Alterac Valley in Classic

[Brokenwind-malganis (Brokenwind)]

Welp, there goes one of the best things about classic. My post history reflects im genuinely very positive about classic, but this announcement is pretty sad. I’m sure it has been brought up (over and over again, but i cant scroll through 300 comments just to see), but the consequence of av 1.12 is catastrophic to ‘gameplay’.

Here is what happens from the horde perspective (i was alliance up to around 1.8 on EU, then horde to mid TBC).

Queue pops, you enter battleground. Some lone hero says ‘defend galv’. Twenty people say ‘ffs, just let them win’. 5 or 6 people try and hold the pallys steaming to drek at IB, they get one spawn, probably at fwgy which is initially skipped, 5 or so go kill bal, then charge to sp. Around ten horde are streaming to stormpike. By now, alliance has tagged the relief hut so anyone dead now resses at the cave. They join the 15 or so AFKers and wait for the invariable alliance win. The horde advance at stormpike is usually wiped out by a few rogues porting ack and recapping stormpike. Now everyone is in the cave. A few will go fish. One or two will try and get their trinket. But mostly, no ones playing the actual game. Maybe three or four will desperately try to get through to the relief hut or trinket back, but once the relief hut falls, a hunter will run in, pull the warmasters, feign death causing a despawn, and then everyone will zerg in and kill the boss. The end.

Well, not quite, because as it goes on fewer and fewer horde will participate. And those that do will more often than not run through the motions or AKCave.

It’s a dispiriting, tedious experience. Once in a while through the force of sheer magic, enough defenders will enter the game and will valiantly destroy the initial alliance zerg. However, more than likely the sheer numbers of horde not participating will result in an alliance victory and everyone moaning about how this PROVES its a waste of time and we should have just let them win from the start. Those people will then never shut up about their wasted 45 minutes in every other AV they join.

Sure, they will grind out their marks. But you might has well have just given people a token for queueing and let them go on their way before the battle begins. The actual point of ‘playing’ AV doesnt exist for them. It’s just a time v honor grind. Spending as little time as possible, results in maximum honor yield (or tokens, i forget when we switched, but its the same difference).

Brokenwind likes this post.

[Mmoku-tichondrius]

Lol my character’s level? Can you please elaborate on your point? It’s such a strong argument, I’d like to see you fully flesh this one out for people.

[Janorie-moon-guard]

This kills the Classic.

[Brokenwind-malganis (Brokenwind)]

Lol my character’s level? Can you please elaborate on your point? It’s such a strong argument, I’d like to see you fully flesh this one out for people.

Your capacity to continue to pay for such a craptastic version of the game does not lend weight to your ability to judge from good and bad gameplay.
Clear enough for you?

[Bepples-khazgoroth (Bepples)]

Lmao do you people think Vanilla was dead when 1.12 was current back in 2006?

What a joke.

[Mmoku-tichondrius]

No I’m still not clear on what you are trying to say. What makes BFA a craptastic game? Have you ever played it? Or do you just like to make unfounded statements about things you know nothing about?

[Cybaster-cenarion-circle]

Old AV, please. I know it makes it janky as hell. I don’t care.

[Davrille-moon-guard]

If they have backups for 1.12, then there really isn’t any reason they shouldn’t have other backups from that time period.

Even if they do, it would be far too much work to get older data reimplemented into the 1.12 database, then front ported back onto the 7.3.5 engine.

It isn’t as simple as people think.

Especially with AV. Ghostcrawler said once that the devs were scared to touch it, it was such a tangle of code, to the point they sometimes couldn’t figure out why it worked.

[Brokenwind-malganis (Brokenwind)]

Have you ever played it?

I played through the demo and it told me everything I needed to know about it. Pay to play it? Hell no.

[Brokenwind-malganis (Brokenwind)]

If they have backups for 1.12, then there really isn’t any reason they shouldn’t have other backups from that time period.

Even if they do, it would be far too much work to get older data reimplemented into the 1.12 database, then front ported back onto the 7.3.5 engine.

It isn’t as simple as people think.

Especially with AV. Ghostcrawler said once that the devs were scared to touch it, it was such a tangle of code, to the point they sometimes couldn’t figure out why it worked.

And yet the vanilla devs were able to make sweeping changes to it from patch to patch from 1.5 through the current iteration.

[Shiromar-malganis (Shiromar)]

Blizzard said they would use 1.12 as a BASE.

I thought that was good idea, for bug purposes, for raid bosses scripting for drop%.

As a base turned into, “okay we’re done”.

It went from private servers have wrong information to we dont have any of the data pre 1.12

kool keith says, i dont believe you

[Meemuu-ysera (Meemuu)]

Was hoping for an earlier version.

[Oskor-cenarion-circle (Oskor)]

Welp, there goes one of the best things about classic. My post history reflects im genuinely very positive about classic, but this announcement is pretty sad. I’m sure it has been brought up (over and over again, but i cant scroll through 300 comments just to see), but the consequence of av 1.12 is catastrophic to ‘gameplay’.

Here is what happens from the horde perspective (i was alliance up to around 1.8 on EU, then horde to mid TBC).

