokens. Alliance already have instant ques, so frankly those who need tokens on horde are stuck with 2 hour ques, but since they tend to win every game on my battlegroup, the get the tokens 3 times faster then alliance.

AV having the most honour is not a problem at all. It does require 40 people afterall. There is already signifigant problems with games starting in WSG where one team has 5 or more less members then the other team, I see it happening for both factions. You reduce the honour of AV so its not better then other battlegrounds will simply cause people to que up for faster turtle free games, such as EOTS/AB, where you need signifigantly less people to play. This will simply make many AV games start 20/20 if your lucky, or 40/20 depending on que times, and if those 40 are horde, it will only promote the problems.

A few months ago, the system was working. Both sides BG ques were almost instant for anything. AV's were often fast, long games being maybe 45 minutes average, with the rare turtle going for over an hour. So what if Horde rarely won...they managed to pull the often Vann exploit, and even with a loss they walked out with half the honour of alliance, and likely still reaching 1000/hour. Premades existed in all the other battlegrounds, but they weren't as prevalent. People who needed honour found that just queing for AV was more efficient then a premade. Premades were more about fast tokens and fun, not about honour gain. Now we see so many people FORCED into premades because they are the only reliable way to gain fast honour, and even then its lower then solo pre 2.3 AV and the number of items required to be "competitive" keeps rising.

All the problems currently faced with the whole system can easily be reverted. Blizzard simply needs to suck it up and admit they made huge mistakes and revert every single AV change, and reduce the price of honour gear. Heck even throw in a bonus 500 honour per AV game for a week just to get people to reque and get used to the "old" AV again.

The problems with PvP are spreading,and spreading quickly at that. Blizzard has barely acknowledged the issue. They seem to think that slightly increasing the time it takes for Horde to stomp an NPC is a solution. Or that increasing the HP of an NPC very few horde even get to is also a solution? And yet the major problems of AV exist, such as Iceblood, Horde getting to SH before alliance...and are completely ignored. Does Blizzard even play AV? Does Blizzard even PvP?

If the goal is to make PvP fun, then why does the unfun "grinding" reward so much more then the fun aspect of PvP, such as Halaa, or WSG, or other battlegrounds? If the goal is to make PvP fun, then why create such a huge gear disparity between new comers and seasoned veterans. S3 gladiators versus fresh 70s is basically returning back to WoW 1.0 with T3 crushing everything in its path. I thought Blizzard wanted to avoid that? Or is it that a fresh 70 still gets crushed, its just with so much HP, it takes 5 seconds longer to die instead.

Alterac Valley has become a total joke, a further embarassment to Vivendi/Blizzard's performance the past few months. If Blizzard doesn't care for the quality of its own product as evident by the "swift" fix to AV...a battleground that affects millions of players, how can one expect paying customers to care if the company doesn't? Im sure glad to know that things like getting a free frog quickly hotfixed, but fixing something that is causing stress for almost everyone in the game has no priority? Maybe they are planning a large AV change? but does that mean everyone must continue to bleed?

So basically, if I slash open my leg (Alterac Valley) I must let it bleed until I am almost dead before I can get stiches in a few months? Ever heard of a bandage? It stops the bleeding until you can get proper treatment, but I guess Blizzard is out of bandages. I apologize for tone of the post, I am just very upset and frustrated with the PvP situation right now.

 

Mordinm

Except the map didn't change at all. It's been a while but the last major map change I can recall in AV was the removal of Korrak and the rest of his trolls. The rules of the game changed quite a bit and they stripped a few honor bag elites out but the map itself didn't change.

I queue up on Ner'Zhul and it's hour long waits and wins more often then not. I queue up on Laughing Skull and it's a minute or two and the alliance dominates. From reading this thread it seems on 2 BG the allies are getting stomped. On the rest the alliance does just fine. Seems to me that's pretty damning evidience that the map is not the reason the allies aren't winning on Bloodlust. If you want to address causes you might want to look somewhere besides the map.

