Shelter your weak, your young and your old!
Each of you shall pay the final sum!
Cry for mercy! The reckoning has come!"
My original idea to gank the horde into the ground was killing-reporting the bots, forcing the horde to come out to farm themselves and die. Most lvl 80 players don't farm the materials they use, just buy it from the AH cheap. The artificially low prices are allowed by bots. The idea based on the assumption of "subtle tolerance" of boting by Blizzard, meaning that if you bot without annoying other players, they look the other way. So all we have to do is getting evidence and report them, and Blizzard will be forced to ban them to keep their face. Unfortunately, Blizzard tolerates even reported bots who are farming 24/7, always the same place, always the same pattern and do nothing else. So the official position is "all go" for bots. (Yes, Historyy is still up)
Destroying the economy is therefore impossible, as it's not player, but bot-powered. While the bot can be corpsecamped, it has all the time in the world, so we surely get bored before he does.
However Blizzard given us a new opportunity: to own Wintergrasp. We can already capture wintergrasp with only 6-10 people against 60+ hordies. We have 15+ tenacity, 3 of us grind some horde for promotion, get sieges from broken temple and go for the fortress. Other 3 go to the back and kill all the horde who want to take Westpark, Eastpark or destroying the back towers. The other players (not from our guild) are graveyard-camped by 90% of the lolling hordies, while the 10% intelligent hordies are desperately - but hopelessly - try to destroy the back towers or the sieges. It sucks to be them. They are skilled players, they don't just run some PvE rotation, they use every little ability their class have to defeat us. But there is nothing they can do against 15+ tenacity, 1 vs 1 or even 1 vs 2. And they can't convince the GY camping M&S to do anything useful.
And this is the current WG. The next patch will equalize WG. If there are 30 alliance, there will be 30 horde allowed to WG. There will be a minimum cap, 25 players, so i f only 5 alliance queue in, it will be 5 vs 25 (I assume with tenacity).
On the server, there are 3-5 players interested in WG outside of our guild. The only raiding guild make premade once a week, but otherwise most of the WG population is our guild. With more members, we could provide 20+ players to WG. This means that in a 25 v 25 battle, 80% of the alliance is a PvP geared and skilled player aimed to win, following a strategy. On the other hand the 25 hordies are pug, mostly M&S attacking anything with red name above its head and has the tendency to prefer a prot paladin over a siege engine as target.
The aim of the ganking guild will be: no VoA for the horde on prime time. Every day from 18:00 to 22:00 they can't do VoA, because they won't have WG! On weekends, from 10:00 to 22:00 they can just whine and spam their /2 "why can't you just l2p WG idiots". The mighty horde will have to do VoA at 3 AM.
Please note that premades are impossible. Even if a properly geared and skilled horde guild queues up with 30 members, there will be other 30-50 M&S queued in too, the 25 spots will be distributed randomly, so the team will be 10 "premade" and 15 M&S.
What we need for that: at first, players. We currently have 15 lvl 80-es, to keep VoA, we'd need 50+ (since we will not play 24/7). We have 85 members and I kick inactives, so it means 70 more growing, active lowbies.
What can we offer: positive PvP experience. The best ally side PvP strategy is often "let's lose fast", as most of the "team" are M&S who just run around like headless chicken. Our guild can offer premades that can win BGs. Also, the best honorfarm is Wintergrasp and the very purpose of the guild is winning WG. So if you are an arena player, you can transfer your team here and you can easily get the honor needed for your offset items. If you want to be an arena player, you can gear up here easily and can also find teammates. After all it's a PvP guild.
We also run badge-raids, aimed on the weekly. We already did this week's weekly, so it's up and running. We'll have badge raid to Naxx for new lvl 80-es to gear up and ICC for the geared players to have more frost badges, PvE items, Ashen rep. Of course in Cataclysm we will move to Tol Barad, making sure that the horde can only go there around 3:00.
Important update: Gankscore is cancelled, due to a bug. It calculated World PvP deaths from (all_death_from_players-BG_death). One can cheat by killing himself in EoS by jumping down. It's a BG death but not from players. So no more gankscore!
Create a new character or transfer to Magtheridon-EU ally side and catch Gevlon. Usually online somewhere around 19:00. You can also ask around in the guild.
PS: how to measure the success? The guild calendar can be used for that. If a member participates in the battle, creates a "guild event" with the current date and time and write into the description: "WG [side][winner]". Of course if other member did it, don't double. I will simply summarize these events and post the results on Sunday. It will be like:
Monday: 17:32 Assault won
19:26 Defending won
21:40 Defending lost
Tuesday:...
