8.2.5 Discussions (Spoilers Ahoy!)

A not-that-often spoken about sin of warfronts is that they kill the drama of their conflicts by virtue of existing.

The conflicts in Arathi and Darkshore will never be solved within the scope of BfA because the warfronts are inherently a stalemate - one faction holds it for a week, then the other faction inevitably gets it back - and any storyline involving those conflicts is going to have to account for the fact that those warfronts are going to exist for at least the rest of the expansion.

That’s assuming they don’t choose to just outright ignore their existence, like how you can still play a Warsong Gulch match even though the implication of the War of Thorns is that night elves are so weak that someone can just decide to invade their land and burn their capitol down and succeed wildly, but abandoning what was billed as a central expansion feature in the middle of that very expansion would be equally inexcusable.

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The one warfront I bothered with (twice) just reminded me of what I found most boring about Alterac Valley, honestly.

A lot of recent game design with WoW seems to be built around making sure you stay subbed in the most unfun way possible

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I’ve thought that as well actually. That the goal is to keep people subbed. It also explains the longer content gaps. The year-ish we seem to otherwise have of no content between expansions has always been a great unsub time.

Which is another story about Square (specifically Yoshi P) that I love.

At a convention a player asked him about what he should do if he’s run out of things he wants to do in game. Yoshi’s reponse? To please go enjoy other games and come back when they’ve released more content he can enjoy.

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Guys seriously, what are warfronts.

It’s a battleground, but only one team has actual people on it, it always goes the same way, and your main function is not to fight the enemy but rather to collect logs.

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Warfronts are…meh.

If I’m bored and they’re going to drop the right level of gear for an upgrade, I might go to one to kill time. But I don’t find them challenging and the fun is minimal. A lot of times, I just farm the mines.

They’d be better if both had dropped at the same time, one for Alliance and one for Horde, and then they swapped off. They’d be better if Blizz gave us two-three more of them. They’d be better if they were PvP entities.

But they’re better than island expeditions. I hate island expeditions. Going to one of those as heals is a PITA and most of the time, I end up with a group where the other people go off in their own directions and we scramble hard at the end.

So yeah, both of those and warmode - which were the main 3 selling points of this expac for me - aren’t worth doing.

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The more I think about it the more it really does just remind me of Alterac Valley in the sense that… there’s a pretense of PvP and faction conflict, but it ends up being a PvE zerg.

Or it was. If this has changed in the last 5,000 years since I actually ran AV, the egg on my face will be legendary.

I am a fan of warmode, and specifically my ability to stay out of it. Its implementation needs some serious tweaking, but it was a good idea.

I’ll be honest, I have never understood what I’m supposed to be doing in AV, on any level.

If the layering or phasing or w/e it is that Blizz used to break it wasn’t there, it’d be tons of fun for WPvPers. But as it stands, it’s not.

Oh, I believe you. I’ve heard lots of complaints from PvPers about that. It’s really good for non-PvPers, though.

I want to say the last time I actually tried to run and enjoy AV was… MoP somewhere. I don’t know, it’s been forever. In the before time in the long long ago, people would actually make full use of the map’s features and while some matches would allegedly go on for days (I was not a fan of that), it really did feel like armies clashing.

Last I saw, it was just both sides rushing past one another to reach the enemy leader and zerg them down first. I’m oversimplifying of course–you also had to capture points along the way and at least defend them long enough to keep the right GYs open for the final rush–but it still felt more like the PvE was a greater focus than fighting other players.

I remember liking AV for exactly that reason. Just killing dudes always felt sorta mindless to me; if I’m going to do a battleground, I like there to be some structure and gamification.

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Personally I never liked that the old matches would drag on literally forever but I did miss the actual ongoing collision of players. Got the same feeling from TM vs. SS too.

In my encroaching senescence, I don’t enjoy PvP remotely as much as I used to but even I can see the current expression of the faction war is just boiled, unseasoned chicken right now.

I’ve never heard of such a thing, and think you’re all making it up. How come I’m level 120, ilvl 411, and have never done one?

Because they’re not nearly as relevant as they were intended to be.

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I genuinely can’t think of something that would make warfronts worse than by adding any sort of PvP element without first scrapping every single aspect of them and rebuilding from the ground up. They’re already such a 30+ minute slog, but with a roughly 50/50 chance of losing at the end of that?

That would be the true definition of suffering.

I think they are imaginary. Like fast food that looks like the picture, or non-annoying yoga people.