Before you again say I am ignorant yes I relize that the horde get points when they lose by capping everything south of SP. The alliance can get a decent sum of points by defending SP and DB though not quite what horde will get from a loss.

 

Twinky

Read up, and expeirence the fights a bit more. Actually take note of where the horde are at the start-mid game. In most games where alliance win, it's simply rush past each other and race to the end, a race in which the Alliance have a significant advantage in doing once past IB. This was the case pre-2.3, as to win you were forced to go offensive and fight to Van, a fight which the alliance had far less resistance in doing thanks to the map design. This is also the alliance general winning strat when you see them win, an all out offensive with 10-15 on defence (more then enough to slow down a horde offensive trying to push over the bottle neck bridge).

Although, now with the inclusion of the reinforcement count Horde now has the option of playing defensively and winning, and if they choose to defend IB and it's surounding structures they can form an almost unbeatable turtle and simply win via attrition and the eventual pressure on SH and beyond whilst maintaining their defensive structure (not allowing ninja tower caps or gy caps etc).

With this map design (which as you said has not changed) we truly see the Horde advantage for once since winning via an all out defence is now an option, an option that allows the alliance little to no honour (they usually get 20 by capturing their mine in the north).

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...Conversion.png

 

Taantric

Ah I see you are arguing for the sake of arguing. Look you can delude yourself as much you want, the fact is that AV is now imbalanced that cannot be disputed (at least not by any reasonable person). Read this thread, it is not just 2 BG's any more it is happening across more as the Horde get a clue.

Also I must say it is pretty magnanimous of you to give the Alliance this


but you know what I am still not going to queue AV on my alliance rogue so enjoy those 2-3 hour queues

 

◊ songster

What I've never understood is why Blizzard doesn't simply make a second version of AV with the starting positions reversed. Vandar where Drek'Thar is, rams swapped with wolves, Galv swapped for Balinda, the NPCs at the base swapped with their counterparts. I believe there's an almost exact 1:1 correspondance for all NPCs and mobs, so it really should be a trivial exercise. Then, when you queue AV, it's a 50:50 chance to get one version of the map or another. Terrain imbalance, while never fun, is at least tolerable if you have a 50:50 chance to be on the favoured side.

The same could and should be done for AB, WSG, EoTS and any future BGs as a simple matter of course.

In regard to the other major problem in BGs - zoning in to a game which is already lost - you need to do as much as possible to stop people jumping ship once the BG has started. A more intelligent queueing algorithm would help. Allow multi-queueing, but suspend progress in the queue while you're in a BG. That way, if you're at position 100 in the AV queue and enter AB, then you stay at position 100 until you get out of AB. No more exiting one BG to enter another. If you AFK out of a BG, you're removed from all queues you're currently in.

A few days ago I was in EoTS trying to complete the daily. Four times in a row I had a 20-minute queue, and each time zoned in at something like 1500:250 points, with the opposition having 3 of the bases capped. That's not remotely fun.

 

Amonra

If the alliance defend SP it leads to a very long game until one side runs out of reinforcements. The horde have a 200-300 point reinforcement advantage by taking out 2 bunkers and balinda so the horde are guaranteed to eventually win this battle.

So the alliance would get very little honor/hour from it. There is no incentive to play because other battlegrounds offer more honor/hour, and if AV marks are required then a quick loss is better than a slow loss.

Prior to 2.3, when the horde lost they got reasonable honor for a quick loss. A very different proposition.

 

Yaltus

I'm pretty sure that if implemented side-switching, whichever team got the weak side (whichever that is perceived to be at the time) would almost completely give up. AFK, queuing out, you name it. Sure, you'd get to win about half the games, but they wouldn't be remotely fun, and the losing side would still get no honor. Seeing as how the first reaction to most people when they see a preform on the other side in AV say "this is over, screw it", I feel pretty comfortable there'd be a similar reaction for side0-switching.

