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World of Warcraft Battlegrounds in Testing
The much anticipated Battlegrounds content is live on the test servers for World of Warcraft. The patch notes for the upcoming game update include class changes and world modifications. From the notes: "The Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley battlegrounds are now available. The Warsong Gulch entrances may be found in the northern Barrens near the Mor'Shan Rampart (Horde) and south of Silverwing Outpost in Ashenvale (Alliance). The Alterac Valley entrances may be found east of Sofera's Naze in Alterac (Horde), and in the Headlands of Alterac (Alliance)."
I recommend waiting a day to transfer your character over. It's totally logjammed at the moment.
Moo
Check out http://wow.azzor.com/ for consolidated information on the new battlegrounds. Tons of info!
I cancelled my subscription back in Feb. to wait for battlegrounds, I'll be back in business tomorrow.
Next you're going to tell me that all online deathmatch-type games (RTS also works here) are pointless because the same person wins every time.
Or, to pre-empt the Guild Wars crowd, the same applies there... once you've beaten the other team once, there's no point in ever doing it again, is there?
Or should I make the sarcasm heavier for you?
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Battlegrounds is on a per-server basis.
So imagine if you could only play Quake III with your roommate, and your roommate totally owns you at it. There's nothing you can really do, though, since you have a 9-5 job and your roommate spends all his time practicing Quake III. You'd love to play with your friends across the hall, but you can't because they aren't on the same server.
Guild Wars doesn't have that fatal flaw because all characters play on the same "server" so to speak. Not so with World of Warcraft.
Battlegrounds is going to be dominated by certain groups of people, and you're going to have absolutely no way to play with other people. You'll be forced to play soley with the people on your "server".
Your only way to play against new people is to start a character on a new server and level it up to level 60 yet again...
I thought this was already implemented some time ago.
I quit playing months ago, because as fun as the game was, there was no reason to do anything. You didn't gain or lose a damn thing for killing someone or being killed. And there was no really massive battle engagement, unless you count the occasional raid on a town.
After about six months, they FINALLY implemented some sort of "honor" system. But I'm not sure if it's the same honor system that was advertised (which is why many of us bought the game in the first place, but it was removed before the game went live). Hopefully, it has some sort of value in combat now to make killing a low level character less enticing and killing a higher level character more enticing. The game really loses a lot of momentum when you're a 10th level guy being mobbed by two dozen 60+ guys who are taking over an area.
I was looking forward to battlegrounds, but I'm not sure it's enough to pull me back into the game. I got pretty bored by the time I dropped my subscription about four months ago.
Guild Wars doesn't have that fatal flaw because all characters play on the same "server" so to speak. Not so with World of Warcraft.
True, you can only play with people on the same server. You call it a fatal flaw - I happen to think that it's much nicer to compete against a smaller set of people. I actually have a chance of being in the top 10 on my server, whereas if it was all servers combined, there's be no way.
To use your roommate analogy - You have a good chance of being better than your neighbor. Even a decent chance of being better than your neighborhood. But you've got almost no chance of being better than everyone in the city.
Pros and cons to both approaches.
Tourach, by the way, next time you try backstabbing me you'll be eating grass! I have a new Polymorph macro with your name on it -- literally! :)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
So having fewer options is a good thing?
The other fun thing is that Battlegrounds is self-reinforcing. The side that does well will get better equipment, skewing the game towards their favor.
I'd rather have more people to play with than play against the same group of level 60s repeatedly. Especially since losing makes the other side stronger.
Battlegrounds is a lame attempt to compete with Guild Wars, and it's causing Blizzard to miss some pretty severe bugs and class-balancing issues with the game.
Yeah, I've really never understood the nature of any competitve sport. Why bother playing anything when the same person/team who wins the first match, wins ever consecutive match. I know that this goes without saying, but I simply have to: The parent's use of logic is one of the strangest I have *ever* seen.
** A Sketch a Week **
http://www.sketchplease.com
Yes, we all know that this season the Red Sox will only be playing against the Yankees, because they're on one server and the other teams are all on various other servers.
That's the issue. You're always playing against the same people. In most sports, you play against various other teams, not the same three or four teams repeatedly.
The other problem is that there are rewards for winning that make the team that one even stronger. So the teams will slowly become more and more skewed until there's no point in the other team even showing up because they'll get pwned.
