08-11-2005, 03:36 AM
(This post was last modified: 08-11-2005, 08:10 PM by MongoJerry.)
I will be posting this letter on several locations on the Blizzard forums tomorrow. All comments and suggestions are welcome.
THE NEED FOR CROSS-SEVER BATTLEGROUNDS -- AN OPEN LETTER
Dear Blizzard World of Warcraft developers,
Kudos to you for creating an exciting and imaginative game, and in particular, for creating the two battlegrounds of Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley, which are fun and exciting to play in. Thousands of people spend hours of their day every day fighting intense battles against both players and NPC's, and the fun rarely flags. There is one problem, however. Not enough people get to experience the fun and thrill of your creations, because the player populations on the individual servers are not large enough to support the large number of battleground instances necessary to allow a free-flow of players in and out of the battleground queues. On many servers, one or both battlegrounds have effectively ceased to exist, because there are never enough players of one faction or the other queuing up at the right times. It's not that people don't want to play the battlegrounds. It's just that when an individual tries to queue up and sees that there are no games being played, the person gets discouraged and leaves. The population of players who want to play in the battlegrounds needs to be pooled together so that there are always a large number of games -- not just 2-3 games but dozens of games -- going at once to choose from.
The Problem -- Tichondrius and Stormrage Examples
Let me illustrate the problem using the examples of two high population servers that I play on -- Tichondrius and Stormrage. Tichondrius is a high population PvP server and for many weeks, we had a pretty good showing at the battlegrounds. There were always 2-3 CTF matches and usually 1-2 AV matches going on. The queue times were often long as bottlenecks occurred (if a CTF match took a long time to conclude, then the people outside were stuck out in the cold), but at least we had games going on all the time. The problem came about a month ago when one of the more organized Alliance guilds on the server decided to have guild AV nights. An organized group of 30-40 people will almost always roll over a pickup group, so they realized they could destroy anybody in the contribution point system by repeatedly winning AV matches in under 30 minutes at a time. Other Alliance guilds followed suit and then some Horde guilds started doing the same thing. So now there are often 3-4 AV games going on at once, but now the small but loyal population of CTF'ers has been depleted as they join guild AV events or find that they also have grind AV to get contribution points and faction. The end result is that there has only been a handful of high level CTF matches in the last month on the server, despite the fact that there are dozens of players on the server (according to the posts on the Tichondrius forums) who want to play CTF. I know for my part that at least 20 people in my guild alone would love to play CTF if only people on the Alliance side would queue up and play. And, of course, people on the Alliance side say the same thing. But the only high level matches that have recently occurred on the server were organized guild vs guild events. Pickup high level CTF is effectively dead on Tichondrius.
The problem is even worse on Stormrage, a high population PvE server. Since the Stormrage players are a self-selected PvE community, a smaller percentage of the population there is interested in PvP play. The end result is that there are typically only one or two AV matches a week -- basically only when one of the organized Horde guilds on the server declare the evening to be an "AV night." The casual player who wants to log on and spend a few hours playing AV is left out in the cold unless they happen to log in on those special scheduled evenings.
If these kinds of problems are occurring on two relatively high population servers, I can only imagine how bad the situation is on lower population servers. There have been many attempts to encourage players to move from high population servers to low population servers, but one has to remember that doing so means that a person doing this gives up their best opportunities to play in these fun and exciting battlegrounds.
It's not that people don't want to play in the battlegrounds. On the contrary, the complaints are loud and clear, "I want to CTF so badly!" The problem is that the populations on the individual servers are not large enough to support a constant flow of players in and out of the games. A person can't just log in, get in the queue for a battleground, get in within 15 minutes, play for a couple of hours, and then log off when the person is done. Instead, in order to get in a game, one has to either log in at specific times when large guilds hold battleground events or one has to wait in queue and hope that the one or two battleground matches that are going on, if any, end sometime soon.
The Solution: Cross-Server Battlegrounds
The solution to the problem is straight-forward: Cross-server battlegrounds. The idea is that when you enter the queue for a battleground, you enter an all-server queue and end up playing with and against players on other servers. This idea isn't original with me. I actually got the idea from an acquaintance who is a GM at Blizzard who told me two months ago that a cross-server battlegrounds system was being worked on. I got very excited about the idea when he told me about it, but two months have passed, and I haven't heard anything more. I now worry that the idea of cross-server battlegrounds was scrapped, tabled, or relegated as a low priority item. I write this open letter in the hope that it will encourage more discussion of this issue and encourage the development of cross-server battlegrounds faster, because cross-server battlegrounds is something that is needed now instead of months from now.
The benefits of cross-server battlegrounds are as follows:
1. There will be battleground games happening all the time everywhere! People can log in day or night and see dozens of games up. This would encourage more people to play the battlegrounds, because they can play them at their own convenience.
2. The bottlenecks will be removed. As it stands, if there is only one match of a certain battleground going on and if the participants are fairly evenly matched, then anyone waiting in queue will have a long time to wait before they ever get in a game. But if there are dozens of games going on, then there will be a constant flow of games ending and starting, so having a few games bogged down by evenly matched opponents won't cause any inconvenience on those waiting in queue. Understand that cross-server battlegrounds will not eliminate queues, because obviously at any given time one faction or the other will have more players trying to enter the battleground queue than the other (probably most of the time, there will be more Alliance players than Horde players overall). However, because there will be a constant flow of games ending and starting, the queue line will constantly move.