And yes, landing in a mostly finished game is completely miserable and near the top of the list of things I'd like to see fixed. Relatedly, preforming is great honor/hour, but it often isn't any fun because of how many games involve an opposing preform queuing out and then you already controlling the game by the time new players are in. Your suggestion is quite good, but I wouldn't have a huge problem with deserter for leaving a battleground by any route either.

Perhaps to stop the preform queue out thing, or at least make it less frequent, stop showing the participants screen before the match starts?

Mon centre cède, ma droite recule, situation excellente, j'attaque.

 

Borland

I wonder how many players knows about the av trinket.
I bet BEs and draeneis doesnt know much about it , so has most of the new players.

Currently its obtained if you go get a quest off quest mob in tarrens mill , in front of av entrace.
The place sees wow player once every month

If everyone had one such item and it wasnt trink (its stats are outdated to carry on perma on a trink slot and 30seconds sometimes are alot of time).

Anyway my idea is - if the pvp trink had the av functionality for example , or av trink was obtainable from the queue mob in the major cities after completing daily - that could change alot the dynamics in av - if 10+ enemy players trinket back to defend when first messages of pops , for example "your entire horde base got caped by one stealthing druid /lol" and 5-6 players trinket back after 4-5seconds.

 

Mordinm

Ahh the myth of the unbeatable turttle at Iceblood. I've palyed about 15 AVs since queues got up to an hour. I've not once seen more then 2 people at IB GY to start. Instead the bulk of the D goes to Galv. The Zerg IB or Zerg past IB remains a very viable alliance strategy in every single game I've been in.

The difference in starting points on the map just isn't a very large factor and hasn't been since the snowfall mattered to horde. It allows the horde to get the first cap on SH bunker, which while nice for points simply isn't a significant factor in the game.

Zerging Galv to start is the flat out the stupidest thing you can do short of sending 40 people to cap a mine. On a balanced map, if one side does the stupidest thing possible and the other adopts a somewhat reasonable strategy, guess who's going to win. Alliance are losing on some BGs because horde started palying less dumb and and alliance didn't adapt. After a week of that alliance has given up and so now they lose because half their team isn't trying. These are not map imbalance issues.

I've said it earlier in this thread. You want to fix the queue times add the Lts back in the game. 200 points of undefendable honor for each side would really fix this issue. The map is fine.

 

Kaladian

Well on LB for the longest time after 2.3 it stayed a race with almost no defense but over the last 2 weeks our horde have slow but surely started defending IB/Galv area. It started with about 1 in 4 games there would be a strong defense in this area but now every game there is 10 or so horde sitting at IB bottleneck waiting to see if the alliance goes for Galv or IBGY. With a defense of locks/mages/healers it is very tough to get thru. The Horde kill Bal while capping SH bunker once those are capped they sure up the defense while pushing SHGY. If the alliance loses SFGY befor eit caps you are looking at a long drawn out very little honor game. I use to love AV not for the wins or loses but for the honor both side could get for racing to the kill but now i can see sitting in a AV for 1 hour and 20 mins for 183 honor or less and that is including kills.

they need to make it fun again. Make it Xhonor/min plus bonuses for tower/wining

 

Talgog

The thing is, it's almost never one stealth/berserker class that gets into bases. Usually, under the current model, it's full-on assault. Five guys going for the lead towers, followed by the main zerg. When you trinket back to do something about that, you just get ganked. If you don't have a hotrod computer, you will probably be ganked before you load.

And, under the reinforcement model, it is almost always over by the time one side is assaulting base. They've probably gone all the way up the map and burned everything, while their defense has prevented loss of captain and usually at least one tower.

It almost doesn't matter how many you kill in base defense at that point because reinforcements heavily favor the enemy. Outnumbered severely, you won't be getting a net positive kill ratio unless you are there with your Arena team and slaughtering the unorganized PUG's. And if you are, why did things get so bad in the first place?

