Unanswered PvP Concerns

WoW Classic WoW Classic General Discussion
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There are lots of things to be discussed about Vanilla WoW PvP, and I see almost none of them being brought up to Blizzard.

I will go through some of these issues:

  1. Cross server BGs.

These were not in Vanilla WoW until the very end(1.12), and are very anti-community and retail-like. I don’t think they should be in a “classic” version of WoW as I didn’t have them my entire time grinding to rank14, and were not added until the end of Vanilla(1.12), preparing the game TBC which is when a lot of people agree was when WoW stopped being a world and more of a theme park. I met all my friends who I PvPed with(and still do, to this day) before cross-server BGs. Post cross-server BGs I never make friends PvPing, and everyone might as well be a NPC. This is also a retail like experience, so a Vanilla version of the game should have the unique old way to experience the content, which you cannot get anymore, instead of the retail version which we’ve had for 10+ years, imo.

  1. Battlemasters

Again, these were not in the original version of Vanilla when BGs were added and not added until much later. I remember going to the enemies WSG portal to look for PvP or see who is queueing, I remember them invading us. I remember battles outside the AV portal. It was fun and made the world feel alive. Adding these removes a lot of potential world PvP and makes the game feel like a lobby, and not a world. You can get that lobby/convenience feel in reail WoW, Vanilla wow should be special and not like retail. I think anything that trades community/world building for convenience should be kept out of vanilla.

  1. 1.12 AV

AV in it’s original release state, after bug fixes/exploits, was a master piece. 1.12 and later heavily nerfed AV and turned it into PvE race to the end where you just mount past each other and don’t even fight. Private servers version of AV is 1.12, and it’s not the original true version of AV that lasted days people remember. For a true authentic experience, I think we should get the original version of AV. I think 1.4-1.5 is the most stable with the least amount of bugs/exploits while still being authentic. This is a piece of content you cannot play on retail or any other version of WoW, and I think fits the classic WoW mindset perfectly. Give us our unique epic days long AVs back!

Thread here talking about old AV: The AV Choice

  1. Forced auto-grouping in BGs.

This is something I am very, very against. I don’t like being forced into a group, I like queueing up with some friends and roaming the BG with them doing objectives and having party frames and being in the party of who I personally want to be in a party with. This was also added in 1.12, which was the tail end of Vanilla and something I don’t think should be in Classic.

These are my biggest issues and concerns about Vanilla WoW PvP. I personally want Vanilla WoW PvP to be the PvP I remember and experienced my entire 3 years playing Vanilla, which seems to be different from private servers version of things, which uses the final end of Vanilla which the majority of people who played all of Vanilla spent the least amount of time experiencing. So for a true authentic experience, we should use the older versions of most things, imo!

I’m curious on peoples opinion and if they have anything else to add that I missed. I would love to see your opinions, so please post a reply

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lol nerdlet

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  1. A concern is what happens when (not if) pops on server decrease to the point of having very long BG queues or not enough action overall.

  2. Reserved agreement.

  3. Agree, but they ought to fix bugs/exploits.

  4. Reserved disagreement. BGs are a set number of teammates you’re supposed to be working with. Also I thought there was always a way to group for a BG with friends, but maybe that came later than Day Zero.

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Yeah, I don’t care for them either.

The game existed for the majority of its life without this curse.

Vanilla with cross server BG’s was a measly 3 month period.

The most authentic and persistent period of Vanilla PvP existed without CRBG, so it’s a valid point when battling against these people who want that garbage.

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  1. I honestly don’t mind since not having xrealm BGs would just screw over the low pop realms in the long-term. I’m planning on rolling on a highpop PVP server so I don’t expect it to affect me too much. I don’t care either way.
  2. I don’t care either way. You still only need 1 person to queue up your group (except for AV ofc) and queues are either short enough that you don’t have time to do much or long enough that you can go farm herbs/gold/honor in high-level zones.
  3. I doubt they even have the map for the older AV (and the data to go with it). I wouldn’t be surprised if people just found ways to cheese old AV with clever mob pulling–>reset like they did in 2006.
  4. A complete non-issue. An annoyance at best and a design flaw that was fixed at worst. There’s no reason to have this in Classic. That sounds like the best way to have no clue where your FC is at, where the enemy FC is at, who is holding what base or where most of your team is on the map in AV.

Either way, gonna have to feel bad for the people on low pop/imbalanced servers that want to PVP if Blizzard listens to people like OP who shout the loudest. They’ll have a hard time getting BGs to even pop, and stuff like AV will end up being 20v40 because of the faction imbalance.

There was, the OP means that they want to be in group with their buddies on their group frames instead of the BG raid frames for whatever reason. Completely ignoring the fact that their group leader should get instance leader and be able to put their group in the same group, inside the BG, if they so desperately want to be in the same group.

I find it funny how OP posts the exact same post they posted on Reddit earlier after it flopped when people realized how nonsensical some of their replies were.

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CRBGs will be required on imbalanced servers. So I would either try to enforce balanced factions, making CRBGs unnecessary in the first place or restrict CRBGs to only imbalanced servers.

People prefer to fight enemies on their own server, but at some point people also want to actually play the game.

