(WOW) State of PvP now? (Gone for 2 years)

[zenga]

In seven years , they haven't tried to come up with a solution to blown out queue times for one faction. At present, I have to wait 10-15 mins to get a pop that is good enough for the boxers that run with my pre made group.

Matter of fact, where I play (EU horde), queue times have gone down from 10min to instant/couple of minutes ever since the release of cataclysm. They in fact DID come up with a solution: merging battlegroups. Many of the reasons of long queue times are player related though: not paying attention to when it pops (so they had to extend a player his slot), players who dc due to crappy connections, ... etc.

[/QUOTE]Frost mages and rogues are insanely OP at the moment (in single toon & boxing) and there has been no attempt to even out the classes (ele shams and thunderstorm being resisted 90% of the time anyone.....?). [/QUOTE]

Yes in cataclysm there have been really OP specs, and often they were toned down a bit later (warriors & ferals at the start, frost dk's with 4.2 ...). Matter of fact frost mages without any pve pieces are actually fine. The OP thing is the pve gear and the human racial. The pve gear will most likely be addressed in MoP (check new stats system). They might have it wrong, yet they do attempt to fix it.

Of the last 3 patches, the only change to PvP has been the addition of cross realm rateds and cross realm group queuing. Still no ability to cross realm raid for BGs or Arenas. It seems to me like PvP compatibility is just something slapped on the back of all the PvE changes.

The only thing you can't do cross realm is do arena, due to the existence of battlegroups. Anything else can be done cross realm. I wouldn't really call that a small change. It's a massive comfort of life thing for players that you can team up with other realms, both for pve and pvp.

The only new BGs we got were rehashes of WSG and AB :'(

Twin Peaks and gilneas were very well received by pretty much everyone who run bg's. And in my book they are awesome maps. I don't know how many new BG's you expect each patch, but every expansion 1-2 new bg's seems pretty fine with me.

I'm sorry but many of the things you wrote are simply not true. Which doesn't mean I agree with blizzard all the time, matter of fact they screw up things quite often.

[Jeremiah]

Matter of fact, where I play (EU horde), queue times have gone down from 10min to instant/couple of minutes ever since the release of cataclysm. They in fact DID come up with a solution: merging battlegroups. Many of the reasons of long queue times are player related though: not paying attention to when it pops (so they had to extend a player his slot), players who dc due to crappy connections, ... etc.

Exactly. I queue alliance and my times have gone up from instant to 10-15 mins. Like I said, the queue times have always been good for one faction, awful for the other. With the merging of battle groups, it just compounded the problem. Add a battle group that has 1:1 alliance to horde with another battlegroup that is 3:1 alliance to horde and it effectively penalises one of the battle groups.

The issue I highlighted was related to one FACTION, not specifically Alliance or Horde like you tried to suggest.

[/QUOTE] The only thing you can't do cross realm is do arena, due to the existence of battlegroups. Anything else can be done cross realm. I wouldn't really call that a small change. It's a massive comfort of life thing for players that you can team up with other realms, both for pve and pvp.[/QUOTE]

Again, you're misinformed. As I said, you can cross realm RBG and group queue. However, it is not an inbuilt function in the game to raid queue (as you can do for any PvE content). At present, I have all my users using preform AVenabler but with 10-12 of us queueing simultaneously, it's still extremely difficult and a long process to get a perfect pop or at least 80% into the same BG. All the changes to the queueing so far have made it harder to make premades, not assisting them in anyway. In contrast, all the changes with PvE cross realm is designed to make it easier to queue together.

[/QUOTE] Twin Peaks and gilneas were very well received by pretty much everyone who run bg's. And in my book they are awesome maps. I don't know how many new BG's you expect each patch, but every expansion 1-2 new bg's seems pretty fine with me.[/QUOTE]

Like I said before, it's a rehash. It's the same BG with a different play style, not different objectives. I'd expect at least one new BG with new objectives. Not just shifting the same idea onto a new map....