-

The problem in AV now is that, with reinforcements, the Horde would win an optimally played, equal gear, numbers and organization battle every single time, with Alliance achieving little/no honor. Some wins would take longer than others, but they *would* win. They would win if they did nothing other than dig in hard at SH bunker and Galv/Iceblood, and there is absolutely nothing the Alliance can do to prevent them from doing that.

You cannot flush 10-15 Horde out of SH bunker and you cannot remove 25-30 Horde from the Iceblood line, assuming fairly equal gear and organization and no unrealistic tactics like an organized 40 Alliance assault on SH bunker. It can be difficult to remove considerably fewer competent, organized players from an Alliance bunker due to the design. They are really well built defensive structures, with two levels of hell and the middle platform which is untargetable except from on the interior steps directly in front of it, which can also be covered from above by players who can't really be targeted effectively from outside either. Stir in Earthbind totems, hunter traps and Blizzards at the door to taste.

If the Alliance could swarm into SH bunker before the Horde got there, they would be equally hard to remove, but Alliance cannot get to SH bunker in time.

Some Battlegroup Horde either haven't figured this defense out, or they don't want the mess of ques that have happened on BG's where Horde have figured it out, but this issue is very much innate to AV.

 

Borland

I played Team Fortress recently and i found out i like their capture point based game model , its pretty tempting.
They have 2 game types assault/defence and equal distribution (our av is this type)
Assault defence - one team has to capture a point and another has to defend.
Equal distribution - every team has 2 points and middle one is free to grab.

Thats the basics , what i love to see in av would be - bases are free to be caped the moment you cap the previous one.
So you can not just run to base and cap it - you need to go to first two towers , have a shoot out with enemy there , and if you get pushed back - you are pushed back to your next point.
I.e. no main base rushes.
Also Players that cap points cap faster than the defenders (eots style btw) so you cant just stand there and cap a flag while your team unloads endless aoe fears or get into someones model (friend of mine with be rogue usualy cap flags standing in some tauren that is spam clicking the flag - if no direct aoe present - the warrior gets hit and the rogue isnt because its protected by the cow.

Another small detail - you get main base respawned , not in the same base you just died - so the offence have some chance.

But i guess all thouse things will require complete revamp of the map ... oh well , just had to write my observations.

 

Kasi

I'm sorry that your battlegroup hasn't figured out the surefire way for horde to win every AV. I'm very glad my BG hasn't either. That doesn't mean that there aren't ones like Stormstrike where the horde do have it figured out and follow it to its messy conclusion every time. Just because the horde on your BG are not smart enough to figure out the commonly posted strat to win AV 600-20 nearly every time doesn't mean it's not broken. It just means your bg's meta game is different.

Edit: It's not the zerg Galv that is killing alliance on these servers. It is the fact that horde are defending IBGY and the tower in front of it with 15-20 defence. Because of the chokepoint you can stop alliance from getting by there and easily wipe out their offence. It seems like you have just not read this thread at all and are completely clueless to how AV goes on some BGs now. The map is not fine.

 

Aadar

They should change IBGY to be an alliance GY that cannot be captured by horde, and change SHGY to be a horde GY that cannot be captured by alliance. Now if horde try to defend the IB choke point the will have alliance respawning on them and wont be able to hold the area for any meaningful period of time. Furthermore, a base turtle will be less successful as a capture of the graveyard there will force the defenders to respawn over half way down the map.

 

deadlights

So you put the alliance beyond the horde's defensible choke point and give them a free run at the least defensible GY in the game and put horde in front of IB which they must take if only for the mere nuisance the archers present to an offensive force... that has to funnel through that bottleneck and then they have to take the most defensible GY in the game. Sounds fair. That would just set the map back to overwhelming alliance advantage of yesteryear.

 

Celnathor

Regardless of how people feel about the map, I think a lot of people would support this. If the norm on some battlegroups were 600-200 instead of 600-0, that would make a world of difference in getting the losing side to actually queue up. 200 bonus honor for a 30 minute losing AV isn't great, but for the solo player is still probably better than getting stomped by premades in AB/WSG/EOTS, which would be enough to keep people queuing.

