Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

The SotA massacre

Since we found the Preform AV enabler addon, we played lot of matches. Since the weekend BG was SotA, we had SotA massacres. Most people in the guild now has the Defense of the Ancients and Not even a scratch achievements. It wasn't rare that in the top 15 damage done there were 13-14 Ally players. Yes, even our healers outdamaged the enemy, thanks to cannons.

The SotA massacres mostly fit to the low geared new players, but when we couldn't fill the RBG team, instead of getting /trade terribles and lose to stupid mistakes, we went to both gear the new ones and have some free wins over the mindless M&S. Random BGs are actually fun when there are no morons on your team.

Where is the challenge here? Nowhere. It would be an utter failure to lose to the random trash with a pre-made, even if several of our members are new lvl 85s (lot of rerollers joining for the PvP focus). But winning is winning. One playing to win must take every tool to do it. If he doesn't like the ways to win a particular game, he must stop playing it. I quit raiding after I recognized that to win the World of Dancecraft you need a fixed team where everyone know his part of the dance. There is no shame in not playing. There is shame in losing.

I find the premade massacres more important part of fighting the M&S than RBGs, simply because RBGs are rarely used, ignored by most. Random BGs provide a place to the M&S where they had their "fun" at the expense of the "play to win" people. They had honor from kills plus the winning honor bonus gained by other people who carried them. By making premades we hit two group of M&S the same time. The alliance M&S loses their boosters, as we no longer show up in truly random BGs. They will get equal M&S to their team to be easy horde food. The horde M&S who are unlucky enough to be matched against us get massacred. No fun for them, they won't "pwn" anyone today.

Preform AV enabler is a tool allowing good players to take over the random BGs from the M&S. If it would become the standard way of doing BGs, the only way to win would be joining one. Those who are refused from all the premades can only join alone, providing nothing but food for enemy premades. They will finally get what they deserve: losses.

If you are gearing for PvP or getting experience for PvP, you should start organize or join to premades on your server. If there is no such thing on your server, join us. On SotA we had 1500 honor/hour on average, and SotA is a bad BG for honor as you can't win faster than 15 mins if you start as defender. This weekend will be Isle of Conquest. Can't wait for the 8-mins chain wins. The estimated honor/hour will be 2K. Come and see!

Before you start daydreaming that Blizzard will ban this addon: they can't. The addon does nothing more than give a feedback if the others got the "Enter BG - Leave queue" window. If we all got it, we move in, if we don't we requeue. This can be done by simple chat, we queue up as two 5-man groups and when group 1 got his queue, the leaders whisper each other instantly (the "called" is written to the chat, finger over Enter). If they get a whisper in the second they got the call, they signal their group to move. The only things they can do is annoying to everyone: limit the number of people in one BG from one realm to 5 (imagine the queue length on large population PvP realms) or waiting for 100-100 people to be in the queue and call them at once (imagine the effect off-hours).

PS: the naming rule has been relaxed a bit: "Your name cannot contain kiddie-speak, whole sentences or "fun" real world references. Your name can be a human name (Anne), a meaningless word (Rowlar), or a neutral word (Treetop). Can't contain references to class, spec, spells or anything "cool" or "fun"."


27 comments:

Sum said...

"One playing to win must take every tool to do it. If he doesn't like the ways to win a particular game, he must stop playing it. I quit raiding after I recognized that to win the World of Dancecraft you need a fixed team where everyone know his part of the dance. There is no shame in not playing. There is shame in losing."

I just can't understand that this is the same blog that used to report the feats of Undergeared. Seems like a complete reversal in attitude. Makes me sad.

Esteban said...

"There is no shame in not playing. There is shame in losing."

Interesting (and welcome) evolution. Not long ago, those who 'didn't play', or had non-competitive objectives in an MMO, had been compared by our little green friend to child-pestering deviants.

zenga said...

and SotA is a bad BG for honor as you can't win faster than 15 mins if you start as defender.

