Man, for Kel'thuzud... this makes everything EZ mode.

I'm not casting aspersions on any specific PvE player. It just got real real eeasy for a horde player on a pvp rulem

I guess Gorefiend contains THE GODS OF PVP. Horde and alliance alike.

Honestly. Destroying most of the alliance in Battlegroup 4 has just been effortless. 90 percent of them have been non-threats. (Which sounds funny, as one of the better hunters on my server, who also happens to be one of the biggest asshats, is named Threats.) A few have known their business, but an overwhelming number of them were just fodder. It is disconcerting.

But, then, a number of the horde have been that bad as well.

Now, maybe, with a larger pool of experience players to fight, these people will improve quickly. Or maybe they will give up quickly. Either way, I am hoping that the better fighters of the servers on my battlegroup step up soon.

Great. No longer will us lowbies in WSG have to put up with the Alliance twinks that populate Ravenholdt PvP.

Now we can play against Alliance twinks from all the other realms

Don't drink and post kids.

Can't even get into the game right now. Grr.

Login runs fine, then I get the usual "pick your language and realm type" which is promptly followed by a blank realm list.

Please tell me that this is natural for a fresh patch?

Are you European? If that's the case then you have to wait at least until 16:00 Paris time. Otherwise I have no idea, sorry.

Ah, misread the notice on the login screen.

2AM. Not PM. AM.

Damn those tired eyes of mine.

Well, in her first cross battleground AB, my corporal noob carebear nightelf priest, who has been into PvP four days, had 5 killing blows, 12 honorable kills, and not one death. We won. She had 17 honorable kills before they got her once.

So far so good for the Alliance!

It's not really all that surprising. The ***average*** skill level of a player on a PvP server tends to be higher than the average skill level of a player on a PvE server. This is due to three reasons:

1) PvE server players have less experience with PvP, since they're not forced to do it on a regular basis.
2) PvP servers attract a more hardcore playing crowd. It's no coincidence that a large percentage of high-end PvE raiding guilds are on PvP servers.
3) PvP'ing helps to make you a better player. You develop more "twitch" skills, and you learn the ins and outs of your class more and see its strengths and weaknesses more clearly.

However, there's some mitigating factors right now:

A) The patch just came out and people's UIs/Mods are screwed up. Become too dependent on them and you're lost.
B) Cross-server BGs are the "hot new thing," and some people who rarely/never PvP are trying them out to see what they're like. On Stormrage, I logged in briefly last night and it felt like 3/4ths of the server was queuing up just to see it.

I wasn't on last night much thanks to numerous server crashes, but I did jump into a WSG game and noticed a distinct lack of play on both sides. This one Horde Warrior just pretty much stood there as I blew him away without using a single Hamstring or stance dance to break my fear, and an Alliance Mage on my side mostly ran around in circles when fighting a 2 on 2 situation (so we got reamed). It was the strangest WSG I've played in months.

Another thing I'm hearing/noticing is that getting in on a PvP match at the outset of a match is rare. People are jumping from one BG to another due to the short queue times, so you often wind up coming in at the middle or end of a match.

Short queue times are nice, but I'll miss being able to queue up and then go farm somewhere for an hour or two, then getting a free ride back to Ironforge when the BG pops. Oh well.

-Bolty

I really hope the queue times of last night are accurate of what they are going to be from now on. I used to really enjoy PvP and battle grounds. But the queue times of one hour or more just killed it for me. Besides the times I schedual raids I'm usually on for an hour or two at a time. If that's not even enough time for a singe BG I'd rather just play an alt or something.

And remember a lot of the newb PvP players out there might just be a bit rusty from not being able to PvP in the last 10 months .

I agree, but I think there's also a much more important factor that you're overlooking: players on PvP servers spend their time/DKP/whatever getting gear to PvP with. The ability to gear your toon - and the knowledge of how to gear it - for PvP is key, and it's something that I don't think PvE server players put as much effort into. This was the main difference I noticed when I rerolled from Terenas to Stormscale: people gear for PvP, plain and simple. There was no real reason to get that asskandi except to whack someone about with it. (On the skill level, I actually felt that a Terenas horde PuG would roll a Stormscale Horde PuG, just because the Terenas crew worked together pretty well. Far too many solo heros and kill #$&^%s on Stormscale. )

Also, in my experience high end guilds on PvP servers tend to be a lot more relaxed about speccing than a lot of PvE guilds. (Excepting when they're making a hard push on PvE content, which is fair enough. )

Finally (okay, so it was three factors) there are a lot more pre-established "teams" on PvP servers. While a PvE server might be able to field a couple of honor farming groups, just about every high-end PvP server guild fields an A and a B team that have extensive experience fighting together and use vent/teamspeak as a matter of course.