Destroying the economy is therefore impossible, as it's not player, but bot-powered. While the bot can be corpsecamped, it has all the time in the world, so we surely get bored before he does.
However Blizzard given us a new opportunity: to own Wintergrasp. We can already capture wintergrasp with only 6-10 people against 60+ hordies. We have 15+ tenacity, 3 of us grind some horde for promotion, get sieges from broken temple and go for the fortress. Other 3 go to the back and kill all the horde who want to take Westpark, Eastpark or destroying the back towers. The other players (not from our guild) are graveyard-camped by 90% of the lolling hordies, while the 10% intelligent hordies are desperately - but hopelessly - try to destroy the back towers or the sieges. It sucks to be them. They are skilled players, they don't just run some PvE rotation, they use every little ability their class have to defeat us. But there is nothing they can do against 15+ tenacity, 1 vs 1 or even 1 vs 2. And they can't convince the GY camping M&S to do anything useful.
And this is the current WG. The next patch will equalize WG. If there are 30 alliance, there will be 30 horde allowed to WG. There will be a minimum cap, 25 players, so i f only 5 alliance queue in, it will be 5 vs 25 (I assume with tenacity).
On the server, there are 3-5 players interested in WG outside of our guild. The only raiding guild make premade once a week, but otherwise most of the WG population is our guild. With more members, we could provide 20+ players to WG. This means that in a 25 v 25 battle, 80% of the alliance is a PvP geared and skilled player aimed to win, following a strategy. On the other hand the 25 hordies are pug, mostly M&S attacking anything with red name above its head and has the tendency to prefer a prot paladin over a siege engine as target.
The aim of the ganking guild will be: no VoA for the horde on prime time. Every day from 18:00 to 22:00 they can't do VoA, because they won't have WG! On weekends, from 10:00 to 22:00 they can just whine and spam their /2 "why can't you just l2p WG idiots". The mighty horde will have to do VoA at 3 AM.
Please note that premades are impossible. Even if a properly geared and skilled horde guild queues up with 30 members, there will be other 30-50 M&S queued in too, the 25 spots will be distributed randomly, so the team will be 10 "premade" and 15 M&S.
What we need for that: at first, players. We currently have 15 lvl 80-es, to keep VoA, we'd need 50+ (since we will not play 24/7). We have 85 members and I kick inactives, so it means 70 more growing, active lowbies.
What can we offer: positive PvP experience. The best ally side PvP strategy is often "let's lose fast", as most of the "team" are M&S who just run around like headless chicken. Our guild can offer premades that can win BGs. Also, the best honorfarm is Wintergrasp and the very purpose of the guild is winning WG. So if you are an arena player, you can transfer your team here and you can easily get the honor needed for your offset items. If you want to be an arena player, you can gear up here easily and can also find teammates. After all it's a PvP guild.
We also run badge-raids, aimed on the weekly. We already did this week's weekly, so it's up and running. We'll have badge raid to Naxx for new lvl 80-es to gear up and ICC for the geared players to have more frost badges, PvE items, Ashen rep. Of course in Cataclysm we will move to Tol Barad, making sure that the horde can only go there around 3:00.
Important update: Gankscore is cancelled, due to a bug. It calculated World PvP deaths from (all_death_from_players-BG_death). One can cheat by killing himself in EoS by jumping down. It's a BG death but not from players. So no more gankscore!
Create a new character or transfer to Magtheridon-EU ally side and catch Gevlon. Usually online somewhere around 19:00. You can also ask around in the guild.
PS: how to measure the success? The guild calendar can be used for that. If a member participates in the battle, creates a "guild event" with the current date and time and write into the description: "WG [side][winner]". Of course if other member did it, don't double. I will simply summarize these events and post the results on Sunday. It will be like:
Monday: 17:32 Assault won
19:26 Defending won
21:40 Defending lost
Tuesday:...
43 comments:
Wow Gevlon, it looks like this PVP project is getting well under way.
In a way you remind me somewhat of Daish of Frostmourne (who has made videos of himself in demo's in WG taking down buildings whilst Horde attack players around the demo), and reminds me of the SotA I did last night, where once again the Horde of BG9 US attacked players rather than demos (made it to the last gate before they killed our first demo.)
Good luck with it and keep us posted.