[/QUOTE] I'm sorry but many of the things you wrote are simply not true. [/QUOTE]

This quote of yours I agree with but send it straight back at ya You seem to have your optimism shades on....but that being said... I used to wear them too. It's just hard to sit and play WoW and see the problems we have in PvP get solved by other games (RIFT, SWTOR). And they're solving the problems in their first year!

"The new Mercenary mechanic in Warfronts is included in 1.7 as well. As the number of people participating in PvP has been going up recently, certain wargroups and brackets have become too-Defiant or too-Guardian favored, causing the other side to suffer extended queuing. The mercenary mechanic aims squarely to fix that, by having people from the more populous side standing in as Mercenaries to ensure the queues are flowing as fast as they possibly can."

If you have the mechanic in the game to fix this, why not implement it. WoW certainly has it. In rated BGs, alliance teams often verse one another. In certain instances, you are given a night elf skin or a human skin. It isn't that difficult to put a horde skin on a toon and play as the horde? If RIFT can identify the problem in their first year and fix it, why has WoW allowed it to go on for years?

Come on RIFT/SWTOR for mac.... :P

[Shodokan]

If you look at the current MoP Paladin talents... They're insane. They removed all of the randomness to their rotation and made healing with them cake. You get WoG plus insta-cast FoL plus a 20 second cooldown attack that also will group heal your 5 Paladins. Plus, for every HP you have you get an extra 10% movement speed? Stacks up to 5 times? They're going to be blenders.

They look head and shoulders above anyone else's talent previews. DKs are a distant second.

I think the 1 dk 4 rets will come back... the AOE stun is just too good imo.

I think a lot of the changes are great in general, even the DK ones. Especially the damage healing talent for a rune that is instant and does 3x howling blast damage.

[zenga]

Exactly. I queue alliance and my times have gone up from instant to 10-15 mins. Like I said, the queue times have always been good for one faction, awful for the other. With the merging of battle groups, it just compounded the problem. Add a battle group that has 1:1 alliance to horde with another battlegroup that is 3:1 alliance to horde and it effectively penalises one of the battle groups.

You said they didn't do a single thing in 7y to reduce queues for 1 faction. As a matter of fact they did solve that. Queues in europe are acceptable, very acceptable. Just because they merged the battlegroup. Think about infrastructure, this is a huge thing they did. What you don't seem to realize is that you do something that is out of the ordinary: queue up for random bg's with groups, and true then you get longer queues. The vast majority queues up alone, and you rarely have to wait longer than 5min to get in, both as horde and as alliance.

Again, you're misinformed. As I said, you can cross realm RBG and group queue. However, it is not an inbuilt function in the game to raid queue (as you can do for any PvE content). At present, I have all my users using preform AVenabler but with 10-12 of us queueing simultaneously, it's still extremely difficult and a long process to get a perfect pop or at least 80% into the same BG. All the changes to the queueing so far have made it harder to make premades, not assisting them in anyway. In contrast, all the changes with PvE cross realm is designed to make it easier to queue together.

The philosophy ain't that hard to understand: queue up alone (or with a limited group) = random bg; queue up with a premade = rated bg. This is exactly why they removed the ability to queue up with a full raid for the non 40m bg's. You want to queue up with 10 or 15 people for random content while you know that the chances you end up vs an organized team is like 99%; and you expect them to facilitate you with this. If you wanna do full premades, do rbgs. Or use a preform addon and try to trick the system (which I've used as well btw), but then deal with downside of that as well.

Like I said before, it's a rehash. It's the same BG with a different play style, not different objectives. I'd expect at least one new BG with new objectives. Not just shifting the same idea onto a new map....

Well that is personal flavour, I'd be perfectly fine with 2 more capture the flag maps instead of isle of conquest and sota.

You seem to have your optimism shades on....but that being said... I used to wear them too.

