Classic PvP Content Plan

[Natinatinati-destromath]

So basically, if I am not 60 by phase 2, which I won’t be, then I should just not log in again until phase 3? As fun as turning my character into an honor farming NPC sounds…

[Idun-wyrmrest-accord (Idun)]

I like having a phase for pure world PvP before moving into BGs.

Get some good Southshore vs Tarren Mill going on.

ISTR them saying at the outset they likely wouldn’t have BGs at the start, and some debate over that. It died down fast, though, lost in other hot topics.

[Idun-wyrmrest-accord (Idun)]

popcorn and naps.

You need this as a guild tag.

[Fateweaver-misha (Fateweaver)]

Thank you for the update, Bornakk.

Still in the ‘disappointed about AV 1.12’ club, but I’ll survive.

[Yoinke-frostmourne]

Thanks for the update Bornakk.

[Anadann-icecrown]

I don’t want either one of those things, but I respect that you can ask for them without the melodramatics.

Also, the South Park clip is cool.

[Manhammer-amanthul (Manhammer)]

I only played Vanilla for about a week before the honor system was removed. How did ranking system work in regards to character level? Were certain ranks limited by character level? Or could you get say above rank 10 even without getting to 60?

As for the gear, most players will only get to rank 10 or less right? Isn’t the blue gear too good to be released too soon? Won’t most players go do AV as individuals rather than take time to group up and farm 5 mans, and maybe even bother with MC? People didn’t individual queue AV early on because it couldn’t be won for days right? But 1.12 AV is like an hour long game at best?

[Farthir-durotan]

@Bornakk

That’ll change once phase 2 rolls around and we add the Honor System, which will introduce Honorable Kills, Dishonorable Kills, and PvP Rank Rewards. The items you earn from the PvP Rank Rewards will be the versions from patch 1.12. Keep in mind though, just as it did originally, it will require a substantial time investment to rank up through the Honor System. For those interested in the Rank Rewards, earning epic gear will require consistent dedication over a long period of time as a top contributor on your realm. We don’t expect to see many people running around with these items early on, but we’re certain Hillsbrad Foothills will still see its fair share of action!

• Grueling honor grind for ranked rewards, that are still worse than PvE epics. PvP and PvE should be equal in terms of reward/effort, not better/worse than the other.
• Only 52 people can reach Rank 14 per year? How is this a justifiable or defensible honor system. How can R14 weapons, that are basically a MUST for PvP due to not even being BiS, being time-gated for such a extremenely small % of players?
• The greater PvP community benefis more from R14 weapons being available, and Blizzard will be happier too, since PvP players will stay subbed longer if there is a long-term goal for PvP’rs to reach.
• People with a dayjob won’t be able to reach R14 and work on PvP content on their own pace. It has been tested, it’s mathematically impossible to reach R14 once you reach certain societal commitments IRL, ie. family and job. The time you have left IRL after those simply won’t be enough to reach R14.
• Should people quit their job in order to be able to reach R14, or stop caring about their family? Worse yet, file for divorce?
• Account sharing issues with R14 players. If you don’t account share, you won’t get R14, I can quarantee it. Legitimate players will suffer. Yet another flaw of the honor system, that can’t be fixed.
• No matchmaking system at all, meaning people can form a 15 person raid group and stomp 15 solo players, leaving them no chance. Why even bother PvPing then?
• Premade vs premade que dodging. Without some rudimentary matchmaking, it’s impossible to stop.
• PvE gear is much easier to acquire than PvP gear and much more powerful. People who primarily PvP won’t stand a chance. There isn’t enough PvP gear to cover all slots, or good trinkets or legendaries.
• PvP system was intended as a system for people who don’t raid to get gear. Now these players are going to get stomped by PvE geared players and R14 won’t even be reachable for 99% of players, this is simply bad design, there is no defending it, and should be fixed before launch.
• No blue weapons for R11/R12 to complement R14 rewards? How are PvP players even supposed to compete against PvP’rs. You guys want PvP’rs to not play your game at all?
• WSG & AB reputations taking significantly longer than equivalent level rewards from PvE.
• Dishonorable kills do nothing positive for the game. The only thing they do discourage and prevent emergent world PvP. On PvE servers they can stay, but on PvP servers they have no reason to stay.

