There’s been so much back and forth about this, but one thing doesn’t make sense.
You have one side who wants 1.5 or some earlier version of AV - citing the quests and all that stuff. Then you have the other side who want 1.12 - citing it’ll be a zerg anyway.
First off, let me say, that it make SENSE that Blizzard go with 1.12. It’ll be easiest. However, my question is to the 1.12 crowd, if any version of AV will be a zerg anyway, why care what version we get?
It all seems to be a discussion about - nothing. It’s going to get zerged anyway right?
I’d like 1.7 AV. The reaction to this 1.12 AV is just so exaggerated parrot fiesta that I just rather try to calm people down, if the game was already released I wouldn’t care to write anything about it at all.
I think by zerging people mean rushing through the map as a giant mob, capping GYs and towers along the way, and heading straight to the last boss.
If people tried to do this with the 1.5-1.8 version they’d get blown up by mines, destroyed by lieutenants and boss patrols, run into the opposing faction who are experiencing the same obstacles, etc. It’s nearly impossible aside from rogue and druid stealth caps.
With the 1.5-1.8 sort of system there is true value to releasing the ram riders, gryphon riders, increasing armor, and so forth because it’s so difficult to get to the next GY/tower. Then when these types of reinforcements are unleashed it becomes an exciting event.
NPCs like Korrak aren’t related to the zerg, it’s more about third party “factions,” quests and quest rewards, and flavor.
You can simply alter the mechanics of AV to force zerging to be impossible. As I’ve ststed elsewhere you can make objectives which require players to fight each other to get what they need to progress the campaign.
One idea that I think works well is requiring escorting an NPC to the enemy base in order to siege the enemy base.
While private servers don’t always have the most accurate numbers, they have shown that the terrain in AV allows the Horde to backdoor the Alliance base and skip all of this.
It’s also rather easily done by pugs once word gets out you can do it.
Given this, the only way to get the original AV experience so many of us remember would be to do something inauthentic.
People can’t really be certain that will be the case.
Like I noted, on private servers they tried to emulate 1.5 AV and people just zerged it anyway. That’s part of where that argument comes from.
Now it’s true that their numbers were probably not 100% accurate, but people are thinking back to 2005 and remembering that we had long AVs, and then thinking that the ONLY reason that could have happened is because it’s not possible to zerg it.
It’s easy to counter Horde back doors as well with earlier versions of AV. I.E the bunker archers respawn and hurt much much harder, as do mines.
As with 1.12 there’s much less need to back cap as there is to race with 1.5- 1.10 there’s too many NPCS to just deathball zerg.
Also No P server uses the old map. we are actually unsure if you can backdoor as horde with the old map. (The whole backdoor thing didn’t come around untill 1.8 IIRC Don’t know if that’s because the map was different or no one found it out. At least on my server.) They could just reverse the HP nerf re-add the NPCS / quest and leave in the newer 1.12 map, and everyone would probably be happy.
Early AV was anti Zerg, whether you liked it or not.
1.12 will likely be zerging due to a lot of the players already being seasoned to accept that AV = Zerg.
What is different between 1.12 and retail AV, among many other things, is that we can get a fairly small group together to consistently turtle the opposing faction.
In retail it would take almost the entire faction to turtle and even that may not even stop it.
And I remember back in the good ole days, that there was always a group who wanted to try and turtle the game and they can succeed at it quite regularly. This would lead to people in general constantly urging players to stop it and head to Drek or Van.
That’s where I’m at. I have no horse in this race. I understand if people are fighting for pre-1.12 AV, but don’t really get why there is backlash. Or if it’s people fighting for the sake of fighting lol.
Do you know what patch the rep rewards came out? I’m google challenged apparently. It says 1.5. But was it really that early?
It’s because that’s not true. 1.5 would not be zergfest. It wasn’t then, it wouldn’t be now. There are features that prevent that from happening - not saying no one ever did it, but it certainly was not how AV was run.
The removal of those things that prevented easy zergfest makes it zergfest. Path of least resistance wins.
1.5 or 1.7 AV is as essential for PVP, like Naxx is for PVE. Ask yourself, would you be ok if Blizzard would give you the Naxx from WOTLK, instead of the original one?
The PVP community might be small, but these people truly care about AV being authentic and not BFA. I follow the whole classic chatter for a long time now, never was really involved in it, as for me, the past is the past.
But one thing was shown very clearly, AV is extremely important to people, they want to experience the epic fight of Horde vs. Alliance once more. Give them that and they will play, deny it and they won´t join your game.
Not saying that Classic will fail now, but we all can see what the vocal majority does to WOW. They rush through the content and then move on to the next game. Blizzard is doing the same mistake once more, by catering to an audience that is just there for the rewards, but not the eternity.