How's this for retarded? There are lots of people that are *PAYING* for the privilege of NOT PLAYING a GAME and the company being paid is PUNISHING them (by not allowing them to play)! Reminds me of a certain penny-arcade.

Newsflash. That's WHY people are complaining about honorgrinding sucking so hard. Because they have to level up alts to keep up with the CURRENT FoTMism.

These issues are pretty much one and the same, since I don't think many people get gear in order to look pretty.

Are you really so dense as to construe the /afk situation this way? It's really like idling in Shat to you or something?

Yeah. I've played de_dust2 more times than anyone has played WoW BGs period. Except, after the first few thousand times I got tired of smearing pubby retards all over the walls and went into scrimming for 99% of my playtime there. It's not fun to beat people who have no hope of winning because they are less skilled or have less organisation. That is why I don't gank greens or greys on any character, and on my main I won't even go after a 70 that isn't obviously in PVP gear. Fuck getting together a bunch of friends and rolling WSG pugs. That's more boring than a normal WSG match because at least then I have a challenge. Give me premade v premade with decent honor gains and I'll play that. If I wanted to beat up on people who can't defend themselves I'd haul a rocket launcher to the nearest preschool and gib toddlers.

I AFKed AV because I couldn't stand to play the honor grinding game. Period. I'm not saying it's right or justified, that's just the reason I did it. By forcing me to play in BGs Blizzard has left me with 2 options: 1) spend hundreds of hours doing something I cannot stand in a game, or 2) quit. I chose the latter. Now, I actually quit a couple days ago when I realised AV was well and truly dead for me on my BG, but I definitely would have quit with this announcement if AV was still a race-fest on BG9. I got a paladin to 70, my 3rd 70 since I started playing again at the end of S1, and I just couldn't look forward to the honor grind with anything but dread. My priest still has S2 honor gear for those slots, my warlock still has his neck slot to fill... I just couldn't do it anymore.

Don't tell me I should quit if I don't enjoy the game because I DO enjoy the game. I just don't enjoy this one aspect of the game and am forced to do it if I want to play the part I do like. I also have played CRPGs since Ultima 7 and MMOGs since UO so I understand the time = power method. I just think WoW has gone too far with the honor grind for me to continue playing.

EDIT: Funnily enough I remember AFK macroing my skills in UO too. God that was painful for trade skills though. Needing to move the mouse and click 3-4 times to make an item when I need to make thousands is a recipe for RSI. Luckily OSI didn't care for a long time and after the split they didn't care at all if you did it in Feluccia.

That's not a newsflash, that's simply affirmation of my opinion of AFKers as generally being those that are unable to compete based on their own merit, and instead take the path of least resistance.

>200 000 honor to be competitive in PVP is simply not reasonable. Given ~5000 honor per 8 hours played, a reasonable average gain (given a decent organized group...), that's 320 hours of continuous play, all spent in the same four battlegrounds, for a TIER 4 equivalent pvp set. For comparison, 320 hours of badge farming at 2 hours per 4 badges = 640 badges, enough to deck your character out in tier 5 equivalent PVE gear, along with achieving exalted with pretty much every faction and a shitpile of money/nethers. 320 hours of raiding, at 5 hours a night, is 64 straight days, or four months, enough for any serious player to be Tier 6 geared (though probably not 5/5).

I hope and expect that the next expansion will deal with this grind problem. The Tier 4 PVP-equivalents require a completely disproportionate investment for the reward. Their costs should be further lowered, and less repetitive methods of gaining honor should be implemented; as an example, if a large number of dailies were associated with the Lich King PVP zone, each rewarding 400 honor each, players would have a simple, obvious, and relatively painless way to gear up.

Playing 320 hours of AB/EOTS groups is completely unreasonable and exactly why AFK became a pandemic. I'm sure a lot of casual PVPers/rerolls out there will now be taking a vacation until the expansion, which is the earliest we will have any sort of fix for the underlying issues of the honor system.

The thing is, if you want to compete seriously you need the gear. Even if you are content with hanging out in the 1500s for a while until you get the gear (which I am on my alts), you still need to eventuallu put 100+ hours in to get the other honor pieces.

Also, arena requires certain gear levels for skill to have a chance to show itself. My massively undergeared mage can get 2-shot in arena. Not much skill in that.

