Do you know what is Blizzard's greatest design failure? No, not the DKs or the retribution paladins early WotLK. It's Wintergrasp. Totally unbalanced, practically impossible to win as assault (assuming teams of similar strength). Imagine that you'd have to play a premade BG against another premade and your team would have no healers at all, while they have as many as they want. This is Wintergrasp as attacker. You have 80-200K HP demolishers and sieges that you cannot heal, nor you can mitigate damage on them via resilience. You can only CC the incoming enemies or burn them down, but good luck doing it against a team that has any brain cells, and maybe a PvP trinket. Did I forgot something? Oh yes, part of your team is unusable as they are driving the damn things and cannot participate in the fight. Your only advantage is that you can place PvE geared and specced casters in demolisher seats. Oh wait, the defenders can build demolishers too. In the keep, close to the fight, while you must walk these slow (did I mention slow) vehicles up to the keep, constantly under the fire of cannons. By the way, cannons and player abilities are available instantly while you must get promoted by killing enemies to use the sieges. And you must have empty slots for them capturing workshops while defense have 2 uncapturable ones.
Why does anyone play Wintergrasp? I mean the side that captures it late night due to no one online on the other can keep it easily all day. Did you ever seen assault win? Of course you did. Actually, assault wins more often than defense. If you don't believe it, just walk to the keep, find Archavon's log and check the weaker side. You see that the successful assaults outnumber defenses by 10:1 (on the stronger side there are more successful defenses, simply because you can only assault if the enemy assaulted successfully previously).
OK, so we see the near-impossible outcome happening again and again. What's going on? "Normalization of deviance" it is. Blizzard does not fix Wintergrasp simply because they seen a completely out-of-order situation happening again and again, and they assume it makes it normal, without further investigation. That thinking destroyed not one, but 2 space shuttles. Challenger was destroyed by a faulty O-ring. It wasn't a sole mistake. The O-ring faulted every single mission and allowed burning hot gases to leak directly to the fuel tank. In the previous missions the faulty ring was blown to the hole by the same gases forming a new seal. So the molten, burned remains of the ring kept the crew alive. And the NASA considered it normal. Until a very cold morning which caused the ring to be very rigid, unable to find its "usual" place. Columbia was damaged by an insulator foam part that broke from the fuel tank and fell to the shuttle. The damaged heat shield couldn't withstand the extreme forces of re-entry. The nasty thing is that the foam used to break down from the tank and used to hit the shuttle. It just hit it in less sensitive parts. Again, faulty parts bombarding the shuttle was found to be OK by NASA, simply on the basis of they killed no one yet.
Wintergrasp can only be captured because it's defended by PuGs who had nothing else to do or just wanted to farm some honor and "pwn lol", and often attacked by premades wanting to do VoA. A cooperating pre-made will always win against a mindless PuG where people wandering around like headless chicken, ignoring (or being unaware of) any kind of strategy. A premade of 25 people can drive 5 sieges trough the walls simply because the "defense" is scattered around the map and only 2-5 people are attempting to stop the incoming sieges and their warnings in /raid is answered by "don tell me how 2 play lol".
Running around like headless chicken in a competitive PvP environment is anything but normal. However it's usual in WoW, where the skill of the majority of the players fits very well to the "headless chicken" strategy. The first time someone played defense properly the normal, and not the normalized deviant outcome happened, poor horde was permanently locked out of VoA. Who am I to tell it's the proper way? Come'on! Would you think the proper way of playing basketball is running around cluelessly, not even trying to score and calling the other players "no lifers" just because they try to win? Would you find a baseball match OK where the running player would just stop before home base, get his phone from his pocket and start to chat with some buddy? Would you call a chess player acceptable if he'd reply to his trainer "i dun care about nites an rookz can i just zerg with pawns lol"? Don't forget, these are also games, and players play on their own time, often paying money for the equipment or the rent of the field. Yet, just because it use to happen, you, just like Blizzard accepted this completely deviant behavior normal.
