The Failure Warmode is going into Shadowlands?

[WhirlwindTV]

War Mode is a resounding success. I wish they kept the trinket as part of it cause going back to only 1 usable trinket (on use or a passive) is gonna feel lame. But all the concerns and problems with war mode don't actually have to do with war mode as they do with blizzard's sharding implementation and their stupid decision to try to incetivize wPvP with quests that can be done in a group. The CTA quests do not in any way incentivize running around in war mode, they incentivize grouping up to mob single players to get the quest done as fast as possible.

Remove the ability to do the quest in a group (or just remove it in general, have the cta simply be "kill x in the world" weekly solo quest) and so many of the problems with war mode go away. Have the ability to turn war mode off at any time out of combat, only turn on in a main town, and then you go out in the word with wm on and if you get griefed you can just instantly turn it off to finish in peace for less rewards if you're heavily outnumbered.

[Orwell7]

Blizz should throw in random overpowered PvP bots from Islands to the underpopulated faction, make the bonus +30% permanently for both sides, and let the memes begin

[Zephire]

Blizz should throw in random overpowered PvP bots from Islands to the underpopulated faction, make the bonus +30% permanently for both sides, and let the memes begin

That would be pretty fun to be honest A mix of players and class mixed island bots. Would be more fun if they spawned to reinforce a camp or so if too many of the opposite faction controls it than normal guards.

[Packmule]

War mode is fine, would however wish they would actually remove any incentive for having it turned on, people should turn it on cause they wanna slaughter each other, not to get more expierence or reputation or w/e

[ff50dccd-a222-42f3-a786]

Warmode is a fantastic idea.
Warmode and faction balance are victims of Activision gr$$d with race/faction change MTX.

[Sialina]

Hordemode is good for 10% free stuff on horde. I don't even think about it being on when I play because I never get attacked. NEVER. I afk at rares for 30+ minutes as horde, noone ever touches me.

On my alliance toons it's always off, because you get ganked if you are not hidden somewhere, every time. It might be different on the US servers but EU there is easily 20 hordes per 1 alliance.

People say there are alliance shards, but I've not been in one since... hmmm, 5 months ago?

[UndedoKoleda]

War mode is fine, would however wish they would actually remove any incentive for having it turned on, people should turn it on cause they wanna slaughter each other, not to get more expierence or reputation or w/e

Absolutely agree.

On EU, the first couple of months the Horde will have free 10% bonus xp, with no drawbacks at all. People forget how bad things were at the start of BFA, even though THE LEVELING ZONES WERE SEPARATED. Now we share zones from the get go, just wait and see the rivers of Alliance tears that will flow once SL hits live.

I was on Ally side at the start of BFA - my first character I leveled with WM ON, I did it pretty fast and I barely met any horde players at all. On my second character, however, it was an absolute nightmare leveling with WM ON, there were already lots of level capped horde players doing stuff around the Alliance zones and they were no strangers to ganking or even corpse camping. And the worst thing is there were next to no alliance players with WM ON to group up with at that point. So I had to turn it off.

My third character was an old horde main - it was absolute breeze leveling with WM ON, sometimes I even forgot that I was PvP-tagged.

Since 8.2 it's pretty much fine on both sides, at least much better than what it was at BFA release.

[Raelbo]

War Mode is a resounding success.

No it is not. If it were there would be no need to offer a +10% (and +30% for alliance) bonus to PvE quest rewards to switch it on.

But all the concerns and problems with war mode don't actually have to do with war mode as they do with blizzard's sharding implementation and their stupid decision to try to incetivize wPvP with quests that can be done in a group. The CTA quests do not in any way incentivize running around in war mode, they incentivize grouping up to mob single players to get the quest done as fast as possible.

Again, no. What War Mode needs is more pvp oriented rewards for actually engaging in PvP activity. What War Mode needs less of is the kind of rewards that try to entice people into using it who would actually prefer to play with it off. People switching on WM for 10% (or 30%) more rewards from PvE world quests is where the real problem lies because it fills WM up with a bunch of players who have zero interest in WPvP.

