Is fighting to win, selfish?

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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Despite my few other threads, I have to admit, I take my hat off to the guys grinding out the ranks.

That much dedication and discipline, takes an admirable amount of determination. Where I start to lose respect, is when they want to lose, but lets not get into that here…

My question is, should I feel guilty for wanting to win?

Its a genuine question, because I cant help but feel sorry for someone on the grind, when all I want to do is win.

Its basic mathematics, if you can squeeze in more BGs, you can increase your honor per hour.

It seems to me, that you can breakdown the PvP mindset into two groups.

  1. Someone who wants to enjoy PvP for what it is, a replication of war strategy and combat.
  2. Someone who just wants to get through the honor grind.

When I played in retail, the player base was predominantly group 1, and I can only assume that Vanilla was too.(its hard to find this information, so if any r14 Vanilla players could comment, that would be helpful). But now with the current PvP meta’s being theory crafted and utilized by the min/max era, this type of player is a minority.

If Im honest, I have no sympathy for the rankers. While I can respect the dedication, I just don’t feel remorse for you, when you cry about how I should just let you lose.

I cant help but wonder, is this selfish of me?

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On a Hunter alt in retail, I singlehandedly turned the tide in EOTS. Everyone else was done and felt the incoming loss, I kid you not.

Sometimes, all it takes is one person.

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No matter what BG you’re doing, what faction you are, and whether you’re in a premade or just solo queuing, winning is obviously ideal.

Winning is more honor. Winning is more reputation.

What matters is how you go about winning, and whether winning is actually a possibility. If it’s 2-0 in the enemy’s favor in WSG, you’re facing a full premade of Rank 13s in full BiS using all consumables, world buffs, etc, and you’re in a team of low ranks wearing greens using no consumables or buffs… yes, trying to win is selfish. You’re wasting everyone’s time by delaying the loss.

Should you feel guilty for WANTING to win? No. Should you feel guilty for needlessly wasting 9+ other people’s time? Absolutely.

The thing is, most people aren’t doing BGs because they necessarily want to win. Winning isn’t the goal, usually. It’s honor or rep. Whatever maximizes those gains is what people are after. This isn’t like retail rated BGs where winning is what matters as it affects your rating. The win doesn’t matter in Classic.

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I’m trying grind AB rep on my main right now, and it might be the most unpleasant thing I’ve ever attempted in wow. Because rep is directly tied to points/resources earned, 5 minute 2000-100 losses to premades are an absolute nightmare. The current horde pug strategy against premades is to take 13-14 players to either LM or mine and try to Alamo that the whole game and farm HKs while getting capped 4-1. That is the best honor/hour for pug players right now, but it makes the rep grind more or less impossible because I can comfortably get <200 reputation an hour if I don’t hit a pug vs pug where our team is going to hold territory.

I know the answer is join a premade and just win more, but it’s still frustrating that if I want to just hit an hour or so of AB and don’t want to find a spot in a premade and then bail, my rep gains may be more or less negligible because my team isn’t even going to try to take more than one base.

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AB has to be literally the most disgusting BG to try to pug. Nothing makes me hate people more than that garbage.

Down 2-3? Better sit 13 people on defense so we don’t lose even worse!

I probably /afk everytime I solo Q ab.

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I guess my issue is, I refuse to give up, its just not in my nature. Lets call it a personal flaw I’m not willing to work on.

Ok I think I see where your coming from. However, they chose to sign up to a battleground, so then I think it important to lay out what we understand a battle ground is…

My version of a battle ground is, a replication of war. An arena of which two opposing factions face off in a fight to the death. Victory is awarded to the oppressor, and shame upon the weak.

… Ok that may be a little overboard by most peoples standards, so then lests start with googles definition…

: a place where a battle is fought.

In no language, is the term battle, defined as one side giving up, while the other takes advantage… thats better defined as submissive lambs vs oppressor.

No one signs up for a game of submissive lambs vs oppressor. Losing faster also equates to allowing the enemy to gain honor points easier. This is against the ToS, since your not supposed collude with the opposite faction. I was summoned to the Arugal PvP discord, and this is exactly what happens. Alliance collude with Horde to pad their ranks, and vice versa, via the discord channel.

They even have a code where, the first team to cap will feed themselves to the losing team, so they can get honor, but only if the losing team stops attacking the FCs. Of coarse I keep attacking the FC, and the rest of the team starts crying to me, honor the code! My position is that there is no honor in this code.

I’m not trying to snitch, I’m just saying, I don’t agree with any of these sissy tactics.

I would never tell anyone to go kill themselves, but that’s exactly what rankers are doing when they think they cant win. You guys are crazy.