"Used to work" is not equal to "should work" or "good solution". That logic would make us still be apes on the trees. "Good solution" is logically proved. Examples that the faulty system worked many times are not proofs. They are indeed interesting and deserve research why they work despite they shouldn't. The proper thinking could give NASA an elastic and fire-proof O-ring that automatically finds its place, instead of a ship lost with all hands.
The circumstances that keep a deviant action successful will disappear, either by bad luck, or by the careful research of an adversary. This happened with WG now. We shown that simply by bringing a team to defense side, WG becomes what it is: impossible to win on assault. I believe, especially with the summer boredom, more and more PvP oriented players will go and lock out opposing faction from WG, just for the fun.
Moral of the story: if you see something that does not work according to the logic, question the thing, not the logic. You'll find the loophole that made it running and you can use it for your own benefit.
How can "normalization of deviance" exist at all? I mean how can someone accept something normal that he knows to be wrong? Because of social conformity. They do not want to challenge the nonsense accepted by their peers.
Why does anyone play Wintergrasp? I mean the side that captures it late night due to no one online on the other can keep it easily all day. Did you ever seen assault win? Of course you did. Actually, assault wins more often than defense. If you don't believe it, just walk to the keep, find Archavon's log and check the weaker side. You see that the successful assaults outnumber defenses by 10:1 (on the stronger side there are more successful defenses, simply because you can only assault if the enemy assaulted successfully previously).
OK, so we see the near-impossible outcome happening again and again. What's going on? "Normalization of deviance" it is. Blizzard does not fix Wintergrasp simply because they seen a completely out-of-order situation happening again and again, and they assume it makes it normal, without further investigation. That thinking destroyed not one, but 2 space shuttles. Challenger was destroyed by a faulty O-ring. It wasn't a sole mistake. The O-ring faulted every single mission and allowed burning hot gases to leak directly to the fuel tank. In the previous missions the faulty ring was blown to the hole by the same gases forming a new seal. So the molten, burned remains of the ring kept the crew alive. And the NASA considered it normal. Until a very cold morning which caused the ring to be very rigid, unable to find its "usual" place. Columbia was damaged by an insulator foam part that broke from the fuel tank and fell to the shuttle. The damaged heat shield couldn't withstand the extreme forces of re-entry. The nasty thing is that the foam used to break down from the tank and used to hit the shuttle. It just hit it in less sensitive parts. Again, faulty parts bombarding the shuttle was found to be OK by NASA, simply on the basis of they killed no one yet.
Wintergrasp can only be captured because it's defended by PuGs who had nothing else to do or just wanted to farm some honor and "pwn lol", and often attacked by premades wanting to do VoA. A cooperating pre-made will always win against a mindless PuG where people wandering around like headless chicken, ignoring (or being unaware of) any kind of strategy. A premade of 25 people can drive 5 sieges trough the walls simply because the "defense" is scattered around the map and only 2-5 people are attempting to stop the incoming sieges and their warnings in /raid is answered by "don tell me how 2 play lol".
Running around like headless chicken in a competitive PvP environment is anything but normal. However it's usual in WoW, where the skill of the majority of the players fits very well to the "headless chicken" strategy. The first time someone played defense properly the normal, and not the normalized deviant outcome happened, poor horde was permanently locked out of VoA. Who am I to tell it's the proper way? Come'on! Would you think the proper way of playing basketball is running around cluelessly, not even trying to score and calling the other players "no lifers" just because they try to win? Would you find a baseball match OK where the running player would just stop before home base, get his phone from his pocket and start to chat with some buddy? Would you call a chess player acceptable if he'd reply to his trainer "i dun care about nites an rookz can i just zerg with pawns lol"? Don't forget, these are also games, and players play on their own time, often paying money for the equipment or the rent of the field. Yet, just because it use to happen, you, just like Blizzard accepted this completely deviant behavior normal.