Damn. I wish Gevlon was based on US servers... He generates more interest in oddball shit than anyone else in the game. (Yah, yah, we could try to replicate his goals - but easier said than done without his blog and his personality driving it.)
Hopefully a majority of the classes that are allowed are gnomes... it annoys the Horde, is nominally easier to avoid targeting by M&S, and a Confederation of Gnomes running around would just look funny. Screenshots Gevlon!
@Narx: that's the point, most players are terribly stupid. They don't have a clue about the BG/WG and if anyone tries to teach them the answer is "stop nerd rage lol". The horde is doomed on Maghteridon EU!
@Yensid: create a trial account on EU and see the latency. If it's low, buy an EU account and join.
LOL, Daish from Frostmourne! I'm on that realm myself and he is famous both on the horde and ally side. The allies herald him as a saviour and the horde mock him in trade. I've been on both ally and horde (faction transfer).
The funniest thing he did was to organise the allies to control WG several times after the maintenance. He then made a horde alt and went into trade:
TheDaish: LFM voa25
TheDaish: O wait...
But to be honest, I don't really feel the impact all that much
Gevlon, I'm wondering if I should transfer my rogue to Magtheridon. He's wearing mostly naxx tier stuff with a few pvp items. He's been inactive since December or so. Do your guild have gear/gem/enchant/ minimums etc?
@Azzur: you don't feel the impact because losing VoA sometimes is nothing. Losing VoA always in prime time and have to organize a guild run at 3 AM is something very different.
@Kenny: I wrote "Create a new character or transfer". Think! If we accept a lvl 1, will I accept a Naxx geared lvl 80?
One thing I feel like adding to controlling WG in prime time.
You would need to control it at around midnight as well, countless times we finished raid in my ex-guild by doing VoA, when the raid was tired at 23:45 to go at Mimiron HM for example, and chilling on Emalon left everyone with a good taste in their mouth before going to bed.
Mocking the M&S with this is one thing, but mocking the hc guilds also could be more fun
Another thing that is nice is beginning to see the other Alliance players online respond to what is happening. For us to win WG three times in a row yesterday in prime time was huge. The ball has started rolling.
Things are slowly changing on horde side. Horde are looking for us (lowbie) to gank. I know it for sure as yesterday there were 2 lvl 80's on hellfire peninsula lookin for me as they ignored others allies questing on the same area. It's quite exciting now because i joined the project mainly for having a challenge and to enrage the ensidia fan boys (and/or M&S as well).
@lux: such hordies belong to the gchat. I'm sure we have some eager lvl 80-es to gank them.
You have to careful with how many WG you consequantly win. Since WG is currently still mostly held and defended by the Horde, the scale is very much in favor of the Alliance. When you start tipping it though it will move towards Horde and if overdo it, then it will make your goal impossible to achieve.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=23329393344
Bascially, what you want to do is only win the battles during prime time and never else. If you can keep your daily win ratio under 50% (which at roughly 8 sieges per day translates to 4 wins), there should be no problem in keeping WG occupied during prime time. With 2 wins you can already cover about 6 hours. There should never be a reason to win more than 3 sieges in a row.
Another point worth mentioning: prime time works fine on workdays but weekends could prove more difficult. M&S are usually also those that go out there and shift their play time to the afternoon instead of prime time evening.
Just out of curiosity, Gevlon, what will you do when you get the attention of the Horde? Do you think that they are *all* M&S? I'm sure there some good guilds and players there.
@Andru: They can't do anything as they are overrun by M&S. To battle in WG they should send an equally competent group against us. But they CAN'T since they can't make the horde M&S not queue up. And with every useless hordie they get nothing and we get tenacity. A 25 man horde guild can win against the 25 of us. 25 man horde guild + 25 horde M&S vs 25 of us? Not a chance. The trick is that the faction is mostly us, so we don't get random M&S.
@Anonymous: thanks for the link, but the advantage is not relevant. Having BT and ST initially are not important as we can take them by force easily. Also getting catapults after 1 kill is convenient but not important as we can get lot of kills easily.
@Andru:
That's the beauty of the WG approach. Since it chooses the participants randomly, there is no way for the good Horde to team up and beat Gevlon's team. Maybe they get lucky once in a while and get enough of them into a battle but most of the time they won't (as Gevlon has laid down in his post).
There are already Hordes taking on Gevlon's team as showed by lux. But they can't win the battle for WG unless the M&S ratio drops - which is the goal of this experiment.