In the end, I think the differences are mostly about desire. There's a greater desire to PvP on the servers set up for it, and thus there's a greater wealth of properly geared and experienced players.

PS. Hehe, I just thought of a forth one. Ruthlessness. On a PvE server, camping the enemies spawn point graveyard is - or was in my day - considered bad form. On a PvP server you're considered mad if you don't. It's par for the course and an accepted, legitimate, above board tactic.

Yes, I've noticed that too. It's also been confirmed by a certain someone that's been noticing it since the Beta... and you know who you are Also, much more helpful to their fellow faction ppl. This is probably due to the whole "Us vs. Them" mentality.

So far, I like the new setup as it let me win 4 AVs yesterday after losing at least 30 in a row (literally). Alliance on Lethon sucks the big one at PvP. I have a feeling that that applies to other servers too. OTOH, WSG is now a pathetic disgrace as at least 3/4 of the participants really have no clue. AB though is ok..... and there's actually a good chance of getting into one pretty quickly.

Overall, not bad. Only thing I regret is that I used to know a good number of ppl in the BGs on both sides and enjoyed playing with/against them. No more of that now. Personality has been pretty much lost in the BGs.


-A

By the way .. this picture shows the WoW server infrastructure once connected PvP BG's have been properly setup



EDIT:

Tiled version:

That image rocks even more when you realise that it's tilable in all directions.

Also, it makes my head hurt.

What you lose in personality you gain in variety.

If you're not familiar with the situation on Stormrage, it's been bad. The Alliance to Horde ratio, which was bad before (like 2:1), has gotten worse in recent months as a few high-end Horde raiding guilds transferred out. Playing on the BGs there got completely monotonous; there were 1 or 2 Horde PvP teams running at any given time and if they didn't want to play AB, you didn't get to play, period.

Sure, you get to know all the Horde players that DO play regularly pretty well. But that enhances the boredom - you know exactly what they're going to do. Start an AB match and you know that this Horde team is going to send 9 players to the stables right off the bat to disrupt the hell out of the Alliance team. They do it every time. Etc.

It IS kinda cool to see Player X and think "ah yes, X, we meet again," and know that he's thinking the same way. As a battleground healer, however, that's NOT a good thing. Even though I'm not a 24/7 Grand Marshal grinder, the Horde teams all know when they see Cleoboltra in the battleground to eliminate me first without mercy. It's amusing when you get triple-counterspelled simultaneously by three mages because they're all so eager to take you out - for about 4 seconds, which is your lifespan when 5-6 Horde characters all gang up on you at the outset of any major team fight. Or else I spend entire fights sheeped, watching my teammates around me do the fighting.

In the new BGs, I have more freedom to not be recognized as a BG healer and my survival time increases. This is a plus just for my enjoyment factor alone and spending less time in graveyards.


No kidding? Ouch.

Yes, on Stormrage, Alliance PvPers will get furious with any jerks who GY camp Horde players. This is mostly due to the population imbalance - anything that could help frustrate the Horde and make them not bother queuing up anymore is considered extremely bad form. So much so that Alliance members have been known to ask Horde players to Mind Control a GY camper so the Alliance guys can gang up and annihilate the loser.

I can see how on a PvP server, the bets are off, since the hatred the sides have for each other is so intense. On Stormrage it's more like "well, we want Honor, you want Honor, let's not be asses about it and we'll all have fun. Oh, and I can kick your butt any day of the week." It's hard to hate Horde so much when half of the "top" PvPers on Stormrage Alliance side also PvP on Horde side with alts. A very different atmosphere, but is it all that surprising when Blizzard's lame Honor System has you compete with your own faction members and not the enemy faction members?

-Bolty

Another source of n00b PvPers are people like me that were always interested, but were not going to bother with 1 hour or more queue times. If the queue times stay as they are, I think you'll see a LOT of new Alliance people playing. And some Horde, too.

As MJ said in another thread, this eliminates the bottleneck of 'is there an AV up?', and makes it 'is there 4 up or 20 up?', and it's no longer 'is there an AB up?' and on WSG, there were over 100 up last night.

I think that one really sums up the rest--When you roll on a PvP server, you quickly learn that the number one factor in survival is to be merciless. In world PvP, the first mover gains a very real advantage. Gank lest ye be ganked, if you will.