"Used to work" is not equal to "should work" or "good solution". That logic would make us still be apes on the trees. "Good solution" is logically proved. Examples that the faulty system worked many times are not proofs. They are indeed interesting and deserve research why they work despite they shouldn't. The proper thinking could give NASA an elastic and fire-proof O-ring that automatically finds its place, instead of a ship lost with all hands.
The circumstances that keep a deviant action successful will disappear, either by bad luck, or by the careful research of an adversary. This happened with WG now. We shown that simply by bringing a team to defense side, WG becomes what it is: impossible to win on assault. I believe, especially with the summer boredom, more and more PvP oriented players will go and lock out opposing faction from WG, just for the fun.
Moral of the story: if you see something that does not work according to the logic, question the thing, not the logic. You'll find the loophole that made it running and you can use it for your own benefit.
How can "normalization of deviance" exist at all? I mean how can someone accept something normal that he knows to be wrong? Because of social conformity. They do not want to challenge the nonsense accepted by their peers.
Heh. My side hurts after that post. Pawn zerg... heh.
ReplyDeleteI also liked the comparison between WG-fails and shuttle explosions. I agree that Blizzard's mindset seems to be that that which has not yet gone catastrophically wrong must be 'working as intended'. We see further examples of this in the constant rebalancing of classes as one class or another becomes drastically overpowered, skewing the distribution for either PvP or PvE content.
@Sjonnar
ReplyDelete"I agree that Blizzard's mindset seems to be that that which has not yet gone catastrophically wrong must be 'working as intended'."
Old school reckoning bomb, anyone? The troubling implications of that talent were obvious, and protested many times by the community. Blizzard, however, thought everything was just dandy. No cause for concern. Well, until Lord Kazzak, the 40 man raid boss, was successfully soloed by exploiting said talent. Oops. Didn't see that coming.
Hotfix within 24 hours.
I get to feel all smug now because I instantly recognized the value of discipline and tactics in BGs.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, I think Blizzard games in general are good for studying certain aspects of war. We keep hearing that, for instance, the taller, healthier, ergo stronger Germanic tribes were repelled by Roman discipline. Now, you can go into WSG and see the power of discipline for yourself.
Because of this, I look at BGs as a crapshoot. Since 90% or more of the team are unherded cats, my tiny contribution is not going to make a win or a loss...but that just means I can dick around to my heart's content. Did you know IoC is surrounded by a wall of instant death? It's pretty far out, though, get some waterwalking or swim speed if you want to see for yourself.
On my server, it looks like our side is already locking out the other exactly the way you describe, which I gotta say is handy, even though I rarely do VoA.
You can get up to 16 sieges, and they scale with gear. Also, there's kind of balance, sometimes players of attacking team can get just one kill to be able to drive them. Dunno, what exactly needs to happen, maybe one lost assault does it.
ReplyDeleteSo, when all of 16 sieges are going to the keep, they will destroy one wall. Next wave - next wall. Assuming towers and shops are defended be attacking team, and all defenders are in the keep, there will be 4-5 incomings of 16 vehicles at once. Usually on our realm they go the fastest way, as they will be met by defenders everywhere.
You're playing against M&S, if they don't stack sieges.
Wintergrasp probably is flawed, as you've demonstrated, but it could be that the siege engine weren't designed to handle 5500GS players, as opposed to poor internal testing (which I think is your point).
ReplyDelete(Or do siege engines scale with gear now?)
You do not consider all information about wintergrasp in your post. Please read: http://www.wowhead.com/blog=145516
ReplyDeleteIn addition, if you want challenge and you want to prove your claims you should realy show that your guild can hold WG when the horde is at 700.
@Olga: if the offense have 16 sieges, defense doing it wrong. They should have a back team.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I've seen several such waves be destroyed before they reached the wall. The tower cannons can AoE them down. They are vulnerable to other forms of AoE too.
I too have noticed this phenomenon occurring in many aspects of human life but mostly in games. In American football, you often see one team score points easily for the first 3 quarters. Then the other team changes their defense and the first team won't change what they are doing, can't advance the ball for the whole fourth quarter, and loses.
