Greedy Goblin

Friday, June 11, 2010

Rise of the horde

Our last week's exploits seemed to wake up the horde. They organized premades to get Wintergrasp. On Wednesday they managed to collect 10 tenacity worth force and defend WG against us 2 times (server crashed before the third battle).

When I log on horde, seen several guilds mobilizing, discussing tactics, being in Wintergrasp before combat started and so on. Why is it important?

At first, despite what naysayers said, we managed to cause impact. A single guild turned the balance of a server upside down for a week, forcing several guilds to do a coordinated response.

Secondly, it created the first competitive large-group PvP in WoW. PvP was always a sideline in WoW, despite for a skilled player PvP is the only way to be sure he is not eating something nerfed. You can't nerf other players. With arenas, competitive PvP became available in WoW, but only in very small scale. The largest group available is 5-man strong, there is no way to conduct epic-scale strategic battles. While battlegrounds had the potential, the ability to "farm" honor via chain-losing changed them into a stupid zergfest. Theoretically you can play in battlegrounds with an organized team, but that's not competitive. A premade easily smash any PuG. Also, Blizzard has disabled queuing up as raid to the random and weekend BGs, allowing honor and arena point rewards to only those who queue up into a zergfest and lucky enough to get less brain-dead than the other team.

While there are news about rated battleground system, it won't be implemented anytime soon, possibly never as it could damage the bottom line by officially ranking morons low. Currently they think they "pwn" just lose because have "low GS nubs" in the team.

So the only chance to participate in an epic scale battle between lots of players is here on Magtheridon-EU. Join us, or join the horde. I don't know if there is competitive PvP guild available there, but I'm sure that the summertime stirrup will create it. There will be lot of guilds collapsing in summer, leaving players with no goal to fight for, in such environment an enemy taunting them openly is an obvious choice to fight against. (Note: if you have a PvP guild on Magtheridon-EU-horde, comment and I post your link to your forum)

While we already made an impact, it's yet to see that it can reach the size of practically creating a new gaming way in MMOs. There are PvP-MMOs, but they are free-for-all, every players against everyone. There is no MMO that's focusing on the battle of 2 sides. With the tenacity (and the upcoming limited queue) system of WG (and Tol Barad in Cata) there is a way to do balanced fights between sides in an MMO where naturally cannot be absolutely equal teams.

I'd like to emphasize the difference between competitive arenas and WG:
  • strategic planning: in arenas there are no objectives, large map or significant amount of players. Your only choice is who open on who, but pro arena gamers who know it's not a real choice. There is calculated precedence of opening, you do it that way or you do it wrong. On the other hand on a large battle several strategies can be viable and all can be countered.
  • less gear dependent: arena is direct player vs player combat. The better geared player will usually win. In WG even a lvl 77 can seriously contribute by using vehicles.
  • still, supports the collection of gear: the previous being said, having better gear opens more options to you. You can gain all the gear from the honor points you earn during the combat! So simply by playing it properly, you gain gear you can use. While it's partially true in arenas (you get arena points if you win), but you still have to farm honor for other items in zergfest BGs.
  • economic battle: in arenas you can't use consumables, in WG you can. You can gain extra strength by having the right professions and using them.
So if you like the World of Warcraft, but hate the nerfed noobfest Blizzard turned it into with heroic farm and all the grind, join the competitive World-PvP community forming on Magtheridon-EU! Don't level another alt when summer hits. Play a competitive, hard game without fixed schedule.

34 comments:

Andru said...

Or you can go play Eve Online.

The large-scale PvP battles between sides are a lot more massive that WoW can hope to achieve, due to inadequate coding.

The tactics there exist, and it takes about 1 hour worth of play for a player to drive a T1 Frigate fitted with a webifier.

Not trying to rain on your parade, but Eve was the first MMO to actually implement fights between sides. WoW is not an innovation in this regard.

Gevlon said...

EVE is free-for all. While players can group up, the number of these groups are limitless. EVE is about politics. As the old EVE saying says: "if you are in a fair fight, you are doing it wrong".

Anonymous said...

I don't think you understand the difference between a premade and people realizing your tactics, and counter-acting them. If you yell at people for not defending against the western zerg long enough, eventually they might get it into their pea-sized brains that destroying siege engines before they hit the walls is good. And they'll continue doing that. From there, it depends on the losing team to shake it up. If they refuse to do so, they will never win.

