Why wPvP is More Fun Than Battlegrounds

Tldr: horde player rolled the ‘underdog’ and is enjoying pvp

3 Likes

Say it aint so-a horde saying he likes wpvp better than bg’s.

3 Likes

Because you are Horde and out number Alliance so you win more. lol!

4 Likes

When there’s a dozen Horde on you the moment you fly anywhere, the moment you rez- they just end up looking like a sea of red. On Vanilla, sure, I did build up rivalries- but when the sole factor in every fight is their numbers- there’s nothing about their gear, spec or name to remember.

I have genuinely forged zero rivalries, because there’s nothing to forge against a blob of names. When you’re trying to get to a dungeon in a group of 5, and at the FP you see spy go off with 40 names, you’re not thinking ‘oh no, it’s Xxlegolasxx, we’re in trouble’, you’re thinking ‘oh, 40 Horde camping the FP, I guess that’s all they could muster this early in the day’.

My memorable Horde rival is- numbers. That’s the big name I’m going to remember, that’s the only thing on the Horde worth knowing.

5 Likes

Murder them all! Camp low level ones and hope they quit. It’s the only way to bring balance.

Blue post said, PvP problems pvP solutions

1 Like

I hope everyone managed to get HWL/GM during phase 2 before BGs came out. Oh wait they only got rank 4-6? I’m glad I didn’t waste my time farming low levels, afks, or mass raiding BRM 24/7 during phase 2 until bgs came out :). Looks like it’s about time for 10-15 AFK bots in AV and none stop WSG pre-made farms.

2 Likes

Everything you said was true back in 2005 when WSG first launched on my medium pop server before cross-realm bg’s.

My server had a relatively-small PvP pool so you were very familiar with every name on the other side. You knew who was good and who wasn’t, what their spec was, who you should focus, etc. And you had these rivalries with the other players which were meaningful.

When I played on Nost/Elysium/LB/Northdale, even though they were single servers the population was so big that it felt like cross-server battlegrounds. You might play a dozen games and never see anyone from your other games. If you became familiar with the teams from the opposite faction, it was because they were premades, and that meant an automatic loss, not any meaningful struggle. And the only times you really became familiar with your own faction was when you ran premades with them.

Out of all the PvP experiences I have had on all the servers I have played on, my best experience was from Kronos 2.

Almost every game was competitive because they were almost never premades, which meant every player on both sides needed to perform to win. In the most basic terms, every game would have been something like a low-end premade on both sides, since the rankers were in with the pugs. You had people telling you where the flag was going, pinging the map, focused on objectives, and generally working together. Games were usually very close, you almost took for granted that most games would end 2-3.

On Nost/Elysium/LB/Northdale, 75% of the games were against premades where there was virtually no PvP(everyone just hid in a corner), and the game was over after a 5-minute flag-relay. Of the other 25%, almost all of the games still ended 3-0 with very little cooperation between the players, and you rarely remembered anyone’s name afterwards.

I think what you call WPvP, is just when you have small numbers of people who tend to consistently be in the same areas, to the point that you become familiar with them.

Currently almost no one is actively engaged in WPvP at any particular time. You have like 10-30 people in about 8 zones patrolling around , depending on the time of day. And the same people tend to camp the same zones. So if you go to those zones tomorrow you’ll likely see the same people you saw yesterday.

This isn’t the glory of WPvP, this is the glory of small populations. Imagine if those zones had 10-20x as many people doing WPvP there, that is too many people to comprehend and they just become nameless and faceless.

If every WSG was the same 10-30 people, game after game, it would be the same feeling as WPvP. But when you have hundreds or thousands of people you feel nothing.

The question is, can you recreate the rivalries and camaraderies of world PvP, without making the game unplayable for everyone else?

The answer is yes. But it will never happen because that would require a complex algorithm of matchmaking which prioritizes people on the same server with a 2-5 minute timeout, along with some kind of hidden MMR.

3 Likes

i enjoy the combat win or lose, always get an adrenaline rush… win some lose some thats how da game works

There was battlegroups for a long time. So you would get used to seeing the best players from other servers in battlegrounds initially. The battlegroup was still a small enough community those rivalries developed through battlegrounds.