ReplyDeleteI have decided to use this how I play WoW right now. I made a new char on a new server and got in a social guild a couple of months ago. After hit 80 showed up to a couple of raids that failed. They run heroics all day but they go to the raid and don't know how to do Heigan and never checked a strat before the raid. And yet these people are obsessed with getting to ICC somehow and they never absolutely never do anything to make any gold. Half of them do not have epic flyers yet but they have 5k+ GS. About a month ago a 5.5kdps fury warrior in the guild asked how to get to Icecrown without flying because he never got flying. ANY flying. None of them ever have any money. I don't have the heart to tell them that when Cataclysm launches, their gear will mean nothing, they will have no money, and they will be flying slow flyers in old world while all the "nubs" fly past them. They cannot see past the social conformity to see they are not failures if they do not get to ICC soon(or even ever). They farm ToC and VoA but they cannot do Naxx. So I keep what you say here in mind and I do not rush to join them every time they ask. I got my tradeskills maxed and I make money every day (some of them have little or no tradeskills because they are so busy queing up in dungeon finder all day). They are fitting well into the social structure and doing what the people in the trade channel say they should be doing. And I am not. I play half as much as they do, got epic flying, got money, and don't feel like an asshat because I don't have 5k GS yet.
@ Olga
ReplyDeleteThe most obvious solution is have a trained RP-GG rocketeer. It takes some practice aiming that thing right but you know what happens when it hits?
One-shots 16 stacked sieges at once, that's what.
@Alrenous
My own experience with BGs is not that everyone is 'sheep' because of social conformity or some other thing. They lack leadership, and the will to follow a leader if one appears.
Playing your best has a small outcome on the BGs you're playing (I won about 60% of Bgs I'm doing and lost 40% - by doing my best, as opposed to friends of mine who just plod along randomly with the flow and won 45% and lost 55%.)
The issue, however, is having start of BG macros with an easy to follow and clear strategy. It's still an one-shot solution though.
If you get a victory in the initial skirmishes, your side's morale goes up and they're more likely to follow up on the strategy that you planned in the beggining, and also a lot more likely to listen to you when you call for adjustments.
If however, you fail at the beggining, the battle turns into a to-and-fro drag in which the winner is decided by who has more wrathful-geared healers.
The solution to not have a BG of disorganised lollers is obvious, yet in random BGs I rarely see anyone else than me try to lead. Dunno why really, it's not like you lose social standing for being a 'fail bg leader lol'.
There's one slight thing you failed to mention.
ReplyDeleteThe defending side has to defend an entity they can't heal too - once the attacking side figures out how to get their siege damage to the walls, the walls [i]will[/i] fall.
Of course, a team of dedicated players can keep off a much larger horde of pugging enemies. Once the other side is as coordinated as the defense is, the game changes by a lot.
When blizzard claims it's working, they are right, though. Wintergrasp is so massively popular that Blizzard has decided to limit the amount of people playing. This popularity means people enjoy it, and that in turn means that it's quite successfull, since WoW is a game.
strat: offence uses it's melee and casters aggressively running forward and not being afraid to 'die'. defence has to fall back and defend unless they want to be pincered. The surge forward is followed by demos and engines that now have a minimal distance to travel while under attack.
ReplyDeleteThis idea will most likely beat any but the best premade as only the best see that sacrificing themselves can work out better for them in the end.
Counter: play on the idea that 'playing in the fire' is bad. Use Death and Decay, volley, especially catapult aoe (any visual AoE spell) at choke points to stop the offensive surge.
useful? hope so
All Gevlon's post is saying that a well-organised team will beat a disorganised one. But who disagrees with this??
ReplyDeleteDo you know what is Blizzard's greatest design failure? No, not the DKs or the retribution paladins early WotLK. It's Wintergrasp. Totally unbalanced, practically impossible to win as assault (assuming teams of similar strength).