You can get the patch right here if you'd rather not use that horrible Blizzard updater (no idea how long I'll keep that mirror up though). Then go on and copy your character over to the test realm.
okay, so concidering an average server which has 200-400 lvl 60 characters on each side. 40 people per battleground. makes a minimum of 5 teams per side if EVERYONE only plays with the exact same people every time. Now the battlegrounds aren't the only way to get better gear and or stats etc. so it's hardly a problem that one side will get better than the other.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
I'm currently ranked about 900th in my server in PvP. This means there are roughly 900 people who are more active in PvP than I am. Divide that into teams of 40. Repeat for the other side. Now tell me that I'm going to be playing the same team of 40 every time I go into Battlegrounds.
Actually, the baseball analogy is quite nice... sure, there are only 32 teams in MLB, but that doesn't mean one of them always wins over another. And, like this, the winning teams get more money from attendance and merchandising, yet this doesn't keep them winning. (Example: the Yankees.)
Also, you'd be surprised how little the PvP rewards mean when you actually start fighting.
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... and fix paladins, which were COMPLETELY overhauled less than 2 weeks before retail, and have been left ENTIRELY UNCHANGED except for a few bug fixes and one new skill (which is rarely ever used - most players will use it less than once a week) for the past FIVE AND A HALF FUCKING MONTHS.
They're a melee hybrid with not a single active melee skill. You turn on a seal once every 30 seconds, and can "judge" a seal onto a mob every 15, except that usually wastes too much mana... so you're left with 3 keystrokes every 30 seconds, plus the occasional stun + heal or shield + heal.
A retarded monkey would be smart enough to realize he's wasting brainpower, and program a simple script to do it for him.
It's more than stupid that this gameplay hasn't changed in five and a half months.
The ONLY worthwhile "World of Warcraft" content, right here:
http://flame.tiefighter.org/WoW/1115793473.wmv
Donald Ferrone, Ph.D of computer science.
http://www.geocities.com/donald_ferrone/
Someone has to be the best in the city.
If it were true that one side will dominate, the constant Tarren Mill/Southshore back and forth battles wouldn't take place. There are already people decked out in much better equipment than the majority, and yes, they'll win 1 on 1, but when group dynamics are accounted for, it just makes for interesting combat.
Besides, we all know to target the highest ranking person first, in effect cutting off the head of the beast.
http://kansieo.com
It's sometimes more *fun*, yes.
The other fun thing is that Battlegrounds is self-reinforcing. The side that does well will get better equipment, skewing the game towards their favor.
Good equipment can often be overcome with better tactics. If you manage to pull a guy with the best equipment in the game by himself and hit him with 5 guys, better equipment or not, he's probably going down. (I'm not advocating zerging; since Battlegrounds will be matched 1:1, you'll have to work hard to separate the other team and keep your team together, rather than just bringing 5x the number of people to the fight)
I'd rather have more people to play with than play against the same group of level 60s repeatedly. Especially since losing makes the other side stronger.
So far you've said that you'd rather have 2000 level 60s that repeatedly kick your and everyone else's butt than 10 that may or may not be fighting you. There's your "more options". (assuming you're the same AC due to writing style and content)
What you're not taking into account is luck, and the experience the losing team will build by losing. Here's a quick example. I was jumped on a PvP server in the wilds by two players, both of whom were slightly higher in level than me. I used my poly spell to take one guy out of the picture for a small time, used a variety of skills to kill the other person, and then focused on and killed the second guy. It was relatively easy for me, despite being surprised, outnumbered, and overmatched in level. Things would been very different if the other people had done just a few things differently. Both players had abilities to interrupt my spells, but did not use them. One of the players had the ability to get out of the spell I used to pin him down, but didn't use it. Etc. Just a little bit of learning, and they would have beaten me soundly. Sure, there's a learning curve to using your skills in this game, but it plateaus. If it takes a month to learn how to use your skills effectively, there's not a lot gained by having played the game 6 months, in terms of skill. Granted, the 6 month player will know some more nuances, but it's like 99% best skill use vs 95%, rather than 99% vs 30%.
I agree with llevity, the paladin is more passive based class. Most paladins complain because before the first real patch (1.1), there was a bug in one of the Paladins skills (it made them increase in attack rate & damage, instead of increasing attack rate and decreasing damage). This change took away the biggest part of the Paladins aggressive abilities. So the people who liked paladins at first liked them because they were so aggressive (due to this bug), when the patch fixed it, the class then went back to its correct, passive design.