During peak PvE raiding times on Magtheridon, Blackrock Mountain's hallways become littered with skeletons. Guilds camp half-formed raids outside instances and slaughter opposing players while they wait for stragglers. It doesn't matter than there's little to be gained and everyone is actually just trying to PvE; Ganking (or time spent on gank prevention) is just something you have to factor into the amount of time required to form a raid.

One other factor for the bad play last night was the server instability. It's hard to form up a solid 10 man team when people are crashing out or getting frustrated and quitting. When Tichondrius stabilized for about two hours, our guild managed to cobble together a team, growing from about four people to about eight at its peak when the server crashed. Also, it didn't help that there was a bug that if you hit the accept button to join a battleground too quickly, you'd get booted, so we were always down a player or two going in. Only once last night did we meet a full Alliance organized group. We had two people not get in, so we only had four of us on Vent and only seven Horde total in the game (I think the game bugs and doesn't let anyone fill the slots of those who got bugged from the start), so we got slaughtered. Otherwise, it was easy pickings. When the servers stabilize, I'm sure we'll all see more organized groups.

I actually remember the situation on Stormrage and it *was* terrible. Of course the fact that I could only really log in at 12 midnight server time did not help, but even on those few occasions that I could log in for any decent period of time at peak time, it was just as bad. I think in my month or so that I spent being lvl 51-60 until I quit the server, I got into 3 AVs and no ABs at all. That's what happens when there is a 4:1 A to H ratio. Of course on my current server, I had instant ques for pretty much anything except AB, but it's all good as far as that even after the patch. My concern after thinking about things and reading WoWs forums, is that the Honor grind has just gotten worse for all those that can *not* PvP 20 hours/day. There used to be sort of "dead" times, but now all those that have a lot of time on their hands will be able to BG almost 24/7, leaving the rest of us far far behind. Sure, supposedly there will be more room for higher ranks, but I think this will make getting rank of let's say 8+ difficult, and 12+ impossible. Naturally, I am not talking about Rank 14, as that was impossible pretty much forever... well, for normal ppl that is.

Anyway, TBC should make all of this irrelevant... and meanwhile it'll be a synch to get Exalted in all 3 BGs. I went from about 5k into Revered to 9.5k in about 3 hours of AV. Let's see how difficult it is to move up from Rank 7. I am guessing with the new system, very.

As far as your experience in the BGs being targeted.... face it.... you are a Priest. Any player that knows something about PvP will tell you that healer squishies need to be squished first. Since Stormrage's H population is relatively small, they probably know each other pretty well even if they are not getting in as a team and know the strategies better than Alliance. Horde tends to be better in the BGs anyway, so they just all go for you. Enjoy


-A

Long term? Definitely a good thing. Short term? I miss seeing the familiar faces.

I gave up on pvp with my level 60 warlock due to long queues (usual population imbalance issue on Malygos). I got back into it on Aman'Thul as something to do when the friend I was levelling with wasn't on.

The queue times were short, and the player pool was fairly small. The players I ran into in the 20-29 bracket, I saw again in 30-39 and then 40-49. I remembered the Alliance players who knew what they were doing, learned which Horde players love to wait in the flag room to ninja flags.

Last night I don't think I saw any familiar faces in any of the games we played. Played one AB match that the Alliance were leading 3-2 for most of the match then had a brain meltdown and lost 0-4. I got some great heals from a druid from another server in that game; I wonder if I'll see him again?

A couple of warsong games were pretty one-sided. The Alliance controlled the midfield a bit in one game, but couldn't coordinate an offence.

Chris

Will it make it worse? I'm not sure it will in the long run. As people move through - and therefore out of - the system, it becomes easier to gain rank as competition decreases and teams solidify. (In the recent months, people have been taking a day off during their rank 14 grind!) Couple that with the increased percentage of players that can reach rank X*, then you see a decrease in the time required to grind a rank.

Stormscale has always had a strong Oceanic community, which meant WSG or AB were generally running 24/7. Yet even then there was a limit on how long the main PvP team would run, and the length of that run decreased over time.

However, I'm not expecting to gain much rating this week due to the surge of PvP activity. It will be a matter of seeing how it pans out over time.

With the social thing, I am missing seeing familiar faces. However, I'm really enjoying chatting to new people as well. It's just really nice to meet so many new people in the 40-49 bracket.

PS. Bolty, that quote in my signiture was from a priest that I thought I'd pinch. I also hate dying before I get out of the charge stun.

* I'm presuming that's what blizard has done to "ease the honor grind". It's what they did last time, and makes a certain amound of sense. I'd still prefer to see them drop the decay percentage a little, but... (Yes, I know the patch mentioned a reduction in the multiple kill penalty. However, if Blizzard doesn't understand how that will have absolutely zero affect on the honor grind I'll go hee. Again, it's just a matter of waiting for the system to be reverse engineered so we can see what the changes are.)

