Ion is oblivious to the reality of Warmode?

[Ealyssa]

My solutions are to either make World PvP a SOLO experience

How is that a solution at all ???

Players stoped doind raids an did multiple groups.
And if groups are banned they will just bunch together without grouping...

WPVP never was balanced, never will be balanced. Deal with it or opt out of warmode.

[bullseyed]

No its not.

There is already a system in place created by Blizzard to balance the amount of players in both faction in one shard.

But guess what.
Is impossible to balance WHERE those 40 people are.

There may be 40 people at south
And the other 40 people may be in north...

Its impossible to balance.

I forgot spring break was this week.

[tmamass]

People have always had this unrealistic idea of world pvp, maybe it's because those fancy, cherry-picked pvp videos? Who knows.
Whenever I run around with WM on these days horde either ignore me unless they outnumber me and I'm dead. At that point I could form a group and repay the favour or move on with what I was doing in the first place.
On the plus side I think WM is actually a success, there sure as hell is more world pvp now than before. From time to time there are some great battles, usually when theres an invasion up.

Sorry I would say wpvp is only there because Alliance gets a kill 25 hordies for free gear item, without it there would be no wpvp like before.

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

Ion has this imaginary vision of Vanilla WoW prior to Arenas. What he fails to remember is there was relative faction balance there ANDDDDD in the later years on private servers people figured out camping flight points were more efficient then mindless searching for people in a zone.

This guy is on drugs. Flight did not kill world pvp but Arenas and BG's did. Also little to no incentive to do it also killed it. It is FAR more efficient to farm a BG or Arena then try and find someone with Warmode on.

I promise you right now when Classic comes out flight points will be camped because it is more efficient because that is what they do on private servers.

Maybe time to make flight masters a lot more powerful so they'll instantly woop your ass if you attack someone near them. It'll just move the camping away from the flight master a bit, but atleast it'll give the one just landing at the flight master some breathing room and decision making.

[Sanguinerd]

That's because you play alliance, and it is known that the horde players are generally greater skill, as seen with raid and M+ stats.

If you played horde you'd find that due to the extreme lack of skill on the alliance side and inability therefore to complete higher content than LFR, may alliance have nothing else to do in the game but harass people trying to do WQs..

....hows the view up there?

Sorry I would say wpvp is only there because Alliance gets a kill 25 hordies for free gear item, without it there would be no wpvp like before.

Still better than none right? If without the quest there would be hardly anything.

[Thoughtsinchaos]

When I was still subbed in BfA, I didn't mind getting ganked 1v5. That's counterable and escable if you're smart. A 40man raidgroup was not counterable. I tried getting groups together to counter, but we would get caught hiding long before we had decent numbers. And even if I was able to amass 40 players, they would all be strangers VS (what seemed like) a group using voicechat. It would be like a casual BG group fighting a rated group.

I get that wPvP isn't always fair. I'm OK with unfair fights to a point. That point has been crossed, and I won't be turning Warmode on until they fix it. Put raidgroups into their own shards, maybe even their own Warmode category.

I don’t think a fix is needed for anything with WM. Encountering a fullblown horde raid causing us grief, without us having a reasonable opportunity to counter, really doesn’t happen enough in my personal experience, to warrant drastic changes of further splitting up the playerbase into more shards. I feel that’s an unnecessary task for Blizz to work on, considering also that I’ve usually experienced WPVP as a mass battle, rather than simple 1v1 or petite group battles.

[roboscorcher]

I don’t think a fix is needed for anything with WM. Encountering a fullblown horde raid causing us grief, without us having a reasonable opportunity to counter, really doesn’t happen enough in my personal experience, to warrant drastic changes of further splitting up the playerbase into more shards. I feel that’s an unnecessary task for Blizz to work on, considering also that I’ve usually experienced WPVP as a mass battle, rather than simple 1v1 or petite group battles.

Maybe it has changed since they added the rewards for Alliance. I had some pretty bad experiences in the month or so after launch. I really have no desire to wpvp in or against a raidgroup anymore, but I still like the 1-5man experience.

[SirCowdog]

You mentioned a big part of how world pvp is now the best it has been in over a decade, and that’s the incentive of actually getting more people to participate. I feel like, for a long time, folks didn’t have solid motivation to put themselves in a situation where they are at direct conflict with a member of the opposite faction, and warmode directly helps fill that void.

I’ve been ganked by groups of horde, and because these situations occurred while I was completing world quests, I was able to find others who were looking to hit back, either through group finder or just simply general chat. These battles, more often than not, turn out to be quite epic, mainly because once one side begins getting the upper hand, it pretty much causes the other group to continue to accumulate members.

If your sole goal in this game is to simply get quests done with no pvp interaction, you’d simply have to play with WM turned off, which Blizz had made incredibly simple to do in any rest area of your choosing.

What I've been talking about is the underlying systems and mechanics of WPVP. Increased participation might be artificially increased via incentives or rewards, but that doesn't actually change the systems or mechanics(which are the same as they've always been, barring a handful of WPVP- only abilities of questionable effect).

So, this is why things like 40vs1 encounters pop up. There's nothing stopping players from doing it, so why WOULND'T they do it? Even Ion, in his rigid way of thinking, has finally figured out and admitted that it's not ideal. And so, if it's the incentives that are increasing participation, but also causing 40-1 situations, then how do we go about getting closer to the ideal 5v5 that Ion thinks is best, but without killing participation?

WoW has a lot of underlying tools to make that happen, IMO. But it would need to be in an environment with actual WPVP objectives or resources to fight over. When you look at a small scale example, like the vanilla version of Alterac Valley, the main body of players were focused on each other with the tug-of-war. 20-30 members of the raid would be fighting 20-30 of the opposing side, while other smaller groups were free to fight over lesser objectives.