I don't agree with this. We can all argue till we're blue in the face but no one is going to convince anyone. All I'm going to say is that there are solid hard evidence: If you check the WG logs, the attackers win more than defence.
If you want anecdotal evidence, I have some as well: The alliance in Frostmourne - US are led by the well-known Daish. He-coordinates the alliance defence but we the "mindless" Horde has beaten them before on offence.
If "solid hard evidence" is not valid in this case, why is the supposedly "solid hard evidence" valid in some previous posts where Gevlon claims that downing Marrowgar-10 puts you in the top 25% of WoW players?
@yaggle: why the fuck would you stay in that guild for more than an hour?
ReplyDeletePugs do far better than them, so just ditch them
Haven't you read the article about how the wg balance is beeing done?
ReplyDeleteIt was on wow.com taken from blue post. I cant remember thing but basically, if alliance lost the last 5 games or even more, they start as some siege workshops already capped for alliance, and if they lost even more, they can build siege rightaway dont have to wait to get rank, etc and there are more favor to the losing team, you just need to find that blue post.
The real problem with wg is the tenacity.Lets say you are 1 vs 1 with an ally who has 20 tenacity, lets say you are near back west tower and he 1 shots you. wtf? there are no hordies around but he still has 20 tenacity on 1 vs 1. The real fail is this. The game should check the area, lets say 100 yards around if its 1 vs 1, then the ally shouldnt have tenacity. If he walks into some area where there are more hordies in the 100 area range,then the game automcatiicaly inc his tenacity. yeah this would fix wg a bit.
I don't think you're looking at it the right way, Gevlon. If the time limit was 5 minutes, even the worst defenders would never lose. If the time limit was 5 hours, the attackers would always win eventually.
ReplyDeleteSo what about 30 minutes, is that too long for the attacker to have or too short? The data suggest it is slightly too long.
@Samus: you are wrong. I'm claiming (and trying to prove with data in the ganking guild) that the attackers can't take the keep in 5 days if the defenders are not making mistakes even if the attackers themselves are not making mistakes either.
ReplyDelete@Samus: you are wrong. I'm claiming (and trying to prove with data in the ganking guild) that the attackers can't take the keep in 5 days if the defenders are not making mistakes even if the attackers themselves are not making mistakes either.
ReplyDeleteIn my experience of software programming we encounter these situations with relatively high frequency. Something works but it does thanks to what we call "double errors", one error balanced by another one. It's impressive the number of times we encounter such things, sometimes they are really non-obvious and you wouldn't believe it's possible for them to emerge.
ReplyDeleteI realized then that it's simply Darwin at work: if it works it survives, just like the O-ring faulty design. It did work and survived, until it met unfavorable conditions which exposed the hidden flaws.
Completely wrong solutions are discarded, working ones either are correctly designed or "happen to work", thus the high frequency you can observe (correct design can be a quite rare thing).
Amazing Gev. This is one of the best post I ever read.
ReplyDeleteNot saying you're wrong Gevlon (I have no expertise in VoA), but your data doesn't really amount to a whole lot. Your latest WG post shows one week of battles on one server, all of which (I assume) were your dedicated PvP guild versus whoever showed up Horde-side. You even admit that by Friday the Horde wasn't even really trying. Over this period of time your record of defense in prime time was 7-1, overall record of defense was 11-4. This is an impressive record, but hardly enough data to claim that it "practically impossible to win as assault".
ReplyDeleteI think you're giving Blizzard too hard a time about "normalization of deviance" as well. It's not all ignorance, it's also about priorities. Blizzard has a new expansion coming up, for which they plan to rework every class (drastically in some cases) and are currently developing a new world PvP zone, battleground, and several new instances. Is it really the best use of their time to fix a WG imbalance issue that (until now) no one was apparently capable of exploiting? Unlike the space shuttle disasters, the risk of not fixing the problem is relatively low.