I'd also like to note that this bug made the paladin an extremely affective dueler. Lots of people rushed to build up a paladin, thinking that class was going to be a PvP machine due to the classes high success rate in dueling. Now Paladins are finding out this is not the best class for PvP, especially after the bug fix. It's typical to see lots of players start a character in a bugged class so they get the most advantages possible. Finally, people are starting to realise what the class is suppose to be about, and not a class better than all others.
I couldn't think of anything witty to say, so...you're stuck with this.
Your argument is predicated upon a skewed assumption.
horde guild a is geared up and has played since retail and they crush the feeble alliance pickup group.
Under these conditions, there's no solution to your problem, whether you coerce all the servers or not. The horde team doesn't need superior gear, given that, under your conditions, they'll always be competing against a "pickup" alliance group. You're also assuming that this hypothetical horde team has more cohesion than is believable. I will readily admit that horde tend to be tighter PvPers (at least on my server, which is PvE BTW), but that is really a function of necessity, not overall time spent or even gear. Nearly all the PvP raiding that happens on my server happens at Crossroads. This dynamic, one that requires horde players to be on constant overwatch for the sake of the lowbies, has produced a tactical efficiency in the horde players that puts the alliance to shame. This, I would think, is actually a kind of balance to the disproportionate ratio of alliance to horde.
So, yes, the horde might be better PvPers, but their strength is dependent upon their cohesion. If one or two of their players have to stop playing for any amount of time, it will impact their dynamic far more than the same group of alliance PvPers, who have more players (on average among all the servers) to choose from. It's kind of a question of one team having more star players in starting positions while the other team has more depth to their bench.
Exactly. Being a druid, paladins are the sole class that I cannot beat consistantly in a fair one on one fight. Actually, the fight is so extremely drawn out because neither one of us can outdamage the other's heals...technically, the duels never end. Everyone else, I can typically beat at least half the time.
http://kansieo.com
Besides, we all know to target the highest ranking person first, in effect cutting off the head of the beast.
Of course your assuming that the otherside's best dueler is going to be there leader/tactician, there are different skill sets involved. Or did you mean something more like "crippling the beast" rather than decapitating it.
I played a semi-aggressive paladin for 59 levels. I could deal with the fact that I wasn't doing the most damage. After all, I could usually heal myself to no end. I'd have paladin vs. paladin duels that could easily last 10-20 minutes. But once I was engaged in any dungeon raids or PvP encounters, my role completely changed from a minor melee player, in which I could stun and sleep a few players, to a secondary healer and buffbot. The only reason to have a paladin in your party for any of these encounters is buffs. My role completely changed from what it was for levels 1-59. I would have been happy if any groups didn't yell at me if I got close to melee range, but that wasn't the case.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
Most paladins complain because before the first real patch (1.1), there was a bug in one of the Paladins skills (it made them increase in attack rate & damage, instead of increasing attack rate and decreasing damage). This change took away the biggest part of the Paladins aggressive abilities.
Heh, reminds me of warlocks. They continually complain about how they've been terribly nerfed because they're no longer allowed to make it so that a player can take no action for minutes at a time while under attack, which was clearly a flaw in the game design. It was fixed.
When the game was released, warlocks were probably the easiest class to play. Several bugs with the class have since been fixed, and now warlocks spam the main board with their "problems" and won't shut up about them.
The funny thing is that warlocks are the least played class behind priests, but warlocks whine much more than any other class. I'm almost to the point where I'd refuse to invite warlocks to raids out of principle, if they weren't needed for their self-res buff (which really should be a priest ability, but that's beside the point).
Riddle me this: why do people bitch about something only to tell you that they are waiting on the same folks that have let them down repeatedly to fix it? Do you trust Blizzard or not? For the love of God how do you end up in a situation where you loathe complete strangers for weeks if not months and in the same breath say that you are depending on them to make you happier?
Do you live to be let down and blame others for your failure to have any spine in the matter or is this just a test of your ability to moan ad nauseum? Hell, I like WoW that's why I am playing it...what's your excuse for sticking around?
Sorry about being so abrasive, but damn.
As a strategy, if everyone targets the one who will do the most damage and remove him/her from the playing field early on, the rest of the fight will go that much easier.
In a WoW PvP sense, this means targeting the one with the highest rank next to their name. In other words, the one with the most kills/contribution.
All in all, I'm very interested to see how it pans out.
http://kansieo.com
... and no one is there. Does it make a sound?
Blizzard is rotten from inside out. Most QA people are assholes. Creativity is gone, while riding on the glory of the past.
