Battleground Content

Community WoW Community Council
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WoW has not had a new battleground release since the end of Legion with Seething Shore. As multiple new dungeons , multiple raids, and a singular arena are made every expansion, it is disappointing to see the lack of battleground content for casual and RBG players. Players are not asking for developers to reinvent the wheel with a brand new type of battleground, they just want to see more content in general. More Capture the Flag game modes like Twin Peaks or Warsong Gulch (my personal favourite), or more domination maps like Arathi Basin or Battle for Gilneas. With the increase of members in the blizzard dev team I hope to see some changes in content pacing for pvp in general.

Cheers, Sha

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Take one of the outdoor zones, copy it, lock it off. Throw Torghast/Cobalt Assembly powers in there. Make it a BR, no flying. Of course these powers would need lots of tweaking for the benefits or compensation of shortcomings for some classes/specs.

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Last Epic Battleground is Ashran, and we’re stuck with the same 4 in rotation of which one is still Wintergrasp, which I think the majority of players dislike.

No please don’t ever bring back any of those powers in any form for PvP.

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To preface: This is from the viewpoint of someone who does 90-95% of their PvP below maximum level. But I also have over 100k honorable kills so I do pvp a lot, just not at max level. :stuck_out_tongue: (Though I do force myself to do Ashran every so often to make progress on the Garrison quests, and I forced myself to grind 3600 Conquest for the 2 weapon skins this season, cause they match Fireplume Regalia so well)

This will be a controversial opinion:

Seething Shore really needs to be removed, or they need to bring back the blacklist system entirely because of this bg.

I don’t know about the Horde side, but when you get Seething Shore as Alliance in the 10-69 brackets, a minimum of 2 people will either complain about getting SS or just immediately leave the group. It does not feel good when a good chunk of your team has already started the bg with the “We should just let them win to speed this up” mentality or outright leaving.

The same goes with Wintergrasp. If you are on offense, you will lose like 99% of the time. The tuning for offense is horrible. Either they need to fix it, remove it, or allow us to blacklist bgs again. Even something as simple like make it so if Defense destroys the 3 towers, the game automatically ends. I’ve never seen offense when once the towers are destroyed. I’m sure it’s possible, but I don’t think it’s probable. Ending once the towers are destroyed would save a lot of headache. But the fact we can be stuck in a game we’ve 1000% lost once the 3 towers are down for 20ish more minutes is so bad.

I’d also like to see Strand of the Ancients brought back. If Wintergrasp as a bg has done anything, it’s shown us that Strand was not nearly as bad as people made it seem. I actually genuinely enjoyed Strand. The one change I’d want is add a forfeit option that polls the entire 2nd group before the 2nd half starts, but ONLY if the first team captures the relic. Cause 9/10 times, if not more, if the first team captured the relic, you lost if you were the second team. If the first group doesn’t capture the relic, you have a 50/50 shot at winning or so, which is fine.

I do agree they should start adding more battlegrounds, even if they’re just “reskins” of existing bgs like you mentioned, Capture the Flag.

I think the devs are stuck in a mindset that every new bg needs a unique type of play when that’s not the case at all - they can easily just use the same concept with a different map. MOBAs do this all the time and people eat them up. Overwatch does this, and again, people eat them up.

A change of scenery does a LOT.

For instance, they really missed an opportunity to make Seething Shore into a Capture the Flag bg where we try to steal azerite from the opposing team’s base. And I’m sure it wouldn’t be as loathed as it is today.

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I hope something is done about group-queueing in random battlegrounds, I think the opposing team should receive some type of buff or rallying cry to create a fair battle, or group-queuing disabled outright.

I know the developers would like to reward organized groups, but in my view everyone is queueing up in random battlegrounds and the advantage a premade has is far too great. Many view solo-queuing as anti-social and antithetical to the MMO experience, but that’s rigid old-school thinking, with all due respect.

In the current environment, players will simply leave the match once they see who the opponent is, if they are brave enough to stick around they will be mercilessly GY camped until they stop rezzing. There has to be a better way than this.

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As a competitive Rated Battleground player, I will admit the lack of new battlegrounds is a bit disheartening. I will say though that I would not want Blizzard to just push out battlegrounds for the sake of having new battlegrounds. Terrain balance is EXTREMELY important and needs to be considered when creating new battlegrounds. For example, in Twin Peaks, if you’re Horde, it’s so nice to be able to grab the enemy flag as a druid, then jump off the edge and flap to the center and then jump across the water and you’re basically already at your base. The Horde have a huge advantage in that regards. These type of terrain decisions need to be considered when crafting new battlegrounds.

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Does grabbing it as a hunter and using slow fall (from priest/mage) after disengaging from the edge still work?

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Yes, you can disengage too.

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Distance between objectives too.

The most famous being Alterac Valley, where the Horde starting point had to be moved back because they would reach mid way before the Alliance would. And of course, the fact the Alliance’s bridge gave us a defensive advantage the Horde didn’t have - and the towers too, Alliance towers are horrible to defend, due to line of sight constantly, whereas Horde towers are incredibly easy to defend, as you just gotta pop a knock back when they try to enter.