My guess is that with the advent of rated battlegrounds Blizzard will pay more attention to battleground balance, as it is easier to judge balance when teams are at approximately equal skill. However, they could also just ignore it and let PvP languish while they focus entirely on PvE. Time will tell what their priorities will become.
Actually, I see this WG problem the other way round :
ReplyDeleteDesigners managed to build a pvp zone which is "working" (ie attackers or defenders can win, and find it fun) when both sides are poorly organised. This kind of open world bg is expected to attract random players without any global strategy, rather than organised premades.
I'm not really surprised that an organised team is over-advantaged, possibly breaking the game.
I'm not trying to explain that well organised pvp-ers are cheating here; but that I don't consider that wintergrasp was primarily designed for them.
There are still tactics on attacks we haven't tried out yet, such as optimizing defenses of sieges.
ReplyDeleteProperly executed, a siege can be a devestating movable fortress that can be used both as an distraction or as main attack siege.
Of course, a full siege attack is devastating as well, but one RP-GG can, as mentioned, blow them all to smitherines.
That's why defending the sieges is important. Ranged protectors should always look for RP-GG wielding players, as well as taking down cannons and healers.
Using the sieges to their full capabilities is key when assaulting.
>I also liked the comparison between
ReplyDelete>WG-fails and shuttle explosions. I
>agree that Blizzard's mindset seems to
>be that that which has not yet gone
>catastrophically wrong must be
>'working as intended'.
Time management: there's always more work than workers. This isn't a safety issue where people die, it's just a game where Blizz chases my dollars by giving me what I want.
If you want WG fixed, describe why it should get more priority than the other work they are currently (not) doing. You may reach the same conclusion, but with a real reason to justify it.
There is always a reason why things are the way they are. I think the reason that people don't play to win in WG, while they do when playing basketball or other sports, is the reward structure. You still get honor and a mark for losing, so lazy people are ok with playing to lose. In a game of basketball, winning is all that counts, so people tend to focus on that more, and there is simply no room for the lazy who just want to jack up airballs.
ReplyDeleteThe US Army accepts the fact that the defense has the advantage and as such recommends a 3:1 ratio to ensure success when conducting a frontal assault (ie. WG); where success is defined as an acceptable number of casualties and lost equipment while, preserving enough combat power for future operations. Assaults conducted at less than 3:1 odds are not necessarily doomed to failure, just more likely to be resultant in higher losses in terms of personnel and equipment.
ReplyDeleteGiven the WG scenario, dealing with virtual personnel and equipment, body counts and deadlined vehicles becomes less of an issue (there are still impacts in terms of time and morale but to a much lesser extent than the $s involved in training troops and building tanks/planes etc.). So, with resource issues out of the way, the WG assault becomes a tactical/operation issue (with strategic implications).
A good assault leader thinking operationally in terms of Main Effort, Supporting and Shaping efforts, Priorities of Work, etc. while executing tactically in terms of Task Organization, Cover and Concealment, Mission, etc. while keeping in mind the ever present economics problem of time v. resources should have moderate expectations of success.
Of course, the number of people conversant in the operational art of war and savvy enough to develop a decision support matrix to fit the WG assault framework is few; hence the headless chicken assault strat which as we see can still prevail over the headless chicken defense strat given enough time and determination.
Yo,
ReplyDelete"They lack leadership, and the will to follow a leader if one appears."
I think that's a typo, but you summarized my experience succinctly; they lack the will to follow a leader if one appears.
Also, people try to strat up all the time in my battlegroup, so it looks like we have some heterogeneous culture going on. (The strats suck, and people don't follow them anyway.)
Support of heterogeneity; I win most of my BGs, by not going into the ones my side is currently losing. My experience closely matches Gevlon's, where each side does have a strat, and which wins is basically down to who's winning the cultural evolution arms race. If right now my side's culture adds up to the losing strat, then there's absolutely nothing I can do. (And vice-versa.) And importantly, it's dead easy to recognize.