Also, what is wrong with instant gratification in a video game we play FOR FUN? My comments do not just apply to PvP. I have said the same about PvE. Anyhing that is described as a "grind" should have no room in a video game. Now, in PvE progression needs to be slowed down so that Blizzard has time to create more content. But since PvP content is nearly infinitely reusable the same argument does not apply.

I wasn't whining about AFKers... I was saying it takes way too long to gear up

You are forgetting one thing, one thing that killed PvP in many MMOs and that makes BGs in this game suck and arenas rock. Matchmaking (or lack thereof). The problem in other MMOs is super geared and skilled gank squads terrorizing the casual players, ultimately alienating them. BGs, where if you solo queue you are these days 70% or so likely to hit a premade and get rolled, have the same effect. But arena does not have that problem due to matchmaking.

Matchmaking to me is the savior of all of PvP. So what if the super skilled have much better gear than you and can 2v3 your team without breaking a sweat? After the first 10 or so games where you are sorted in ratings wise you should never face such a team. Unless you are the very best or very worst you will quickly gravitate towards 50% wins and fair matchups. Sometimes you will hit overgeared but underskilled people, sometimes the opposite. But the games should be pretty fair after a while (if they are not the matchmaking needs to be improved).

Even though I am decent at PvP (peaked at 2200 last season) I still get dominated by the top players. I know because I have played against some. And if every game was against the #1 team I would be frustrated, too. But it is not. Most games are against teams within 100 points. Matchmaking and instanced PvP prevent the tyranny of the elite. They can terrorize the top of the ladder, but they cannot kill the enjoyment of the average player (abuses of the system nonwithstanding).

That is also why I am lobbying hard for rated BGs.

EDIT: And as someone who has a full time job, I disagree that everyone has equal access to free time.

It seems this thread has turned into a "BGs suck" thread, which I pretty much agree with. I hate the monotony of grinding new gear but I wholeheartedly oppose most changes to the system that would make the honour grind significantly shorter.

Rated BGs / ladders would be fun, but organising teams would be quite difficult I think. It's something I'd love to see but a lot of stuff would need to be worked out, and once it entered a significantly competitive stage, balance would have to be changed significantly. In the end it could quite easily turn into more trouble than it's worth.

I'd like to put that into another perspective as this popular notion seems a bit one-sided.

In the end there are 2 big reasons to play BGs either for fun or for the rewards. A given player will probably play for each of those reasons or both at a given time over the course of his wow "career". I personally started AV only for the rewards as I was strictly interested in high level PvE, but also sometimes came back to have some fun. Now the premise that people who want the rewards for little effort are burdensome leeches assumes that the fun aspect is more important about AV than the reward aspect, although I suspect that the majority plays it for the rewards, which is, from my view, blizzard's misconception as well and not solely the fault of the players in question.
When I did AV strictly for the rewards I used to HATE those people who kept trying to delay the ineviteable win or loss of my team as it would delay my rewards. So from my perspective at that time they were inconveniencing those who wanted the rewards just for their own fun (I would have prefered them to actually go AFK instead of their pathetic struggle). Which is better? Maybe it is playing for fun. But not by as much as it might seem at first. In the end both motives are somewhat selfish as "fun" typically means "my very own fun" (and not maximizing the fun for all) and "rewards" typically means "my very own rewards" (and not maximizing the rewards for everyone playing).

I think one needs a better argument than one along the lines of "AV was intended this or that way so my motive > your motive", to make your current motive better in a way that gives you the right to badmouth people playing against your current motive. (We can can't even be 100% sure how AV is actually intended since blizzard isn't a homogenous entitiy. This also indicates that this bandaid didn't go through undisputed.)

I don't see anyone playing AV long enough to get S1 and still enjoying that process (assuming time spent in AV isn't decreased) no matter what blizzard does. But since it's the most efficient way to get the gear players will "endure" it (which goes against what many might expect from a game) and thus I think blizzard is more to blame than the AFKing individual. They should make the most efficient way more diverse and interesting (and maybe even in a way that forces you to do *something productive*), which indicates that the most efficient way to get your pvp gear probably shouldn't be limited to the current BGs.