Never done the math for honor, but SoTA is the best BG xp wise, when you level up. On skillcapped (google the site) there is an indepth movie covering the math for each bg. It was my understanding that honor works in the same way xp is given out, per objective.

About AV-enabled: it's just a matter of time before Blizzard will restrict the amount of players that can queue up together even more. They removed the ability to queue up with a full premade raid, which clearly indicates that they want random bg's to be random, not premade. Even more, they might add random time delays when multiple people from the same realm queue up.

Andru said...

Or, alternatively, Blizzard would disable the preform functionality.

Small wonder they didn't yet, considering they built the queue system EXPRESSLY to disallow raid groups from joining. (As opposed to the past, when only AV was no-raid group.)

It could be that they're not aware yet.

If preform would become meta-game standard, I'd bet my hat that Blizzard would break it.

Sabris said...

Blizzard obviously does want the non M&S to carry the M&S. Therefore I have no doubt that if this addon ever becomes common enough to actually cause noticeable impact, Blizzard will break it.

Gevlon said...

@Andru: see update in text.

@Esteban: there are many games to play and you must choose. Those who play for non-competitive stuff are still considered M&S. I still play competitively, on a different field.

Anonymous said...

Strange... when you raid, you have gold bidding loot rule (you've got even boost runs with selling spots in the raid), but you freeboost newbies/gearless people in pvp, where you only get useless HP? No, don't say converting 375 HP to 250 JP and selling damn jp boots are worth it. So why? Why would anyone (any goblin) in conquest gear free boost people, when they could gear up by themselves in 2-3 day casual bging?
Besides the "punishing m&s" crap that I don't buy I only see 2 reasons:
1. You enjoy being "God", you enjoy these wins that you justify with "opposite team is m&s so it's okay to destroy them", which is nonsense, at least 3/4 of the opposite team can be simply normal people who, for some reason (15 min deserter debuff), even when they look at the scoreboard they stay and fight.
2. You want hype around the addon, probably to get it banned, however I don't see any goblinish reason behind it.

Anonymous said...

That's a whole new interpretation of playing to win. So instead of finding new ways to beat the competition, you simply play on a level where there is no competition.

Squishalot said...

@ Gevlon: They could simply impose a time restriction on joining - if you reject a BG after being offered to enter one, you receive deserter debuff (which is reasonable, since the BG has been created at that point) and cannot join another / requeue for another 15 mins. It won't stop you 100%, but will provide a reasonable disincentive to perform your strategy, whilst retaining the intent of Blizzard's queuing system.

Gevlon said...

@Squishalot: not viable. Why is the "enter battle - leave queue" buttons exist at all? I mean you could just been pulled in the BG instantly.

The reason is that people can queue and do something else or just go AFK. I guess many players would be upset if they would get deserter for finishing a quest or just going to bio-AFK in Stormwind (not inside a BG) and found themselves deserter.

They could limit the number of rejections, like you get a "rejected entering" stacking debuff which disappears on entering or 30 mins, but if it stacks to 3 you get deserter.

However it wouldn't seriously harm the addon as usually we get in together the first or the second try.

Anonymous said...

What I think will happen is: Blizzard implements a "No more than 5 people from the same guild in one random BG" - that will help against most usecases of preform AV.

Anonymous said...

But until then we'll just continue to roll over the M&S using the addon.

Gevlon said...

The "5 from the same guild" can easily be bypassed by having an alt or newbie guild.

Andru said...

@ Gevlon.

You sound like random numbers haven't been invented yet. Allow me:

while not(empty(queue)) do
pop(group, queue)
push(group, RunningBGsWithEnoughFreeSpace[math.random(1, #RunningBGsWithEnoughFreeSpace)])
end

There. Groups will be randomly sent to incomplete BGs, instead of filling them in order(as I assume the case is currently). The drawback is that BGs will not be filled in order (and thus, some BGs will run undermanned), but it achieves the scope. And even if you get the dialog together, your addon will not be sure that all your 'premade' groups get sent to the same BG.

Anonymous said...

