AV Alliance Strike...

[Trien]

AV I've mostly given up on, mainly due to the fact that it's really not fun anymore (for me), since it's become a race. Who can kill the general first, who runs out of reinforcements first, whatever.

I'll admit that many (most?) found the oldschool (ie. original) AV a tedious grind, from which people tended to disappear once they got their exalted reputation. But as a battleground with numerous things to do which could affect the course of the battle, it was well done for the most part. The main issues with the old design were that spending hours and hours in there just to get a loss was not worth it (for the marks when they added those, or the honor), and that once you'd gotten your purples (at L60) there was no reason to go back.

People like me who would go back after exalted just to *play* were rare I guess... I enjoyed hopping into the battle to do what I could... fight at the front lines sometimes, gather up the medals/crystals to try to pull off the summon, tame rams and gather wolfhide to get a cavalry charge going to try to push them back, interfere with opposing players trying to do the same thing. Given the choice, I'd rather have *more* things to do in AV rather than less, which is what all the redesign changes have done.

My vision of AV has been, "let it turtle if it does happen, just make it fun and worth it during the turtle." If the BG finishes and one side wins, give them a bonus for it, but put the focus everything that happens in the middle of the fighting, and not on getting the win.

What I would have preferred to see in the course of the redesigns is to make it worth your while (for those wanting in marks, honor, whatever) to hop in mid-battle, fight for whatever time you have available, and leave even if you haven't seen the BG through to a win. Let the battle rage on for hours or days, so those who want to play the BG for the sake of it can actually do so, and put sufficient incentive for those who are in there just for the honor/loots/whatever will play as well. Give out reward commensurate to effort. Rewards for taking zones perhaps, though you'd want to avoid the tower-swapping mess that is Hellfire Peninsula where it's worth it just to lose your tower just so you could retake it. Reward being in a zone and helping to defend it. More repeatable in-BG quests which could be accumulated for reward. I dunno, 100 kills for a mark, or whatever... yeah, sound silly and that was off the top of my head so it's probably not even the right proportion. Quests to kill certain NPC's perhaps, which may not necessarily respawn in the same spots. Once upon a time you gained rep from looting corpses (well, the body parts to turn in, which wasn't entirely fair since whoever got to the corpse first got the rep)... but once you hit exalted there was no reason anymore; could they not do something like that to accumulate towards honor points or whatever. Granted, this would be a major overhaul, and would require some major balancing work to make it fair compared to the other BG's... which they're not likely to want to do now at this point with an old BG like AV.

I guess what I really miss about the old AV is that the feeling of it being one big PvP zone where you could play at the front lines with the big group, or run around and have smaller encounters (towers, mines hunting/defending wolves/rams), or sneak around to accomplish different goals (cargo, wolves/rams). It had options to cater to different styles of play. Nowadays, for the most part it's stick with the zerg or get zerged, unless the group automagically splits up into the right size of attackers and defenders, and even then you're still forced into a certain way of playing. Yeah, you can try to ninja or defend the odd tower here or there, but that's about it.

Here's hoping for a future BG like that, but I'm not keeping my fingers crossed...