I'm curious, does anyone know of a site that tries to track Alterac Valley win/loss ratios per battlegroup? What I'm interested in is the actual overall win/loss ratio. Seems like some battlegroups have Horde dominating AV, and other battlegroups find just the opposite.

On a side note, do you think randomizing the map starting points would actually even out the win ratios?

You're looking for Warcraft Realms. They use data collected by an addon to do a census and to determine BG win/loss ratios. You need to graph the data to make any sense of it; for example, over the past few months the horde on Nightfall have drifted from relative dominance to completely dominated. The raw win:loss ratio would tell you we're at 50:50.

As for your second point, a lot of people would /afk out every time they got the 'bad side' (which would be whatever side always lost AV on their BG) but since both sides would get the 'bad side', it would even out. My guess is that it would lead to the Horde winning more across most battlegroups since they're better at PVP.

They couldn't do random start locations because the art/models/NPC's in the south are for the Horde and the art/models/NPC's in the north are for the alliance. Or are you suggesting they swap them completely? Bunkers are a lot bigger than towers so I'm not sure it would even work to swap the models.

And broad generalizations are awesome.

They don't seem to track BG win/loss ratios. Only population ratios per server.

Flipping the start locations wouldn't make sense from a lore perspective. But, I'd be curious to see the effects of doing so.

Your post was going so well up until this point!


AV is a really strange beast, the fact that landslides wax and wane like that suggests that map imbalances aren't the core issue. Both sides have easily-exploitable imbalances, but getting the right mixture of 40 people on your side who are both knowledgeable and driven with regard to these advantages is the tricky part.

If there's some other explanation for the Alliance's consistently worse win/loss ratios in WSG, I'm all ears.
Mouse over the Realm Data button, then go down to the last option, Battleground Stats.

While I have experienced mostly losses horde side in a PuG vs PuG situation, it feels indeed like it is very dependant upon group makeup (experience, average gear, skill).

Though why I am posting, is that there is currently an interesting thread on the WoW forums, pvp subforums, about map flow. While the thread is the typical wow-forum discussion, the original poster brings a new perspective into play, being map flow.

link

I certainly cannot support the notion that Horde players are inherently better. =(

PUG vs PUG groups tend to come out 50-50 in WSG/AB/EotS, seems to be impacted more by the time of day. AV has been 75-80% losses in my battlegroup, but I hear other realms have different "default" strategies and enjoy higher win ratios.

A big problem is that AV has become a huge honor farm for the Alliance. That means gearing up new characters has become difficult for the Horde on our realm, while relatively easier for the Alliance.

Map flow is very interesting to me, because I wonder what would happen if they chose to flip starting positions at random. It also makes me wonder if the 'default' losing strategy might change over time. It seems unlikely now because most players in AV don't do much thinking and prefer to just follow where the bulk of their comrades go. But if the starting positions were reveresed, that might create additional perspective...

That should work in the favor of alliance though because they are generally waiting for enough horde to queue. Almost every AB and WSG I'm in the Alliance team out number the Horde team to start. Sometimes by a great margin.

My own anecdotal belief has to do with the fact that it seems most people upon purchasing WoW simply gravitate to the Alliance and therefore you get the bulk of the newer players (poorly geared, specced and inexprienced) who are thrown into the Alliance PuGs compared to Horde side.

Flipping start locations would make sense from a war perspective. Front lines are rarely static.

Also, I'd like to purchase a roll of razorwire for a certain length of fence on the horde base

Screw the razor wire, I want to hire an architect to revamp the whole fracking Horde base.

Actually though, what I need to do is spend my next AV scouring the map and getting friendly with all the paths/terrain. In my battlegroup Alliance wins more often than Horde in everything except AB, but I've talked to people in a battlegroup where the Horde kicks butt so much in AV that the Alliance just mostly refuses to que up. That means the total terraing disadvantage I see might not be so and we just might not be using strategy to maximize what we're given.

Stormstrike has returned to at least a semi-race situation with 2.4 live. It's too early to say if Scorched Earth has been abandoned, but the shift in Horde starting location makes the exact old strategy unworkable, and apparently eliminates the option of a 30-40 minute 600-0 win.

Rampage was a base race in the single AV I played last night. Hardly enough of a significant sample size, but it was interesting to see the shift back to the old methodology. Alliance won in about 15 minutes but the Horde still got honor. Hopefully this will help queues to return to normal?

Yea, Bloodlust had a HUGE AV problem in 2.3, since the Alliance stopped queuing for it. On AV weekends, Horde would experience a short queue of 30-45 minutes. Otherwise, we were waiting an hour+ for it to pop. Horde QQed, everyone got pissed, and nothing changed. I haven't had the time to play since 2.4 hit, so I've been unable to see what AV is like now (Horde side).