I can agree that the way sharding works is a problem though. What sharding should do is pit players against evenly matched competition. Instead what happens is that sharding simply puts everyone into a shard where they heavily outmatch their opposition. Take the battle for Nazjatar as a prime example: As soon as players realise that their side is not likely to win, they look for a winning group. In the end you land up with very one-sided battles for both factions on different shards. You have a horde raid winning an uncontested battle on one shard, and an alliance doing the same on another. It's utterly stupid. What the game needs to do is to phase the two opposing raids onto the same shard.

Group finder should be about finding other players to group up with, not about finding a shard where your faction is dominant and the other faction is non-existent. If alliance are outnumbered 10:1 in a zone, the tool should be pulling more alliance onto the shard, not helping them to go elsewhere.

Remove the ability to do the quest in a group (or just remove it in general, have the cta simply be "kill x in the world" weekly solo quest) and so many of the problems with war mode go away.

Which problems specifically?

If anything this will make things worse. World PvP is fun and interesting when you feel like part of faction in a contest with the other faction. That requires two things: Playing with other players of your own faction against a similarly matched team of players from the other faction who are actively seeking each other out. Taking away the ability to group up in order to achieve your quest objectives would be a huge problem towards this goal.

Have the ability to turn war mode off at any time out of combat, only turn on in a main town, and then you go out in the word with wm on and if you get griefed you can just instantly turn it off to finish in peace for less rewards if you're heavily outnumbered.

What you're effectively advocating here is switching on WM to get more rewards, while trying to avoid WPvP. But the whole point of WM is supposed to be to cater for people who want to engage in WPvP. Hence my contention that they need to get rid of the bonus PvE rewards. The decision to switch on WM or not should be about one's preferred playstyle, not about what is more expedient.

[Puupi]

I love war mode.

I mean, I love the fact that I can toggle it off and keep most of the toxic people contained there.

[uncl55]

exactly my thoughts, finally i can enjoy game on my stupid 90/10% server

Warmode is a best thing since sliced bread.

[Zyrinx]

I really really hated it early on, especially because it stole iconic abilities and gated then into outdoor content in PvP mode only. Actually, I still hate that part

But by the end of the expansion, it was kinda fun to take part in some world PvP now and then. I even managed to get the Conquerer of Azeroth achieve, tho I did cheese a few zones honor at the end.

So I hope.it stays, but I hope it doesn't have specific talents (but, I'm sure it does).

[Xeenith]

(World) PvP is fun and interesting when you feel like part of faction in a contest with the other faction. That requires two things: Playing with other players of your own faction against a similarly matched team of players from the other faction who are actively seeking each other out. Taking away the ability to group up in order to achieve your quest objectives would be a huge problem towards this goal.

it already exist, it's called a battleground.

I got fed up with ganking for the lulz, in Firelands, and from both sides. so I left the pvp server my guild choose when we changed game, most of them already stopped playing anyway, and it cost me much transfert money at the time and I kept only the best of my chars, and reroll all the others.

[Raelbo]

it already exist, it's called a battleground

That's beside the point though. WM was created in order to provide a World PvP experience. I am simply stating why I think that his stated suggestions are in opposition to creating a fun World PvP experience.

That is not to say that I think WM does a particularly good job of creating a fun WPvP experience, or that I don't think that battlegrounds are a better medium for PvP.

My real criticism of WM though is not that it's a bad idea, but rather that it is promoted through rewards that have nothing to do with WPvP simply to get people to participate in it. If people aren't particularly interested in WPvP then it's fine that they don't switch WM on - the game doesn't need to try and incentivize people to do something that they don't care for through what is, essentially, bribery.

[Wuusah]

That's beside the point though. WM was created in order to provide a World PvP experience. I am simply stating why I think that his stated suggestions are in opposition to creating a fun World PvP experience.

That is not to say that I think WM does a particularly good job of creating a fun WPvP experience, or that I don't think that battlegrounds are a better medium for PvP.

My real criticism of WM though is not that it's a bad idea, but rather that it is promoted through rewards that have nothing to do with WPvP simply to get people to participate in it. If people aren't particularly interested in WPvP then it's fine that they don't switch WM on - the game doesn't need to try and incentivize people to do something that they don't care for through what is, essentially, bribery.

The question is "what is world pvp" or what should it be. For example, if you are questing and a rogue comes out of stealth and kills you. Is that world pvp? Should world pvp allow or push such a player behavior?
If yes, then Warmode MUST give extra rewards for pve activities or else people wouldn't activate warmode when they are questing.
If no, then Warmode shouldn't reward pve activities but that would also lead to there never being small spontaneous battles.

