What's the story on war mode/sharding/battle for Nazjatar?

[SirCowdog]

So if I understand correctly, Alliance gets a larger bonus while War Mode is active because their population and participation, on average, is much lower in War Mode than horde. Upwards of a 30% increase to experience, gold, rewards, etc.

Now...I just resubbed a short time ago because I wanted to show appreciation for the value-add of Classic being included in the subscription, and the overall improvements to the game that 8.2 brought(also because flying). But this change to how war mode works doesn't make sense to me. I'm a horde player, and the last few Battle for Nazjatar events have been overwhelmingly Alliance. Something on the order of 3 to 1 population imbalance. The alliance literally invaded Newhome with something like 50+ people directly after the event ended.

I'm trying very hard not to jump to conclusions here. I want to understand the process that leads to this, because it doesn't seem very fair for Alliance to have such a massive population advantage during the battle event, but still get WM bonuses due to lack of population.

Is this some kind of manipulation of the system, by only flagging War Mode for the event? Is it bad sharding or design of the War Mode system? What's actually going on here? Help me to understand so I can not just be the typical forum rager angry at something that doesn't make sense.

EDIT: And before anyone LOLs at a horde being angry about unfairness in PVP, please consider the tone and nature of my post. I'm trying to understand this, even if it means there's a legitimate explanation which isn't in the favor of horde. Please respond accordingly.

[burek]

Is this some kind of manipulation of the system, by only flagging War Mode for the event? Is it bad sharding or design of the War Mode system? What's actually going on here? Help me to understand so I can not just be the typical forum rager angry at something that doesn't make sense.

The problem is the group finder. If you want to win the battle, you join a raid in the group finder and the battle is over in a few minutes with no opposition. If you happen to join a raid that is somehow losing, you just leave that one and join another one on a different shard.

Even if we assume the game is somehow managing to form reasonably balanced shards, as soon as grouping starts the balance gets completely destroyed. The game can't randomly throw people off of their shards to maintain the balance, as that would create a lot of other issues, especially after the battle starts. It also can't prevent you from making raids/groups since you need to see where people are & heal them. It can't limit groups to just people on your shard because you want to be able to invite friends to help. And so on.

The only solution is to turn the battle into queued content, but since its supposed to be world pvp - its just going to be unbalanced like it always was.

[SirCowdog]

The problem is the group finder. If you want to win the battle, you join a raid in the group finder and the battle is over in a few minutes with no opposition. If you happen to join a raid that is somehow losing, you just leave that one and join another one on a different shard.

Even if we assume the game is somehow managing to form reasonably balanced shards, as soon as grouping starts the balance gets completely destroyed. The game can't randomly throw people off of their shards to maintain the balance, as that would create a lot of other issues, especially after the battle starts. It also can't prevent you from making raids/groups since you need to see where people are & heal them. It can't limit groups to just people on your shard because you want to be able to invite friends to help. And so on.

The only solution is to turn the battle into queued content, but since its supposed to be world pvp - its just going to be unbalanced like it always was.

Ahhh....I didn't know you could use the group finder to join Battle for Naz. That seems like a blatant oversight by Blizzard. Once the battle starts you shouldn't be able to server/shard hop like that.



So basically it sounds like it IS a manipulation/abuse of the system. That's too bad.

[burek]

Ahhh....I didn't know you could use the group finder to join Battle for Naz. That seems like a blatant oversight by Blizzard. Once the battle starts you shouldn't be able to server/shard hop like that.

So basically it sounds like it IS a manipulation/abuse of the system. That's too bad.

Yeah the hopping after the battle starts should be prevented, but it still wouldn't change much. I do one battle every day and I had to hop maybe twice so far because the shard my raid ended up on had multiple opposing faction raids. All the others were instant wins.

But ultimately, the only way to balance world pvp is to make it instanced. And even if it wasn't for crz, warmode and sharding, you'd still have no one to fight against. Every server is dominated by a faction.

[SirCowdog]

Yeah the hopping after the battle starts should be prevented, but it still wouldn't change much. I do one battle every day and I had to hop maybe twice so far because the shard my raid ended up on had multiple opposing faction raids. All the others were instant wins.

But ultimately, the only way to balance world pvp is to make it instanced. And even if it wasn't for crz, warmode and sharding, you'd still have no one to fight against. Every server is dominated by a faction.

Largely I think this is due to trying to graft Open World PVP into what is otherwise a PVE design, both in terms of class mechanics and environment.

Simply dropping some king of the hill flags into a questing area is sloppy and lazy. Trying to fix that with sharding or layering is like painting over mold on a wall. It doesn't address the underlying problems with WPVP.

This has always been a flaw with wow, and part of me wishes Blizzard would either give up on it, or go all out. I get that they're trying new things all the time, but they're clearly not learning. If you want to have world PVP, you have to devote entire sections of the game 100% to it. EVE online would be a good place to start looking for ideas. It would also have to be almost completely divorced from PVE influence, as in a totally separate progression path, gearing, talents, etc.

All in all I don't really think WoW is the place for it. WPVP has always been bad. It's never once been good and healthy or even had an attempt at balance. Blizzard has NEVER known how to do it in a way that's satisfying, and I think they should just stop trying.

[Nathasil]

Battle for Nazjatar is the biggest joke of a "feature" this game has ever seen. It repeats ALL of the mistakes of Ashran. Every single one of them. And then adds some new ones (the lag is MUCH worse in Nazjatar than it ever was in Ashran). I am really puzzled how anybody at Blizzard even THOUGHT this would play out....they created Ashran....saw that systems like that + free, custom, premade grouping for players are a big no-no...then went ahead and tweaked Ashran for an entire fucking expansion until throwing their hands up in the air and converting it to a std queued BG....and now they add this.

My conclusing after playing this game from the very first month it launched in the EU:
Never ever try to build a reward-system around WPvP. WPvP should simply "happen"...without any schedule, rules, rewards, objectives. That's when it works. That's when it is the most fun. Everything else should always be either completely FFA (Like timeless isle) or instanced with a Q that manages team-size.

And the real conclusion from that conclusion is that strictly separated factions are a fucking stupid design because no system that builds on them is worth having in the game. Every kind of PvP in this game that is actually fun and "works" is NOT based on factions. That should tell Blizzard something.

[Shockzalot]

Battle for Nazjatar is the biggest joke of a "feature" this game has ever seen. It repeats ALL of the mistakes of Ashran. Every single one of them. And then adds some new ones (the lag is MUCH worse in Nazjatar than it ever was in Ashran). I am really puzzled how anybody at Blizzard even THOUGHT this would play out....they created Ashran....saw that systems like that + free, custom, premade grouping for players are a big no-no...then went ahead and tweaked Ashran for an entire fucking expansion until throwing their hands up in the air and converting it to a std queued BG....and now they add this.

My conclusing after playing this game from the very first month it launched in the EU:
Never ever try to build a reward-system around WPvP. WPvP should simply "happen"...without any schedule, rules, rewards, objectives. That's when it works. That's when it is the most fun. Everything else should always be either completely FFA (Like timeless isle) or instanced with a Q that manages team-size.

And the real conclusion from that conclusion is that strictly separated factions are a fucking stupid design because no system that builds on them is worth having in the game. Every kind of PvP in this game that is actually fun and "works" is NOT based on factions. That should tell Blizzard something.

How are you going to insult Ashran like that? Ashran was capped. It couldn't be 110v30.