Preform AV enabler was hot before 4.0. After 4.0, it suddenly couldn't display # of bg to which each person in group is assigned to. I.e. we tried to premade with it but found out that we can't guarantee to appear in the same bg. After hours of testing we desided that Blizzard really wants premades to be on rated bgs and not facerolling randoms, and gave up on addon.
Looks like it had been repaired since then?

Ciaphascain said...

I dont get the point of that addonn except if you are boosting friends/guildies/costumers/whatever to full honor gear, unless you are one of those that gets cheats for single player games and like playing godmod (remember quake?), because quite honestly i dont see the point in playing something so easy that takes minimal effort.

Gevlon said:
"I quit raiding after I recognized that to win the World of Dancecraft you need a fixed team where everyone know his part of the dance. There is no shame in not playing. There is shame in losing."

There is no shame in losing, if the playing field is even, you will win some and lose some, otherwise there is no challenge in either end of the spec, always wining is fun for while but gets old after a while and always losing gets old even faster.

Where there is shame is in being wrong and never coming out and saying "I was wrong", instead always finding some "other ppl" fault for your failures, like when you started the PUG to raid and the purpose was to show that a PUG could do as well as a guild, well, that failed, didnt it? never saw you writing here "I was wrong", I was blizzards fault for that, for not making all fights patchwerk like, wasnt it?

About the addon being around for long or not, that will depend if blizard deems it use "game breaking" enough or not, because they can and will break it if they want, even if they break a couple of other ones in the process, anyone remembers AVR?

Rorik said...

It's funny to see how many of you are thinking of ways for Blizzard to ban the addon. It kind of proves Gevlon's philosophy about the vast majority of WoW players and their desire to have fun on their terms.

If you like to win, don't want to deal with idiots who don't read BG chat, don't want to deal with kids who give up after the first flag cap or go for a joy ride in a demo in Strand, then use Preform Enabler. There is no other way to deal with their stupidity. My guild has tried. We have macros for which door to attack in SotA and we communicate that I'm the DK Blood tank with 4000 resilience and we still get children with 100k health grabbing the flag when I'm 3 steps behind them.

Blizzard's entire pvp game design has led us to this. If they don't like it then they need to revamp their entire pvp system to make addons like Preform Enabler not necessary.

Anonymous said...

"Blizzard's entire pvp game design has led us to this. If they don't like it then they need to revamp their entire pvp system to make addons like Preform Enabler not necessary."

And this would be.... Rated BG? Exatcly thatswhy you have the option to separate yourself from them. But if you join into a random, expect that there will be clueless people. They are really frustrating yes, but YOU have another option that you just refuse to use, while you enjoy winning with ridicilous overpower, and by glitching the game.

Ciaphascain said...

@Rorik
If you read the coments carefully, you will see that what most show is not a wish for blizz to break the addon, but amazement that they haven't done so yet.

"About the addon being around for long or not, that will depend if blizard deems it use "game breaking" enough or not, because they can and will break it if they want, even if they break a couple of other ones in the process, anyone remembers AVR?"

The previous text is copy paste from my previous comment, and thats what most other posts say as well.

About your point of:
Rorik said:

"If you like to win, don't want to deal with idiots who don't read BG chat, don't want to deal with kids who give up after the first flag cap or go for a joy ride in a demo in Strand, then use Preform Enabler. There is no other way to deal with their stupidity. My guild has tried."

I must say that the solution for that is not AV Enabler, it is Rated ones except for the always wining part i must guess since you need something that enables you to pwn n00bs.

" It kind of proves Gevlon's philosophy about the vast majority of WoW players and their desire to have fun on their terms."

I dont see what is so surprising or new about this, after all, if I am paying for a game, then it is because I enjoy it, and for most persons for something to be enjoyable it must be in their own terms or close enough.

"Blizzard's entire pvp game design has led us to this."

Yes indeed it has because their intent is to provide an even playing ground (or as close to it as the gear will allow for) so that what matters is skill, either in mindlessly zerging Drek or turtling up in bridge in AV or team playing in Gilneas or AB, or in just trying to GY camp in WSG or dominate middle in TH.

