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324
08/01/2018 09:32 PMPosted by Frizzlefry
08/01/2018 09:24 PMPosted by Utterly
...

What is SPM?


A rare disease the CDC hasn't figured out yet.


Also an alliance premade that does AV. They didn't fair so well tonight in the game I was in against them though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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07/27/2018 04:27 PMPosted by Phalanx
Alterac Valley


can you uh,... make the NPCs hit harder ?
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Also rogues are despawning all archers in towers by stealthing as they take the flag
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08/01/2018 10:19 PMPosted by Bloodrusher
Also rogues are despawning all archers in towers by stealthing as they take the flag


Its always been like that.
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08/01/2018 09:06 PMPosted by Bloodrusher
please just fix this already, this is stupid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHhNCNAGeLA


That's from 2008... you can now shoot a gateway up the mountain (which seems like a bug but w/e) Works heading into IBGY area too to bypass horde choke.
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08/01/2018 11:34 PMPosted by Jugajr
08/01/2018 09:06 PMPosted by Bloodrusher
please just fix this already, this is stupid

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHhNCNAGeLA


That's from 2008... you can now shoot a gateway up the mountain (which seems like a bug but w/e) Works heading into IBGY area too to bypass horde choke.


It still works, done it myself 100 times doing rams, and seen countless horde do it too
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08/01/2018 04:19 PMPosted by Luku
Bynir you have 2000 AV games played and a 64% percent win ratio, shouldn't that be closer to 50%? That is unless you do a lot of premades which usually tear through PUG's.

The map hasn't changed but the mechanics have. It was a race before, Alliance usually won the race. Now is different, things have been slowed down.


If you looked more thoroughly, you'll also notice my towers assaulted/bunkers defended stat is also skewed. That is what wins games.

The mechanics are almost exactly the same, just things hit harder. The Iceblood choke has been there for over a decade, players just needed to use it. The only difference is they may have lost Galv before because he was a wet tissue, but given the captains are not a win requirement and 100 reinforcements would be the only thing sacrificed (vs Alliance's 300 to use the bridge), still a stronger map thus not an underdog.

To whoever mentioned towers/bunkers, those also haven't changed and the last I checked the dis/advantages of either can be applied to either faction.
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08/01/2018 11:52 PMPosted by Bloodrusher
08/01/2018 11:34 PMPosted by Jugajr
...

That's from 2008... you can now shoot a gateway up the mountain (which seems like a bug but w/e) Works heading into IBGY area too to bypass horde choke.


It still works, done it myself 100 times doing rams, and seen countless horde do it too


? I'm saying it's even easier to do.
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08/02/2018 12:02 AMPosted by Jugajr
08/01/2018 11:52 PMPosted by Bloodrusher
...

It still works, done it myself 100 times doing rams, and seen countless horde do it too


? I'm saying it's even easier to do.


I can already see horde doing this next to make winning more efficient. Shoot gateway up and take GY behind us
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08/01/2018 04:27 PMPosted by Meyka
The problem in a nutshell is you now have Horde queueing for AV WANTING it to last an hour. We drag it out now because we know that's how we win and that's the experience we're looking for. Horde that don't want that experience are doing regular bgs.

Several of us have seen SPM successfully use IBGY as a choke so it's doable. Adapt and overcome!


Horde turtle IB because it’s easy to set up and hard to counter. Both factions needed to move away from the zerg mentality and adapt to a more defensive game. It just happens to be easier for horde. Let’s be honest about it.

Just because a premade can take IB doesn’t mean pugs will have the same level of organization and cooperation to do the same.
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08/02/2018 01:41 AMPosted by Jadei
08/01/2018 04:27 PMPosted by Meyka
The problem in a nutshell is you now have Horde queueing for AV WANTING it to last an hour. We drag it out now because we know that's how we win and that's the experience we're looking for. Horde that don't want that experience are doing regular bgs.

Several of us have seen SPM successfully use IBGY as a choke so it's doable. Adapt and overcome!


