Fixing wow's pvp system

[Ravensign]

Originally Posted by Torrid

Rewarding failure was the biggest mistake Blizzard ever made in their PvP design, period. I hate losing to a preform in a PuG. I *HATE* seeing people AFK for honor or losing on purpose.

People didn't start off doing this. People are losing on purpose, because the alternative is trying and wasting time they could be back in queue for that magical PuG they may get (which never seems to come).

It's all fracked up, the maps, the honor from kills v. honor from bonus, the token v. honor system, the lack of a matching or ladder system, the effect of wait times on strategy, the AFK'ers (which are the worst, fuck your free stuff for sitting in a cave)

It desperately needs to all be addressed in one Marshall Plan uber rework.

[Makata]

And as for splitting pugs vs premades, I'm on the fence for that because just because you, in a pug, can beat another pug, doesn't mean shit. Go join a god damn team already. Play with your friends (if you have any).

I'd support a solo queued bracket and a group queued bracket, provided the group queues always, always provide more honor for the same result, since those games can drag on for a long time. If it takes my pre-made 50 minutes to beat another pre-made yet one pug can beat another in 10 minutes, I better get far more than 5x the honor, which would just break me even.

[Ravensign]

Originally Posted by Makata

Frankly, if you end your day 1-10 or some such, I don't think you deserve dick. Maybe some tokens, or honor than can only be spent on rank 10 and below shit, but fuck you in your ear if you want to encourage losing your way to HWL.

I am with you... in a world with a matching system or other pug/premade separator mechanism. No way would PuG's even exist if they weren't any damn reason to queue up in the first place, because people are getting records like those in BG's all the time v. premades.

A Pug member can't do SHIT about the AFK people or other people in his group that arent helping, so he gets an 1-10 record, that he cant do anything about as long as he continues to be a Pug. He could be skilled, determined, etc.

Maybe the answer is for very last subscriber to just join pvp guilds/groups and screw being a pug.

[Ravensign]

Originally Posted by Makata

since those games can drag on for a long time.

No sarcasm, seriously, is a Pug vs Pug AB really that much shorter than a PM/PM one?

[rinthea]

Originally Posted by Makata

Losers shouldn't get any honor just for being in the BG. Fuck that. Rewards are for WINNERS. Losing your way to HWL items is a crock of shit and you know it. This should not be a "put your time in and get your shit" game it should be a "put your time in, SUCCEED, and get your shit."

Here's my solution: make honor/day similar to arena. No minimum but if you play and win 1 game (1-0) you get X honor. If you play and win 2 games (2-0) you get a little over 2X. And so on. Losses would only very slightly affect you negatively so that 1-0 and 2-5 might award the same or so. But just because you have alot of time to sit AFK at the zone in doesn't mean you deserve shit. Furthermore, to even get credit for a kill you'd have to meet some set of requirements (that wouldn't unfairly hurt defenders). Like mark the inside of the playing field, where you stand a reasonable chance of actually participating in pvp as a certain playing zone and you have to spend the majority of the time in that area. Maybe even make it more specific and detailed and have detection mechanisms to make sure you're moving. You could even give the ability to be voted out by a large majority (7/10 in WSG, 11/15 in AB/EotS and at least 20 in AB).

Frankly, if you end your day 1-10 or some such, I don't think you deserve dick. Maybe some tokens, or honor than can only be spent on rank 10 and below shit, but fuck you in your ear if you want to encourage losing your way to HWL.

This is the sort of attitude that results in shit battlegrounds where the weaker team afks out or sits and and waits for a loss.
The weaker team NEEDS to be rewarded for competing. Or, simply put, they wont.
This can be done how I said in that earlier post. It could also be helped with a ranking system and getting a better reward for competing/beating a higher ranked side, then crushing a lower ranked side. It could also match against likely ranked sides. However, this would take a fair amount of implementation and with the faction imbalance would be difficult.

[Believe]

I got a crapload of honor during the AV weekend (Hello Grand Marshall Claymore), and probably easily won 95% of all my games - but I'd say any Horde grinding as much as I did would have probably made more honor for the simple fact that they can lose a game in the time it took for me to just get into 1 game.

[Kolle]

Some of you make the solution sound so simple. No honor for the loser? Don't want people losing their way to gear upgrades? Same thing applies to winners. You can also afk in a BG and win. It goes both ways.

You can't award activity either. There have been countless bgs where I was defending something. It was necessary to winning, but in that particular bg I didn't see much if any action. Everything that's mentioned so far punishes everyone, not just bad players or afk'ers.

[Makata]

Originally Posted by Ravensign

No sarcasm, seriously, is a Pug vs Pug AB really that much shorter than a PM/PM one?

I was referring to WSG and, if it existed today, premade vs premade AV. But to actually answer your question, it is yes as a good premade vs another good premade will almost always be 2v3 with the 2 once in a while capping and becoming the 3. Most pugs I'm in will see alot of 4v1 and while pugs WILL have more caps more often (which leads to an overall loss in resource acquisition rate), I'd say that overall, most pm vs pm in which both teams are of a similar caliber end up as the ~23 minute 2v3's while pug games usually drop under 20.

Originally Posted by rinthea

This is the sort of attitude that results in shit battlegrounds where the weaker team afks out or sits and and waits for a loss. The weaker team NEEDS to be rewarded for competing. Or, simply put, they wont. This can be done how I said in that earlier post. It could also be helped with a ranking system and getting a better reward for competing/beating a higher ranked side, then crushing a lower ranked side. It could also match against likely ranked sides. However, this would take a fair amount of implementation and with the faction imbalance would be difficult.