How many more sequels they will make? WoW FPS ? StarCraft FPS (well that thing been on the burner since 1999!!!!). StarCraft MMO?StarCraft 3?
Save this post. Wait a year, you will see this as inside info. NOTHING that we are working on is original anymore...or creative.
we must stop hiring idiots...
wtf is battlegrounds? seriously.
Good equipment can often be overcome with better tactics.
The point you are missing is that the team with better tactics is also going to end up with the better equipment.
If I kick your ass once, I get to be better equipped, and there's nothing else for you to do except try to beat me again, but this time with me in possession of better gear.
So your ass is once again kicked. I'm now somebody you failed to beat twice, and have yet even better gear. Guess what your objective is now? Try to beat me!
Aw, lost again. I become more powerful, and you must try again, because there's nothing else for you to do. Ready? Fight.
Eewww! You were reduced to a sticky paste that time. That must have hurt. Hey, more gear for me. And look, two of your allies got bored with getting their asses kicked and quit the server. So now we have way better gear than you, we've already shown that we know how to outplay you, and your side has fewer players than before. Now comes the fun part... Attack us!
Ouch. That didn't go well for you at all. Okay, attack us again.
Oooo! This is getting hard to watch. Try again...
and so on
and so on
and so on.
Still sound like fun? For either side?
If one group gets on top through tactics, and therefore gets the good equipment, and stays there forever, then yes, that's no fun. This can happen on either situation (partitioned vs. one large server).
We were originally discussing partitioned servers vs. one large server, remember? I gather that you're arguing that one large server is going to be better for preventing one group from getting on top and staying there? I don't see it.
I think one uber-team ruling everyone has more of a chance of happening on one large server. It'd be like assembling all the greatest basketball players in the world, putting them on a team, giving them better shoes, and then having everyone else play against them.
I'd much rather play against the people in my neighborhood, even if Michael Jordan was one of my neighbors. Because even if he is, the chances of another superstar player being in my neighborhood are slim, which means I have a much better chance of being able to win once in a while.
Big huge problem with this line of argument: The difference between, say, the set of blues that your average level 60 has, and the PvP reward set (which is going to take a lot more than one victory to attain, and which only a finite number of people on each side can have at one time) is not that great, especially since the latter is mostly stamina. In a 10v10 battle, an extra 500 HP is not going to do you a whole lot of good against a coordinated attack. In a 40v40 battle it's almost negligible.
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It was quite fun, very easy to get into, and familiar if you've played capture the flag before. The initial games I had were fairly quick, ended within what seemed like 15 minutes or so of starting. Finding a team of 'good' people, or co-ordinating a team was a little bit trickier, but eventually things worked out.
There were some bad things, but I'll post about them near the end.
The first thing that I noticed was the bases. The bases are fairly well laid out with 2-3 main entrances which you may or may not want to be defending. It took a little bit getting used to the design, but after the first few games the layout became second nature. Something I didn't discover for a bit was the fact that the layout of the Horde and Alliance bases are the same, even if they look different from the outside. I guess this makes things more fair, but from a Lore perspective I would expect it to be a bit different on each side.
The second thing I noticed were the floating buffs. There are atleast 3 of these on each side, I'll give a short description of each.
When you die in the game ( and that was probably the next thing I did after finding my berserker item.) You are transported to the graveyard, where you're asked if you want to rez. The guy is on a 30 second timer, and it's going over and over. He rezzes you with mostly full health and mana so it doesn't really make sense to take a rez from another player, although that works too. The 30 second timer never seemed to change, so you were never really out of the game for too long.
I found the dying / rezzing part to be fairly well executed, my only complaints were when I just missed the rez window and could maybe have rezzed if the interface had come up faster. The other annoying bit was when the alliance was camping our graveyard, and there wasn't much we could do about it.
After I got all that sorted out, I started to get into the actual match. This is where the people you're playing with make a big difference. If you stay together, and keep each other healed / buffed you can do really well. Typically players who were running out alone would get quickly taken out by the other side. I maybe haven't pvp'd agaisnt hunters before, but I really noticed them here for the first time. Hunters seemed to be doing really well, and due to the nature of PVP you had to actually worry about their pets ( as opposed to a Duel where you can ignore them and take out the hunter first. ) I had one hunter try to feign death on me in battlegrounds. When his pet didn't die, I figured what was going on and took out the corpse ;-)
The game was pretty fast paced, and I lost two or three matches in fairly quick succession, mostly due to lack of coordination on the team. We could possibly have slowed them down a little bit, but I'll claim unfamiliarity on everyone's parts as the cause.