Horde turtle IB because it’s easy to set up and hard to counter. Both factions needed to move away from the zerg mentality and adapt to a more defensive game. It just happens to be easier for horde. Let’s be honest about it.

Just because a premade can take IB doesn’t mean pugs will have the same level of organization and cooperation to do the same.


Having those 30% more dps and heals, good deathgrips etc... Being able to just walk in... And just had a game where we did finaly push IBGY only to find horde go up that hill in a group of 20 and hit the gy and take it behind a group of ally at Tower Point so saying this choke point works both ways is a joke. Try comparing that with Stonehearth.
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08/01/2018 09:19 AMPosted by Luku
It's true, but only because Alliance are playing foolishly atm. They rush to their deaths trying to kill Galv or take IBT instead of defending SHGY/SHB and taking and holding SFGY then pushing forward.

If it's SO easy and SO valuable, why isn't your side doing it exactly?

SO many of these "[I]The changes are great guys![/I]" are coming literally only from Horde players.
GEEE I SURE DO WONDER WHY. IT IS TRULY A MYSTERY.
Your side already had the general advantage in gear/capability.
On top of that, you have massive terrain advantages in Alterac, Arathi, Twin Peaks, and Eye of the Storm.
So congrats, you already had the easiest time in the world getting easy wins, but now the only 2 BGs Alliance had a fair shot at getting rewards from favor you too because the AV zerg is gone, and IOC is just easy mode workshop deathball for the win. I agree that this does "fix" these 2 BGs, but "fixing" them just means constantly Horde favored as it does with all BGs.

As a very very casual PVP player, I just want the reward structure fixed. I already know Horde has the general advantage in players AND every non-mirrored terrain advantage, I can accept that. Even if you fixed all the horrible terrain, Horde would still win more.
Can I just get fair rewards for my time investment instead of literally half just because I picked the faction that isn't full of tree-burning backstabbers?

I mean good for you, AV is fixed, it's now the free win it always should've been for you. But don't pretend it's "[I]kek alliance am dumb, me am smart, zub zub, defend easy free win[/I]". Your side definitely has better players but AV is also just hilariously terrain favored for you guys as well. So no, the Alliance can't do anything to fix that. You'll have those exceptions where the queue gives Alliance more geared folks, more healers, etc but that advantage goes to the Horde almost all the time, and that's all that matters in unranked PVP.

08/01/2018 11:50 AMPosted by Maizou
Now that Horde know that Iceblood is unbreakable if they defend it, it's literally impossible to win as Alliance.

AV was always unwinnable against Horde on defense, because their team is almost always going to have more gear and more healers. Thus they always win direct fights. This is why Alliance never goes Workshop on IOC.
No amount of map changes to AV short of somehow breaking the map to favor Alliance would fix this, and you shouldn't just skew maps in Alliance favor to balance winrates. That just wouldn't be fair.

If the map is even, Horde wins through more geared players and more healers.
The ONLY reason AV was ever won by Alliance basically ever is because mutual zergs bypasses Horde's advantages, both in terrain, and in gear and healers. Horde already always won by defending. You can't fix this problem but you CAN fix the reward structure by shifting rewards from winning and kills to time on objectives and participation.

08/01/2018 12:25 PMPosted by Gdtroll
Another problem seems to be with the "quality" of the individual players themselves (skill level, DPS output, healer output, knowing what to do, etc), it seems many individual Horde players are the "equivalent" of 1.5-2.0 Alliance players.

Correct. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. Or perhaps the childish angry tantrum races who ruin everything all the time naturally appeal to aggressive people who like PVP or something.
No offense. But I mean, even your "good" Tauren are burning down the forest over here.
I'm kidding with all this, but it would not surprise me that a lot of players want to pick the big hulking roid rage monsters for their PVP, though Human shoulders definitely live up to the steroid accusations. I prefer Gnomes for PVP and Goblins would be fine too, for the irony of getting wrecked by a tiny little thing.

On my original server, I was a bit infamous for often being at the head of attacks on Orgrimmar on a pink twintail gnome mage. People would try so hard to kill me, but I would find so many ways to escape. Fun times.
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08/01/2018 02:45 PMPosted by Luku
08/01/2018 02:08 PMPosted by Krienn
...
Luku your response?