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Standing around and soaking up rep and honor without trying to win is selfish.

The BG has a clear win condition, if you are sabotaging that win by farming rep and honor then you are being selfish.

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There’s a victor and a loser in every battle. Some people, wisely so in some cases, are quick to admit defeat, surrender, and avoid having their forces decimated.

Since it’s obviously a game, none of that really applies, but the concept is the same: knowing a battle cannot be won and simply accepting defeat because you’d rather not be killed (repeatedly in WoW’s case). In both situations, getting on with the defeat and moving on to the next battle with better chances of victory is the right move if you’re trying to win the war rather than needlessly sacrificing your time and energy in an attempt to delay an inevitable loss.

Morale is a very real thing, even in World of Warcraft, though it cannot be quantified as easily as stats, DPS, or HKs. When you charge into the initial battle and get utterly destroyed, most people are going to give up. “We lost the fairest fight we could’ve had, and now we’re on the back foot every step of the way. They have the flag, if they haven’t capped it already. They still have buffs; we don’t. They’re cornering us in our graveyard. Maybe I just won’t accept the rez so we can move on.”

You ever watched large scale PvP where a mounted charge of 5 people can send a full raid into full retreat? They don’t even have to kill anyone for it to work. Imagine what being wiped will do to morale.

Well, they’re clearly talking about in-game, which is notably different than telling someone to kill themselves in real life. “Let them kill you. Just die” is obviously different than “kys retard.”

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If they reduced or got rid of honor decay you would see a change in this mindset from many people. One bad day on a highly competitive server is enough to stifle gains and maybe even bump you into losing ground despite grinding everyday due to how honor decay works. You could take a break in the middle of the grind if they did something about that. Out of all the things they changed I’m a bit shocked they left the unhealthiest grind in the game as it was.

Lok’tar Ogar! Victory or death. You aren’t wrong for fighting. They can /afk if they feel it’s a waste of time fighting.

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It’s RP decay, not honor decay, and I don’t think removing that would really solve the “issue” of people giving up, because you still have to earn more honor than others on your realm to reach the higher brackets and gain higher RP.

People would still want to minimize their grind as much as possible, so they’d still want to give up and get into the next BG to get higher honor per hour. Even if the grind is 3x faster (which is what removing the decay would do), you’d want to get it done in 4 weeks instead of 12.

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If a “ win” in wsg extends the game past the time it takes to enter another game and lose/win it. It is NOT worth it. Keep games under 20 minutes as horde and 12 as alliance.

AB is just awful and I’d say most non mass consumer premades avoid it.
If you aren’t sappering on nodes with faps and lips you aren’t gonna win AB fast enough to out honor wsg

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Yes it’s selfish. It’s also a normal healthy inclination.

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If you’re not there to win it, you shouldn’t be in it.

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Its not selfish at all, winning is usually possible if you can show your team that there is hope and the opposing team is not the monster they think it is.

I have done more battlegrounds in the last 2 days than in all the time they have been out in classic because I needed a change of pace from killing the mountain.

Point is, don’t feel bad, just push. You know in your heart it’s the right thing to do. Even if you’re hopelessly outnumbered take as many of them with you as possible, and often the enemy doesn’t know how to respond to that kinda violence.

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Too bad for them. Maybe they shouldn’t have been losing.

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I love this game. I’ve played it for a long time and I plan to continue playing it for a long time, but this “dilemma” is the thing I most dislike about WoW and its playerbase.

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play for fun, whatever that means to you.

PvP is a means to interact with the world, if you don’t interact with the world, it doesn’t matter what you do, you don’t have an impact on the world so why should you feel selfish?

Rankers just get their cap and log off, they don’t matter.

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Is it selfish? Yes

In this situation is it an inherently bad thing? No.

If you don’t care about efficiency, and if it’s a pug without pre—defined expectations, then play how you want to play.

I personally don’t care about winning if I am not having fun. I would rather lose a fun game than win an Unfun game. Other people have different priorities and that’s okay.

Doesn’t mean I won’t think someone is a piece of cow dung for dragging out the game and wasting my time.

Same reason I don’t play league anymore, enemy team is up 20-5 at 15 minutes and people want to play it out even though the flaming started at champ select.

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I have mostly liked what you have had to say, but on this I can say, I dislike you mostly as a person for even thinking this way.

No. You should never feel guilty for trying to win. If anyone on your team is trying to lose, you should report them for cheating, because they are. At the very least, they are cheating you out of the chance to win, and they should remove themselves from the game or be removed from the game.

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You have no idea what cheating means.

/facepalm

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