Game is unironically over after these changes. World feels dead due to layering. I’m here doomposting because I’m invested but I unsubbed today. I need to just put down wow for good and find other games.
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Over-correction is an understatement.
They completely gutted the event.
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Losing side just waits longer to lose now. I haven’t seen alliance lose on our server. Nice I’m alliance, would suck as horde. I’d probably just drag it out if I were them and make us suffer too lol
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They gutted the event and made the world feel dead in one fell swoop, 10/10 excellent fix blizz.
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I think one simple elegant solution that may not have too much of a downside would be to use the time limit as a regulator (and likely needing to remove the ramp-up period). With a 60 minute time limit on the battles, a control could be implemented that no other layer can start a new battle until at least 61 minutes has elapsed since the “global” battle start across all layers. That’d ensure a situation where one battle can’t start before another can end and borking the whole thing like we’ve been seeing.
Of course doing that means that the ramp-up mechanic sort of becomes somewhat irrelevant since progress could get to 100%/100% but then we could still be stuck and needing to wait another 10 minutes minimum to get started again. The UI could be updated to communicate a situation like that clearly enough to satisfy players though, I imagine. However maybe the system for the ramp-up period might need to be reworked or abandoned altogether.
I do love the concept of the ramp-up phase encouraging continuous world PvP in the zone and it does do a good job of that, but I posit that it might be unnecessary. If Battle events are happening regularly (roughly every hour or every 90 minutes) then there will be high PvP traffic in the zone regardless, and despite the PvE-objective nature of the event there will still be a lot of players running into each other and fighting as a result. And if that were coupled with a situation where the system of spinning-down low-pop layers wouldn’t need to be removed then I think that’s all the better. The zone could remain very active well outside of peak times, which feels like a big positive.
I would certainly argue that between losing the ramp-up phase as a driver for wPvP or having to look at 3+ hour waits between events under the current solution, the former definitely feels like the lesser evil to me.
Tl;dr on that: It might not actually be such a bad thing to simply go Wintergrasp style on the Battle for Ashenvale (without the need for instancing) and have it be purely timer based without the ramp-up phase, as that seems like it would neatly solve a lot of the issues described in the post without too great a downside.
Another thought: This isn’t a specific idea but rather a general concept… perhaps there’s a novel solution somewhere in giving players more power to manage layers themselves rather than relying entirely on the functions of the system itself. Giving players that info/power would have to be done in such a way that incentivizes players to use layers/layer-hopping in a way that promotes healthy functionality and in a way that also prevents abuse, so I don’t know if there’s any possible solution there or what it would be like but it might be a good conceptual approach anyway. Players already try to work around the layering system (albeit unreliably) using 3rd party addons and grouping, and with the right controls in place players might be quite effective at helping to regulate the system to work as intended. I’m sure that’s something the team has already given a lot of thought to, but maybe there’s still a novel idea in that concept.
Anyway I’ve been loving the wPvP action in Ashenvale and really enjoying the Battle event and the zone as a whole. I’m loving the design with SoD and the game has been a ton of fun. It’s cool to get to see the Classic team working in a more experimental way like this, even if it’s had some bumps along the way. The near-constant breaking of the Battle event the last couple days has been pretty frustrating however and I’m glad that there’s action that should at least fix it from totally breaking now even if the solution isn’t ideal. Thanks for all the hard work and the transparency!
oh they do it here too, just with smurf accounts, typically the ones with 1,000+ posts.
sounds to me like blizzard needs to retire layers altogether and invest in servers that can actually hold a current gen population.
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This is what I don’t understand.
Those two points are entirely counterproductive to each other.
You know there are going to be more layers then needed and on top of that you make it so people who play off-peak hours have to get as many kills to start the event at 2 in the morning as they need for 7 p.m.?
If anything with the layering changes the amount of kills needed should of been lowered.
I’ve been ingame for 1.5 hours now and 1 side has been at 100% and the other side has moved 9%.
Has one single event even happened in the last several hours?
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The event is completely broken now on Wild Growth EU. The last three times we killed two generals and suddenly progress reset back to 3/3. The generals never respawned and the boss was immune forever, making it impossible to win. Great fix, thank you.
This fix was implemented to fix what you’re talking about.
When was the last time you actually did the event?