It rocks for healers

Other servers' pug players are better than our native Horde pug players, they hunt in packs not as lone wolves. Our server had become obsessed with the "do not join raid, do not share kills, grind to rank 14" mentality and the gameplay suffered. It's now much easier to lurk in the middle of the pack and heal

I'm feral/resto now and I have a much bigger impact being able to heal than having to gank the wounded in kitty form or slog it out with a Warrior as a Bear

Full battles help healers, zero queue time helps everyone

The cross-realm, cross-forum trash talking has begun.

I feel somehow complete, whole for the first time in patches.

On [EU]Kel'Thuzad, waiting times multiplied. There are 15 AVs, 47 WSGs, 53 ABs and always a waiting time of 40+ minutes. I guess the faction imbalance is nearly the same on all servers in the battlegroup.

I may be wrong but I don't think faction imbalance is the issue. I suspect there is hardware to run only so many battlegrounds, and you don't get in until those ahead of you have finished. On Stormrage last night people were waiting hours, or at least over an hour, in queue for WSG. In contrast AB averaged about ten minutes.

Given that I am totally new to BG since last weekend, I don't have a lot of experience to compare. I do know that it was a lot of fun, even with the problem that Mongo described with getting in and the other problem of being stuck in the BG and unable to get out. Other than one AV (where I have no idea what is going on) all I did last night was AB.

The worst AB was losing in moments with no HK's and several deaths. We never saw what hit us. The most interesting was when there was someone who took charge of an alliance PUG and seemed to know what they were doing. He/she had macros set up and assigned people to tasks at the beginning. The leader explained that AB was all about defense and asked us to "refrain from glory". Baguette's job was to take the blacksmith's shop and hold it. Which she did. Only one banner, 3 KB and 5 HK for Baguette but we won handily. And she didn't die.

The most annoying person in BG (actually from the night before) was a warrior friend of a friend who kept complaining about not getting healed. I said: "Find a healer."

The most frustrating moments were losing one on one to an undead priest and another when I thought I had gotten away from an out numbered fight, with no mana and a shred of health, only to be caught.

We also had some long, come from behind victories, which were very sweet.

The last two AB of the night were loses, but Baguette led the Alliance stats. From an operations research point of view (not that I know any more about operations research than than about BG) I don't know what strategy is best. As I understand it we are really competing with our own faction for honor, not with Horde. I'm not sure whether the object is to win games or not.

Well, I am seeing only 2-3 people from my own server in AV. I assume this is similar to other's experience, with PvP realms probably seeing higher attendance. In this case it should be good to try to win, as you are not in direct competition with most people in the BG, only those from your own server.

With the 10% decay rate instead of 25% on HKs and the huge increase to the number of potential players you kill, there is possibility for some incredibly huge honor totals. I expect it will be difficult to honor grind right now.

Check out WoW's PvP forum. AV is completely breaking the whole Honor grind. Looks like you have to PVP 24/7 now, and do it in AV.... which is really not PVP anyway. Looks like Blizzard's good intentions have made things much much worse.


-A

*Actually*, we have no way of knowing this for sure until next maintenance, *after* the first week of cross-server BGs.

Yes you do. Ask a AV pugger how much honor/hour he gets, and compare it to somebody playing on a pro AB/WSG team. If they are in the same ballpark, it's broken more then it was before.

My guess is the relms that had already figured out how to race AV are sharing that knowledge with the less PvP inclined ones. Everybody will realize that the sky really is falling, like I tried saying a month or so ago.

Yeh..... I have 130k Honor for the week, not counting today. Let's see if I lose rank.... AV is a joke with teams not even bothering to PVP and just rushing toward each other's Generals. You stop by to kill someone - you get cut off from your group..... not even worth it now. AV is pure PVE now. Takes 20 min to finish the game and with 10 HKs and a loss I can get more Honor than from a win in WSG. Bleh, this sucks. I've stopped equipping my PvP trinket.... Why bother? Carrot on a stick FTW.



-A

Well I, or rather Baguette, went from nothing eleven days ago (6 lifetime HK) to ranking 67. Essentially all from AB. I will have to compare notes with friends who were doing primarily AV. My satisfaction tonight was being out of mana and wining a knife fight with a rogue.

Sort of as an update, after four weeks of PvP (lifetime 6 HK four weeks ago) Baguette is now up to rank 9 and was third in the Stormrage standings for the week. She skipped rank 8 which people told her was impossible. She still spends most of the time in AB but does some WSG and AV as well. She has two new pieces of her ugly priest set.