Come on guys. Vanilla was good for it’s time but it’s not perfect. The glaring PvE/PvP disparity and PvP gearing stand out as obvious issues and flaws to the game, especially in comparison to PvE.

I won’t be playing any PvE content outside of 5 mans so PvP will pretty much be my endgame. How enjoyable the PvP content will be will determine how long I will stay subbed.

If I can work towards R14 reasonably at my own pace, I could see myself stay subbed for a long time, maybe even years. Once I get exalted of AV and get bored of my class, there’s no reason for me to keep playing if R14 is going to remain a forever unreachable goal, and if I keep on getting destroyed by PvE premades.

All im asking for is for you to simply be reasonable. Make PvP weapons accessible for 100% of the PvPrs who work hard for them by removing rank decay and reliance of your ranking to other people’s. Add a basic matchmaking system so solo players aren’t steamrolled by a team of 15.

Add some blue weapons to lower ranks and make WSG/AB rewards equally as easy to get as AV’s, and add some legendaries that rarely spawn as objects in AV and require equal amount of materials to make as PvE ones.

That’s literally all I ask.

@Bornakk

In the third phase, we’ll introduce the first Battlegrounds: Alterac Valley (version 1.12) and Warsong Gulch, alongside with their associated vendors. One thing to note is that there were a couple of updates to these vendors over the course of the original patch releases, so some items won’t be available right away. For example, the Spell Penetration trinkets available from the Warsong Gulch vendor weren’t introduced until Patch 1.9, so we’re currently thinking that we’ll add these in phase 5.

The Arathi Basin Battleground will follow in phase 4, along with its specific vendor. It’ll be interesting to see how many people stay behind to guard the flag.

Warsong Gulch introduced a few problems into the game. Namely;

• Warsong Gulch is a boring BG that has no place in an MMORPG. BG’s should be about glorious battles, not about dilly dallying around with the enemy faction’s flag. It undermines the entire conflict of the serious and bloody war between Horde and Alliance, replacing it with roses and rainbows. It does not belong in a serious MMORPG like WoW.
• The designers had to eventually put a time limit and a stacking debuff to the current flag carried, once again proving that the game mode is not fit, neither tone OR design-wise in an MMORPG.
• It feels like a deathmatch, making it almost exactly like arenas, which is exactly what ruined live WoW.
• It introduced the concept of honor farm. Before WSG, honor couldn’t be systematically farmed. With WSG, raid geared premades can form a 15 person group and repeatedly farm a BG like it was a PvE instance, then GY camp the opposing team.
• It made honor gain too easy. PvP shouldn’t be as easy as to que up for a BG and farm honor; it should required you to think logically, where you can expect to meet enemy faction’s players, and then go there to farm honor.
• Along with DK’s, it completely destroyed emergent gameplay and world PvP such as the ongoing war between TM / SS by introducing a farmable way of acquiring honor.

As for AV:

• AV won’t be nearly as bad as WSG, since it can’t be farmed for honor. I suspect AV and World PvP would be able to coexist in peace with some changes, ie. increased honor gains from outdoors PvP, but not with WSG and AB.
• AV is harder to abuse for honor, because completing objectives and winning is much more difficult than in WSG or AB, so AV can stay, and it needs to be that 1.5 AV as echoed in the other thread.

Also, for for all BG’s:

• Battlemasters are jarring and undermine the whole Vanilla experience, because they make entering BG’s far too convenient and break the immersion and long traveling times of Vanilla.

Please concider the health of the entire PvP system before implementing DK’s, WSG or AB into the game. We don’t need to repeat the mistakes of the past - we have the superior knowledge to fix the flaws of Vanilla, and prevent the loss of emergent gameplay and cool world PvP we have from the lack of existence of farmable BG’s such as WSG or AB.