It is a matter of scale. The point is, the smaller the community the more-likely it is for people to know each other. It is just a fact of life.

It is why people in the country wave at each other, while in Japan the crowds of people are barely seen as human, just a blob of moving flesh.

Imagine Times Square in NYC, that many people just become objects, or really obstacles, they mean nothing to you. You could see ten-thousand faces and never remember a one. But you’ll remember that one guy you saw walking down the street in the middle of nowhere.

The bigger the server, the harder it is to have a community. And with cross-realm anything it spreads it even more.

Ideally you would want people regularly interacting with as few people as possible, so that they can build a relationship/history with them. But once the population drops too low it makes it impossible to find enough people to play the game.

Without cross-realm BG’s, on smaller servers and at certain times of the day/night you might not have battlegrounds popping at all. And if people can’t do BG’s or 5-mans because the community is too small, they’ll either quit or go to another server, which creates a downward-spiral until the server dies completely.

The dilemma is, how do you recreate the feeling of that small tight-knit community, while still having enough people for there to regularly be BG’s popping, and enough people to do quests and 5-mans?

What other games?

I keep waiting for the next shoe to drop where somebody figures out that people standing around a remote FP far from reinforcement, probably semi-AFK from boredom, that you can approach without warning (I guess I could be wrong about this depending on how far away Spy picks up on people on gryphons) are mighty sweet targets for farming themselves. Let alone people camping a boat with no escape route that it is a short hop from IF.

If it turns out they can get away without getting murdered when 20 Alliance land at once, then maybe some bait would help, send the level 55 in 10 seconds ahead.

1 Like

world pvp used to be incredibly fun but not anymore now that everyone runs around in zergs.

2 Likes

The world pvp has been awful. Absolutely awful. It reminds me so much of Ultima Online, and is flawed in many of the same ways.

It’s all about setting up an unfair situation so you can wreck the other side. You have more people, more consumes, in a better position, and you overwhelm and destroy your enemies.

I remember Ultima Online rapidly dying as friend after friend quit. We didn’t want to be griefed. This isn’t pvp. This is griefing. Endless griefing.

Battlegrounds are fair-ish fights. You know that you’ll be against a force in equal size, at the very least. That’s what I enjoy. Winnable fights.

Being the underdog is one thing. Being unable to survive in any questing area at all is quite another, and kills games.

This crap killed UO. It killed vanilla wow server after server. It isn’t any surprised it’s doing it again.

The first week was fun. Being the underdog and finding ways to fight back was great. Past that? It’s getting real old.

3 Likes

That’s only because we didn’t have enough time to get a real honor per hour meta established. First the old SS vs TM zerg went on and that was really just for the nostalgia factor. After that people starting running around in 10-15 man groups because they are unlikely to die that way but it’s only decent honor if your group of that size can hold its own in BRM / Searing Gorge. The 10+ zergs on outposts like Light’s Hope Chapel are actually poor honor.

But again, we only had 3 or 4 weeks to figure this stuff out. I’ve been roaming Burning Steppes, Felwood, and Un’goro solo the last few days and have actually gotten vastly superior honor from it opposed to group play. But that depends on heavily on your class and gear. For me as a warrior to pull it off you need to be well geared, well stocked on consumables, and good at 1v1s. Yeah I got crushed by roaming groups many times. But winning just a handful of 1v1s racks up honor points very quickly. And 1v1’s are fun.

But yeah I’m actually having a lot of fun going solo in wPvP this week and I hope that after BG’s come out it remains a decent way to get honor while farming.

To be fair, I actually thought Alliance were going to outnumber Horde in Classic. Between the historical advantages Alliance has in Vanilla, the fact that most streamers were rolling alliance due to those min/max advantages, and that most people have been playing horde in retail and going alliance would be seen as a fresh of breath air it seemed like the most realistic scenario.

My friends wanted to roll horde so I followed them, which worked for me as I was also alliance in Vanilla and didn’t want to outnumber the enemy again.

Turns out people still think horde is bis, and it didn’t become apparent that horde was the popular faction until I was already doing MC and trapped by social ties.

