Town Raids, Battlegrounds, etc.

[Bias]

This has been beaten to death numerous times, but bear with me. I was talking this afternoon with a coworker/guildmate about WoW, and we were both talking about how much we missed city raiding since honor was implemented.

As things stand, the home cities will never be assaulted by anyone who cares about their honor ranking, since there are so many civilians & dishonorable kills to be racked up. Plenty of people have said "eliminate the civilians in major cities" to bring back the assaults of old. Blizzard is pretty obviously uninterested in doing that, and doesn't want to encourage town raiding by removing the current negatives associated with it.

The idea that we discussed that I think holds promise is a sort of battleground/instanced version of each home city. Rather than being a queue up & fight 20v20 or whatnot, it's an open/rolling queue with a maximum number of players on each side. The goal, of course, would be to sack the town and kill the royals. The cities could even have some variations, like the sewer being bricked up in the undercity & having new/different defensible positions for archers, etc.

I look forward to the detailed explanations of why this is a shitty idea.

[Wizarddeath]

I loved town raids. I loved both the massive PvP at TM and SS before BG, they still happen sometimes on the server I log on to. I usually listen to vent to get into these events. I think that would be the best idea they could do. Short of a "Capture the city" event, where you could actually take over a city and make ironforge or something into undead IF, but after awhile reenforcements would get there and just retake the town after say 30 minutes or so. Time enough to give the aliance or what not to fight back and attempt to overthrow.

[Zehn - Vhex]

Wasn't that sorta originally what was planned for alterac valley and whatnot? You'd burn the main base but eventually reinforcements would arrive, clean out the area, rebuild the towers and everything would start over again?

[Cybsled]

That was one of the original battleground ideas, yes. Although that was also back when they said infernals would be seige-weapons in PVP ;_;

[Torrid]

Originally Posted by Zehn - Vhex

Wasn't that sorta originally what was planned for alterac valley and whatnot? You'd burn the main base but eventually reinforcements would arrive, clean out the area, rebuild the towers and everything would start over again?

AV was originaly planned to be always up, yes. But they couldn't make it work for some reason. A dev mentioned it in an article a long time ago. The abandoned Azshara BG was supposed to be always up too.

Town raids owned. Back before BGs, everybody got honor by attacking a town. As much as I hated the faggot Alliance zerg, it owned getting enough honor to make standing #1 every week by defending TM from the manginas. Honor had a more literal meaning back in May '05. The highest ranks got that way by defending their faction's territory instead of AFKing in BGs for a loser's mark. Horde who lose on purpose are scum.

Along with dishonor, they also put assbeat elite mobs in the center of TM/SS, and made the guards hit for 250+. They went total overkill to fix the "problem." The only reason town raids were a problem in the first place was because of the population imbalance.

What I would like to see is an outdoor, always active, non-instanced BG that uses NPC spawns with some decent AI to help out the underpopulated faction. Have it reward enough honor to make it a viable alternative to warsong/basin.

[InterSlayer]

I really hope the new objective world pvp is something profoundly meaningful to the game and its players, and not something silly like a GY or Tower between TM/SS that you fight over to control.

For example, it'd be neat if they added PVP hot points to existing zones with objectives in them we could fight over. The hotpoint areas could be flagged as Arena Style PVP, and whichever faction controlled the majority of objectives claims the zone. Owning a zone has bonuses, such as a NPC who grants special buffs, access to unique high-end consumeables, recipes, gear, etc. Anyone belonging to the faction who controls the area has access to the the rewards, and the guild that actually has the claim for it gets a discount or perhaps % of the profits mailed to their guildleader. Their name or tabard should be displayed on the map or on flags around the area.
*Each zone has its own special unique buffs or rewards.
*Arena style PVP allows servers with severely unbalanced factions to PVP anyway.
*Arena style PVP adds espionage and political elements to the game for Horde vs Alliance, or In-faction fighting.

You could do this for towns too. Wouldn't it be neat to occupy enemy faction towns? They could just make Civillian NPC's invulnerable and add PVP objectives directly in towns and major cities. Keep the PVP toggles the way they currently are so people who want to participate in it can, and people who don't can just ignore it.

All this is more or less cobbled from features that are in game already.
Hopefully 1.12 is something of this calibre and not the a repeat dissappointment UO/DAOC/Shadowbane players felt when WoW BG's were initially released.

[Bizanich]

Make it so if you control the zone via PvP, it spawns an NPC that does free armor repairs for anyone rank 7 and up.

[Incognitogamer]

Every contested zone should have some major pvp objective in it. (Castle, Tower, something semi-large.)

Whoever owns the pvp objective owns the zone, it's no longer a contested zone, it's alliance or horde territory depending who owns the objective.

Also, herbs, ore, tradeskill shit is all only collectible by the faction that controlls the zone.

[Lleauaric~EW]

Open zone PVP is going to suck.
On many servers Horde are outpopulated 3 to 1. How do you create a level playing field in that context?

[Iannis]

One thing-- the obvious thing-- you could do would be to handicap the losing team. Factioned zone NPC's scale in difficulty depending on the raw count or maybe ratios of their PC faction allies in the zone. Raw count for #'s maybe, ratios for difficulty. There's plenty of ways to work that.

It wouldn't be that easy to balance, but the raw implementation of it wouldn't be that hard either. Of course, if that's the only thing that was done it would still end up sucking.

If you wanted to get fancy with it create a scenario where the 2 factions are battling over a truly contested area. Not the timid "contested areas" that I remember from the way back. The local NPCs are on a sliding faction. Their primary interest is to not get their shit stoled... so they're gonna be interested in helping out whoever happens to be losing.

There's not any 1 thing that could be done to level the field without being gimmicky and cheap. However, a collection of mechanics could accomplish the goal without being lame.

[Quineloe]

if really as many people as you claim wanted to see city raids, there'd be city raids

[Crap]

Originally Posted by Lleauaric~EW

Open zone PVP is going to suck.
On many servers Horde are outpopulated 3 to 1. How do you create a level playing field in that context?

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.

[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.

If they made civilians unaffected by AEs and made them have 0 aggro unless someone actually targets them and attacks, then it would solve most of the problems with city raids.

[Cad]

My guild raided orgrimmar once with 3 full raid groups to kill thrall. 2 in the front door to keep the horde busy, 1 in the back to kill thrall. It worked, but it was stupid. The guys at the front door would walk around the corner in org and be dead 10 seconds later and their screens never loaded.

Blizz knows this doesn't work, which is why they aren't promoting it.

[Zehn - Vhex]

They should really just bite the fucking bullet and allow people to betray their faction and switch sides. Just make it so that you can do it max every 2 months or something (seriously, fuck you "OH NOES MY IMMERSIONS!!!" counter-arguments).

In less then half a year, the problem will solve itself. Fuck Tigole and his "I love that I hate shamans when I'm on my paladin!" comments too.