 

• Vema

All this would result in is a revert back to the old PvE race style. Short of modifying graveyard mechanics in a way to make defense impossible this would do nothing to prevent a base turtle. In fact, by removing the major horde defense point, but doing nothing about the major alliance defense point (Not SHGY, but SPGY and the bridge) you would be just shifting who the defense strategy favors, not fixing anything.

 

Kasi

Easy enough to fix.

1) Have that hill where you can't go up where the IBGY is be an actual hill you can run up. Thus IBGY has two points you can attack it from.
2) Change it so that in DB archers can't fire into the buildings like they can't in the horde base. (or make it in the horde base that archers can fire into the tower)
3) Move the npcs in the alliance base into a more out of the way place.
4) Do some changes in map geometry to make FW more defendable.

Thats it really. Sure the bridge is annoying, but so is that damn blind ramp from the outbuilding up into the horde base. If anything that can be more nasty because horde can sit on top of the towers and rain death from above. You can't do that on the alliance base because the towers are too far away from the chokepoint.

 

Melador

True, but the horde base is much more compact (and the entrance is blind) so it's pretty easy for alliance to just charge all the way through to the RH flag and fight there, rather in the ugly chokepoint. It's considerably harder to charge all the way through the SP chokepoint, over the bridge, through both tower's archers, to the Alliance base's flag.

For alliance, the real challenge is to get people to actually run through a crowd of horde rather than dismounting as soon as the first red pixel hits their monitor.

Overall, they can bandaid stuff here and there, but there are really just two options:
1. Give both sides enough honor in a typical game that no one cares that it's imbalanced.
2. Mirror the map (or essentially mirror it ala WSG).

The geometry is just way too asymmetrical right now and that's always going to give one side or the other an advantage. There's not really any way around it.

 

Lodekim

Melador is exactly right, any kind of solution that removes the horde advantage at defense right now gives the alliance the advantage of a much more defensible base, the only real way to fix it entirely is to essentially mirror the map, choke points and being capable of getting to key objectives first is inherently imbalanced, and unless both sides have it exactly equally, someone will have the advantage, and a small advantage in AV as it is right now turns into a guaranteed win.

That needs to be the end solution, they need to make it so no side has a map advantage, but until then, they really need to just change the honor so that you always get some worthwhile honor out of the game, and are never just getting absolutely crushed in honor gains.

 

Mordinm

I guess I didn't specify clearly enough. Those 15 games were palyed on my alts which remain on Ner'Zhul in the Bloodlust group. Except for one game where the alliance had what looked to be a fairly large preform they were all horde wins. This is a BG that has got the winning horde stragey down pat and in a real application it has huge holes that a less dumb alliance stragey could exploit to turn the games competitive.

 

◊ songster

Doubt it, especially coupled with stronger sanctions on afking out of a running BG. And if they do, Blizzard can tweak it comparatively simply by giving the weaker side an extra 50 honor (or 100, or whatever it takes to even up the imbalance in honor/game). Right now they can't do that as it would be perceived as unfair to selective give one faction "free honor". With side-switching, there's no cause to complain.

 

• moz

Looking at those numbers posted a couple of pages ago -- I am pretty sure Stormstrike is easily 90%+ win for Horde. However, I am also pretty certain that Horde has a far greater % of capable players -- then again it could just be a side-effect that Alliance has been battered so much since the change that no one really bothers to try or even pay attention to instruction.

 

• Vema

A few posters on FoH correctly stated that the biggest issue that alliance face on BG5/9 is learned helplessness. The horde defensive strategy is not some massive juggernaut that is never beatable, alliance have tried to beat it, with limited luck. As the boycott started games became more and more full of AFK bots and people with no desire to even try, further cementing into the alliance that even if they got a few organized people in, they would be unable to make any serious difference.