Blademasters are so cool!
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So why did you and other Devs go on Twitter and tell everyone that if they lost it’s purely because their faction sucks at organizing? All while knowing layering and other factors played a major role in what happens in Ashenvale.
Talking down to your community isn’t a good move. I hope you learn from this.
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Boost the rep if it’s going to take hours between events.
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I’m curious about this as well. On Chaos Bolt - US I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Horde win a game due mostly to the reasons described in Aggrends post.
Going to absolutely enjoy waiting 3 hours to lose every game now.
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Major issues, are when you are in a raid during the event. Then you get phased from your raid even though you remain in the raid group.
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This is a good suggestion and something I imagine we’ll be looking at soon.
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Personally I think the shorter duration between events really encouraged the slaughter and kept it a non stop meat grinder. That might not be the case anymore 
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I appreciate the communication a lot!
I do really think the event ruins Ashenvale though – it could be working flawlessly and it would still make Ashenvale kind of a nightmare to play in. This isn’t the kinda world PvP I think anyone wanted.
PvP that involves huge groups swarming areas like locusts is kind of terrible gameplay for anyone not in the raid.
I pray that you guys don’t do any events in STV, it’s a wonderfully fun zone without any intervention and incentivizing people to make big raids in the area is just going to ruin all the natural fun that happens there.
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There were already groups of five+ roaming STV on every server I’ve been on. Heck, sometimes there were sixties roaming!
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5 people is more fun to deal with than 50-100+ though.
5v1 is not fun. 100v100 is much more fun.
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Appreciate the clarity on what’s been going on, and glad you’re finding solutions to streamline it!
I love world PvP. Always have since Vanilla. The Ashenvale event has been one of the most fun additions to WoW since the Classic era began… I’m sad to see that its frequency is going to substantially decrease. I was just getting into it 
Is it possible to implement something like a timer to its initiation - e.g. cannot happen sooner than an hour after the last one started. Set the event duration to 55 min. Then some layers will have their match end at 55 minutes and get to hop into a new one shortly after, people with quick events will not be stuck waiting for too long until the next one. I will get to play it at least once per evening if it isn’t ~3 hours between, it just won’t be worth logging in to figure it out at that point
I also wonder if adding something like a 15 minute debuff to players when the event ends that stops all WSG reputation gains could prevent layer hopping. The chances of successfully finding a new layer with an ongoing event that ends in >15 minutes will strongly dissuade the behavior, but that 15 minute timer wouldn’t stop you from hopping into a new one when it pops (even if it popped 5 minutes later).
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The problem is a lot of people will find themselves not having time to participate in them anymore if they go 3 hours between battles. That’s a large time gap between events.
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Everyone has their own preference, I don’t wanna diminish what you like.
For me personally, I’d rather deal with 5-10man groups organically than have to watch out for 4-5 full raid groups washing over a zone like some kind of plague that you either get run down by, or hide from. There isn’t much I can do personally to impact a fight that large.
They’re also super laggy, and it’s just not very much fun imo. It might be more fun if I were on a paladin so I could bubble to get into range or escape… or a ranged DPS… but even then I don’t see how to really enjoy it.
I much prefer smaller more intimate scaled PvP. I want the people I’m fighting to actually see my player name instead of just a sea of nametags.
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I think this game is at its greatest when it departs from the arena mentality, and embraces the actual war in its name. Large scale battles, in my opinion, feel more like Warcraft to me. I just wish large scale world PVP had more support, and was more fully fleshed out
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I would like to second the idea of a rep-catch up (or boost) for future Ashenvale events if there is going to be significantly more time between battles, but I would also like to put forward: Was there ever any consideration to making the battle for Ashenvale to be instanced? I think there’s something to be said for the event being at least a little less obnoxious to run if both Alliance and Horde had to queue into a pvp instance of Ashenvale that was explicitly run for the event. It could still involve the timer between events or “kills needed”, but it could help solve the issue of it ending too early (I’ve found many of the battles are over in ~10 minutes unless there is significant coordination in the team to go and try and halt the other team’s progress, but generally a zerg rush of the bosses > end is the meta) by giving both teams a hard start point, and have it run like WSG where a certain number of instances can be open at a time? I’m not going to pretend like I’m an expert on server things, maybe that’s a little too hard to set up, but I think it’d be a decent consideration.
And I’m aware that some of the charm of the battle for Ashenvale was supposed to be that the battle is happening in the open world, but it seems like the way it’s currently set up is causing a lot of issues across the board, and I think at least considering having an NPC in Splintertree and Astranaar that you could speak to (maybe the new static Far Seer and Priestess NPCs) that lets you queue into the first available instance and have that instance be just there for the battle. It could also prevent instance hopping (it is occasionally possible right now to be invited to another instance that hasn’t completed its battle yet and potentially get another kill or two- But regardless). As I said, I realize this could potentially cause more issues and might be harder to set up, but it gives us an alternative to the current system.
I feel like this misses the point that you join one of your faction’s own raid groups? You don’t stay apart from them in an event like this if playing it as intended.
I understand that judging by your character you may be a lifelong Horde player, and I am on the opposite side as a lifelong Alliance player, but I have tried both before and I know the STV experience is different because of Grom’gol’s placement. Anyway, what I’m getting at is you may not have had the same experience because of your faction (and perhaps class, if you play rogue often, if not, wrong assumption).
Rather than just be hit by marauding groups that flew in easily and quickly from the Horde capital, I’d like the incentive to fight back for the Alliance that encourages them to get to and stay in the zone more often.
You have not analyzed the issues correctly. Lets think about this, the event starts on all layers at the same time … WITH A 60 MINUTE TIMER. The only adjustment that needed to be made was preventing the start of a new event until 61minutes have passed. How did you not think of this? Good lord thank god I’m alliance, the lower population side will never stand a chance of winning let alone gaining rep when everyone literally everyone will be in Ashenvale for the 1 of 5 times the event happens during their waking hours…let alone the poor soul that misses the event that happened as he gets off work.
Farm that rep now boys because it’s gonna blow later. There’s no reason you couldn’t have kept the “time to end” around with the % and not let the event start until time to end hits 0 and percentage hits 100. SIMPLE fix, instead of this ridiculous excuse to limit the number of events and make rep grinding take longer.
When you do the redesign, and when you do STV, please please make this happen on instance servers where you can balance the horde vs alliance, use cross realm if need be down the road. I mean you have the technology, there’s no reason not to expand on the Winterspring model you already got. You got it right in wrath, but what’s gonna happen to Ashenvale in p2 when we are 40 and there’s some leveling up that want to try it? Level 40s killing the bosses in under 10s? You have it…EXACTLY right in Winterspring…just don’t kick people out of the “normal” zones if they say they don’t want to join upon entering the zone or the event starting. Be real nice if you could “heirloom” their gear and allow higher levels to go in as well not to mention scaling up lower toons but meh pipe dreams.
On your dreams of saving $$$ with scaling down layers as well as making the world more full. Once the layer balancer has determined it wants to shut a layer down, pop up timer 60s for players to accept the layer move or be forcibly moved. Solved. Just don’t scale it down during the event (although again, the event needs to be instanced so it CAN be a zerrrrrg or not a zerg if less are interested can scale bosses based on # of participants in the instance).
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Imagine if hunters had such an in depth blue post regarding their issues with scaling, abilities, and long term plans in SoD. I cant speak for everyone but a real discussion would be appreciated.
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Hear, hear.