All that is happening is people realizing your tactics have a hole, and responding to them. Do not get high and mighty because your opponents are not retarded.

Squishalot said...

"Secondly, it created the first competitive large-group PvP in WoW."

Only on Magtheridon-EU. We've had competitive WGs for ages on Saurfang-US.

"With the tenacity (and the upcoming limited queue) system of WG (and Tol Barad in Cata) there is a way to do balanced fights between sides in an MMO where naturally cannot be absolutely equal teams."

How do you reconcile this statement with the one you made two days ago about WG being "totally unbalanced" and "Blizzard's greatest design failure"?

Anonymous said...

LotRO player-controlled monsters vs. player avatars system is actually very similar to WG or AV.

Squishalot said...

Sorry for the multiple comments, but just a thought:

"Also, Blizzard has disabled queuing up as raid to the random and weekend BGs, allowing honor and arena point rewards to only those who queue up into a zergfest and lucky enough to get less brain-dead than the other team."

The rationale for this, presumably, is that you can't queue 40 people into a random WSG or AB, and that they don't want people abusing the 'random BG' feature to get a steady stream of pre-made AV wins with bonus honour and arena points.

Gevlon said...

@Squishalot: Never heard of Saurfang-US, nor anyone else. It has no recruitment or any kind of rally to participate. Just because you and some buddies play to win it won't make it an event.

Also, the current WG being completely unbalanced have nothing to do with the perspective. Blizzard is quick to fix things that doesn't work in practice. We simply have to show that defense always win. A buggy system is miles from a non-existing.

For example the Southshore-Tarren Mill World-PvP is non-existing, since there are no rules and objectives, just random players did it for fun. You never get "you win" or "you lost". WG has it. The rest is just balancing issue.

Also, considering it "abuse" to not go with a mindless PuG is bizarre (granted, not on your, but Blizzard's part)

Squishalot said...

@ Gevlon: "It has no recruitment or any kind of rally to participate. Just because you and some buddies play to win it won't make it an event."

Does it need advertising? You're arguing that your PvP efforts on Magtheridon are 'the first competitive large-group world PvP' - unless you're referring to 'large server population', I assumed that you were talking 'two full raids a side' 'large'. Fact of the matter is, there are plenty of competitive WGs out there, so it's not right to claim that this is the first time it's ever happened.

"We simply have to show that defense always win."

You do realise that this argument falls over as soon as one side gives up, right? That defense always wins is no evidence of unbalanced-ness.

Squishalot said...

"Also, considering it "abuse" to not go with a mindless PuG is bizarre (granted, not on your, but Blizzard's part)"

You can join an AV as a raid, if I'm not mistaken. It's just the random BG and the weekend ones that are blocked. What would be the point of low-level arena if you could farm arena points from BGs like that?

Gevlon said...

@Squishalot: yes it does need advertising. If people can't join, because they don't know, if the results are not published, it is not existing on the large scale. It's just another "fun" thing players do.

WG can always be captured by organizing a premade to 3AM and zerg it 50 vs 5. We just have to prove that whoever has WG when prime time starts always keep it until it ends.

Squishalot said...

"yes it does need advertising. If people can't join, because they don't know, if the results are not published, it is not existing on the large scale. It's just another "fun" thing players do."

Not really. It's advertised fairly heavily on our server. Calls to head to WG, at least on Alliance side, come through trade and several General chats of regions regularly. What's the point of telling people on other servers that we've got a competitive Wintergrasp? Unlike your ganking guild, we're not trying to prove anything, we're just enjoying competitive 'world' PvP.

Here's our figures: http://www.timeuntilwintergrasp.com/realm.asp?r=Saurfang

Alliance lead the prime-time stakes generally speaking, but on a fairly regular basis, Horde will steamroll us for a game or two. A fair number of games come down to the final minutes, but details like that aren't recorded anywhere.

"We just have to prove that whoever has WG when prime time starts always keep it until it ends."

The reason why I don't think this works is because you can look at servers like Magtheridon before you arrived, and see that the defenders always win. An observer will never be able to determine the difference between a side that resigns itself to not owning WG, and a side that organises itself perfectly but can't defeat the defender-bias.

