New BG Idea

[cncrules45]

Okay, so I know everyone and their mother has a new BG idea, but hear me out. Or, well, read me out?

Background: One of the biggest problem with node-based battlegrounds, at least in randoms, is that there is no incentive to keep any one node. From an individual, selfish, cocky player's perspective, they could stay there, and keep their node, or they could charge on and pick up a new node. Even if they lost the node they were defending while getting a new node, they still come out even in the process. Best case scenario, they don't lose the old node, at least not immediately, and their team picks up points. They could certainly lose both nodes, but a lot of RBGers see themselves as heroes and think they can win 1v2s regularly. How can we encourage defending nodes? How can we make it fun?

Proposed solution: Instead of the battleground rewarding having nodes (usually, more nodes means more points per second), what if the game rewarded holding nodes? For any individual node, the longer you own the node, the faster it generates points. Also, to further incentivize individual players to defend their node, the node itself would actually become more powerful and thus easier to defend the longer the game went on.

Details: A node that scores more points the longer you hold it? That sounds confusing and complicated, right? Maybe not! Imagine a node in the corner surrounded by a densely populated forest. When you and your alliance brethren show up and take the node, a troop of Night Elves shows up, bringing along a number of wisps to gather wood from trees. The longer you are able to hold the node, the better the Night Elves are able to setup a base and the more wisps they can recruit, thus earning your team resources faster. Similarly, as the base is getting setup, moonwells would be created to provide progressively better healing to those in its radiance, with the potential for buffs being earned from some buildings and even some defensive structures eventually being built. When the Horde finally did ransack the base, they'd find some local goblins to start building some shredders to harvest wood and cobble together a base. Similar concepts could be used for all sorts of resource earning nodes, like a mine (dwarf vs orc?), a river fishery/power plant (worgen vs tauren?), a mana fountain similar to the Sunwell (blood elf vs human?) and many more.

Battleground specifics:

I see this laying itself out in 2 different ways.

Option 1: A 3 node, 15v15 battleground where the base defenses don't ever get that powerful. The base would get visually impressive, it could give off a number of buffs or add quite a few guards, but in reality, they would never get to the point where they could change the dynamics of a 1v2 fight. This kind of fight also has the potential for developing a meta in randoms of each team giving the other team 1 base for the whole game and just fighting in the mid, which allows lots of HKs and finishes the game quickly, as the two main bases keep upgrading and earn resources faster. I doubt this meta would be present in very many of the games, simply because it would be hard to get people to agree to not attack a base.

Option 2: A 5 node, 40v40. This version could have significantly more powerful bases as the numbers could support these kind of defenses. This also allows a pretty wide range of tactics and ensures that both defending and attacking are fun. You want to help make your team the best fortress that's ever been made and you also want to help tear the other team's walls down. This would also be the only 40v40 that isn't a zergfest to get in the other team's base and eventually kill a PvE boss. That has a lot of appeal to me. If there is some value to PvE from the dev's perspective, adding "creep" mobs off the paths in between nodes and giving the team which kills them resources and potentially buffs could be fun. This fits in very nicely with the other WC3 elements of this BG. 40v40 matches probably take many more resources for Blizz as well as never being in the RBG circuit.

Thoughts? Additions? Issues?

[Matt0193]

I like the idea of nodes becoming increasingly potent but they should remain as easy to assault/defend from start to finish so the gameplay doesn't promote hardcore turtling. RBGs were changed specifically because it was "Wait for stacks, kill efc before your own fc dies". Waiting isn't fun, it's why people rarely defend in random BGs. Now if there was an incentive, such as more points generated (Like ToK), then you might see more people stick around at Stables or Farm, for example.

As for which option, both. I'm all for more BGs, even reskins so that there's more variety. I think there should be a battleground released each content patch, or alternating between content and filler with filler patches having a new BG, so PvP'ers have something new to experience same as PvE'ers get a new raid. More fluff in the form of aesthetics are meh, it's nice but I'd rather resources be pushed towards function rather than flash. If we could have both, wonderful.