Recently, how many games have you seen won without the wining team holding SFGY (before the latest changes both Horde and Alliance often just skipped SF).

As for the IB choke point, like any choke point you at some point just need to zerg it. Push into the IBGY spawn area to cap it. Once Alliance owns IBGY the map is theirs. SFGY is half the distance to IBGY than SHGY so it is much easier for Alliance to zerg from SFGY than it is from SHGY.

The Horde only really needs SF to stop Alliance from spawning there. Alliance now needs SF to take IBT/GY.

One other thing I'd like to note, Horde just completely skips Balinda now (no need to kill her to win so just skip and keep pushing). I think thats one mechanic that could be looked at, something like you get massive honor for killing a sub-boss or you cant kill the boss until either Galv or Bal is down, or maybe towers are much harder to take down if Galv or Bal is still up. Not sure but skipping Bal or Galv seems kind of cheap to me.

While I disagree with your premise that it's the Alliance's "fault" for "not playing the map right" as opposed to simply being less geared and/or with less healers than your team...
I do agree that the design of the BGs should not encourage skipping/avoiding objectives.

I'm curious, what do you think about Honor rewards being changed as follows:
- A much smaller bonus from winning. (Think 50, tops.)
- The bulk of Honor rewarded for physical proximity to objectives, rewarded passively ticking over time, for being near your Flags or Flag Carriers, occupying Towers and Bunkers, etc. (How often have you helped defend say... Stonehearth Bunker until it capped and no Alliance ever came... and some derpy guy who went to the meat grinder by Dun Baldar got 100+ more honor than you for that BG? Or heaven forbid you have to sit in or near a mine so some Rogue doesn't shaft you on Reinforcements in a close match.)
- And, of course, you still get some from kills. It is still important in BGs to try to win fights too, not just "afk" in a tower.
"Defend the Payload!" and such.
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07/31/2018 07:48 PMPosted by Chromey
07/31/2018 08:31 AMPosted by Squeektoy
Chromey,
What exactly is agnostic honor? Never heard that phrase before.

By victory-agnostic, I mean that winning/losing is not the bulk of your Honor reward.
I personally dislike the culture of "wow everyone's special, everyone's a winner", this isn't based on that kind of mentality. This is simple practicality.

The reward structure sucks in PVP.
- If it's a loss, I'm encouraged to give up and lose faster, because the longer the match goes on, the worse of a time waste it was.
- Regardless of win or lose, I'm encouraged to go derp around in a meat grinder for HKs, not to do objectives.

You can fix the former by reducing/removing the difference in honor gains from winning or losing. In fact, if the net bundle of honor for BG completion is gone entirely, that removes the "[I]Let's finish this BG ASAP[/I]" mentality which leads to mutual zergs and such.
In Epic BGs, I am penalized as a player for not completing matches ASAP and ignoring objectives. Win or lose, it is "better" for me to only commit to the fastest BG completions rather than make an effort to win, especially if behind.

Then you increase Honor and provide small range Honor gains for objectives. Right now, as an example I put out previously, if I go and sit on Tower Point because I want to win AV... and the Horde never tries to retake it. I can spend 5min getting basically no Honor and no Rep. The whole team gets Honor when that sucker burns, except I just spent 5min getting no HKs because I was "doing nothing" aka defending the tower from a recap which may not ever show up.
If I just went and ran into some stupid meat grinder around Stonehearth, I'd not only get the rewards from Tower Point while not contributing to it, I'd also get another 50 or 100 HKs of Honor.
I am penalized as a player for actually doing Battleground objectives under the current reward structure. It is "better" for me to just keep throwing myself at fights and not actually do the objectives of the battleground.

Make sense now why I'm advocating for a reward structure where your Honor gains come from being in range of objectives. "Defend the Payload!" And where winning and losing contribute less to your rewards than participation.

