Town Raids, Battlegrounds, etc.

[Gauss]

Originally Posted by Cybsled

No one city raids because all it takes is a couple dumbasses and you can lose weeks worth of honor gains. It also makes AEing an extremely risky plan purely because you might hit civilians.

We raided Orgrimmar about a month ago, culminating in killing Thrall. In order for our avid PvPers to participate, we had a team of alts that did nothing but kill civilians as they spawned. The result was only one DK credited to the raid, which nobody really complained about because it's a one time rating hit that's easily recovered from. We did however, lose a metric fuckton (6-9k worth) of rep with the steamwheedle faction when we fought our way to the zeppelin towers and AoEed the guards there, which we were wholly unaware of not having stepped foot in Org in nearly a year prior. It's disappointing to see that even our best efforts to keep town raiding alive involve some tradeoff of reputation/faction, even with good countermeasures in place.

[Dyscord]

City raids would be a lot easier if they'd just get off their asses and implement them. 40 alliance queue up just like a normal BG. A call goes out across horde global chat saying "Ogrimmar is being attacked!" 40 horde queue up and everyone's whisked away to a 'besieged' ogrimmar. Shops have been boarded up, barricades erected, etc. Alliance spawn at the front gate and horde at 'barracks' points. Alliance have to fight an uphill assault style map with Thrall as the final raid target. City raids of course wouldn't be a typical BG game. The game heavily favors the defender, and the attacker needs superior coordination and skill to actually have a shot at winning.

[Delores Mulva]

If you wanted you could even have population imbalance be reflected in the city BG. Have the "Sack Orgrimmar" battleground be between 40 Alliance and 20 Horde (or some other imbalanced ratio), with the Horde players having a degree of control over the NPCs to even things out. Then you wouldn't have one side waiting in line for people on the other side to play.

[Soygen]

Delores Mulva

Hah, great name.

[Olio]

I would have liked to have seen DKs go away. They're a terrible game mechanic. Much better to have the civilians leave empty or no corpses, offer no xp or faction, have no agro, and instantly repop. All the guards should offer an xp/loot bonus over comparable regular mobs, and there should be quests that involve killing X number of the opponent's guards. You should get xp from killing other players that decays or whatnot just like the honor does.

On PvP servers there should be powerful DROPPABLE items that people can loot off of your corpse (and some relatively easy means of telling who is carrying them at the time). The city bosses should drop GM gear or similar. They can have two versions, one with loot and one without, that are easy to tell apart. The ones with loot are up once a week or so like the dragons, if they're killed the lootless version pops for the rest of the respawn timer. You could even go all out and do the dead Thurgadin thing where the city is overrun for an hour or two if they die and then an army of gnomes spawns and retakes the city resulting in a reset.

They also needed to put shaman and paladins on the opposite teams and put in a reasonably hard defection quest so that the servers can rebalance themselves over time, as well as bonuses for the team with the lower population (and an indicator of which is which when you create a new character). EQ2 seems to have a good model for how to handle that.

Olio

[Chaid]

Killing Cairne is a joke. Zero risk of DKs. Last week my guild killed him with 28 people to help a guildy pushing rank. He drops more gold than an AQ40 boss.

[Gauss]

Originally Posted by Olio

All the guards should offer an xp/loot bonus over comparable regular mobs, and there should be quests that involve killing X number of the opponent's guards. You should get xp from killing other players that decays or whatnot just like the honor does.

Funny you should mention that because before the honor system came out, guards used to drop loot - in fact anything a same level mob could drop these guards would drop. I used to AoE farm with a friend the guards at Kargath for runecloth because it was so good. I believe I only found a blue once though.

They also needed to put shaman and paladins on the opposite teams and put in a reasonably hard defection quest so that the servers can rebalance themselves over time, as well as bonuses for the team with the lower population (and an indicator of which is which when you create a new character). EQ2 seems to have a good model for how to handle that.

Yeah I saw that was introduced recently. Minimum access to towns you are defecting to until you get the required faction. There are a few faction deserters if you look at the NPC's in certain towns, so this sort of implementation wouldn't break the immersion unless a particular server had tons of people trying for these quests.