Though I did single-handedly win an EotS once by death gripping literally a second before the flag cap and two before we won.
@Svenn: The main reason it's easier for the headless chickens to assault, is that it's a set visual goal to get into the base and you can cram everybody into one spot to break through.
ReplyDeleteBeing defense, it's harder, as you have to be ever vigilant for that one smart player that goes to the oposite side and smashes down a wall before he or she's noticed.
Or worse, having assaulters split up into groups and attacking various kinds of directions.
However, that only takes a few defenders to disrupt.
The most important thing a defender has to do is one thing:
Do not die.
If you die as a defender, you provide the assaulters a step closer to promotion, which means better sieges coming your way.
Basil H. Liddell Hart, a British officer and veteran of the Great War, was the foremost military strategist of the interwar period. Highly influential before and after the Second World War, Hart’s theories on mobility in war would influence combat operations and strategy throughout the 20th Century. His concepts of maneuver warfare distill into three components: the use of grand strategy and tactics to paralyze the enemy, the adopting of the indirect approach, and the importance of technology in combat (Wheeler 2).
ReplyDeleteLiddell Hart, drawing on his experiences from the Great War, believed that technology made the defense superior to the offense, rendering the massive frontal attack obsolete. However, he believed armored or mechanized forces brought to bear against the enemy in a moment of surprise could achieve a breakthrough if the enemy was unable to adequately maneuver (Bond 612). The necessity of surprise, coupled with maneuver, would build momentum in combat, paralyzing the enemy in indecision (Carver 797). After the Second World War, Hart believed that the attack would be successful if the indirect approach was adopted, which not only focused on surprise and maneuver, but on the psychological dimension of warfare. Wheeler summarizes Hart’s focus on the mental side of war:
That the dimension in which wars are really won or lost is essentially a psychological dimension. Wars reflect conflicts that grow out of human relationships, and human relationships are but a manifestation of the influences which human beings exert, one upon the other. So far as a study of war is concerned, then, the central truth implied by this state of affairs is that ‘the real target in war is the mind of the enemy commander, not the bodies of his troops.’ (Wheeler 2)
The theory of the indirect approach had expanded from avoiding a frontal attack, to the use of surprise and maneuver to overcome the inherent strength of the defensive position. Once maneuver was employed and surprise achieved, the enemy would be psychologically devastated, paralyzed into inaction by the momentum built through the application of the indirect approach (Danchev 313-315).
errmmm, you can heal siege vehicles.
ReplyDeleteGoblin Beam Welder.
@Gevlon:
ReplyDeleteWalls cannot be repaired or rebuilt. Even if attackers only manage to get a couple of shots in every few minutes, eventually they get that wall down. If the attackers are really "playing perfectly too," they might not get the wall down in one try, but they are going to get in a lot more than just a couple of shots.
Even putting WG aside, this is a very rampant point of view in the world:
ReplyDelete"Sure, it has problems, but it is working, isn't it? Why change it." I encountered this view in almost every business I've worked for.
Back in WoW - I see the same thing in LFD groups.
"Could you please stop ?"
"I didn't die, did I?" (This is a quote I have heard frequently from someone doing what I call "The Dumb".) Alternate versions of this response are "lol its fine" and "stfu i no how 2 play".
Normal - adj. - Conforming with, adhering to, or constituting a norm, standard, pattern, level, or type; typical
ReplyDeleteBased on that definition, I would contend that Wintergrasp's behavior is normal. What you want really, is the way Wintergrasp is supposed to be based on its design. However, isn't that what you complain that 'socials' are constantly trying to do? Impose some standard of the way things are supposed to be.
(Couldn't resist pointing that out. Now for a real response to the issue you raise)
In effect, if you want Wintergrasp fixed, convince more people to think and act strategically. If the result (that Wintergrasp defenses are regularly successful) is made more prevalent, Blizzard will address the issue.
