Greedy Goblin

Monday, November 21, 2011

Random BG massacre reloaded

The PuG and PvP update: the TBBars addon is available (actually it is long ago, but I just learned it). It shows the capture status of all 3 bases if there is someone with the addon is there to report it.



I wrote a post about the random BGs being unstable. They allow several meta-gaming tricks that practically guarantee victory at the expense of players with less meta-gaming abilities: new players and M&S. The easiest move is to create a pre-made: going in with a cooperating, non-retarded raid and smash the AFK/bridgefighting/green geared/retarded opponents.

However I also acknowledged that the above theoretical truth is practically irrelevant as most players who are capable of forming/joining such premades are not playing random BGs due to the lack of rewards. Good players have arena and rated BG teams, OK-ish players play 2v2 with some /trade guy at 1200 to get 1350 CP and let the rest rot. Therefore only new alts and rerolled characters of good players are interested in random BGs and they are way too few for having any relevant effect.

Now Blizzard went out of its mind and offers 100 CP for the first random BG win of the day and 50 for the rest of them. This means that random BGs will be a useful way to get CP for OK-ish players and undergeared alts/rerollers. Also, players who can't RBG this week due to lack of time or meta-gaming reasons (one key member missing, we would lose rating) can still cap CP via random BG.

Now, with a pre-made you can win a random BG in 10 mins, unless it's SotA and you start defending. If you play an hour a day, you can get 100+5*50 = 350 CP/hour. It's comparable to RBG where you get 400 for a win, a match can last 25 mins, and you lose every second one. It also provides a no-risk, no-pressure "pwning" fun, you don't just win, you smash your opponents. If OK-ish players join the pre-mades, they become significant factor, allowing permanently existing premades (one where people leave and join between matches, even the leader leaves at some point but the group keeps running for whole prime time).

This, mixed with the fact that in the first week everyone can use honor, which is a nice "startup marketing" campaign next to premades, the next random BG season can be the season of premades, bringing nothing but being pwned to the ones the feature want to reward: the newbies and the M&S. I for sure will organize such premades, as it's a great recruiting tool. Many players who joined our premades and experienced the effectivity of our team joined our guild too.



It would be "moron of the day", but can be named "the reason why random BGs with randoms are terrible". We did a crazy-slag defense, and the specimen and his buddy went wrong bases, then attacked the sieges at the towers. Luckily the horde was stupid enough and driven sieges only when it was too late, the towers were at 40-50% when the 15 mins passed. In the /raid he also gave stupid orders called everyone names for not following him. Luckily only his buddy followed him, the rest did as I told in /rw. This obviously bothered him, so he sent whispers, revealing his lack of knowing Armory, blatant refusal to learn and complete butchering of English:
You don't want to play with him? Join a premade!

22 comments:

Andru said...

Can't argue with that. Back when I argued against this project I had no idea that Blizzard would do something so mindnumbingly, utterly stupid.

The more I see what the direction of WoW takes, the less I am inclined to resubscribe.

My god.

In any case, now that AV preform enabler will become popular, I am waiting to see in which creative way Blizzard will break it.

Anonymous said...

Don't argue with an idiot. He will bring you to his level and win the argue with experience on that level.

suetekh

Azuriel said...

Back when I argued against this project I had no idea that Blizzard would do something so mindnumbingly, utterly stupid.

Outside of Gevlon's pissing in the ocean project, what is "mindnumbingly, utterly stupid" about rewarding more than the joke amount of 25 CP for BG wins? I enjoyed rolling around in BGs on the warlock until I got to the point where I couldn't buy anything more with honor - the honor wasn't the reason I queued for those BGs, but it made the wins/losing meaningful.

The funny thing is that Blizzard may not break the addon precisely because of what Gevlon is doing and what it means under this new BG paradigm. The more people enter into premades, the more they want to enter premades reliably, the stronger the incentive to join guild-based premades. Once you're in a guild of active members, suddenly things like fixed-team Arena/raid groups make sense.

Anonymous said...

I feel as though someone in Blizzard thinks that people play games for fun and they should be rewarded for doing just that. Very noble and idealistic; it would work if people played the path of most fun. It is shame that significant numbers don't play for fun but instead grind the path of maximum efficiency. Unfortunately it looks as though this latest reward scheme will send those two groups crashing into each other and the "fun" players will get smashed.

NetherLands said...

Good to see others have come to the same conclusion.

As said before, this is a classic Blizzard mistake (making gear more accessible is generally GOOD for PvE, it's generally BAD for PvP) that will only make things worse for 'casuals' yet is cheered by M&S.

It will raise the Average Gearing Level (as more people will have Conquest gear) meaning you will have more gear to grind to stay competetitve yet paradoxically it will mean less to have it.

Do M&S get this?