I’ve actually been thinking of doing an alliance challenge run to 60 on a more unbalanced pvp server. Trying to get friends to join in too to add some competition.

I don’t have experience playing any of the super unbalanced servers. My server tilts, but it’s still within healthy ranges. The alliance have even taken world bosses. My experience probably vastly differs from others. But at the same time, just because you might be on one of those unhealthy servers, it doesn’t mean that is what every other server is like.

We do a lot more than just FP camp and zerg people down. Just yesterday my guild came in with a large group in EPL and found a group of 3 people, and then challenged them to Mok’gora instead of just zerging them. (I wasn’t part of the group, but did join in for the dueling since i solo in that zone)

I fought an SL lock and embarrassed myself. Really dumb opening (tried to grenade/banish the felhunter when they had DC up) and then got locked out of shadow trying to banish pet, and then got fear locked (resisted my counterspell) without my insignia up (should have waited for the cd timer, but w/e). Still got them to like 15%, but i didn’t even deserve that. I consider myself a great player, but sometimes I have full blown autism.

I got another duel with a rogue. He actually destroys me normally (i never get lucky with stun resists, and then he shadow reflects if i break cc so I can’t DC/seduce him. He’s also pretty good about moving out of grenade range if i try to drop it, and I try to only use invuln pots if i’m outnumbered (def not using it in a duel unless i’m playing around), which he can honestly just blind me through. However he decided to sap me and open on my felhunter (didn’t change pets cause i didn’t expect to win and didn’t want to lose a shard) for reasons I don’t understand. Sap broke and I dotted him as pet died (rip shard), think it took like 2-3 globals to kill him from there (i’m conflag). Probably just him being cocky.

This isn’t even a unique situation. I’ve had alliance find me in WPL/EPL and surround me in a circle to force 1v1s before, and i’ve seen it out in the world on both sides, but usually to smaller scales like people “respecting” 1v1 fights.

I think the reality is that it’s better for someone to get full honor for a kill then for a raid to get like 10, on top of being more entertaining for all involved. Also if you find a person 1v1ing in wpvp, it’s a waste to tag them and get partial credit because of the 25% reduction. So it’s better to hope your side dies and then you can 1 shot the wounded enemy for full credit. If they win, you can always try to grab them when they rezz.

I disagree’d at the title… reading the rest didn’t convince me. :stuck_out_tongue:

I really do not get the draw of world PvP.

It’s really not that entertaining. I mean, you do you I suppose, but I just don’t get it.

1 Like

I’d say about 90% of people agree with you.

PvP servers have ALWAYS been deeply unpopular.

It just requires a different mindset. You can’t care about dieing constantly, you can’t care about being in unfair situations where you often have zero chance to fight back. To me wPvP just has a higher high and a lower low. I’ll rage HARD sometimes, especially after a series of double kills (you kill each other) and the opponent got the credit and you didnt. But i’ll also feel a rush and get legitimately happy when I kill a larger group like 1v3.

It just get more out of it emotionally speaking.

I won’t get stressed at all in normal competitive play. But i also won’t get excited or anything for a win. The only raging that happens is within my own team for not doing things correctly. It’s just a more bland experience.

Bgs can be just as unfair as WPvP at times, but it’s made in such a way to reduce the unfairness by a bit.

And hey, if you get stomped and can’t do anything, you can leave a BG, and go do something else. :woman_shrugging:

I can moderately undersatnd the thrill of the -chance- of getting in a fight with someone and having to overcome them.

But that’s not what WPvP is in classic, and what it is in classic is not PvP imho. It’s just a mess.

1 Like

Been done. Day 5 Faerlina. It was a sweet, one-trick HK bonanza before the counter-corpse-camp fest. Half the raid went back to SS afterwards.

Tacticsltp do work in spurts but on megaservers, really hard to maintain position as underdog once you kick the beehive. Before you counter with “multiple distraction groups” etc: the numbers and morale were never there.

Again, the SS-TM HK raid trading was more appealing and hk rewarding for those ‘serious’ about ranking.

Wpvp in 2019 is just lame.

1 Like