However, I noticed just the opposite for most of 2.3 - Horde sucked hard at all the other BGs. This was due to a massive influx of premades from the Alliance, and more often than not Horde would just sit at the starting point and "let them win, they're a premade." If you were lucky enough to face another pug, you had a 50-50 shot...but most of the time, people would just let the allies win since it would be shorter to lose the BG than to be a deserter.

SH bunker can be defended now, but that doesn't mean that it will be defended, or that your average PUG will be able to shift gears in the face of an unexpectedly heavy horde defense. Alliance get to Galv, get wiped, and realize now they need to keep Balinda alive and retain SH bunker - what are the chances that's going to happen?

I think people are happy to be able to play AV again and as a result are not pushing it, but whether the current situation is the new norm, or if it goes back to the 2 hour queues, remains to be seen. Hopefully we can keep the current balance (even if it means the horde players have to "hold back"), because when AV went away as an honor farm for alliance, all the other BGs ended up ruined for PUGs.

It's more that Alliance is motivated to try and Horde does not seem to be as motivated to really form a wall. Racing is a lot easier and far faster, and so people race. Horde forming wall no longer guarantees high honor win, so it is much harder to make Horde do it.

I haven't seen any really pitched Horde defense at IB in fifteen AV's now. Two serious defenses at Galv, one of which worked, one of which got mowed down by three warlocks spamming SoC. Backcapping and contesting nodes is a much different story - people understand that the warmaster buff *hurts*, but that's far less obnoxious than trench warfare. More than half of the AV's have either Alliance or Horde retaking midfield bunkers with pretty forceful teams.

Compared to pre-2.4 where every single AV was defined by a 20+ Horde wall just beyond the IB fence, there is a dramatic difference.

EDIT: Scorched Earth never made economic sense for Horde, so anything that discourages most Horde from going along with that is good. It would be irrational for Horde honor-hounds to go back to trying to get 300 honor/hour when the current rate is between 1200 and 1600.

On Vindication, the large majority of AV's this current AV weekend have turned out one of two ways.

1) Horde has around 15 or so on defense, primarily recapping IB and TP. If they can defend Galv, they will, but don't bend over backwards to do it. When things get messy, they fall back and defend Frostwolf as best they can, usually to great effect. The other possibility which has happened a few times is that they will simply allow the Alliance to ride through more or less unhampered, and hold TP and IB through the entire game, which makes killing Drek'thar next to impossible.

2) The far more common, and much much less successful strategy has been the classic Horde "OMG RUSH TO AS AND WE WIN LOLZ!" Unfortunately, the majority of horde players on Vindication have no idea how to rush effectively. As such, Balinda typically gets smoked, they cap SH and IW bunkers, eventually, and then spend a solid 10-15 minutes goofing around at SHGY. I don't know why people have such an aversion to capping SHGY, when it is clear that the majority of players will dismount and attack the constant stream of alliance spawning there rather than trying to progress further in the game.

The lack of a graveyard eventually results in the entire horde force spawning closer and closer to our base. Alliance take IB, FW, and the Relief Hut in such quick succession that the majority of the time all that happens is Horde essentially mass-recalls back to the cave only to try to run past and start something up again, after being 15 minutes behind. The lack of taking graveyards is killing AV in its current state. The terrain and NPC's still have a large effect on some games, particularly those with 10 or more alliance defending in Dun Baldar. However, most games don't require any defense for them. Horde stalls out, doesn't take a graveyard, and ends up back where they started minus 4 towers and 3 graveyards. I played one today where nobody except for myself passed Icewing Bunker. I assaulted SPGY twice, but when nobody even attempted to help, I just started farming the guards as they respawned for repair money.

Alliance on our battlegroup have the idea down pat. In roughly 90% of games, either FWGY or the Relief Hut are being assaulted BEFORE Tower Point or Iceblood Tower. Horde can do the same thing; however, due to horrendous NPC placement and far better archers in Dun Baldar, the majority either can't due to damage constraints or don't know how. I can immediately take the Aid Station at the start of a game on my paladin and warrior, barring player interference, while only pulling the NPC's around the flag. However, both of them take anywhere from 1/2 to 2/3 of their life off just by running and attempting to do so. And if you do misstep while getting to the flag, you will either pull the 3 or 4 mobs near the forge, the elite next to the entrance to South Bunker, or the other elite near the flag who inevitably gets pulled once a large force gets up there.