Balancing warmode is extremely difficult and honestly, I think Blizzard is doing a fine job with it in 8.3. For Shadowlands, I could see a continuation of the Call to Arms weekly quests as quick ways to get a lot of conquest points so that you don't have to grind that much arena to get your multiple item choices from the weekly chest.

[Soisoisoi]

That's beside the point though. WM was created in order to provide a World PvP experience. I am simply stating why I think that his stated suggestions are in opposition to creating a fun World PvP experience.

That is not to say that I think WM does a particularly good job of creating a fun WPvP experience, or that I don't think that battlegrounds are a better medium for PvP.

My real criticism of WM though is not that it's a bad idea, but rather that it is promoted through rewards that have nothing to do with WPvP simply to get people to participate in it. If people aren't particularly interested in WPvP then it's fine that they don't switch WM on - the game doesn't need to try and incentivize people to do something that they don't care for through what is, essentially, bribery.

This, so much this.

I always have Warmode on. My free time is spent, if not in arena with my IRL friend, in the world PvPing during assaults or whatever. I like random skirms/1v2s etc. just for the hell of it. Always have.

It would be very easy (other than the coding, of course!) to fix Warmode to be best of both worlds [imo]:

• Lower/Change the XP reward
  
  Reduce it from the scaling up to 30% that it is now, maybe a flat 5 or 10% at most, and make it always on, regardless of faction and balance - this is purely a compensation to the slowdown of levelling when PvPing, but not enough to be the massive 30% that makes people use it to cut a THIRD off their levelling times. Alternatively, make it so PvP kills give XP instead or, for example, a 1-5% rested bonus similar to the items found in WoD treasures. That completely removes people in Warmode just to level faster who hate PvP.
• Remove Bonuses
  
  Remove any other rewards/bonuses that you can't get out of Warmode. Can keep PvP specific quests, just make them not doable in raids and just give credit to the PvP weekly chest, or conquest points/gold etc. Not a really good item that is a massive upgrade to everyone at the start of the expansion/first few patches.
• Fix Phasing
  
  Remove the ability to phase out for world quests for 5 minutes after PvP combat (similar to PvP flagging), and make it so you can't enter Arena Skirmishes whilst in PvP combat. Not like you lose anything with Skirms and the queues are super quick, people just abuse them to avoid dying.
• Fix faction balance
  
  Reduce the amount of shards so that all the zones are active, alive, and don't feel like 20:1 just because somewhere else in the world there is 20 of your faction on the same shard.

End result:

• People who don't want to PvP don't feel forced to join Warmode for better gear or faster levelling
• People who want to play in Warmode for WPvP have people to fight who CHOOSE to be there, and they can't be toxic morons avoiding fights by phasing out.

[WhirlwindTV]

No it is not. If it were there would be no need to offer a +10% (and +30% for alliance) bonus to PvE quest rewards to switch it on.
---
Which problems specifically?

If anything this will make things worse. World PvP is fun and interesting when you feel like part of faction in a contest with the other faction. That requires two things: Playing with other players of your own faction against a similarly matched team of players from the other faction who are actively seeking each other out. Taking away the ability to group up in order to achieve your quest objectives would be a huge problem towards this goal.

The reward incentive to turn it on is (in my opinion) in an attempt to get more people interested in experiencing the mode and increasing the amount of players that eventually will actively participate in the PvP. People that used to play on a PvE server always played the way they did, but the game is intended to have the world be open. The game state was not designed to have wPvP be an optional thing like other MMOs where you had to flag for it. PvE servers were only implemented because they knew their market and catered some service to people they knew were not interested in the always on competitive atmosphere, but if that was the intended design then that would have been the norm and there would not have been split servers in the first place.

So if you can learn the game at your own pace and then introduce yourself to PvP through world encounters via the War Mode system then that eventually pulls people into that kind of style. Again, IMO.

So now to address some points, what problems would editing the quest address? The problem of 5v1 train time that is actually the norm for these quests. Its cute that you say wPvP is fun when you feel part of a faction and matching teams of players vs others hunting each other. Except that is not what happens. Those are called battlegrounds. What actually happens is people join LFG groups that are just filled with people (5 dps? Go. 1 heals 4 dps? Go. 3 tanks 2 dps? Go.). I've never once joined a group that has had any standards or built itself to win team fights. People complete their required kill numbers and leave, slot the next dude in.