@Bornakk

Finally, in phase 6, we’ll have the world PvP objectives in Silithus and Eastern Plaguelands, which will come out at the same time as Naxxramas.

I mean, these were cool concepts, but frankly useless in practice.

“PvP” objectives should be better designed to fit the zone they are in, that open up cool stuff for your faction once you control them, instead of being designed as an ad hoc “PvP” experience seperate from the rest of the game, with no NPC’s in it, which didn’t work.

PvP guards giving exp, loot and honor = interest to kill guard → town raiding → natural world PvP. Of course, only on PvP servers.

[Lexemic-tichondrius]

Some better ideas for world PvP content:

• Enemy faction’s NPC’s give EXP, loot and honor, indirectly encouraging world PvP.
• Town guards more closely match the level of the zone they are in. Ie. level 30 guards for SS instead of level 50.
• Towns have finite amount of resources(guard spawn) and can be conquered for your faction, giving level-appropriate amounts of EXP and honor. Imagine conquering a town after town, cutting supply routes until finally reaching a main city like Darnassus, that would be fun.

This is a long ways away for most of the player base.

While I truly believe that after Classic is done going through the phases, Blizzard will need to begin implementing changes that fit in with the Classic/Vanilla game style, it won’t be for another year that the community begins to see the need for new patches.

Use Old School Runescape as an example. It took a few years for it to ramp up, but it is now a better and more successful game than the actually 2007 Runescape was and better than the current Runescape 3 is. I believe WoW Classic can do the same. There will be no need for new level caps or expansions, just new content.

[Snippt-area-52]

• People with a dayjob won’t be able to reach R14 and work on PvP content on their own pace. It has been tested, it’s mathematically impossible to reach R14 once you reach certain societal commitments IRL, ie. family and job. The time you have left IRL after those simply won’t be enough to reach R14.
• Should people quit their job in order to be able to reach R14, or stop caring about their family? Worse yet, file for divorce?
• Account sharing issues with R14 players. If you don’t account share, you won’t get R14, I can quarantee it. Legitimate players will suffer. Yet another flaw of the honor system, that can’t be fixed.
• No matchmaking system at all, meaning people can form a 15 person raid group and stomp 15 solo players, leaving them no chance. Why even bother PvPing then?
• Premade vs premade que dodging. Without some rudimentary matchmaking, it’s impossible to stop.

This all sounds exactly like Vanilla.

The hyperbole is insane, you need a break from video games dude.

[Mogar-stormrage (Mogar)]

People have become brainwashed over the years that everyone is entitled to all the best rewards and gear. That there has to be a perfectly even playing floor. That just because things exist in the game they HAVE to get them. That’s not how Vanilla worked. People will achieve things you never will. Players able to invest more time will earn greater rewards. Deal with it. It’s just a game. Maybe concentrate on having fun instead?

And I say that as someone who might not pvp at all. However, I look forward to actually being impressed again when I see someone who’s achieved the highest pvp ranks.

[Cybaster-cenarion-circle]

Go back to retail, dude. No respect.

[Faithless-kirin-tor]

.1% player base

[Faithless-kirin-tor]

.1% player base, not easy

[Littledeater-uther]

If the older AV was used instead it’d be perfect. Classic looks promising.

[Eilìnna-senjin]

I support dishonorable kills, but this made me lol. Now I’m going to make it a goal to hunt down every horde bread vendor XD

[Shimy-khadgar]

Why DH’s tho… for real… at least make it so you have to physically HIT the mob to be viable to receive a DHK

[Leyris-hyjal]

can you comment on Cross-Realm BGs in this update as well? Is this something you’re still pondering?

Why would this require any pondering? Cross-realm BGs were in Vanilla, and absolutely should be in Classic.

[Psychedelicz-bloodscalp]

when i did bg’s in vanilla there was no cross/realm

[Luuni-area-52]

Did you play during patch 1.12? Because there were Cross-Realm BGs then.