What you are complaining is not about blizz, its about your inability see the error in this:
"One playing to win must take every tool to do it." as in relation to any relaxation activity, I will "play" to win and use everything in my reach to win, short of breaking the law and/or lie during my professional activity but never during the relaxation period I have or do you think it's ok to use steroids and other performance enhancing drugs to win during the sunday afternoon soccer matches with friends?

Anonymous said...

"Can't contain references to class, spec, spells or anything "cool" or "fun"."

As always, I wonder how "Stabsahlot" for a rogue passes the name rule.

chewy said...

Like Estaban I took umbridge with your comment that "There is no shame in not playing. There is shame in losing." because frankly it sounds like an excuse.

To have never tried is not shameful but to have tried and failed must register the same degree of shame.

Personally I don't find either shameful because shame is merely a received wisdom.

Rorik said...

"And this would be.... Rated BG?"

Thank you for reinforcing my point. Rated Battlegrounds are part of the PvP system that Blizzard designed that is pushing us to use Preform Enabler. In order to be competitive in any of the rated PvP systems, you have to have a minimum amount of gear. Just about everyone realizes this and getting into a trade chat RBG without over 3600 resilience is very difficult. New level 85's will take forever to gear up using regular battlegrounds, even on weekends. Because the bonus honor for a bg win is go much better than for a loss and because undergeared players usually get less honor due to fewer kills during the bg, the natural solution is to group with the guild/team and use Preform Enabler to greatly increase the honor/hour, allowing more of the group to participate in RBG's on a competitive level.
Another good use of Enabler is to make the grind to save honor/justice points for the next season tolerable.

Normal battlegrounds are just a means to an end and part of the grind that Blizzard has built into the game to keep people around longer. Beating up the disorganized mob on the opposing team doesn't do a whole lot for me, but losing due to the M&S on my team is far worse and feels like a big waste of time and as we all know, time is money friend!

Looking back at Gevlon's gear nerf posts, if PvP gear were nerfed and had a linear scale then it wouldn't matter as much because the gear disparity between seasons wouldn't be as great and new players wouldn't get blown up as fast as they are in the current system. I'm sure there are plenty of better ways to fix PvP.

Anonymous said...

Sounds like "I cannot win rated BGs so I try to make a rated BG using premade AV" to me. Which is furthermore underlined by your battleground rating of 1422.

If I come across a premade I don't even bother to play. It is a waste of my time. So I either sabotage my team efforts, or leave the BG. It might as well be that the opponent sees "oh, premade, screw it" and does the same leading to even more wins.

There are multiple ways to combat Premade AV enabled. Here is a simple one: you make a grace period between the queue pops up between all participants of new random BG, and you limit the amount of people who can queue together for a random BG further. The result to this particular solution would be that you'd have to wait longer until your BG starts. You can thank that minor side effect to the kiddies who wanted to turn random BG into rated BG even though rated BG are now available.

@ Squishalot, great idea. Especially since you can pause the queue time in 4.3.

@ Ciaphascain, yep, I remember AVR.

Holly said...

Ciaphascain said:

"Yes indeed it has because their intent is to provide an even playing ground (or as close to it as the gear will allow for) so that what matters is skill, either in mindlessly zerging Drek or turtling up in bridge in AV or team playing in Gilneas or AB, or in just trying to GY camp in WSG or dominate middle in TH."

I have to disagree with this statement. If blizzard wanted to make this a truly skill based game, they would have universal gear or brackets of gear instead of aquiring piece by piece, and giving people who started earlier a clear advantage over people who start later. This game sadly does not fit esport competition very well and Blizzard knows it, and it's not because the engine doesn't allow. But with so much RNG running WoW, and the gear variances and the very very loose rating system, I can't say there's anything level about WoW PvP at all.

Anonymous said...