I appreciate the long and thought out post. This transparency is a big step in the right direction. It sucks to have to sift through the noise of complaints but you can never please everyone. Keep doing this!
Now, my point: Please continue to allow layers to spin down. This game thrives on community and that’s ultimately the reason we play. Feeling alone will likely drive people away and start a domino effect. Even griping about the bugs in /1 has an element of togetherness to it. I’d rather do that than see the game a ghost town.
I think there are some good suggestions in this thread. +1 to the 61-minute lockout. Or, dont start the ramp up period until all layers are finished. But please, let us keep the world full!
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Here’s my extremely unpopular no likes except me answer:
Force break up or remove all premades. That way you don’t have a massive conglomerate of one faction thereby making it very unappealing for the opposition.
people would rather leave if the numbers dip. They always want overwhelming odds for easy honor and the shortest path to success.
PvP servers are naturally faction unbalanced or they eventually drift one way.
conversely, I know they group en masse to give players a chance to avoid dynamic layering breakups as well as coordination on VOIP. World PvP is uncontrollable chaos.
I’ve always viewed it as transitory and happening in unexpectedly random places. For this reason,
It would make more sense to just put an Alterac Valley like portal for Ashenvale BG. An instance that sounds very much like Darkshore for BFA.
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Really disappointed in their fix. I haven’t had time to ashenvale really, and now the grind is going to be so extremely long with the change’s to timers and my play times I might as well consider it broken for the rest of the phase.
I appreciate the breakdown in why it failed, I don’t appreciate the conclusion of making it so infrequent and breaking the world experience.
Night/morning gamers being sacrificed on the altar of bandaid use.
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currently right now, the % is going up about 1 every 20 minutes. At this rate no one is going to stay and wait. This isn’t going to work because players who can’t play during normal hours are at a severe disadvantage where they may NEVER even get to participate in the event.
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yup life isnt fair… I happen to be one of thos suckers that fall in the bucket that probably wont be able to do another event, my troll hunter got to friendly last night at least! it only took many many many days of grinding and many warsong battle grounds wins. Meanwhile, I heard alliance just can afk in town and get exalted without even hitting a mob there. again life isnt fair
The problem is, “current gen populations” as you put it are inherently dynamic. Yes, some people still have WoW as the only game they play, as was the case back in the day, but these days, as someone else in the thread stated, MMOs no longer grow continuously.
WoW’s sub count grew constantly until Cataclysm, so for over half a decade. Now? Peak population is often at the start, and while there might be the odd spike here and there, it’s just a constant decline. It was so consistent back then because aside from going out of your way to add people on Skype or MSN, or unless someone was paying for a vent server, a big big draw of the game was the social aspect. That still exists, but with social media, Discord, smartphones, and much easier/faster internet access, there’s no reason to log on to WoW instead of doing anything else, unless you actively want to play the game. It’s just not novel anymore, and too many other games (MMO competition was thin back then, remember, so WoW really was the “place to be”)
SoD is a different beast, but classic WoW is still, at its core, considered a “solved game”. When things are rolled out in phases, it’s far FAR more likely in the modern day that people will get to where they want to be, maybe roll an alt and play that for a bit, before wandering off to play something else.
Server populations are not constant, and they don’t tend to grow. They need to be large enough to handle the massive influx at the peak points (launches, patch/phase releases) but having a static server with no layers that’s large enough to handle that? That’s invariably going to result in a dead, empty server by the end after the expected drop-off.
Where does that lead? Server merges. Arguably a far worse and far more detrimental solution overall.
I normally prefer not to @ the game director directly but I feel you could accomplish the goals you want of inciting PvP in Ashenvale by awarding 5 or 10 rep per HK while in Ashenvale, up to revered.
You’d kill three or four birds with a single stone.
Just my take though.
This is going to be a big win for the bots, now they can congregate on empty layers in US “off-hours” (AKA, mid-day prime time for China) and farm baby farm.
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This is also a huge boon for gold farmers, now instead of having to compete with real players off hours they can find a nice empty layer to happily farm all night interruption free.
Plus now that they aren’t competing with each other and are spread across 9 layers instead of 3, they can generate resources and dump them into the economy at 3x the rate.
Absolutely trash fix just for an event.
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No they have to have a reason for why they lost. It’s not their fault, it’s someone else’s fault.
Hallmark of the era we live in unfortunately.