The level breakdown made the matches fairly even, and there wasn't that often that I felt outclassed. One match I was fighting a number of level 49-50's which made it a lot harder than the others, but in general the spread was good enough that I felt that I had something to
You are reviewing one of the two battlegrounds presently available.
There is another which is 40v40 combat, which is everything they've said about battlegrounds. There are captureable objectives: graveyards which help respawn player reinforcements farther up, towers which spawn NPC reinforcements farther up, and a number of objectives to achieve against non-player character spawns which help your side (acquire gold mines, summon elementals, air strikes...).
I quit playing WoW a month ago. Since then I've gone back to playing Diablo 2, which is faster-paced, more fun, less buggy, and free to play online. Blizzard had better work hard on Diablo 3 if they want more of my money.
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
Ever heard "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?" Now, I know that doesn't apply much to WoW -- I'll be the first to admit WoW has its share of problems. But the other ones are just plain stupid.
World of WarCraft FPS? I see no plausible reason ANYBODY at Blizzard would think that would do well.
StarCraft FPS? Yes, that's SC: Ghost, and yes, it's been in the works for awhile, but it's far from a careless money grab -- by my count that's three games (counting Brood War, which is technically an expansion) in the universe, not 15+ that don't really deviate much from a set path save for a few games (Tactics, FFX-2). And before anybody gets in my face, yes, I do like the Final Fantasy series.
StarCraft MMO -- Worlds of StarCraft? That'd be fucking awesome to play provided they learn from their mistakes with WoW.
StarCraft 3? What the hell are you talking about? They haven't even made SC2 yet (No, SC:G is NOT SC2). And still, even with 1 expansion pack for SC2, SC3, should it ever happen, would be only the 6th iteration of the series.
And I might add that most of the WarCraft games have taken leaps forward over their predecessor. OK, maybe not gameplay-wise between WC1 and 2, but graphics and story-wise.
And one last thing -- what is "If WoW falls down in the forest and no one is there... does it make a sound?" supposed to mean? Last I checked, WoW had one of the biggest subscription bases in the world. And I highly doubt, even with the trolls in the forums bitching about stealth nerfs that sometimes don't exist, or trolls that just seem to want to crap all over the game just because it's popular (see first comment on this story), that WoW is going anywhere anytime soon. So please, think clearly before you spew your end-of-Blizzard prophecies, and definitely think twice before you try and make a witty comment that is so out of context it's not even funny.
gamedrain: A weekly gaming/internet cultu
I never complained about the low damage, I complained about how passive it is.
"I'd also like to note that this bug made the paladin an extremely affective dueler."
No, it didn't. Very few paladins used the skill in duels - seal of command has *always* (in retail, post overhaul) been the seal of choice for pvp. The damage from seal of the crusader is and was far too predictable. While it did do more damge over a long period of time, making it the superior seal for pve, it didn't have the quick bursts of 1k+ damage that seal of command can, occasionally, provide. Some paladins used it, sure, but don't think that the sotc nerf did a damn thing to pvp. It's in the same state it was.
Also, I made my paladin the day the game opened (got a 10 day pass from a friend). I had very little knowledge of the game... and moreover, that particular sotc bug didn't even exist back then. It had a bug that decreased it's damage over time under certain circumstances, and wouldn't go back up until the weapon was re-equipped. Fixing this bug was what broke seal of the crusader.
I have few problems with the technical balance of the class, but I, like most paladins, have huge issues with the passivity of the class, as well as a huge dependancy on luck.
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about.
A paladin cannot kill a competent druid. The druid's travel form means that the druid can control the terms of the fight almost completely. If it's going poorly for the druid, the druid can leave.
If a paladin's fight isn't going well, he can just throw up his invulnerability bubble and hearthstone home, but that's beside the point.
Neither a paladin nor druid is going to kill the other in a fair 1v1 fight between relatively skilled players. The damage output from either party cannot overcome the healing output from the other party.
http://kansieo.com
Anyone who brings up shield + hearth is a retard. It is in nearly all cases better to die than to have to travel back from ironforge, and you can only do that once an hour anyway.
"Neither a paladin nor druid is going to kill the other in a fair 1v1 fight between relatively skilled players. The damage output from either party cannot overcome the healing output from the other party."
And the paladin can merely not kill any class, because it will either win or run.