I'm not optimistic, but if you some form of objectivity ain't to bad at all. e.g. I'll totally agree with anyone saying that blizzard has no fucking clue when designing pve content what the implications are going to be for pvp (vengeance scaling this patch for ferals & blood dks, vial & cunning trinkets, ... rogue legendaries, ...).

[Ualaa]

The only way to balance queue times for BG's will be to move from an Alliance vs Horde system... to a Blue Team vs Red Team system.
That way, everyone for both factions is in the same pool of players.

At the moment, for any given BG (forgetting Random, at the moment), whichever faction has fewer players queuing gets Instant queues... while the faction with more, has some form of wait time.

If it was Blue Team vs Red Team, the BG could launch when there were 60+ players interested in an AV/IoC, with a total of 30+ players on each side.
As a horde or alliance wanted to join, they'd be added to whichever side had fewer players.

Wait time would be identical for both factions, and be based on the total number of players (US-wide or EU-wide) who wanted to run a given BG.

Not going to happen, likely ever.
Arena allows Horde vs Horde or Alliance vs Alliance...
But you cannot play Alliance & Horde on the same side.




I'd like BG's, that have different objectives...
WSG and Twin Peaks, are the same idea on different maps.
As is AB/BoG.

But its hard to come up with variable objectives, that are fun and easy to implement.
EotS is good, in that you have both AB style objectives to hold and WSG style flag to run.

IoC/SotA are vehicles/bombs vs fixed defenses.
I find IoC to be very fun, and SotA to suck, at least as a boxer.

What kind of objectives would you put in a 10/15/40 man BG...
That is not "Hold X Locations", "Destroy this Gate", or "Capture X" flags?

[Jeremiah]

I'd like BG's, that have different objectives...
WSG and Twin Peaks, are the same idea on different maps.
As is AB/BoG.

But its hard to come up with variable objectives, that are fun and easy to implement.
EotS is good, in that you have both AB style objectives to hold and WSG style flag to run.

IoC/SotA are vehicles/bombs vs fixed defenses.
I find IoC to be very fun, and SotA to suck, at least as a boxer.

What kind of objectives would you put in a 10/15/40 man BG...
That is not "Hold X Locations", "Destroy this Gate", or "Capture X" flags?

Yes, I totally understand what you mean. The existing BGs can be categorised fairly easily into what the main components of a winning team are (although not exhaustively):

AB,BfG: Mobility: Speed between nodes and ability to move people to counter enemy offensives

WSG, TP: Gear Fight : Ability to split team into two groups (Offensive and Defensive) and work together. But mainly relying on the gear and skill of individual players in those two groups.

IoC, AV : Synergy: Ability for multiple groups of players to work together to complete small objectives or concentrate firepower on a certain target (Galv/Belinda, Gate of Keep, Node/Tower)

SoTA: Pure CC fight. Team with most frost mages, rogues, hunters and DKs will win 99% of the time.

EoTS: As you said, combination of a Mobility and Gear fight. With enough mobility, you can outmanoeuvre a team to cap 3 nodes constantly and rule out the gear factor.

I love IoC. Must be my favourite game to play as a boxer. Certainly the easiest to wield most power in and have fall back positions when pugs fail.

Was thinking about what you said about new kind of PvP games.

What are your thoughts on a single flag CTF game? Same WSG map or TP, but with the sole flag spawning in the middle of the map and taking 10 seconds uninterrupted to pick it up.

If you think about it, IoC is similar to the world PvP Wintergrasp. Take vehicles to destroy walls and get in to a final objective (relic or king). Killing the enemy doesn't matter too much in the grand scheme but destroying things does.

What would a BG based on TB look like? Similar to EoTS but without the flag in the middle? And with siege engines/ vehicles? You could do a timer based game like SoTA where your goal is to cap the 3 nodes fastest by player numbers and control. Could be fun

[Ualaa]

You could do a Capture the Flag type game...
With say three flags, instead of one.


Not sure if it is traditional PvP, but something like a raid-scale Arena match...
Two armies battle, with so many players active on each side.
Maybe players can rez?
Could be a long one though.