Queue pops, you enter battleground. Some lone hero says ‘defend galv’. Twenty people say ‘ffs, just let them win’. 5 or 6 people try and hold the pallys steaming to drek at IB, they get one spawn, probably at fwgy which is initially skipped, 5 or so go kill bal, then charge to sp. Around ten horde are streaming to stormpike. By now, alliance has tagged the relief hut so anyone dead now resses at the cave. They join the 15 or so AFKers and wait for the invariable alliance win. The horde advance at stormpike is usually wiped out by a few rogues porting ack and recapping stormpike. Now everyone is in the cave. A few will go fish. One or two will try and get their trinket. But mostly, no ones playing the actual game. Maybe three or four will desperately try to get through to the relief hut or trinket back, but once the relief hut falls, a hunter will run in, pull the warmasters, feign death causing a despawn, and then everyone will zerg in and kill the boss. The end.

Well, not quite, because as it goes on fewer and fewer horde will participate. And those that do will more often than not run through the motions or AKCave.

It’s a dispiriting, tedious experience. Once in a while through the force of sheer magic, enough defenders will enter the game and will valiantly destroy the initial alliance zerg. However, more than likely the sheer numbers of horde not participating will result in an alliance victory and everyone moaning about how this PROVES its a waste of time and we should have just let them win from the start. Those people will then never shut up about their wasted 45 minutes in every other AV they join.

Sure, they will grind out their marks. But you might has well have just given people a token for queueing and let them go on their way before the battle begins. The actual point of ‘playing’ AV doesnt exist for them. It’s just a time v honor grind. Spending as little time as possible, results in maximum honor yield (or tokens, i forget when we switched, but its the same difference).

Basically this. I’ll be the one trying to rally a defense at Galv and backcapping the towers, but this is pretty disappointing news.

1.10 or 1.8 would’ve been so much better, if we can’t get the original iteration.

[Oskor-cenarion-circle (Oskor)]

For those of you who want a better idea of all the changes AB went through, here’s a great old thread to read through:

World of Warcraft Forums

[Galaborn-proudmoore]

First time poster. I am gutted by this news. I check the forums every day for news from you guys, and this is the first time I have been disappointed.

Not having the information from patches prior to 1.8 is not an excuse. It’s laziness. If your intended goal is to re-create vanilla World of Warcraft, this is not doing that. This is a cop-out.

[Pwnbot-frostmourne (Pwnbot)]

An earlier version would definitely be more interesting, but I’m ok with this

[Ippollite-frostmourne (Ippollite)]

Since this will be the watched thread. I have some constructive feedback. I made a post earlier on what actually happens in AV, but im going to tweak it.

AV 1.12 can be very similar to AV 1.5. Not exact of course, but still very similar. There is nothing to stop players turtling and having a real battle. Its well within the parameters of the design. The problem though is incentives.

The game incentivises players to rush through it. The shorter the battleground, the faster the overall honor gain. Win or lose, you are incentivised to finish quickly for more rewards (horde will lose predominantly, but also the discouraging effect will result in fewer horde wanting to play, resulting in faster queues - lets say an average of 3 alliance marks to 2 in terms of pace - not perfect, but you also dont need to care about winning and its fairly consistent).

Now lets assume blizzard can NEVER remake 1.5. The code is too messy, it takes too long, whatever. Lets give the benefit of the doubt and assume its 1.12 or nothing.

Well, this doesnt mean the internal mechanics of rewards couldnt be tweaked to make longer battles yield greater honor than shorter battles. Pulling down towers, capturing graveyards, killing other players, summoning riders, capturing mines. All of these could be tweaked to give FAR greater honor than rushing to the boss and skipping everything else.
The main thrust though should be on player HKs since its supposed to be a BG and you dont just want horde and alliance waving across the field of strife as they both just race to pull down towers and maximise their yield. So look at that.

Are players incentivised to engage in PVP in a PVP battleground? If they arent, shouldnt they be? Like SERIOUSLY incentivised? Perhaps tie in the final boss kill yield through total honor kills for the final bonus? Make honor kills actually garner serious honor (with the final boss kill simply a bonus). Perhaps then even the losing team may find it more in their interest (even if they lose), to kill as many players of the other faction as possible, and the winning team may find their rewards for capping the boss to be insubstantial without engaging the opposing faction.

So if you cant give us 1.5, please look deeper at the way av1.12 is incentivised. Im sure this would bring round almost everyone to 1.12.

[Shimy-khadgar]

This person above me… blizzard… hire this person to write your forum posts.

[Aristylla-sargeras]

Don’t worry friends, Blizz still has time before AV releases to reverse their decision.

[Entourage-malganis]

Would certainly bring me around.

I’ve been firmly in the #nochangesreeeeeeeeee camp on almost every issue, but only because I’m worried about losing aspects of the game that I really, really enjoyed. I could care less about the particular version and/or numerical code associated with the AV we get, I just don’t want it to be two teams running to opposite ends of the map and PvEing a boss. Its just so… mediocre. Anything that incentivizes actual, y’know, PLAYER VS PLAYER is something I’m all for on this one.