That being said I'd hate the AV chat to become a blamefest where players are denouncing each other to get them reported and cause grief.

Another way to think about it is that it would put immense pressure on the Devs to balance things much more quickly, because glaring imbalances would be all the more obvious when everyone could more quickly reroll a perceived OP class. See the discussion on "making arena more accessible."

As for the second point, the fact of the matter is that classes often go months or even years in a suboptimal state before they receive any attention. Sticking with a class and being patient is commendable in a way, but realistically many classes are simply not seriously viable in many areas and receive essentially no balance attention, or incorrect balance attention. I don't blame anyone who played a hunter for leveling another alt to actually play with, for example.

It is already trivial to obtain, it just requires a lot of time. The consumption of inordinate amounts of time does not make something hard or difficult, it makes it boring. Pressing space bar once every 4 minutes for i141 loot cannot compare to the actual challenge which is clearing BT/Hyjal for i141 loots.

Peoples' comments about the BG daily quest and its original 4k honor/turnin are spot on. I wouldn't be in AV or any other BG if I got 4k honor from a single win. I would get it completed and go do something else in game due to the extremely low time/reward ratio for any further BGing past that point. It is really quite confusing as to why Blizzard did not leave that in.

The time investment is exactly what makes it non-trivial.

I think the point of the daily quests are to encourage participation, not discourage it, which a 4k daily quest would do since no one would really bother to queue without it (I know I wouldn't.) People would just form a premade, win, and then disband... and that would be the honor system (oh, wait, I guess you'd probably want 10 tokens or so as well of the given battleground... if that didn't happen, people would start trying to lose BGs on purpose to get quick tokens.) I really doubt that this is what Blizzard envisages. I wonder how much this would cut down BG participation by, really... probably somewhere between 50-80%, I'd guess?

And yes, it would also make PvE content trivial as well if you could get a new high-quality epic every 4-6 days for 15 minutes of effort. Why run 5-mans anymore except for maybe some rep rewards? I can gear up for PvE much more efficiently via BGs now. Remember how much people are inclined to bitch about the arena system for rewarding losers every 6-8 weeks... you want to accelerate that by a factor of seven?

Might as well have the non-heroic daily quests give 20 BoJs and give that Naaru some T6 loot while we're at it. Eventually we'll be able to play an hour every day and nearly have the best the game has to offer in a few weeks, guaranteed.

I agree. Crafting would become much more attractive for gear, if there would be some basic set, perhabs always a bit lower than the current honor gear and the recipes could be retrived by quests of winning a certain battleground once. Or Perhabs a better idea would be, that it is a repeatable quest that would give you one piece of material needed and you get it everytime you win a certain battleground.

I think the idea of highly increased bonus honor for winning only is better than increasing the amount per kill, that Dahis suggested. Also the daily quest should give a lot more bonus honor. Winning should be attractive. Perhabs winning a battleground should be rewarded with a small amount of money.

Problem is, that even now the honor stuff is better than Karazahan/Gruul/Magtheridon gear and partially even better than T5. If they speed up the honor gain too much it will also cause a lot of trouble.

Exactly. And it would decrease the whining because people would see first hand how green the grass on the other side really is. Right now the makeups are somewhat limited by what people can run with the classes they have at hand, and people get these inflated views of other classes capabilities. Arguments like "class X takes no skill" would disappear very quickly when people are actually forced to put up or shut up. Because many 1400 players might blame their gear or class for their rating when in reality if you are stuck in the 1400s the only one to blame is you.


The difference is that PvE progression is supposed to lead you to new, exciting and increasingly difficult content. Giving everyone full T6 does nothing, because what would you use it for? PvP is different. There is no progression of content. Because of that there is no harm in giving shortcuts to the top.

I have said it before. Arena should be the model for how loot is handed out. Good players get the loot fast. Bad players get it slowly. At the end of a season when titles are handed out everyone has all the loot except for a few bragging rights pieces. And the difference in power is not enough to matter at the ratings level where you cannot get the pieces. If you are sub 1850 at the end of a season then it is not the 10 DPS difference on the weapon that keeps you from getting Gladiator.

In my book, statements like "you can't" have no place in a billion dollar business. If your customers want it you better figure out a way to deliver it, else someone else will soon have that billion dollar business.