Anyway, on that note, I'll depart - taking up too much comment space as it is.

Chewy said...

A very enjoyable post. It's good to read about an objective aimed at improving the game play rather than simply highlighting how bad players can be.

Good luck with this venture.

Anonymous said...

@Gev "While there are news about rated battleground system, it won't be implemented anytime soon, possibly never as it could damage the bottom line by officially ranking morons low. Currently they think they "pwn" just lose because have "low GS nubs" in the team."
It won't hurt anything and it is being implemented. The whole point of rated BG's is so all the players who are bad at Arena's can go do Bg's instead. If you lose a rated Bg your rating apparently doesn't even go down. So I seriously doubt that it would hurt the moron's self esteem as he obviously just needs to grind more and he'll eventually get to the "pro's" level.

Gevlon said...

@Squishalot: "competitive" needs - you know - competitors. If no one knows the competition exists, they won't come. So the winner wins only against the available competitors who can be a very low standard.

As extreme example: 2 0/0/71 DK duel and the winner declares himself world champion.

Andru said...

Fine. You dismissed Eve Online as 'not fair'.


How about Guild Wars then? Very fair, gear has a limited impact on performance, and Alliance Battles were the large (relatively, for that time - 2006) side-vs-side battles.

In fact, bias or not, WG is heavily influenced by one of the GW's Factions side-vs-side maps, namely Fort Aspenwood.

http://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/Fort_Aspenwood

The concept of 'king of the hill' style games is not new at all. Claiming that WoW was the first that thought of it is simply silly.

Anonymous said...

"There is no MMO that's focusing on the battle of 2 sides"

warhammer?

/rev

Jokkl said...

quick question:

are there some other bloggers around writing about the ganking project? need some more reading... adam is doing a great job but maybe there are some otheres.
need a littlebit more befor switching to nongerman realm.

Weapon X said...

Warhammer failed hard, you can't really count it.

Tonus said...

It will be interesting to see how long the horde maintain an interest in meeting your group with organized forces of their own. Many M&S like to think that if they mass up and make one big effort, that will "teach them a lesson" and things will return to what they were previously. When things do NOT change, they are very likely to become disillusioned and give up.

After all, you have to wonder how many of those who organized to win are people who normally prefer to let someone else win WG so they can farm VOA? If they must make the additional effort each time they want to go to VOA, they may find it more of a hassle than they prefer.

People like simple, one-time solutions to problems. When those do not work, stress levels increase rapidly.

Anonymous said...

AoC failed, warhammer did not. It's probably the best non-wow game for wow addicts.

Anonymous said...

@Gev "While there are news about rated battleground system, it won't be implemented anytime soon, possibly never as it could damage the bottom line by officially ranking morons low. Currently they think they "pwn" just lose because have "low GS nubs" in the team."

Actually, you have it backward. The morons will be thrilled to be matched up against other morons and low GS alts. Whereas, the hardcore PVP players who are used to ending their BG's with 10 killing blows and 1 death will be the ones who aren't having as much fun in BG's anymore.

I can't wait for the system because then I'll be able to start doing BG's on my new 80's alts without getting annhilated due to lack of pvp gear up hitting 80.

Phil Ullrich said...

@squishalot:

There's significant interest on the US server side in organized world PVP along the lines of gev's ganking project. Would you say that saurfang/your guild there is interested in bringing people over?

Phelps said...

Ditto for Warhammer being exactly what you described. In fact, at the start of the game (not sure if it is still the case) they locked the end game instance behind a WG like wall, where you had to assault and take the enemy's capitol to get to it. Those certainly were organized between multiple guilds, offense and defense. That was helped by having an in-game mechanism for alliances, though.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon, why don't you play EVE? I've often thought that it would be a better environment in which to practice your Goblin philosophy than WoW.

Anonymous said...

@grayhammer - Saurfang US is a PvE server, according to WoWwiki. I'm interested in World PvP, myself, and I don't count WG. WG is a non-instanced battleground, and no one is there between battles. WoW players need reasons to go places. WAR-like RvR lakes would be a step in the right direction, on any kind of server.

Unknown said...

@ 2nd last Anonymous:

Well actually, you have it backward... ummm... sideward?