Rorik, yes, fresh 85s need gear, BUT if you queue up as a fresh 85 in questing gear, you have no more use than a fully 371 geared who went afk. So what you expect is a boost. A FREE boost where you can get gear WITHOUT EFFORT, without letdown. If you are EQUALLY gearless in a group, is it fair to call THEM morons?
I farmed full 371 gear in 2-3 days of casually playing AV on my hunter. And I tried to be useful, I defended towers, I attacked towers, even in shit gear.
You are bigger m&s with expecting to fall 371 gear in your hands for free (with the difficulty of tricking out a training dummy) than the ones Gevlon use to talk about.

And good to see that Gevlon "forgot" to answer my question: what is good for a goblin in boosting guildies in pvp for free?

Cyrell said...

I find this addon to be obnoxious and can't wait for the day that it is made useless by an API hotfix or something.

Not everyone who plays this game enjoys being in groups of 10-15 raiding or playing Battleground. I've played this game five years mostly as a "World PvPer/ganker." Silithus and the old EPL were my style of play. Halaa was epic. Tol Barad less so. But now with stupidly hard guards in every town, protected vendors and even Darkmoon Fair being taken away from the old school PvP folks like myself (hello Sanctuary island), there's not much left to do on this game.

Going into a Battleground, staying away from the zerg and/or occasional premade and doing your own thing is one of my last forms of entertainment. And the addon you're using is just another way for premades to become extremely popular and take away this last form of entertainment for many people who only play with a few friends or alone.

I'm hoping they do ban it or if they don't they recognize that it severely goes against the spirit of the game. You have Rated Battlegrounds to play with; use them instead of trashing random pugs.

Also, a few days ago you posted that you have new players doing RBG with blue gear and gearing up. Now they need to gear up using HK gear and normal BG? I thought the Conquest stuff had better stats?

*If you've ever played War3 or DotA, you also know how obnoxious and annoying third party addons that redefine the spirit of the game can be. Heaven forbid you happen to live outside of the UK if you try to log into a DotA match on one of the European servers. Instant ban and kick just for having the wrong IP (even though your latency and ISP is scores better than BT Internet).

This ruins the spirit and purpose of normal BG, whether you admit it or not. It's not "playing to win" as much as it is "being a dick."

Anonymous said...

"Thank you for reinforcing my point. Rated Battlegrounds are part of the PvP system that Blizzard designed that is pushing us to use Preform Enabler. In order to be competitive in any of the rated PvP systems, you have to have a minimum amount of gear."

Sorry, bad argument. There are tons of people out there doing rated BG, and they never used this addon. For a good time in 4.0 it was broken, and as far as I remember it used to be Alterac Valley only.

Instead, do a few TB (600 HP a win) and you have full 371. Getting full HP gear is a grind, yes, as it should be. The rest of the CP gear you have to get by doing arenas (before rated). However, even those you can get with a little bit of PvP gear as long as you and your partner(s) are skilled. This is because there are people running around in arenas doing the same as you (without full PvP gear), or simply not skilled or without a PvP spec. If you lower your rating a bit you get queued with likewise opponents. During an AV weekend you can also easily get HP capped in a few runs.

Even then, full CP gear says nothing. Glotan has full 384 and only 1498 rating: http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/agamaggan/Glotan/advanced

No, it is simple: if Blizzard wanted you to be able to queue with more than 5 people in a random BG, they would have made it possible! You'd be able to make a raid group and queue for a random BG. Guess what? If you want to do that, it is possible, but then it is called a rated BG. That is what premades are now in patch 4.0+. Therefore, by using this addon you're actively exploiting game mechanics. Should I come across you (I am alliance, so I doubt it, but if I see you as alliance I will do too), I will write down your names and report you, and leave the BG because I don't want to waste my time (would rather spend it to get cheaters banned though). Again, simple.

Losing is part of the game. If you queue with random people, you are at their mercy and they are at yours. Don't like it? Don't play with randoms! Why do you think I am not excited about LFR at all? Gevlon is. Well, I tried it on PTR, and it is madness to play with 24 unknown people some of whom barely speak English. Besides that, LFR is also a heavily nerfed normal whereas for me normal raid is just a bit too unchallenging and faceroll.