You have several very valid points, on the engines, ease of defensive strategy, etc. However, Blizzard is looking for a situation where the place changes hands regularly. The only way they'll do anything about it is if it ceases changing hands. And that will only happen when we get groups defending the place that know how to do it.
Your Shuttle analagy, while amusing, is less than successful. People accept hazardous situations all the time, and have a tendency to address 'the last crisis' rather than addressing the situation that causes the crises in the first place.
Your best bet of achieving the change you want is to spread information on how to defend Wintergrasp as far and as wide as possible. If even the idiots know how to win, eventually, they will. And when Blizzard sees that it is broken in that way, they will address it.
However, my advice to you is to forget it. At this point, Cataclysm will be out long before you can teach enough idiots to win Wintergrasp. And once it is out, why would you want to come back to Wintergrasp?
if you see something that does not work according to the logic, question the thing, not the logic.
ReplyDeleteThis is right if you mean questioning your assumptions. For example, that WG consists of teams, that winning WG is the reason people play, that battlegrounds represent competitive environments, that a "good solution" is superior to a "good enough solution," etc.
Lacking any sort of leadership, commitment to success, coordination of team play or long-term interaction, the question should really be why any PUGs ever succeed?
In an instance, you must contribute to the group effort in order to achieve personal objectives, the group can kick out underperforming members and replace them with better, the pace can be slow enough for adjustments to be made, there is a cost of failure (repair bill, long corpse run), and the division of labor is clear (tank, healer, dps). Battleground PUGs lack all of these.
If one were to design a bg for how it will actually be played, the assumption of headless chickens is far better than the assumption of rational teams. The design challenge becomes how to prevent premades from completely dominating any battleground they choose.
So the problem with your analogy is just because Wintergrasp doesn't work the way you want it to doesn't matter. Blizzard doesn't care if each of the individual parts work perfectly because it doesn't cost money to let the problem slide it costs to fix it. In the case of a video game there are no environmental, health or safety hazards to worry about, the only thing to worry about is player attrition. As long as the game is working well enough to maintain the player base than there is no failure, as long as Blizzard continues to make a profit from the game there is no failure. Your complaint is about a cosmetic problem not a systemic problem and from a business viewpoint I would have a hard time justifying a fix to a zone that will be played a lot less than zones in the upcoming expansion. Furthermore the problem as you see it probably isn't causing much if any player attrition. From the standpoint of the greatest enjoyment of the greatest number of people (which is what Blizzard is going for) it doesn't make much sense to design a battleground that one side can hold forever.
ReplyDeleteOn our server, alliance offense almost always wins. The strat is basically go to the front gate, kill all cannons and any players that show up, barrel straight through the front gate and the next gate too.
ReplyDeleteIf horde defends the front gate, we get our kills fast and can get sieges, if they dont, enough people kill random horde npcs to get sieges and force a defense to show up.
Considering that we severely out number the horde and that CCs if equally applied can change a 20v10 into a 11v1 very easily, I really don't see how even coordinated defense could compete.
"How can "normalization of deviance" exist at all? I mean how can someone accept something normal that he knows to be wrong? Because of social conformity. They do not want to challenge the nonsense accepted by their peers."
ReplyDeletei give another reason:
If logic fails, it's quite reasonable to assume that the premise is simply wrong, for instance you might have neglected a variable in your formula , calculating the outcome is only possible if you take in all variables, if your information is incomplete your logic will fail, often searching for the missing piece is deemed too expensive and so people gamble with their luck that it just keeps going like always
Gevlon: "Also, I've seen several such waves be destroyed before they reached the wall. The tower cannons can AoE them down. They are vulnerable to other forms of AoE too."
ReplyDeleteIf the attackers aren't taking down tower cannons before building siege, then they deserve to be wiped off the map. Cannons can't be resurrected once destroyed, do about 4k AoE DPS to vehicles when aimed well, and should be the very first target of any attacking team.
Furthermore, if your siege are walking straight into an ambush 50 yds out from the wall and aren't splitting up and changing directions to get around, again, they deserve to fail.