Take a map like Warsong Gulch. If the match is even remotely close, and you ever get 1 flag, you are immediately encouraged to have your entire team turtle with the implied threat that a Rogue or Druid might sneak into the enemy base and take theirs, hard forcing a 9v8 or so most of the time. You're immediately encouraged to STOP TRYING TO WIN and to STOP PLAYING THE MATCH because the reward for losing is SO poor. This is the opposite of the Epic BG problem, but the core cause is the same. As a player in a smaller BG, I am encouraged to immediately stop trying to win as soon as my team gets a small lead, and to turtle as hard as possible, riding a defender's advantage to a narrow win. Why throw away the bulk of my honor gains in a gamble to try to get 3 flags when we can just AFK turtle on 1 flag?

Besides, in Rated PVP where it matters, winning is already how Rating increases and losing is how it falls. In casual PVP, we don't really need to replicate and compound that issue. ENCOURAGE PARTICIPATION BY REWARDING PARTICIPATION!

The problem with this is it would encourage teams to just lose on purpose for fast honor gains. This happened in tbc. There were premades who just sat at the starting area the whole game to get their quick mark.
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08/01/2018 04:11 PMPosted by Krienn
I Agree with you Luku. But keep in mind part of the reason horde lost so much was because it was a habit to zerg north and lose under these changes. Horde strategy was never changed and the outcome remained constant. Krystar had a good point when he said the people who just wanted to get the game over with(and predominantly promoted the losing zerg strat)

This. Horde didn't lose because AV was Alliance favored, they were just somehow slightly worse at actually being fast on burning bunkers down. Maybe that has to do with the cave or whatever, but it was certainly never an issue of any Horde team who was trying to win losing. If the Horde tries to win AV, ie they defend in any substantial measure at all, the BG massively favored them.

08/01/2018 03:57 PMPosted by Luku
I'm just a little worried now that since Alliance isn't winning as much and the outcry is getting louder that Blizz might over react and give Alliance an additional advantage somehow.

Let's not be paranoid considering you still have:
- Arathi's horrifically imbalanced unbreakable triangle to hold 3/5 bases with
- Mage Tower being a free cap in Eye of the Storm because it has NO PLATEAU to defend from, whereas Blood Elf Tower is very easily defended
- The entirety of Twin Peaks... carrying flags downhill with mobility skills and only 2 valid entrances into your flag room as opposed to 3 for Alliance
And you think what, precisely? That Blizzard who refuses to fix the above, 2/3 of which exist for a decade, is going to suddenly make some kind of Alliance favored changes?
Let's not go into tin foil hat territory here. They can't be bothered to fix blatant massive terrain advantages, which I'm sure only "coincidentally" all favor the Horde, they're not going to suddenly add some in intentionally to blatantly favor the Alliance.

Like I said, just fix the reward structure. I don't want it to take twice as long to get any kind of rewards from this content because I "picked the wrong faction". I just want my participation and attempts to actually do objectives to be rewarded to the same degree as someone playing an Orc or a Tauren.

08/01/2018 04:31 PMPosted by Krienn
Luku and Bynir I think y’all are both right. The only point I disagree with you on luku is always losing because of the few second difference there was in the Zerg strat. Y’all should have back capped and defended more. It was so rare that the horde would and it cost them. Instead y’all played to the strength of the alliance instead of your own strengths which have been stated and haven’t changed since the changes. It’s all about strategy now and the horde frankly have the better pvp players in most games at this moment.

Humorously, the times I have played AV on Horde in the past, were 10min of me begging the team to defend for a free win. And they didn't and they'd even spam report me AFK to get kicked sometimes, that's how bad it was with impatient people. Really sucked having people throw away free wins and try to punish someone begging them to try to win.

08/01/2018 05:16 PMPosted by Meyka
You could argue the bunkers vs tower issue but that can work to our favor once we take a bunker.