[Quineloe]

Originally Posted by Chaid

Killing Cairne is a joke. Zero risk of DKs. Last week my guild killed him with 28 people to help a guildy pushing rank. He drops more gold than an AQ40 boss.

how much honor is he worth?

and how much gold did he actually drop =P

[Nerion]

I'll tell you exactly how to fix WoW pvp. Take away the gear from honor system. Practically anyone with a brain realizes how bad of an idea this was for many reasons. Gear use should be cyclical, where guilds are forced to be dominant in multiple forms of the game to truly be dominant overrall. The high end gear from doing these very hard instances like naxx should be infinately better than gear that can be attained by theory solo, or very small group. You don't even have repairs for pvp for Christ's sake. 5/20 man instances give very easily attainable gear that is not far from 40 man raid gear. This is good because it makes people experience all of the content in the game instead of burning out to get rank 14 which so many people do. Replace the gear with pvp oriented potions with some pve use and a visible ladder ranking posted on each realm forums with various stats. People will still compete for honor and PvE guilds will experience the BG's to get the potions.

As for world pvp, capturing a city should be an attainable objective, obviously. As stated before this game is called World of WARcraft and is about conflict over the WORLD of Azeroth, not AV3. Give high amounts of honor of taking over a city for a period of time and make it so the price of basic items in that city and the AH cut is larger for the next day. Helps the economy drain excess gold and creates a nice in-your-face reward that you can gloat about without overgriefing. Also pisses people off enough to go fight back. Put in some neutral towns also that are controllable that offer easier flight paths and closer GY's to high end spawns. It doesnt have to be the difference between a 10 minute run and 30 sec walk to the zone but something like a couple min difference would make it worth it.

There are many other things that can be done to revitalize the pvp and create decent world pvp objectives. I think the major mistake Blizz has made is they want you to be able to do whatever you want with no consequences and follow whatever path you please, that it actually stereotypes players into 3 stupid categories with no connection and blinds them from the full beauty of a MMORPG, the giant fucking world your in where you can do whatever you want and everything is connected.

[Lleauaric~EW]

Oh I dunno, grow some balls and lock character creation on the overpopulated faction per server until the ratio comes within reason of 1:1? No, no, wait; that would be logical nevermind. We gotta think strictly about the $$ here not whats best for playability.

I dont think that would help. Even if blizz locked character creation on the overpopulated side, Horde would still always trail.

Paladin, being the ultimate raid class has made Alliance the side for the raider.
With serverwide BGs there is absolutly no logical reason to play Horde if you want to raid.

Blizzard really fucked up this faction thing.


As far as how to fix PvP... I think a good idea would to be to turn honor into a currency of sorts. Honor can be used for repairs on pvp gear, for buying items, for maintaining rank, as long as its always being spent

[Nerion]

I agree with Lleau, these faction seperations were poorly done. Oh mighty Blizz in its infinite wisdom divided the players into two seperate factions with the only fence between them is a language barrier. I can't even get started on how dumb that is. On my server the people I hate the most are the idiots I talk to on my own side. In video games language is the fuel of war, it pisses people off at each other and is used to motivate them to fight. The lack of language takes away the motivating factor to fight and the war just runs outta gas in WoW.

"They also needed to put shaman and paladins on the opposite teams and put in a reasonably hard defection quest so that the servers can rebalance themselves over time"

NO, Blizzard can't do that. It is part of their sekret plan to keep the sides actually hating each other as they told us.

[Kiely]

When I was testing out WoW, the prospect of city assaults was a terrific thing for me. Just the huge scale of things right in the heart of your "home" etc, but oh well some things don't shape up.

[DisgruntledOrangatang]

Seriously, removing DKs and just making civilians non aggro /invulnerable or some other means would ROCK, + giving city leaders some loot, why the freak not. It would be so much fun. I believe brad said a quote that to me I think is always good "When we have to choose between having fun or making some more balanced, we'll choose that players have more fun." Paraphrased of course, but you get the idea.

WTF would be so imbalacing about that? Just make vital merchants like bankers/Ahers/ invulnerable. Who cares if the hunter trainer gets killed or some shit, he'll respawn in like 5min.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Originally Posted by DisgruntledOrangatang

Seriously, removing DKs and just making civilians non aggro /invulnerable or some other means would ROCK, + giving city leaders some loot, why the freak not. It would be so much fun. I believe brad said a quote that to me I think is always good "When we have to choose between having fun or making some more balanced, we'll choose that players have more fun." Paraphrased of course, but you get the idea.

WTF would be so imbalacing about that? Just make vital merchants like bankers/Ahers/ invulnerable. Who cares if the hunter trainer gets killed or some shit, he'll respawn in like 5min.

Dev's love to spout that line but it rarely holds truth.

Vhex's Law #332: "Immersion and Roleplay are how Developers justify screwing the players."

[Furism]

They should just make the civilians, you know, FLEE from battles. As in, despawn. You could throw some conditions in, like if they are twice as more ennemies than friendlies (NPCs included), they'd despawn. Twice as more ennemies sounds like a pretty large assault. This way you won't see 12 years old griefs running around despawning quest NPCs.