Many MMO players seem to suffer from something similar to the battered spouse syndrome. They have been mistreated by their games for so long that they have come to expect it. But arena has shown that you can make MMO progression based on skill and not time invested while at the same time making it accessible to all levels of play. I don't know if that can be applied to PvE in its current form but it surely can be applied to BGs.

Terms of Service, Part 4 (Rules of Conduct), C (Rules relating to game play):
"Rules Related to Game Play. Game play is what World of Warcraft is all about. Accordingly, the rules that govern game play in World of Warcraft are taken very seriously by Blizzard Entertainment. Note that Blizzard Entertainment considers all valid play styles in World of Warcraft to be part of the game, and not harassment, so player-killing the enemies of your race and/or alliance, including gravestone and/or corpse camping, is considered a part of the game. Because World of Warcraft is a "player vs. player" game, you should always remember to protect yourself in areas where the members of hostile races can attack you, rather than contacting Blizzard Entertainment’s in-game customer service representatives, referred to herein as "Game Masters," for help when you have been killed by an enemy of your race. Nonetheless, certain acts go beyond what is "fair" and are considered serious violations of these Terms of Use. Those acts include, but are not necessarily limited to, the following:"

"5. Anything that Blizzard Entertainment considers contrary to the "essence" of World of Warcraft."

Blizzard can ban people for whatever they want, whenever they want.

I agree with you entirely. In PvE progression to new gear is the end goal whereas in PvP gear is simply the means to the end (the end being, of course, #1 in the battlegroup). However, I think the main reasoning behind the honor grind is to act as a protection of sorts for the old raiding system. As we've established over and over again, people are going to take the easiest path possible to getting gear. If there was little or no time investment required to get PvP gear, everyone and their brother would be decking themselves out in Season 1 + randoms as soon as they hit 70. What happens to raid content like Kara and Gruul that you clearly outgear thanks to your shiny new free 141's and can jump right into ZA or SSC?

I'm a fan of reducing the costs of PvP gear to make it easier to gear up alts and players who really want to do it, but I think there needs to be changes to the gear before it could be done. PvP gear needs to be clearly itemized for PvP alone, just as PvE gear should be at a large disadvantage in the arena. Whether this involves adding new stats on PvP gear like dispel resistance or increasing the budget cost of resilience, I think making the gear more distinctive would help. If PvP gear was for all intents and purposes "bad" for PvE then there would be no more need for a protection system like the honor grind.

And I really think crafting would be an excellent idea as well. Blizzard could have done so much more with crafting professions to make them an integral aspect of gameplay.

Season1 Armour is distinguished more than well enough.

If I only look at my li'l rogue - load of useless stamina, some useful agility. Low AP. No Hit rating...
Only the gloves have some use in a couple of the encounters.

It's the same for a number of classes.

Weapons on the other hand... going from 71 DPS Blue weapons of crappiness to shiny 91 dps weapons. Now yes - that is a massive boost, no matter the wasted resilience on it. Heck, it even comes with a tiny bit of hit rating and ap !

Basically, the armour barely would impact Karazhan/Gruul, because it isn't geared for PvE. A rogue running around with 80 hitrating isn't going to break damage meters, despite their 11k health. Since there's little threat of massive impact, there's no reason to restrict it too much. Prices on S1 armour could easily be lower and there'd not be a PvE problem.

Prices on weapons though will have to stay up - since they will dramatically improve the performance of all classes dependent on their weapons.

However... when you get to the s3 gear - it's starting to turn into some of the best options available to some classes. The gear is drool-tastic for feral druids. The overall stats are good in general (broad sweeping statement since I didn't go over the lot with a microscope). And even if they're not tailored for PvE, the massive leap in ilevel will mean that they'll be head n shoulders above the entry level raid gear, due to their much higher item budget.

So, now, with Season1 on the shelves at vendors - this won't be a problem.
Season4 arrives and Season2 gets put on the shelves, and it will become an issue.
One of the easiest options, in my opinion at least, would be to
1) Leave s1 on the vendors when s4 arrives.
2) Base the price of s1/s2 armour on item levels.

That means you can drop the prices of s1 and still keep s2 on a reasonable price where it won't instantly make karazhan and the likes redundant.