I also think that this is a way better approach to make M&S leave than the economy approach - especially because M&S tend to just farm materials themselves if they aren't on the AH or too expensive ("it's free then afterall!"). So even if Gevlon's team did clobber the AH economy, I have my doubts it would have had a significant impact on the M&S.
@Gevlon:
Yes, my point was more that you might have to be careful to not give these advantages to the Horde.
But how will you prevent Alliance M&S from joining?
And what effects will this have over the primary target, the Horde M&S? You're already saying that it won't hurt the economy. So what's the point? Just to annoy them?
@Andru: There is NO Alliance M&S. The faction is completely deserted. There are 20-30 people online outside of our guild in prime time, mostly lowbies. Most of the 80-es couldn't care less about WG. The few who does are a minority, so we can talk to them. It's not like one person spams /bg, it's like 10 people whispering one "please join us in BT and defend the sieges"
Why does it matter? Because VoA is the best loot pinata for M&S. They can't go ICC (except trash rep farm). Imagine they can't go there in prime time.
Actually, they can control the queue, cause it's actually a queue, as far as i know. First in, first out, you just need to queue yourself earlier than M&S, and it's rather easy, as M&S don't bother with WG when queuing actually starts.
@Olgs: No, the "queue" is not a queue, It's just an "I want in" flag, you are randomly selected from the "queue".
http://www.wow.com/2009/06/20/patch-3-2-gives-wintergrasp-a-queue/
25 is all you need, 25 trained and ready players. Hordies get random picks out of 100's of player on the queue. This will give them mounting aggrivation each time you are successful since they will more and more players frustrated from not being able to farm Voa.
The problem I see with this is that success raises the morale of your faction and then the M&S of you faction will queue up too.
I hadn't considered the effect on the economy, of camping bots. Someone made that same point in a reply to me on the last post. That's a good point, with fewer materials, prices go up and players are more likely to try to farm their own mats.
My advice on the bots, assuming that it is true that Blizzard prefers to ban in waves every few months (thus allowing bots like Historyy to farm unimpeded for weeks)-- have everyone in the guild report them. See if multiple reports from different people has any effect. Even though I'm sure if Historyy is banned, soon you will see Historyyy in his place.
Also, it'd be interesting to see what horde chat is like prior to WG starting in prime time if they continue to lose. There should be some pretty funny arguments going on.
I am just wondering, perhaps it is different on EU realms, but here on the US realms I have been on almost no guilds run guild VOAs, and prime time is infact the least significant time of the day for VOA for us.
Generally, VOA is so easy, that even with a raid full of random M&S it is doable. 95% of pug VOAs 1shot the bosses.
Since this is the case, VOA is almost always pugged, and most frequently at off times to avoid conflicting with real raiding schedules.
While if you can some how formulate enough interest and members to hold VOA at almost all times of the day (which if you convince enough non EU players to grab accounts and roll on your server to assist, maybe you could due to time zone differences) but if you are holding it only during prime time hours, perhaps the impact may be rather less than you expect.
Good thing that most people in the horde side in maggy are retarded.
2 days ago, on my lvl 59 death knight, i killed a 65 level death knight and a level 64 druid.
Are they as bad at level 80?
The answer to farming bots is -- rather obviously, ganking bots.
Gevlon,
Have you thought about camping the entrance to ICC? It's a long narrow corridor. You could do that during prime time too and not let people into a progression raid.
Clearly the ranks of this effort could be supplemented by US transfers. I want to break down what is required for this just to be certain I have it right. I suspect others are curious, too.
So first, I need to buy EU WoW. Once I do that, will I need to level a toon there, or could I move my 80 PVP rogue from a US pve server to EU mag ?
@ Sten
It would probably be more effective to MC them to somewhere they can't get away from.
Although it is possible they have an HS to go back to the farming spot. Or the bot master can go there and fix the situation if he doesn't see much income that day.
You should have done this on my realm. (Burning Blade-EU) I don´t know how many times I´ve ragequitted because of the alliance tactic you write about. =(
Gevlon,
Does WG count towards the scalp count, or only world PvP events? I'm curious to see if the -20 penalty is making it hard for your to break even.
-JR
@Greyhammer, no you can't transfer from EU to US.
I suggest to first create trial account and check latency.
It's also enjoyable from time to time to deliberately "lose" WG when on defense (which your guild should be able to organize fairly easily) and then establish a defense around the VoA portal and gank everyone who tries to zone in until the next WG; with an organized group of competent players you can keep anyone of the opposing faction from running the raid at all the entire time that they "control" Wintergrasp.