No, 'lulz i finally will have top Epics!' completely ignoring that if gear gets easier for you to get, it also gets easier for your opponents to get and so the whole excercise gets moot at best.

And of course the other problem with this dumb move is that it provides even more incentives for premading in a PUG-environment.

Like Andu, the thing I am waiting for is seeing in which way Blizz will 'break' AV Enabler etc. . Perhaps by limiting the amount of players of a certain Realm/BG.

Anonymous said...

@NetherLands
there seems to be lots of hate to rbg/arena for whatever reason. Some played arena just to get gear for random bgs, now they can just do bgs.

As a arena player this change will hurt me of course. The smaller the arena population the less glad slots will be aviable.

Andru said...

@Azuriel

Let's remember the last time Blizzard mixed up people with different goals in the same queue, with the same rewards, hoping that the good players boosted the bads.

LFD was born. Look at how THAT turned out.

Mixing people in standard BGs will just end up in tears. AGAIN.

It's not even the fact that it promotes gear inflation. Although this is part of the reason. (From my point of view, equal gear in PvP makes the fights more interesting and promotes skill as a differentiator. Of course, this change is nothing more than implementing a Red Queen's Race, a race in which one must do all the farming they can just to remain in the same place of relative power. It's an underhanded method intended to keep people playing, nothing more. If Blizzard intended everyone to have equal gear, they could just make one single PvP set/season then make it mandatory in structured PvP.)

While the above is underhanded, but affecting only the morons, the mistake I'm complaining about is mixing up people with different agendas, in an effort to subsidize morons' gearing up on the backs of competent (if roughly inefficient) Rated BG players.

As always, the middle class will be the one that will be decimated by strife and conflict.

As opposed to Azuriel I'm almost willing to bet Blizzard will disable AV preform enabler, if precedence is anything to be judged by.

Remember LFD? First, morons got damage/health/healing bonuses. Then individual people started getting vote kicking penalties. Then, GROUPS started getting vote kicking penalties. Then, tanks and healers were pulled away from structured groups and given to morons.

Just how many changed are there needed, Azuriel before you get the point that Blizzard is making?

This was PvE, and lo and behold, PvP gets touched by the same design flaw. Blizzard doesn't want good people meta-gaming and smashing terribles into the ground. They don't even want the good players playing against other good players in a queue of their own. They want good people on both sides of the barricade, smashing each other's faces in, while morons lol around in caves and on hills.

Battleship-AzjolNerub said...

Following The Pugs example my own guild has started using av enabler, originally for somewhere to unwind or chill when the RBG's have been stressful.

With the changes to rewards in normals my guild, which normally RBG's 6 days a week, will definitely take at least two of those days for "roflStomping".

Really not sure why blizzard does these things, I'm sure the developers are smart people surely they could see what this change would bring, perhaps they really are just trying to cater to the PvP crowd, with all the excellent changes in Mists I wouldn't be surprised.

Energybomb said...

oh goodness grace, that moron of the day is just.....too good (bad?)

It reminds me of a guy I was forced to play with in a random dungeon. He just couldn't believe that doing some "unfun" rotations would be more beneficial for the team than making more flashy explosions.

Ermak said...

Well, I've checked this guy's armory and surprise: he has 1600+ rating. So him not knowing what S.Major is rather strange. Or an act of trolling.
And if he's so confident going against 2 hunters I'm surely will have lots of fun dueling with him.

Yaggle said...

When you have no argument and no remaining insults....."i bet u RP too". I hate people like this.

Anonymous said...

Dear Gevlon,

the moron of the day guy has 1651 rating in rbg (http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/agamaggan/Bjpwz/advanced), more then you and anyone in your guild. Using your definition ("Good players have arena and rated BG teams, OK-ish players play 2v2 with some /trade guy at 1200 to get 1350 CP and let the rest rot"), he is definitely a Good Player.
How do you explain that he behaved as a M&S ? Maybe being rude sometime does not pay ?

Shintar said...

One thing to keep in mind is that if entering randoms in premades becomes "the thing" to do, it is likely to happen on both sides, increasing your chances to run into an enemy premade and ruining the efficiency of your conquest farm.

NetherLands said...

@Anonymous

The dislike for Arena has a different reason than the dislike for Rated BG's:

Arena is a different animal from Battlegrounds (which are generally - AV IoC/Win by Reinforcements excepted, and even then optional tactics) in that it is a Deathmatch type of game, and many BG-players dislike Deathmatch games (it's partially were all the annoyance about 'midfield farmers' and 'roadwarriors' stems from).

Rated BG's on the other hand were looked forward to with much anticipation when announced, but the Full Raid requirement (esp.) made a lot of people loose interest, and when the resulting small pool of players meant that teams of highly varied rating would often meet eachother, even more people lost interest.