Granted, due to the open world nature of WPVP, it's not so simple. But under the hood each shard is still limiting the number of people allowed in each zone or shard, right? In that environment it's basically working the same as a battleground instance, so it seems like it should be possible to also borrow other concepts or mechanics from battlegrounds to help disperse or discourage the effectiveness of one massive raid-sized ball-of-death rolling around a zone ganking everything that moves.

This is, in part, why I keep saying that dropping a PVP mode into what's otherwise a purely PVE environment is a bad idea. It creates situations like the 40-1 problem. And those 40-1 situations will cause people to leave WPVP no matter what incentives Blizzard provides. Participation will drop once people realize there's no point to either side, with only minor spikes each week to complete a quest. That's not GOOD wpvp. And I think we're already seeing that happen; correct me if I'm wrong.

- - - Updated - - -

Because people complained about content being released before Christmas and feeling obligated to play instead of spending time with family.

And Blizzard doesn't want to be working to support it during that time either.

Sorry, that doesn't parse. BfA has been out for the better part of an entire year, with very little in the way of actual changes to the available content. This can't be explained by a month or two of low-intensity dev time due to the holidays, especially when the development cycle of a game like WoW is measured in years.

As I said in the entire post you cut down, Legion had the benefit of extra time due to cutting WoD short in order to focus on Legion. BfA doesn't have that advantage, and I think we're seeing the results by way of weaker content releases, and seeing those releases less often. I don't LIKE it, mind you. I would much prefer higher quality more often, and I think most people would agree with that statement.

[bullseyed]

Sorry, that doesn't parse. BfA has been out for the better part of an entire year, with very little in the way of actual changes to the available content. This can't be explained by a month or two of low-intensity dev time due to the holidays, especially when the development cycle of a game like WoW is measured in years.

As I said in the entire post you cut down, Legion had the benefit of extra time due to cutting WoD short in order to focus on Legion. BfA doesn't have that advantage, and I think we're seeing the results by way of weaker content releases, and seeing those releases less often. I don't LIKE it, mind you. I would much prefer higher quality more often, and I think most people would agree with that statement.

Your lack of ability when it comes to comprehension does not change facts. The pacing of content is slower because they spaced out the content to avoid a holiday situation they ran into last time that people didn't like.

If BfD came out before Christmas, 8.2 would be coming out already and the content pacing would be the same as Legion. Everything is delayed a few months because they stretched Uldir to get past Christmas.

[xuros]

Its funny in chat on the Horde side now. At the start it was all LOLs at jumping the few Allys we would find in the open world, nows its all doom and gloom at being the hunted for a change.

[SirCowdog]

Your lack of ability when it comes to comprehension does not change facts. The pacing of content is slower because they spaced out the content to avoid a holiday situation they ran into last time that people didn't like.

If BfD came out before Christmas, 8.2 would be coming out already and the content pacing would be the same as Legion. Everything is delayed a few months because they stretched Uldir to get past Christmas.

Ok, I think I'm starting to see where you're coming from. But using that logic, now that the holidays are over, wouldn't that tend to suggest that Blizzard would be free to release content more often, since players aren't going to be limited?

I'm not saying this to trap you. I'm just trying to get a full grasp of your point of view. Even if players didn't like having to play over the holidays(I'm not sure I agree with that, given that gamers tend to use their free time to...you know...game), the devs wouldn't stop working for that same amount of time. Except for the holiday break itself, Blizzard would still be working on development.

Wouldn't that imply, then, that 8.1.5 should have had more than it did, and that 8.2 would be right on its heels instead of potentially being delayed until june or even july, because of the backlog of content that was still being developed while players were taking it easy?

[Maudib]

Ion is oblivious to the reality of everything?

Fixed that for ya.

Ion is trying so very hard create a legacy for coming up with the next awesome thing WoW offered. I'd say he's downright desperate, as none of his ideas as a game director has done anything but cause loss of subs.

He made a much better encounters designer than a lead developer.

[Alkizon]

ideal 5v5 that Ion thinks is best

An ideal battle for him remains 5vs5 arena of identical characters (class and abilities). He doesn't know how to think in other categories in terms of design, so every step that he will take under your pressure in this situation will bring you closer to this *points up direction* state. He doesn't consider other conditions (design) than those that they have been trying to push on players over past (5?) years. But, well, it's untrue for this particular game, no matter how you'd dance around conditions that they created (and continues?) and, as you understand, I don't speak here purely about PvP, but generally about this game as a whole.

[tmamass]

Still better than none right? If without the quest there would be hardly anything.

No, In my book none is better then 1 gets raped by 40....

[Sanguinerd]

No, In my book none is better then 1 gets raped by 40....

Which is what was happening before they introduced the gear quest to get Alliance to participate in the first place.

[SirCowdog]

What would you guys think about a bunch of 5v5 instances scattered around the map, with PVP-centric objectives inside to reward players for going in and doing them. Inaccessible to a raid in the same way you can't enter dungeons in a raid. By completing the objectives inside the instance, maybe spawns powerful NPCs in the open world that larger groups could fight and maybe kill for loot or rally around to help ward off or break up 40-1 situations?

It's not a fully formed idea, but it would at least be more interesting than just the "ROFLMAO I farm u!" joke of WPVP that's happening right now.

[tmamass]

Which is what was happening before they introduced the gear quest to get Alliance to participate in the first place.

No. Thats WHY alliance got the quests because alliance all opted OUT of WM before the quest.

[Sanguinerd]

No. Thats WHY alliance got the quests because alliance all opted OUT of WM before the quest.

...that's what I'm saying. They opted out because they got ganked constantly.

Atleast now they have a reason to turn it on even if just briefly which is better than 99% not even bothering because of horde gank squads.