I'm all for the loser being "rewarded" as long as it isn't with honor as it exists now .. honor that can be used to purchase rank 12-14 gear. If all you do is lose, then maybe you eventually deserve the 7/8/10 gear, but you SURE as fuck never deserve a HWL weapon. EVER. Since there's already no incentive to ever buy the blue set now, simply remove the honor cost but leave the marks and make it so that if you lose a game, you get no honor for it (and your HK honor is erased). That way you can buy the blue set, you can buy the tabards, you can buy the mounts, and maybe some other things can be retrofitted to just cost marks .. but the only way you can buy epic items is to win.

The way it should be.

[rinthea]

Originally Posted by Kolle

Everything that's mentioned so far punishes everyone, not just bad players or afk'ers.

Its a mmo though. You want people to work together and help the bad players as its best for your chances to win. You dont want the SWG jedi thing where people only work for themselves.
AFK'ers should be castrated.

[Crap]

Just a note, reward losers but give them a 5 minute no que debuff if they dont contribute to a predesignated amount in each bg.

[Krag]

Originally Posted by Kolle

You can't award activity either. There have been countless bgs where I was defending something. It was necessary to winning, but in that particular bg I didn't see much if any action. Everything that's mentioned so far punishes everyone, not just bad players or afk'ers.

You can combat the retardedly annoying afk'ers somewhat, but it will likely have to be taken into consideration when the battleground is designed, i.e. I doubt it can really be done with the current incarnation of battlegrounds.

Having an "activity" requirement for actually getting any honor would be one of the first things to look at. Don't start yelling about defending yet!

Say we base the map on capturing towers in the fashion of EPL (and I think EotS and some of the Outland) objectives. Around each tower there would be an area designated for defending. If you are in this area you get "activity" credit. The ressing point is not in this area however so afk retards parking inside range of the towers would hopefully get killed and kicked out to the graveyard. When you are out of the tower areas you have a certain time attack/heal someone or get back to defending - longer time than the ressing + travel times of course. This crude system would of course hurt people defending choke points, but similar areas could be made here.

I'm sure there's a million issues with it as I just made it up on the fling, but if Blizzard takes into consideration what the previous battlegrounds, realm balance and honor systems have taught them, I'm sure they could come up with some systems to at least limit the annoying crap we see today. I do think it needs to be new battlegrounds built from the ground up with these issues in mind. As have been suggested "flipping" these new maps once in a while certainly won't hurt anything.

[Kodylan]

Losers should not get honor if they don't earn it through node caps, flag caps, or other means. But by the same token, teams shouldn't be able to pick and choose which games they stay in by abusing the queue system either. You should *lose* honor if you leave a battleground by any means other than being offline for more than the time allows.

[Plorkyeran]

Originally Posted by Ravensign

No sarcasm, seriously, is a Pug vs Pug AB really that much shorter than a PM/PM one?

The one thing AB did right was make a good game not take that much longer than a non-5 cap blowout, as unless you consistantly 5-cap, hitting a premade will at most make you lose the honor from one win, instead of potentially many wins.

Random thoughts on how to fix things:
Split premade and pug.
Winning in Pugs should give about 50% more than losing does now, and losing should give half as much as losing now.
Winning in premades gives you current win honor, losing gives you nothing.

As a result, pugging gives fairly low honor even if you win, but consistant honor. Before I got the gear to HK farm, there were times where I'd spend an hour or two solo-queuing and end up with triple digit honor. This sort of thing results in large amounts of frustration.

For good honor, you'd have to group queue, and not suck. Fail to win any games, and you just get your HK honor. Suddenly preformed "lose groups" instantly cease to exist. By having a large honor difference, it also gets easier to define what is and isn't a preform. The only reason to try to get a preform into the pug queue (via queuing up at the same time/etc.) would be to grief solo queuers, which while fun for some, would not attract enough people to be a major problem.

[Kolle]

It doesn't matter what feature you try to impliment. You can't measure someone's real life effort over the internet. You can't even do it all the time in person. Even if you could there's still a lot of gray area. Do you punish someone who tries 90% of the match, but doesn't try 10%? What about 70/30? What about 99/1 because he had to sneeze a few times? What about someone with an impairment who can't perform as well as another player? What about gaming noobs?

[ZeckEQ]

Main things that piss me off.

1. Spending 1.5 hours in Q to land in a game that 90% finished (AV) or 50 min in Q for an AB thats 1800/400 in favor of the opposistion. On a long PvP day I waste about 4 hours of Q time to that shit.

2. The game starting with 15 horde and 3 alliance. We are 5 capped fast and it ends with us finnaly getting 11 for the finish, leaving the last to join in situation 1. Fucking horde wins and ques up instant for the next AB while we get fucked out of a 50 min wait.

This weekend and I've got a 15 loss 1 win record in WSG, 90% of my matches are against horde premades. I was in 1 very close pug that pulled 2 caps vrs their 3 against a pre-made, seems most of the alliance team did not have head in ass syndrome and knew how to play it. On average tho, their brain dead retards with no sense of team play. Part of it may be the fact they have limited experience since we spend most of our time waiting in q's instead of PvP'ing. In any case, the only consolation I have is that I at least get a little honor and a token out of the deal. Take that away and I would just never q for AB or WSG and stick to AV where we win 99% of all the matches I've ever been in.

I don't like the afk shit bags, but I think those that do work at it should get something for their effort, even if the side effect is leaching ass wipe getting something. There are ways to address that, like forcing the res. Port the bitch back to the GY and force the res. If you not in combat for X period of time and not near a node or defense point, your potential honor for the match decreases, etc..

Anyways, the system needs some serious work.