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Apparently I’m not alone in thinking the CRBG was a bad move.

I always keep one of these in my bank to remember the great old times of WSG and the server rivalries that came from it. Forum trash posts from the Horde guild to the Alliance and vice versa about who had turtled/used faps/drank too many potions/exploited.

This game has lost a LOT of its personality since the Xserver BG patch was released. Now you don’t really know who you’re fighting against and you don’t really care. PvP is missing the grudge factor and that was one of my favorite things about it… there was always a few guys on each faction that everyone hated and tried to kill all the time, then there were the fun guys who would always hang out with the opposing teams outside of PvP, then there were the guys who you just respected so much that they almost had some aura of leadership around them.

Of course you also had all the feuds and dueling/ganking that happened between games in Ashenvale and the Barrens. I remember the Gnome Mage on our team used to kill one of the Pack Kodos by the Horde entrance, hide in it, and shoot Fireballs at everyone.

Mostly though what I remember and liked so much… 2 years ago, the Rank 14 gear was the best gear available to anyone, including raiders (BWL wasn’t out yet). So you had literally the best players on the server hanging out by the WSG entrance in Ashenvale. People would be dueling and shooting the breeze between queues and it was just so relaxed and enjoyable. Even while I was playing 14 hours a day to hit Grand Marshal, there was just something that kept it enjoyable even when it shouldn’t have been.

Anyway… cheers to the good old days. Every time I see my Talisman of Merit in my bank I think of those times. I hope there’s still a lot of players around who remember that era, but I think lots have quit this game already. I think I might too.

Source info.

https://web.archive.org/web/20080109162353/http://thottbot.com/i19213
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Great post! Really enjoy stories like this.

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CRBGs are a bad solution to a problem that was inevitable.

Server decline, and server imbalance were inevitable. It’s worse on pvp servers because of the “if it’s red, it’s dead” philosophy that more accurately translates into “If I can kill someone with no risk, I will.” Funny how they never attack a passing red “??”.

A little server imbalance leads to long queues on one side, and no queues on the other. That means the number of gankers on one side goes up and the other goes down. This increases the imbalance, which increases queue times, which increases the difficulty imbalance for new players.

Server decline and server imbalance was inevitable, as I said, because a little imbalance leads to a bigger imbalance, and there’s always a little imbalance on any server. Players actually seek it out. The “need” for CRBGs were merely the first symptom of runaway imbalance. That’s why they were inevitably followed by cross realm grouping, cross realm raiding, and eventually cross realm zones.

I think a better solution would have been incentivized server transfers when realms reached a dangerous level of imbalance or to encourage new players to roll on the lagging faction with some kind of incentive.

In hindsight, CRBGs should have been a massive red flag to us, and should have telegraphed years in advance their inevitable refusal to merge realms when the game lost 80% of its subscribers.

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Something to consider when talking about Battlegroups: there may not be as many servers in Classic as there were in Vanilla when Battlegroups were introduced. So if they become a necessity down the road, they may not be as disruptive as some people fear.

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Even if there are fewer servers it doesn’t mean that CRBG will not directly harm the local server PvP community.

The problem is, they’re designed to support the arena system, not vanilla BG community.

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Only thing I care about is WPvP population balance.
It has to be roughly even or the same old problems will occur and PvP suffers.

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Patch 1.4 (April 8th).

  • PVP ADDED

60 days pass

Patch 1.5 (June 7th)

  • WSG added
  • AV added

35 days pass

Patch 1.6 (july 12th)

  • Battlemasters added

63 days pass

Patch 1.7 (September 13th)

-AB added

Battlemasters have been in the game LONGER than AB. So to say Battlemasters aren’t Vanilla, well I guess AB is even more “not vanilla”.

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The post you quoted doesn’t even mention Battlemasters. It’s about cross-realm bgs, which came much later (1.12), were in Vanilla a very brief time, and pretty obviously were put in in anticipation of arenas.

Well, that last part is debatable, but crbgs are much more consistent with TBC game design, than Vanilla’s, which was all about community.

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Yes I pressed reply, but I guess I hit the wrong reply. It was meant to reply to OP.

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I’m very specifically talking only about CRBG…

Cross Realm Battle Grounds.

My metric for something being a main point in Vanilla was how much time did it persist within the game.

If the component was only there for a fleeting moment, and also destructive, then does it belong in Classic?

I’d say no. CRBG ticks both the destructive to community box and almost non-existent box.

If you use that same measur for the battle masters that you have brought up, a different area of concern; you will notice they were in game for a very sizable portion of original vanilla wow and did annoy me, but didn’t kill the local server PvP community.

By the same measure the battle masters actually got into the Classic WoW experience.

EDIT: I see now your reply was misdirected. Those darn TBC abilities and features keep on trying to get play.

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Keep any kind of button to do content out of Classic.

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Agreed, cross-server BGs were just the beginning of that type of gameplay that a lot of people complain about now and one of the biggest reasons people wanted classic WoW.

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Agreed, give me an instance portal or NPC that I need to actually go visit!

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you didnt mention the biggest and most controversial issue: what to do about queue dodgers.

Also i sort of hope they do have cross realm bgs so i can twink out at 49 and still get games.