I do not think that ganking at the portal can be as easy as you say, just because there will be no restrictions for numbers and tenacity will not be active. Sheer weight of numbers will make you an easy kill no matter your individual skill.
Just an idea to fix your gankscore glitch, couldn't you set it to ignore, or penalize, the death if the killing blow is from fall damage? I know there's a few addons that can find the source of the damage, and if the death is from fall damage or environmental [drowning, lava, etc.] than you could just ignore the BG death.
With a well-coordinated group of 20-30 skilled players, it's fairly easy to hold the line against most people who attempt to cross; even people running 25-player VoAs tend not to trickle in rather than all forming up outside the gate at once. On those occasions when a raid actually gets organized and tries to take you on head-to-head, it's more of a challenge, but as long as you prioritize the warlocks and such, it doesn't matter if they get a couple people past you.
Given that I've spent many an October evening in the SM graveyard surrounded by Headless Horseman corpses, I am somewhat bemused by your choice of a quote to start this post.
re "botting without annoying other players" - that is not strictly true. Early morning in bgs, maybe 20% of players from Alliance K-T (US) are bots. Another player said he has petitioned Kombatklye and kombatkarl from multiple accounts for months and nothing has been done. So i would not expect your bot to be gone a month from now.
It does mean that these bots are getting far more honor than you (or I) ever will, which will periodically really annoys me. In point of fact, while the weekly WG is the best honor deal, after that I think serial random lfg is a better hk/hour than WG.
All bots are bad, but the BG bots seem much worse to me. Partly because they have a more immediate impact on other players. The allies are not the best PvPers on my battlegroup so when you are Alliance in a EoS with 5 of 15 being bots, it is not fun. And when I am a stealthed rogue and kombatkarl follows me, mounted, through enemies I get annoyed. Especially since they tend not to waste time killing bots.
I do think WG will do far more to get the attention of and hurt your enemy than ganking random farmers.
Would anyone be interested in trying a similar experiment on a US server? I really want to join up but I can't really justify the extra money for another account right now. My budget is lame. Not trying to steal steam from you Gevlon, I think your idea is awesome. I just see a lot of people wanting to do something similar but being in the same position as me.
@ardoRic
You're absolutely correct. However, botting has very little to do with in-game efficiency.
A bot (numbers taken right out of thin air) tends to help you make five minutes worth of work in ten minutes -- 24/7.
Hence the only way to counter a bot is to use another bot for sabotage, as it can gank (equally inefficiently, but the farming bot will be coded for doing PvE-farming combat only, so that bot dies anyway) 24/7 as well.
Botting a DK, as it starts at 55, with a max selfhealing tank-spec is likely the way to go for a simple solution.
The ugly solution is to use a class with a fade/bubble effect on as a short a cooldown as possible. It rounds up mobs around the farming bot and leaves combat. That way you incurr in-game repair-costs on top of the sabotage.
Luckily you are not up against EVE Online metagamers: the simplest tactic is just to have an alliance alt. if a couple of dozen afk alts queued up on your side, it would affect your tenacity considerably.
@Anonymous: you need a lvl 77+ alt to queue up.
I don't think there are many people with 2 accounts and a Maghteridon-Ally lvl 77+ alt on it.
Of course one can transfer or level a char. Leveling takes lot of time, transfer would cost money and losing a char on your main server/faction.
One AFK-er makes no difference. To make it working lot of people should do it. And the catch is: since WG is free for everyone, you can't exclude freeloaders (those who don't level an ally but queue up and get the win). So no one is personally motivated to make this effort for the rest of the faction.
Sten,
Don't think that making a bot to grief other bots is a solution to the botting issue.
Elaborating on my idea, one could make a "holding pen" for bots. Even if they use their HS every cooldown to get away from there, the bot would be offline for at least 30 mins. When he does it the first time, we simply have a priest waiting for it to bring him back to the holding pen.
Done right, the bots would be in a place where they can neither walk out from easily or die from environment.
There could be a "bot sweeping party" every 30 mins or so to keep bot uptime at an all-time low.
Too bad that HS cooldown has been taken down. This would be even better with 1 hour cooldown on HS.
These are just random ramblings about how one could try and keep bots in check, not actual ideas I'd think Gevlon should do. Having an impact on VoA uptime is a lot better than the bot shenenigans.
@ardoRic
:D
Now you're getting VERY close to how we handled the problem during my old MUDding days.
Let's just say that bots were never a major problem.
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