Yet Cata had removed the Ratings requirement on the top-PvP gear in Blizz's futile Quest of higher accessibility, meaning that it ended up more in PUG Battlegrounds raising the AGL etc. so more people felt compelled to farm Conquest - and finding 1 partner > 9 partners.

Before Cata, you were only likely to meet Arena geared people with any regularity (at least in Europe) just after the Season had ended, because the ratings requirement made it so that only people who weren't terribly interested in Battlegrounds had it. I liked that situation better, and no, I wasn't one of those Arena geared people.

But yeah, more grind = happier Blizz so they will continue to do things like this.

chewy said...

Your example epitomises a type of fool we've all met in either random dungeons or battlegrounds. It's the reason that most of us resort to a guild of like minded people, so we can play while avoiding these fools.

It seems almost counter intuitive but it's exactly because these people are so obnoxious that Blizzard want to look after them. The more intelligent look after themselves, these people need looking after such that they continue to pay their subscription.

Which is why I find myself nodding in agreement with Andru's comments - Blizzard want the more capable to help the idiots.

Lars Norberg said...

Now that discussion was one of the best so far. Loved it! It completely took the focus away from your initial subject actually. And it made my day!

I'm happy you shared the wisdom of Bjpwz with the world! He probably even thinks he really put you in your place in that "discussion". Instead he unknowningly provided good entertainment for all your readers, hehe!

"Yes. And my main is GOD"

Rodos said...

@Andru - For most players LFD is a massive success, and a huge improvement to the game. Spending 30 min in queue, and dealing with a couple of wipes in a bad group, is far, far better than what Vanilla and BC was like for those who didn't have regular guild groups to run with.

I spent several days trying to drum up a DM group for my Paladin charger quest pre BC. At the end of BC it was almost impossible to PuG a heroic MgT if you were DPS with no CC. I once spent 5 hours wiping in H ShadowLab with 2 tanks and a fury warrior dw daggers because that was all we could find.

CP for RBG might be a bad idea, but not because it's like LFD.

Anonymous said...

I just can't see the reason why didn't you put him on ignore after about first five lines.

When you argue with an idiot, first he brings you to his level and then beats with his experience. (yes, you did get carried away in this conversation, or so the chat looks like)

Jabarj said...

This post of yours actually made me go check your armory and noticed you didn't kill regtular rag... at this pont, so close to next patch it is probably moot, but on the future, you should consider forming a group to go after the end boss on regular mode, his weapons are always an upgrade...

Andru said...

I am nor arguing against LFD, but against LFD's design.

From my POV, when LFD was implemented it was a perfectly usable tool, able to be used by everyone equally, depending on their agenda. I liked it back then.

Every subsequent change (except maybe the extra tank/healer awards which I'm more ambivalent towards) restricted the power that groups of friends had and boosted the power of random lollers.

I used LFD a lot in the beggining. However, by the time I quit WoW, I didn't even queue in LFD anymore, disgusted by the expectation Blizzard had of me boosting morons. (And I was incensed when Blizzard made it so that 'needing' on BoEs made them soulbound, for reasons I have explained at large on the forums at the time.)

The idea behind LFD is solid, but most subsequent changes just felt like slaps. Unfortunately, the trend continues. VP from raiding is being slashed in 4.3, with the puerile excuse that they want gear from drops to be more important. This lie is so transparent that I can't believe that they believe anyone would buy it. It is a stinking, dastardly, deliberate plan to drag even more raiders into LFD.

"Oh we want people to do what content they like. What? You like raiding? SUCKER, LESS VP. Now to the LFDmobile with you!"

I desperately want to like WoW. It is a good game, but I just can't get past the fact that Blizzard thinks every above-average player to be a drooling, gullible ineffectual.

Anonymous said...

The moron of the day showed little social skills, and did not come across as intelligent. Judging from the evidence he is not team player, or at the very least he lacks required strategic insight and ability to listen to a leader (although listening to bad calls from a leader is also stupid).

However, his rated BG is 1651. Now, this isn't good at all, but it still is ~130 more than you have. This suggests you don't need to be intelligent, nor have much social skills, in order to be more succesful in rated BGs (or PvP) than you are (not very succesful). What can this fellow have what others don't have? His gear is much worse: he is in full 371, has 2 unenchanted items. You are full 384. I can only come up with one answer: dexterity.

As for The PuG not killed Ragnaros normal post-nerf they have only killed Alysrazor and Majordomo once and their focus lies now in PvP (premades, since rated BG they're not able to get past 1600 rating).

Nate Kerkhofs said...

the fun part about these M&S that play really bad and whisper profanities to you is that you can report them afterwards for those insults. so while they detract from the overall experience, you can get back at them afterwards with a 3-72 hour suspension, depending on their record.