They do that because they're only doing the quest for the reward and they want that reward as fast and easy as possible. There are exceptions of course as there is with everything that I have seen a couple people occasionally stay in the groups for exceptional amounts of time (or see an enemy in the zone hunting people for a long time as well). But for the most part, because of how the game is currently designed with regards to wPvP, it is group up and hunt easy prey.

I do agree that War Mode needs more engaging rewards/activitis/draws to be successful at world pvp promotion, but when I said War Mode was a resounding success I am talking in regards to merging the playerbase to allow for flexibility. When we were segmented into servers you had a hard choice. War Mode specifically allows that choice to be a soft one, and at the same time does allow for some extra tuning for Blizzard to be able to potentially limit some spells that would be too busted for good pve design (think grounding totem) to the section that it was designed for. There are problems with that too but mitigated to a reasonable level.

War Mode by itself cannot ever properly promote world PvP with how the game is designed right now and basically how it has been designed since vanilla. Flying ruined a good portion of what consistent world PvP could become, and i'll illustrate that now. If players want equal forces vs equal forces, they queue BGs/Arenas. That's just how it is. When people want to hunt others in the world, they have to do just that. Hunt. Now this is the part that people don't like to hear, but unfortunately its true. Hunters need prey. In a world without reasons to go somewhere, where are you going to find them? How players handled this in vanilla was simple, people had to run to dungeons and dungeons were farmed even at the height of raiding because you could still get enchanting materials and gold. So where do the hunters find their prey? In route to dungeons. Tarren Mill/Southshore became a thing solely because for the longest time the only way for alliance to get to Eastern Plaguelands and two endgame dungeons was through the mountain pass up past Tarren Mill. So the hunters found their prey. People that wanted PvP would gank people running to dungeons. Sometimes they'd fight back other times they wouldn't. Enough ganking happened that calls for help were made to friends/guilds/trade chat. This drew people that wanted to PvP and hunt the hunters. Then if it became heated enough, this drew people that liked to PvP but didn't like running around trying to find random singles. Thus the Tarren Mill/Southshore PvP hotspot.

This happened with Blackrock too. You'll frequently see most of the PvP videos from back in those days occuring in the 2 zones Blackrock was connected to and in the halls of the mountain itself. Again, for the same reasons. People flew in to do the dungeons, which drew people that wanted to PvP because they were traffic areas, and the cycle mentioned above starts anew because that is an area where someone can reasonably expect players to be at. Ever heard of any consistent PvP in the Badlands? Or the Swamp of Sorrows? How about Silithus (outside of gong nonsense obviously)? Or Winterspring? Winterspring is the perfect example here. 55-60 zone, endgame leveling. But nothing else. No traffic. Couple pushover levelers, maybe you could gank some guys long enough that they'd call in guildy support but that isn't a sure thing so you could burn hours and only have maybe one real fight. So yeah, world PvP needs victims to provide reasons for people to be in areas to attract the people that want to fight in the world with the reasonable expectation of actually finding more than 1 fight every 30 minutes.

Incentive. You'd think it'd be easy right? Well not with the existence of flying mounts. The ability to easily hopscotch from one objective to the next means that the second a PvP fight breaks out, the victims scatter into the air and just sit and wait. There is no choke point. No need to call in support. They'll get bored and leave. Or I'll just move to another area of the map, bypassing mobs with no risk of getting dismounted and just do something else. Watch people do world quest objectives and you'll see people (including myself, i'm not laying judgement down here just how people play if the game doesn't punish it) kill a mob and mount up to get to the next mob that is a mere 55 yds away that much faster.

