Greedy Goblin

Friday, November 4, 2011

Don't go random BG, go rated NOW!

I noticed a very weird thing. 5 of us went to random BG. Several healers and some really good DD. People who use to excel in RBGs too. We did not slack, we played for objectives. We lost. And lost again. And again. We might still be losing if we wouldn't get Isle of Conquest what you can't really lose with 3+ (defend Quarry and Refinery, so the enemy door breaks 30% earlier).


"Obviously" the reason for the losses were the countless morons ignoring objectives, fighting at random places, abandoning flags and having no gear or skill. But the enemy contains the same kind of crap, so why did we not steamroll them? I mean on a 10 man BG we had 5 of us + 5 morons against 10 morons, clear win. We could start whining that "horde always wins" but we know it's not true, the BGs are balanced.


I would still curse the mindless bride-fighters but somehow in the next morning something came to my mind. When we had 997K/1M guild kills we went to random BG for the remaining ones, with the aim to kill, ignoring wins. We chain-won and I was even surprised back then, but considered it a "lucky streak". But now it had a very different light. I went back to the random BG alone, with an easy strategy "heal the biggest zerg". I practically ignored strategies and objectives besides obvious moves, like prioritizing FC over randoms or interrupting flag captures, avoiding healer stacking and not leaving bases as last guy. But I did not preach strategy and went where the zerg was. And the "lucky streak" came back, we won all the time.


At this point the cardinal problem with random BG became apparent: you must help the bridge-fighting, EOS-flagger, mid-HK-farmer idiots or you lose. If you go for objectives, they will still not go for objectives, they die in their stupid spot. However if you help them wipe the enemy in the idiotic place they are, they will start moving somewhere. Since maps are not so huge, sooner or later they end up near an objective (or the objective ends up near them in a flag carrier map).


With other words: even a terrible strategy is better than anarchy. The morons has a strategy and they play that strategy only: "if itz red itz ded lol". If you join them, you win the fight, if you don't you lose it. Of course the mindless grinding has little correlation to objective captures, but still non-zero. For example the AB bridge fighters usually don't wipe the enemy until they respawn. But sometimes they do and then they press on to the flag.


If you want to win random BGs (and we play for win), you must adapt to the drooling idiots, acting like them, just better (more DPS, HPS, sometimes an objective capture). You will not learn anything about BGs or strategies, actually you pick up bad habits. You should go RBG even in crafted blue PvP gear. There are 800-1000 rated BGs too. There you can not only practice with other good players, learn good habits, but also gain more honor points (400 for a win) but 400 conquest until cap (1650).


If you can't find a beginner RBG team on your server, join us, we are organizing a second (third...) group, especially for beginners. Of course you'll lose several matches as your starting MMR is 1500 but once you reached the MMR matching your beginner skills and gear, you will win 50%, then you'll start climbing up. You can find funny things when facing /trade groups:
... and you can see "funny" things when you have to fill up your roster from /trade:
yes, he is a fully geared holy paladin who did not know about dispels or hand of freedom.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not sure the "moron of the day" is actually a moron. He seems to apologize for his low performance which is something a true moron almost never does.

Anonymous said...

A newbie is someone who is willing to learn. An idiot is someone who, according to the eye of the beholder, has to step up yet refuses to. Often even refuses his bad performance. A first step to increase performance is acknowledging mistake. The holy paladin appears to do exactly that.

Kimmo said...

I used to have roughly 75% win-rates in WSG, ~70% in AB/EotS and around 60-65% in the rest of the battlegrounds (that was in WotLK) with solo-queues as a healer. I almost exclusively went for objectives, even if it looked like a suicide.

I also did some random battlegrounds in a small premade group, and they definitely didn't work as well as they should have. Yeah, we were almost guaranteed to win because we could win 3vs10 or 4vs15 fights, but it was a struggle: M&S generally were either in stupid spots or followed us around (even though we could have beaten every single Alliance-player in the map without help) in search of free HKs.

There definitely is some truth in your post, and now that I think of it, the optimal move probably indeed is to play the same way M&S do. However, while you didn't say that, I get an impression that "you cannot win by playing properly". In my experience that's false. You are guaranteed to win if you are good enough, but it is a great struggle.

Phelps said...

It's the same way in World of Tanks randoms. The idiots have much, MUCH more of an influence on the match than the skilled. Three skilled players are never going to win the match on their own, but three idiots sure as hell can lose it for the whole team.

stubborn said...

As you've gathered, I'm not a big pvper, but I am a learner and a preparer, so when I go into BGs I know the strats and have appropriate gear/enchants etc.

While leveling a few of my toons, I decided to PvP, and I learned, as you unfortunately have, that there's no point in trying to direct the mess. I state what I'm going to do, what I think should be done overall, and why at the beginning of the fight and then I do it. If no one else does, we usually lose. Sometimes I follow big zergs in places like AV where I know there are better strats, but this is exactly the core problem with PvP - and to some degree, all team games: you can't make everyone as good a player as you.

That doesn't mean you shouldn't try, but doing so only wears you down (and I've seen you wearing down a bit now and again, so even you, the asocial, is susceptible). I truly hope Rosalee learns what to do next time, but I doubt it. There's simply no consequences for failure in normal BGs. You might not get as much XP, or you might not get as much honor, but you do get some rewards, so while it's slower, you still progress. There's no real incentive to improve.

Anonymous said...

WS tactic:

Block incomming zerg, your job is to hinder they progression to the flag slow enough so your own zerg returns to the base before they leave.
This leads them to respawn closer to the battle and ultimatively almost guarantees a win. Having lost the first flag other side often returns to zerging while someone carries the remaining 2 flags to base

I successfully apply that as rogue and tank class, lots of baiting and losing helps mitigating damage

Anonymous said...

@WS Tactic
just realised that some might misunderstand my text

in "lots of baiting and losing"
losing should be LOSing
aka using Line Of Sight to avoid damage, job is to bait them and slow them down engaging for real just means dying faster making whole endeavor pointless

chewy said...

You bullied your moron supported by "yes" men.

I don't dispute that he neither dispelled nor understood his spells but you treated him as though it were a police cell interrogation from government secret police. Gathered compliant witnesses, asked for a confession and then sentenced him to a ritual humiliation at the suggestion of one of your henchmen.

Alrenous said...

I found an essay formalizing what a moron is. They use the term stupid, and it's someone who acts to harm themselves AND others.

It turns out to be mathematically correct that stupids en mass can out-compete smarties, and it's called the double Morton.

Summary:
Single Morton: you're in a three-player game, a stupid person (Bob) costs themselves something to punish you. Result: the third person, Alice, wins the game.

But what if Alice is stupid too? Bob and Alice together cost you double, but gain in relative terms. Bob is no longer automatically out of the game, but you certainly are.

There's a great example with a tennis court in the link. Basically there's two courts with different time limits, three people, and you have to choose in advance.

If you all chose court B, you each get to play for 40 minutes, total 120 minutes.

However, if you're with Bob and Alice, and they both go to court A, they get it for all its 45 minutes, and you get nothing. If either had individually chosen court A, you'd have been alone with the other in court B. Double Morton.

Esteban said...

Yeah, this moron post left a bad taste in my mouth. That pally was certainly not deserving of public scourging on your blog.

Sure, they may have screwed up. They may have gotten flustered and tried their best to spend gcds healing instead of dispelling, especially being a guest in a premade of performance-oriented asocials.

You can teach dispels and their high value in rbgs. You can't teach personality. As others pointed out, humility is almost always indicative of non-moronhood.