There’s similar issues like the flag positioning in Isle of Conquest - Horde will reach the Airship much faster than the Alliance, and Alliance will reach Docks much faster than Horde.

Same with Arathi Basin - although both teams reach the Mine’s flag at the same time, Horde reach the Blacksmith much faster (like a good 5-10 seconds) and the Alliance reach the Lumber Mill slightly (as in like 1-2 seconds) faster.

I know tuning these so they arrive at the same time is hard, but it should only take a decent QA team a minimum of an hour to figure out how far back/forward things need to be moved to make them even .

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Agreed. Considering Blizzard has been better about player feedback I would hope that maybe they would do a beta testing with some of the pvpers before releasing a map so that distances and terrain can be adjusted accordingly to be fair. I’m still waiting for them to do a PVP chat with the council LOL

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Only if they actually facilitate organized group content. There’s currently nothing that facilitates raid sized group content other than rated 10v10.

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I agree, but I don’t think it is fair to continue on with the status quo, battles against organized groups in randoms are completely lopsided and I don’t think that is good for the game. Great system for those who want to farm easy honor against uncoordinated PvPers, but probably not great for subscriber retention.

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I disagree. There are a lot of premade communities. Even if people end up solo queuing without Discord (or 5 person groups max), they’ll end up together and “stomp” randoms because of experienced leaders. Forming communities is what naturally happens to avoid pugs and randoms.

6 groups in a single community queuing up together will still result in either 4+2, 3+3, or 2+2+2 groups spread over several battlegrounds opening at the same team. Most communities have at least 3 or 4 people that can lead, so even if there was a solution, players taking command will negate any of that effort.

Everyone is uncoordinated until someone picks up lead, you don’t need premades for this. Discord makes things easier, but there’s nothing stopping others from joining in premades or even in-game voice.

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This is why if a group without a premade gets paired with a premade (a premade meaning at least 5 people queued together in this context), then the losing team should be given rewards as though they won, if the losing team is the one without premades.

Essentially incentive for us to stick it out while the premade murders us. We all win in the end.

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This can go 2 ways:

  • people queuing with a group of 5 will cause others to not gain more rewards if they lose, without them knowing this
  • if you’d say 6 or more, the game can’t detect this

So not really an option.

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It’s my understanding that queueing with a premade will automatically match you into another group with a premade. I will admit that the system needs to account for the SIZE of the premade group though. For example, a group of a premade of 4 is occasionally queued into two groups of 2 premades. Not exactly the same justice. A premade of 4 should only queue into another premade of 4 unless the queue timers will not allow that.

With all that said, I feel bad that the discussion about premade groups has “hijacked” Sha’s initial thread regarding new battleground content. I feel we should be more cautious about deterring from the initial purpose of a thread and create a different thread to hold discussions which deter from the initial post.

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I couldn’t agree with this more. Imagine doing M+ with the same dungeons for YEARS at a time. That’s how it feels for those of us that love battleground PvP.

Personally I don’t want fancy new BG concepts I just want new scenery and maps that are balanced.

Regarding balanced maps I’ll link my thoughts on that from a previous post:

It’s not directly related to this topic but I think CC in honor battlegrounds speaks to the OP in that having new maps that are unenjoyable or virtually unplayable due to unbalanced mechanics such as the current state of CC is important to consider along with the lack of new map development since it speaks to the general lack of development attention to this area of the game. Those thoughts can be found here:

The community has been speaking on these types of issues for a long time. Competitive PvP is a bad experience for players who want to try it for the first time and honor PvP in battlegrounds in particular is such a poor experience that many people new to PvP who try it just instantly through their hands up in disgust and just say “This isn’t for me.” and never try again. It’s too bad because Honor PvP is one of those things that someone can just keep doing whenever they want on any time schedule and have fun; if there was more done to keep it fun.

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That depends on what “premade” means contextually. If you mean multiple groups, then no. If you mean full groups, I don’t know for sure, and I don’t know what happens if the opponent team has no groups. Regardless, my feeling says that this matchup isn’t working properly.

I personally would like to see Battlegrounds that have more than 2 teams. Either PvPvE of which Horde and Alliance have to fight a 3rd PvE faction at the same time (Epic Battleground), or we ditch Horde and Alliance and just make mixed teams in a map where 3 or more factions at the same time. While this would still be an Epic Battleground of players, they’ll be in different teams.

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We agree with the sentiments expressed here and we’re working on it. Unfortunately nothing to share or announce today. We love battlegrounds too.

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I’d really be interested in seeing an option to choose what style of BG you’re interested in playing. For instance, I really love Capture the Flag style BGs and much prefer them over the Domination-style BGs like Battle for Gilneas and Arathi Basin. I suppose this is more of an indirect deny-list, but I’ve shared the thought amongst friends and there are definitely love/hate relationships with the different BG styles.