Ok so put something on the map both sides would want to fight for and that'll pull people in. Oh boy Halaa sure was a blast wasn't it. Constant fighting there day and night, right? Oh wait, a ghost town you say? Guess there wasn't enough incentive for people to go to this random location and so there weren't enough people to fight (and poorly executed O/D mechanics) so people stuck to BGs. Oh hey the Hellfire towers, you could fight there to win control of the zone.....and thats it...and you took a zone and mounted up and flew to the other area to maybe fight a couple people doing it cause they want to fight. Ok lets boost the incentive by making it a raid location giving PvP loot. Oh boy Wintersgrasp was just a blast wasn't it. Oh wait it sucked ass. And no one went there outside of the actual battle times. Hmmm. Ok lets add DAILIES! That'll pull people over to it, all hail Tol Barad! Oh people just ignored half the dailies and then just grouped up and did the other dailies as quick as possible before leaving. Still some decent fighting to be had but so spread out. No flying, so it forced alot more combat, but again not really much traffic because people got quests that were near their camp and the camps were far apart and they just did their own thing. Good attempt but not really good enough.

So yeah, foot traffic and intersection points are necessary for real wPvP hotspots to happen and that isn't going to happen anytime soon with dungeon summon stones and the insane cry for flying mounts to be accessible as soon as possible. The forum crying for pathfinder was insane. So even just throwing some PvP centric world quests on the map generally aren't enough because they're too temporary. The BFA assaults proved this. They were definitely a step in the right direction but were generally so spread out that you couldn't really centralize a fight because of the quick objective clears moving people out and around, and if a group wiped they'd just mount up and fly away instead of needing to call support in to actually rally and fight back effectively. There never were really solid fight locations that someone could login at any time of the day and just mosey on over there hoping to get some ganks in and maybe then get into some large group fights.

Then if an assault site was also a location of a CTA and it just became nonsense. Just swarm on swarm. If a swarm met a swarm it was ok, but pretty rare was there a time that I did a CTA quest where we fought a group more than twice, cause they'd all just run and/or disband to find another shard that was easier to get the quest done.

So yeah for the most part War Mode did its job very well. And yes I was advocating the ability to put WM on for the rewards but dodge wPvP because not everyone will do that, but ANY incentive to PvP is going to piss off the PvE crowd as it currently does. "WE HAVE TO DO WAR MODE TO GET THESE REWARDS!" No you don't, just get less rewards because you're risking less. "BUT I WANT ALL THE REWARDS!" Ok then risk being ganked. "BUT I DONT WANT TO PVP I WANT TO JUST GO IN AND KILL MOBS WITHOUT THAT KIND OF STRESS!" .......Ok so turn it off and do it for less rewards. It is a risk reward system. "BUT I JUST SAID I WANT ALL THE REWARDS ITS UNFAAAAIIIIIIRRRRRRRR!"
So having the system be friendly to those that are petrified of getting killed and camped (maybe have it only able to turn it off in a rested area or as a ghost....) will still let people take the risk but also not get their experience crushed by being forced to be camped if an opposing side's group/swarm takes over the area. Having victims allows for PvP hotspots to potentially occur (if i'm doing one of the original BFA zone CTAs outside of an assault, I look for Magni world quests, otherwise i'll never find people), which is needed because as mentioned above if flying, summon stones, and only short random incentive zones exist then there isn't otherwise areas for hunters to know that other people are going to be to hunt each other without spending an hour to find one guy.

[Raelbo]

The question is "what is world pvp" or what should it be. For example, if you are questing and a rogue comes out of stealth and kills you. Is that world pvp? Should world pvp allow or push such a player behavior?

World PvP is literally that players can attack players of the opposite faction. Obviously there are some rules in place to ensure that players don't harass others beyond the confines of the game mechanics (eg whispering them with insults and taunts etc), that players don't cheat, and that players don't disrupt the world. But other than that pretty much everything goes. If you don't want your character to be killed by a character played by another person, don't enable WPvP.

If yes, then Warmode MUST give extra rewards for pve activities or else people wouldn't activate warmode when they are questing.

Sorry, but that is NOT a valid reason. The choice of whether to activate warmode or not should be predicated purely on the basis of the experience being sought by the player. If you want an experience where you are able to attack players of the other faction and vice versa, then you shouldn't need extra rewards. And if you do need extra rewards, maybe the clue in there is that WM is not for you. And if that means that no one wants to use WM, that is 110% fine

Balancing warmode is extremely difficult

Balancing warmode should be about making sure that there is parity between the two factions. Not about trying to make sure that the effort:reward ratio is the same as non-warmode.