Indeed. In fact, that's precisely why it favors you. Because the attackers need to defend it for a set period of time, so Bunkers being easier to defend favors the Horde, because it's the Horde who NEED it to be defended for a consecutive period of X minutes. The Alliance can just hold them intermittently and they'd never burn, which is why the Towers being easier to back-cap is a big problem for Alliance.
To put it in clearer terms, if the Tower is easier to assault, then that favors the owning team, because shifting ownership back and forth is the same as nothing happening. The attacking team is the one who benefits from the Bunker being harder to assault, because they're the ones who have to hold it for a set period of time.

08/01/2018 07:55 PMPosted by Zalathel
It's not as simple as that.,

Indeed. If the Horde are stuck on Iceblood Graveyard and can't push out, Alliance should burn Iceblood Tower and then just starve the Horde out with their resource lead. Horde should do the same thing from Stonehearth Graveyard, and is much easier to do so since the choke on Icewing Bunker is positively tiny... Alliance has to push the Horde back to SHGY itself JUST to even get a good concave in the fight. Usually the Alliance just dies going uphill behind Icewing Bunker and the Horde not only has the chokepoint, but 2 Bunkers.

If the Alliance has Tower Point, the chokepoint is already BEHIND the Alliance front lines, and the Horde doesn't even need to contend with it to engage.
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08/02/2018 01:58 AMPosted by Bloodrusher
08/02/2018 01:41 AMPosted by Jadei
...

Horde turtle IB because it’s easy to set up and hard to counter. Both factions needed to move away from the zerg mentality and adapt to a more defensive game. It just happens to be easier for horde. Let’s be honest about it.

Just because a premade can take IB doesn’t mean pugs will have the same level of organization and cooperation to do the same.


Having those 30% more dps and heals, good deathgrips etc... Being able to just walk in... And just had a game where we did finaly push IBGY only to find horde go up that hill in a group of 20 and hit the gy and take it behind a group of ally at Tower Point so saying this choke point works both ways is a joke. Try comparing that with Stonehearth.


IB does work both ways. If it’s alliance owned, you have to keep enough players between the gy and the crossroad to take out players trying to glider from the hill with the tower or get past by hugging the hill at IBT and any players trying to recap it.

If 20 horde come from behind to take it back, that’s not the terrain or map design. That’s a player problem.
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08/02/2018 03:57 AMPosted by Artanu
The problem with this is it would encourage teams to just lose on purpose for fast honor gains. This happened in tbc. There were premades who just sat at the starting area the whole game to get their quick mark.

I'm not sure you're reading properly.
If Honor is rewarded over time for being physically near Objectives, you aren't GETTING a reward by losing faster.

Reduce the rewards for BG completion, shift the reward amounts into the Honor generated by Objectives. You get your reward from attacking flags, escorting flag carriers, attacking bunkers, defending towers.
You could even have it coded that certain objectives don't yield anything UNTIL another objective has been lost. (ie no bonus Honor defending Drek if the Horde still owns the Frostwolf Village objectives, no bonus Honor defending your general in IOC if all 3 of your keep walls are still intact) You could do that to prevent people sitting idle on irrelevant objectives that aren't actually capable of being meaningfully attacked.

Because right now, PVP rewards suck.
Why should I have a ~50% reward penalty because I'm a Gnome instead of an Orc?
You tell me how that's fair or supposed to encourage me to participate. It's unranked PVP, I shouldn't need to get a premade, get on discord, and make a healer stacked deathball to farm it when I can just queue up on the other faction and get rewards twice as fast when both teams aren't coordinated.

And why should I be punished for, say, trying to hold Tower Point... instead of mindlessly walking into some meat grinder of feeders in mid?
Fix the reward structure.
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07/30/2018 02:53 PMPosted by Phalanx
We realize players have a passion for some of Alterac Valley's classic mechanics (Ivus, Lokholar). While we have no immediate changes to announce yet, its something we may adjust in the future.


If you do, and are looking to address all those fun little side mechanics, Ram/Wolf taming redemptions should be lowered. I think it's 25+ or so quest redemptions to trigger right now for both the taming quest and hide quest, so 50+ in total. Not possible to do in a game right now because games are too short. Alternately a scaled assault could work (ie small assault at 5 rams, larger at 10, etc), or even a redesign.