Because Fafner has to spend a fair amount of time raiding (we finally got Razorgore and she is now exalted with the Hydraxian Waterlords), Baguette does not have as much time for PvP as she would like. Yet it was gratifying in BG tonight to get a whisper from stranger on another server "You just tanked a rogue," to which she replied "That's why I use a dagger."

I would think that grinding honor would probably be harder, not easier, on a PvP server where presumably a higher percentage of the population was in BG. Oldmandennis what has been your experience since cross realm BG was started?

I play on a 3 month old PVP server and last week with about 160K Honor I got 1/2 rank going from 8 to about 8.6. As far as a higher% of ppl being in BGs compared to a PVP server, don't be so sure. I bet many people (especially Alliance) who play on PVE servers are starving for some PVP, so maybe at least for a while longer they will actually que up more. Also, our ques have been almost instant even before cross-server BGs.

-A

How much honor did that take? On Terenas Horde I think that would take somewhere on the order of 800k to 1 million to get #3, maybe higher, I haven't really been inspecting the high honor people. I know I inspected one guy with around 350k and he was around #40-something.

Personally I was never really on the grind - there was a while where pugging BG's was fun for me, then it got not fun when the skill of my teammates and opponents didn't change. I got exaulted AV in a weekend on my hunter, and I go for 3-4 games a week on my shaman to keep repair costs low, or maybe a couple more if I'm bored and a guild team is running.

One of my friends is going for HWL, he and his twin play the toon pretty continuously when not in a raid. I believe he pulls down 800k-1.2 mil a week, and gets #1 pretty consistantly. He doesn't really have a team, which hurts him I think. Many of the real serious players that would form an actual team finished the grind some time ago, and are just now starting to play again at rank 2-3.

I just checked. It was 608993 honor for last week.


Edit: #1 on Stormrage last week was Seagal with a little over a million.

As the waiting times normalized on my realm (~15 Minutes AB and WSG, 1 hour AV), I started hitting AV with my Priest again. I tend to stay on defense, since most people seem too stupid to realize how important it is to slow the opponent down. Anyway, we were 2 Hunters, a Paladin, a Rogue, a Warlock and 4 Priests - and the Horde could not push past the SH graveyard, because the Hunters REALLY knew what they were doing.
I guess that many horde players returned to their base when they saw the turrets burning, but our crew of 9 kept 20 to 25 opponents busy for 15 Minutes. It was the most enjoyable PvP-experience I have had so far.

If you want to PvP in AV, stay on defense.

I do. I rush with everyone else. As we are getting to FW, I check if there's not too many on D already, and if there are not, I hearth out. The only time when this is not timely is when the Horde uses the backdoor exploit.

Edit: Wait on my Realm for Alliance is AV - 3-7 min, AB 3-5 min, WSG - anywhere from 5 - 10 min. Life is good for those who love PVP


-A

I know, I've been running WSG near-consecutively for the last two days and haven't had to wait long (About 9 minutes was the most I've had to wait).

That said, I kept running into the same teammates over and over again. Which is good in a sense that I knew that if I stayed with some of these we'd form a pretty unbeatable defense (Only three times in something like fifteen flag caps by the Alliance did the flag carrier actually make it outside the mill. Intimidation+Concussion Shot+Frost Nova for the win) but it did sorta shatter the illusion that tens of thousands of other players on the realms were also competing for a place in the Battlegrounds.

That said, maybe it's because not many people play in the 30-39 bracket for all the twinks on the Alliance side.

As a further update, after eleven weeks of PvP, Baguette has made Field Marshal. She is not sure if she wants to continue all the way to GM but she plans to keep at it for a while to see how it goes. Has anyone done GM and would care to share how long it took?

Congrats on making FM! As far as GM (I have not gone that far but have done much reading on Blizz's PVP forums) it usually take 3-4 weeks of standing 1-2 to get to 14. IMO, with the new Honor system being imminent (before the BC comes out) I really do not see the reason to go for it, as it is a HUGE difference to go from 13-14 as opposed to 12-13. Besides, you might not even have enough time to get there.

Of course if you've got nothing better to do and are still not burned out on BGs....

-A

If you get standing 1 each week and start exactly on the line:

55000 * 0.8 + 13000 = 57000
57000 * 0.8 + 13000 = 58600
58600 * 0.8 + 13000 = 59880

so it takes as much as 4 weeks even if you get rank 1 every week. Only 3 weeks if you start in at least 250 points in (5% to rank 14)

It will always take at least 3 weeks to go from rank 13 to rank 14.