So it IS possible to solo cap AS with both towers up. You simply have to be able to solo the guards on next to no health, while avoiding NPC's, and cap the flag from the exact right spot that neither tower can hit you.

This is pretty much spot on. Especially the part about NPC placement comparison. The alliance base is simply too open compared to the Horde base (concerning archer LOS and damage) and it is just a lot harder to infiltrate. I am also in Vindication and so many times the Horde has no problem advancing up to SPGY and taking it, but actually taking over Dun Baldar (towers and relief hut) is incredibly more time consuming than it is for Alliance.

I still don't understand why they didn't just have a mirror map for AV. I mean they basically mirrored the map in every other BG, why not AV?

That post explaining map flow is incredibly biased towards the horde perspective. Having played AV since the beginning as well and having done it in every incarnation on both horde and alliance I would agree with most people that overall alliance has the advantage in AV; however, that doesn't excuse some blatant misrepresentations of the AV map that the OP made in that thread.

In his very first map outlining choke points he claims that the only horde CP is between IBT and IBGY while the alliance have three CP's; IWB, SPGY and the DB bridge. While this is partially true he conveniently leaves out the fact that horde can get to SPGY from the front as well as looping around the hills and claims that IWB is a good CP because it can be reinforced quickly from SHGY when it makes no sense that SHGY would not have been capped yet.

From my time playing horde it is also not true that the horde have no CP's past IBT. Although the horde base is inferior overall to the alliance base there is still the area from the towers down the incline into the building that is just as tight of an area as the DB bridge and lacks only the ability for the towers to shoot anyone riding through like the DB bunkers can.

Though I play alliance the majority of the time now I would be all for a mirrored map or a rotation system of some type. I just hate the ridiculous claims on both sides of perceived imbalances that may or may not exist.

The answer to this is in the original intention for Alterac Valley. As I understand it, it was originally intended to be a pvp zone - hence all the various quests and mountains of NPCs strewn across the original AV map.

Whoever designed AV should swallow that pride and admit that non-mirrored maps simply don't work well for balance and switch to a mirrored version or a random start point version.

This is similar to what I saw on the Ruin battlegroup over the weekend as well. We were much more successful when we had 20 or so on defense at the IB choke point. Sort of. When it worked and we were able to make progress on offense we ended up winning with only one or two of our towers having been capped. When we didn't, they often turned in to 40 minute games of attrition.

On the other hand, in situation number 2 it was just a PvE race to see who could cap everything the quickest. Our strategy was maybe marginally different in that we rushed SPGY and then assaulted Dun Baldar from there. Typically we had 10 token defenders to slow them down at choke and then try to recap behind alliance and hold FW for as long as possible. Alliance did the same. The win ratio was roughly 50/50 and the games lasted between 12-15 minutes on average. Winners walked out with ~450 bonus honor and losers with ~250. That evens out to 350 honor average at 4 games an hour (queues were instant). That's 1500 honor an hour for both sides plus honor kills.

I found the first type of games much more exciting...there were some intense battles at IBGY and IB tower and taking Dun Baldar was a real challenge. However, I found the second type of game to be much better in terms of bonus honor. Even if we dominated alliance in those attrition games we only walked out with 500-600 bonus honor...for 40 minutes. That doesn't take honor kills in to account, though, which could very well more than make up the difference...

Now that I've played both Horde and Alliance on my battlegroup I have to say they're not that much different in terms of zerg strategy. Alliance's strategy is to LOLZERG Galv and then cap IB and TP on their way to storming FW. The difference is that I feel Alliance has it a bit easier because of how easy it is to cap the relief hut. I could stroll in to FW as a Dwarf Shadowpriest with 170 resilience and 400 +dmg and solo cap the relief hut no problem unless there was more than one defender there (and depending on who the defender was, of course). There's no way in hell I could solo cap the aid station on my Undead Warlock even though I have better gear.

Because of this, a few smart alliance members can go in and cap the relief hut giving Alliance a small advantage once they're done zerging Galv. On the other hand, I often see Dun Baldar North and South being capped by Horde stealthers but never the aid station until we've at least capped the SP GY. The best strategy I've seen for taking Dun Baldar is to cap the towers and kill the archers ASAP, and then just try to defend the towers till they cap and slowly push at the aid station.

Yeah, going back to their original postings about the design, it was a zone that was going to exist in the game world (not instanced) that was supposed to be a constant struggle. It came complete with siege weapons (woot) and bases were meant to be destroyed, then rebuilt over a number of hours. There weren't games or matches, just an ongoing conflict.

Then someone realized a few weeks before it went live that every fucking server had a massive population imbalance and this made no sense whatsoever and turned AV into what it is now.