Taming quest as of last week still bugged: if you don't wait for the ram to catch up before you redeem, the ram doesn't despawn and you can't tame another until the one following you gets killed.

-

Time-wise same thing with the mine supply redemptions - they take too long and should probably be lowered (or do something at a scaled rate). In a turtle game I *might* be able to pull off the opposite-faction one (8 redemptions I think) using the trinket to return but only if uncontested and everything were to go perfectly.

This is exacerbated by the fact that multiple people can't really do mine redemptions simultaneously because there aren't enough crates to go around. So doing your own faction's mine would be impossible right now.

The mine bosses can bug also. Killed but mine doesn't flip. Neutral boss won't respawn to allow trying to kill again. May be due to pet/effect getting killing blow but not positive as I haven't played the hunter in years - if that bug was never fixed it's probably still the one causing issues.
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08/01/2018 10:07 PMPosted by Meyka
08/01/2018 09:32 PMPosted by Frizzlefry
...

A rare disease the CDC hasn't figured out yet.


Also an alliance premade that does AV. They didn't fair so well tonight in the game I was in against them though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Oh, thank you for the info. Yeah, thought maybe it was an alliance premade. However, I think it's unreasonable to expect unorganized 40-mans to accomplish on a regular basis what premades might be able to. And what horde are facing the vast majority of the time is unorganized alliance teams; where maybe a handful of us are trying to direct others (many quite clueless) what to do.
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08/02/2018 03:39 AMPosted by Chromey
08/01/2018 02:45 PMPosted by Luku
...

Recently, how many games have you seen won without the wining team holding SFGY (before the latest changes both Horde and Alliance often just skipped SF).

As for the IB choke point, like any choke point you at some point just need to zerg it. Push into the IBGY spawn area to cap it. Once Alliance owns IBGY the map is theirs. SFGY is half the distance to IBGY than SHGY so it is much easier for Alliance to zerg from SFGY than it is from SHGY.

The Horde only really needs SF to stop Alliance from spawning there. Alliance now needs SF to take IBT/GY.

One other thing I'd like to note, Horde just completely skips Balinda now (no need to kill her to win so just skip and keep pushing). I think thats one mechanic that could be looked at, something like you get massive honor for killing a sub-boss or you cant kill the boss until either Galv or Bal is down, or maybe towers are much harder to take down if Galv or Bal is still up. Not sure but skipping Bal or Galv seems kind of cheap to me.


I'm curious, what do you think about Honor rewards being changed as follows:
- A much smaller bonus from winning. (Think 50, tops.)
- The bulk of Honor rewarded for physical proximity to objectives, rewarded passively ticking over time, for being near your Flags or Flag Carriers, occupying Towers and Bunkers, etc. (How often have you helped defend say... Stonehearth Bunker until it capped and no Alliance ever came... and some derpy guy who went to the meat grinder by Dun Baldar got 100+ more honor than you for that BG? Or heaven forbid you have to sit in or near a mine so some Rogue doesn't shaft you on Reinforcements in a close match.)
- And, of course, you still get some from kills. It is still important in BGs to try to win fights too, not just "afk" in a tower.
"Defend the Payload!" and such.


The problem we had in the past (on both sides) was that people would just sit in the cave and farm honor, Blizz doesn't want to go back to that again I'm sure. That's likely why they are working in this "physical proximity to objectives" bit. If you are at an objective you are at least somewhat a target.
A much smaller bonus from winning, sounds good to me. Horde have been losing on average for a long time. Though I do have both Alliance and Horde toons, how can you not with the game as old as it is (Horde was my original faction). I'm personally in it for the fun of epic battles, winning is just icing on the cake.
Back in the day as many of you remember AV used to be much longer than even today's battles. There are times, when the battles are so long, you have to leave during it (real life calls). It would be nice not to have to feel like you have to camp out somewhere and hide (something I never personally did but have seen others do) to get that big honor boost at the end. Just leave, take your honor, and let someone else come in and take over.
All in all good changes to honor, but I still feel it's been nerfed time played wise. Every time there are changes made like this honor becomes less and less, for everyone.