Before WoW people said you can't let people progress solo and quickly because it destroys the community and degrades retention. WoW is big largely because it broke down a few of the barriers holding EQ back from enjoyment by the masses. It's a stupid, dead argument. If your only argument against something is "you can't" or "that's not how it is" then you have no argument. Amazingly retention can be achieved by making a fun game people will want to play for a few hours a week and stay subbed for that and some socialisation with their guild/friends/whatever. The carrot only works until the donkey decides walking that far isn't worth the carrot anymore, or figures out the carrot is forever out of reach and there's no other reason to be walking. Fun works for as long as you can keep the game fresh, something PVP is very good at provided you don't keep putting up barriers in front of the fun.

EDIT: The solution is to make honor fun, make it quick, or make it optional (or some combination of above). Having an unfun, mandatory (to compete in arena) grind that takes forever is quite possibly the worst system a game can have.

Right now a raider can ignore arena if they choose. Some arena for a weapon and possible one or 2 other slots can be useful, but it's not necessary. For honor grinding the trinket is very useful for some fights and most will PVP just for that if nothing else. Fortunately for the raider it's quick and easy to grind for the trinket alone and arena can be quite a small investment of time if you only need 1-2 items. A BGer needs arena gear, but like the raider they're fortunate in that arena doesn't take long if all you want is gear. The arena player can ignore raiding if they choose to as the benefits are small enough for all but paladins (and even they can ignore it as there are tradeoffs). The honor grind cannot be ignored however, and unlike some quick arena on the side for gear, grinding honor takes forever. The arena player is currently the only type of player out of the 3 that requires a heavy investment of time into an activity they may not enjoy.

It strikes me that WoW has gotten the gear progression situation with respect to PvP vs PvE almost exactly reversed now.

Here is what I mean:

PvP: People PvP for the challenge of fighting a competitive game against other people (while ignore gankers and griefers). They don't really care about gear as long as they have gear as good or better than the opposition. Symbolic rewards (titles, mounts, flags, tabards) that signal "I am the leetest" are good rewards here. Many PvP players just want to get the "the game" meaning competitive PvP.

PvE: People PvE for teamwork, the challenge of exploring and beating new content a sense of progression through the story and rising to more powerful fighting bigger challenges. Gear matters as it is the means to progress. I also think gear progression is a fundamental part of what makes PvE interesting to people symbolic rewards aren't the same to PvE players. PvE players are generally more interested in grinding gear setting up networks of people to play with and advance, etc. Within an expansion the gear "hamster wheel" is set by the raiding/instance progression and is not really reset until the next expansion or non-instanced content nullifies it (crafting, PvP, rep rewards, etc).

Consider what has happened in TBC...

PvE: You can craft near T6 equivalent gear for some classes from the day you hit 70 (FSW, etc). Progression gone. Gear progression from T4-T6 is seen as poorly itemized and generally "weak" in that you don't get much better stuff from one tier to the next. Much of the itemization is now routinely skipped by people PvPing for key pieces (weapons and more now). All of this breaks down what PvE players want which is gear and content progression. They are unhappy.

PvP: Has more grinding and gear progression than PvE! As has been said numberous times in this thread getting a full set of S3 honor gear is a huge grind, but it gets you to the top of the heap gear wise and you can basically do it solo + Arena team. You can do part of it and skip a lot of the PvE gearing up process in instances and such. But the people that should be interested in PvP are the ones least interested in progression, they just want to play (actually I would argue that any system that has 200+ hours of solo grinding even possible is a bad one). Imagine if they had the equivalent of Frozen Shadow Weave for the PvP it wouldn't impact the PvP game at all. Every time they need to reset the PvP "hamster wheel" it has knock-on effects on the PvE game - but the PvP people don't really need a gear hamster wheel do they? So PvPers stuck grinding gear to play the game they want are unhappy.

So you have what seems to me the odd situation that PvP is now the gear treadmill certainly for PvP but also partly for PvE. Yet, this tread mill is damaging PvE progession (why bother just do loss arenas for a S2 weapon noob) and forcing hardcore gear progression on people that presumably don't care. But, Blizzard can't eliminate that PvP gear progression without doing even more damage to the PvE progression given how they set things up...