No one likes mismatched competition. If you're sporting current season gear and a good pve or arena weapon you won't really have a good time fighting people in pve gear or dusted-off alts in hateful gladiator and naxx weaponry. It's certainly less boring then being farmed by a premade in full wrathful+2200 rated weapon, but that's just because that means nothing you do can even in theory get any results ever. The opposite example is just less boring because while being STUPIDLY easy, it at least requires minimal effort.

My point is: You're forgetting pvp players don't usually play for the loot, but for the game itself. When there is no trace of balance (like now) it ceases to be fun for both sides. In fact there are only 2 groups of people that can benefit from imbalance, and neither are what you would consider "low gs noobs". It's either the guy who just plays arena, has a high rating and the best gear and is just there once per day for the points, and for him it's better to get noobs in the opposing team sometimes then to get only near-equals all the time, OR the "i'm here to pwn noobs" guy who actually has fun tipping defenseless cows and thus would actually rather play a completely random field and just spend the whole BG chasing after the worst geared people to two-shot. I think the first type can, being a PvP player, appreciate playing an actual game of AB (or whatever random BG he gets) once per day, and the second type is both uncommon and impossible to balance a game around even if they were a majority of the playerbase.

Squishalot said...

@grayhammer - I don't have a serious guild on Saurfang - I'm one of those 'special snowflakes' from Gevlon's last blog that isn't guilded, has no progression into ICC, but knows enough to use the relevant resources as necessary to proceed. And I've only got 2 80s, because I don't have that much time to play.

I'm personally not that interested in leveling another 80, and the main reason I'm on Saurfang in the first place (used to be on Dreadmaul, another Oceanic PvP realm) is for PvE with RL friends/family. Love to join a ganking-style guild for against-the-odds world PvP, but yeah, not practical for me.

@Gevlon - You can argue that unless people transfer to your server, you're not getting the cream of the competition. But by the same token, no horde players will ever transfer to Magtheridon, so you suffer from the same 'low standard' problem as well. So your claim to have great Wintergrasp PvP will only be validated once people transfer onto the server to join / counter you.

Nils said...

I'm not usually a fan of you and your .. reasoning (to stay polite).

However, I applaud you for this achievement! Thank you Gevlon!

Glyph, the Architect said...

"Blizzard is quick to fix things that doesn't work in practice. We simply have to show that defense always win. A buggy system is miles from a non-existing."

A quote from your latest WG report:

"10:35 Assault won
13:15 Defense won
15:45 Defense won
18:10 Defense lost
21:10 Assault lost
23:15 Assault lost"

Anonymous said...

@glyph: Tell me, if arthas 10 norm, to be killed, needed bis 264 gear, the 30% icc buff AND world-top players to be downed, would he work as intended? I mean, after all, he WAS downed

Anonymous said...

"Secondly, it created the first competitive large-group PvP in WoW."

The first competitive large-group PvP in WoW would be either the old Tarren Mill/Southshore battles from back in vanilla, or the large 40+ vs 40+ battles between high-end guilds grinding carapace fragments in Silithus.

The latter was very well organized, so I guess that'd be the best early example of it, at least as far as I can imagine.

There were also some pretty large organized guild-on-guild battles in Blackrock Mountain when it was the nexus for two relevant 40-man raids.

Anonymous said...

If this were on US servers I would absolutely join in. However, I play horde on Blackrock which has a 1:5 alliance:horde ratio of players. I have recently started an alliance paladin for the sole purpose of ganking the numerous horde for pure fun. I have quite a bit of money horde side which would be easy to transfer to my alliance noob toon. If any were actually interested in forming some type of gank guild on alliance side Blackrock I would be interested in financing this venture. Name in game is Cyanophage.

Anonymous said...

Gevlon, Arena is far more complicated then you give it credit for.

Most of what goes into high-end arenas (At least, with comps that aren't LUL TRAIN ONE GUY) is a lot of very subtle deviations from what you've described.

The difference between an 1800 team and a 2700 team is that the latter doesn't treat each match by the textbook.

Likewise, most high ranked teams have equivalent gear. Likewise, there are plenty of very high ranked players who (At least, earlier in the season), are undergeared compared to their competition.

Kaaterina said...

So, your guild lost the first battle against a medium organized group. What does that say? Sure, you can handle disorganized groups. But if the first effort against you breaks you - and it wasn't even a guild! - that says a lot about your... movement.