- - - Updated - - -

• Lower/Change the XP reward
  
  Reduce it from the scaling up to 30% that it is now, maybe a flat 5 or 10% at most, and make it always on, regardless of faction and balance - this is purely a compensation to the slowdown of levelling when PvPing, but not enough to be the massive 30% that makes people use it to cut a THIRD off their levelling times. Alternatively, make it so PvP kills give XP instead or, for example, a 1-5% rested bonus similar to the items found in WoD treasures. That completely removes people in Warmode just to level faster who hate PvP.

I agree with your second suggestion. Any extra rewards for participating in WM should be based on engaging in PvP while in WM, but not for just switching it on (while never engaging in WPvP).

• Remove Bonuses
  
  Remove any other rewards/bonuses that you can't get out of Warmode. Can keep PvP specific quests, just make them not doable in raids and just give credit to the PvP weekly chest, or conquest points/gold etc. Not a really good item that is a massive upgrade to everyone at the start of the expansion/first few patches.

Fully agree

• Fix Phasing
  
  Remove the ability to phase out for world quests for 5 minutes after PvP combat (similar to PvP flagging), and make it so you can't enter Arena Skirmishes whilst in PvP combat. Not like you lose anything with Skirms and the queues are super quick, people just abuse them to avoid dying.

Agreed

• Fix faction balance
  
  Reduce the amount of shards so that all the zones are active, alive, and don't feel like 20:1 just because somewhere else in the world there is 20 of your faction on the same shard.

Yeah. Faction balance is a big problem. The source of the problem, of course, is that it is advantageous to be on the stronger faction. Which leads to an unstable system with people feeling incentivized to leave the weaker faction, making the problem worse. What they need to do is introduce mechanisms that make it better to play the weaker faction. This would encourage players to switch whenever there is faction imbalance, and results in a stable system.

Regarding shards, I reckon that they need to set up tech that keeps the number of players in each zone on a shard balanced between the factions. If I form a Horde raid in group finder to fight the battle of Nazjatar, the servers need to make sure that the Alliance raid that forms is put into the same shard. Having an Alliance raid on one shard and a Horde raid on a different shard is stupid. And I have definitely seen it happen.

End result:

• People who don't want to PvP don't feel forced to join Warmode for better gear or faster levelling
• People who want to play in Warmode for WPvP have people to fight who CHOOSE to be there, and they can't be toxic morons avoiding fights by phasing out.

Yes, yes, yes!

[delus]

Do we know something about warmode in Shadowlands?

Will the alliance recieve +30% bonus during the whole expansion again?

Yeah. Warmode is not a change that can just be undone like that.

[Zenfoldor]

I feel like there were two camps in BFA. Horde and Alliance, lol. J/K, but really, there were people who never turned it on and people who never turned it off. Those who love it, love it. Those who never turned it on, will never know. I am one who never turned it on.

Here is why I hate(d) warmode.

When I would get in a group, there would be no filter, it would just have to say in the group text "wm on" or "wm off" and if you got into a wrong group(or any group) half of the people are phased and you cannot group with them. This was an annoyance for things like summoning in dungeons and doing world bosses. Not sure if they ever fixed it, but if not, Blizz, please just add a filter on the group finder for wm....I haven't played in a while.

Fix that, and i'm okay with it, though will never turn it on. I like skipping content that I don't find enjoyable.

[Wuusah]

Sorry, but that is NOT a valid reason. The choice of whether to activate warmode or not should be predicated purely on the basis of the experience being sought by the player. If you want an experience where you are able to attack players of the other faction and vice versa, then you shouldn't need extra rewards. And if you do need extra rewards, maybe the clue in there is that WM is not for you. And if that means that no one wants to use WM, that is 110% fine

Sorry but that is extremely naive. Nobody wants to be ganked. Nobody would activate warmode if there were no pve rewards for activating warmode and go out and start questing. That's why I asked "what is world pvp". Getting ganked is part of world pvp. If you remove all incentives of having warmode on while doing your pve stuff AND give players the tool to deactivate pvp, then nobody would activate warmode because nobody wants to be ganked. Warmode is risk versus reward. You get more but the world is also more dangerous. You might waste a lot of time getting ganked.
In such a scenario where warmode has no extra pve rewards, warmode would just end up to be an uncapped battleground. People would ONLY activate warmode to fight the other faction and then immediately deactivate it again once they don't want to fight. But those big open battles are not all what world pvp is about.

Balancing warmode should be about making sure that there is parity between the two factions.

That ship has sailed long time ago.