So, after my little tirade revolving around the complexities of cooperative combat that caused Kotaku to lift up its arms and yell "Aaaaa-men, brother. Kick him to the curb! Uh-huh.", I did a little sightseeing of the WoW forums to determine whether we were an island in a sea full of AFK fuckers.
What I found was a landmass and plans by the statutory body to bring in the bulldozers and smooth things out.
Does that analogy even make frickin' sense? Anyway, read down 4 posts and see Caydiem's words.
It has been stated that we are working on incentives for Battlegrounds in order to bring more people into a particular Battleground at a given time. Be patient -- there are solutions in the works.
Well, I'm not sure what these incentives entail but if Blizzard intends them to work they had better well address what is at the core of the problem - population imbalance. It's not that the Horde players (or Alliance on a smaller percentage of servers) are a bunch of yellow-bellied wimps who'd rather debate the finer points of calling each other "asshole" over the Trade channel in Ironforge rather than go smashing heads together in Alterac Valley. It's the fact that in the case of a significant number of servers, there just aren't enough players on the other side of the war fence. Less players = less PvPers. Simple.
So what can be done? How about taking a page out of the book of another MMO (never stopped anyone before)? Server-clustering for PvP ala DAoC? The ability to hire NPCs and add them to your group ala Guild Wars? Or, heavens forbid, remove the battlegrounds population cap all together. Hey, sure I might end up against a force of superior numbers, but at least I get to PvP for once. That's a mark in the thumbs up column for me. And perhaps I'd even gain extra honor points for being the underpopulated side? Now that's incentive.
So, I guess we just kick back and wait to see what Blizzard churns out. Meanwhile, I'll just continue to try to put this aside for now and play a bit in Alterac - a zone I just found out right now is telling people they aren't in "this instance's group" and is teleporting everyone back to Ironforge.
Fuckers.
I was going to reply on how long the wait times are on Lightbringer (79% alliance) for 31-40, but while I was writing this a situation occurred where there wasnt enough alliance to form an instance? I had been playing 5 minutes beforehand, only 6 alliance vs 10 horde (after a 2 hour wait). Very bizzare. Anyway the wait times are terrible yada yada. Maybe the current alliance pvpers are getting sick of being beaten by the same max-twinked-alt-level40-horde players that are in Warsong 24/7.
While we are wishing, is it too hard to be ported back to where you came from after finishing a round? Warsong is pretty far out of the way if I'm questing in Alterac or Stranglethorn. If there wasnt any queues, then I wouldnt need to be questing to kill the multihour wait times.
They should just go with: draw players from every realm for global-realm instances with a prematch lobby so you can set up your raid party, ignore the players you know who suck etc, then enter as a complete 10 when ready. Its so simple and ACCESSIBLE i dunno why they didnt think of that. I doubt that any 'incentives' are gonna ease the wait times.
oh yeah and at least another 10 player BG wouldnt hurt - they arnt that big so how hard could it be to implement one. oo how about a different style of play? 5 horde defending a fort from 10 alliance? 5v5 BG? 15v15 bg? Escort Mission?
/rant
Posted by: illuminarc | July 24, 2005 at 09:57 AM
I literally couldn't tell you what the inside of Alterac looks like. Warsong Gulch is constantly getting action, but long ago I read about the 'revered' rewards for Alterac and thought that as a casual gamer I might actually get a chance to wield worthwhile Epics. So I've ignored Warsong (even though my friend's list seems to always have people there) and daily I put my name into Alterac. Usually I go 4 hours without ever being notified of an opening and log off. The last couple of nights I've played I put my name in right away (putting the guy in Ironforge was actually a good move), stand around for an hour looking for a raid, get an hour into a raid and get notified of an opening (at a time I obviously couldn't accept). Theoretically, this should be a great idea for those of us who want to continue improving our characters but aren't hardcore enough to belong to a guild raiding MC regularly. Realistically, it's a complete and utter waste of resources currently.
Posted by: Genious | July 25, 2005 at 09:51 AM