3. Severe faction population differences will be smoothed over. While there is an overall higher population of Alliance players over Horde players over the World of Warcraft universe, some servers have much more severe population differences than others. Some servers have as large as a 2:1 Alliance:Horde ratio, which makes it nearly impossible for Alliance players to get in the battlegrounds on their servers. Meanwhile, some servers actually have higher Horde populations or at least higher populations of Horde players interested in battlegrounds. By linking the servers, these severe population disconnects would be smoothed over, and players on these servers could experience a more rational queue rather than the severe queues that they have been experiencing.
When I've mentioned cross-server battlegrounds to others, some people have said that technical problems may be the issue -- such as perhaps the server architecture isn't set up to handle that kind of system. According to my GM source, however, that's actually not true. The technical details are supposed to be actually quite simple, because the battleground instances for many different servers are already hosted on the same machines. Instead, he said that the main problems were working out minutia like naming conflicts (e.g. What happens if two Neriads from different servers join the same battleground instance?). I don't want to minimize the task that I'm asking for. I realize that it would take several programmers to work out all of the details of the system to get it working properly. However, I also know that this kind of system is possible to implement, and I want to emphasize to the developers and the WoW community at large how important that this feature gets implemented as soon as possible. I don't care if my name in the battlegrounds has to look like Neriad_Tich or Neriad_0015. I just want to be able to play in the battlegrounds whenever I get the itch to play in one.
(Note: There could also be an issue with a cross-server economy. That is, one could make farming characters on low population servers and use the cross-server battlegrounds to transfer supplies and cash to characters on high population servers. If that is considered a major problem, then one can either disallow trading in the battlegrounds altogether or just allow trading of conjured items like mage water and warlock health stones).
The problems with battleground queues are severe, and with a third exciting-looking battleground to be released soon, splitting an already too small PvP crowd, the situation is only unfortunately going to get worse. I encourage you, as World of Warcraft developers, to work on implementing cross-server battlegrounds as soon as possible in order allow more people to experience the fantastic content that you are creating.
Sincerely,
Neriad aka MongoJerry
Tichondrius
THE NEED FOR CROSS-SEVER BATTLEGROUNDS -- AN OPEN LETTER
Dear Blizzard World of Warcraft developers,
Kudos to you for creating an exciting and imaginative game, and in particular, for creating the two battlegrounds of Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley, which are fun and exciting to play in. Thousands of people spend hours of their day every day fighting intense battles against both players and NPC's, and the fun rarely flags. There is one problem, however. Not enough people get to experience the fun and thrill of your creations, because the player populations on the individual servers are not large enough to support the large number of battleground instances necessary to allow a free-flow of players in and out of the battleground queues. On many servers, one or both battlegrounds have effectively ceased to exist, because there are never enough players of one faction or the other queuing up at the right times. It's not that people don't want to play the battlegrounds. It's just that when an individual tries to queue up and sees that there are no games being played, the person gets discouraged and leaves. The population of players who want to play in the battlegrounds needs to be pooled together so that there are always a large number of games -- not just 2-3 games but dozens of games -- going at once to choose from.
The Problem -- Tichondrius and Stormrage Examples
Let me illustrate the problem using the examples of two high population servers that I play on -- Tichondrius and Stormrage. Tichondrius is a high population PvP server and for many weeks, we had a pretty good showing at the battlegrounds. There were always 2-3 CTF matches and usually 1-2 AV matches going on. The queue times were often long as bottlenecks occurred (if a CTF match took a long time to conclude, then the people outside were stuck out in the cold), but at least we had games going on all the time. The problem came about a month ago when one of the more organized Alliance guilds on the server decided to have guild AV nights. An organized group of 30-40 people will almost always roll over a pickup group, so they realized they could destroy anybody in the contribution point system by repeatedly winning AV matches in under 30 minutes at a time. Other Alliance guilds followed suit and then some Horde guilds started doing the same thing. So now there are often 3-4 AV games going on at once, but now the small but loyal population of CTF'ers has been depleted as they join guild AV events or find that they also have grind AV to get contribution points and faction. The end result is that there has only been a handful of high level CTF matches in the last month on the server, despite the fact that there are dozens of players on the server (according to the posts on the Tichondrius forums) who want to play CTF. I know for my part that at least 20 people in my guild alone would love to play CTF if only people on the Alliance side would queue up and play. And, of course, people on the Alliance side say the same thing. But the only high level matches that have recently occurred on the server were organized guild vs guild events. Pickup high level CTF is effectively dead on Tichondrius.
The problem is even worse on Stormrage, a high population PvE server. Since the Stormrage players are a self-selected PvE community, a smaller percentage of the population there is interested in PvP play. The end result is that there are typically only one or two AV matches a week -- basically only when one of the organized Horde guilds on the server declare the evening to be an "AV night." The casual player who wants to log on and spend a few hours playing AV is left out in the cold unless they happen to log in on those special scheduled evenings.
If these kinds of problems are occurring on two relatively high population servers, I can only imagine how bad the situation is on lower population servers. There have been many attempts to encourage players to move from high population servers to low population servers, but one has to remember that doing so means that a person doing this gives up their best opportunities to play in these fun and exciting battlegrounds.
It's not that people don't want to play in the battlegrounds. On the contrary, the complaints are loud and clear, "I want to CTF so badly!" The problem is that the populations on the individual servers are not large enough to support a constant flow of players in and out of the games. A person can't just log in, get in the queue for a battleground, get in within 15 minutes, play for a couple of hours, and then log off when the person is done. Instead, in order to get in a game, one has to either log in at specific times when large guilds hold battleground events or one has to wait in queue and hope that the one or two battleground matches that are going on, if any, end sometime soon.
The Solution: Cross-Server Battlegrounds
The solution to the problem is straight-forward: Cross-server battlegrounds. The idea is that when you enter the queue for a battleground, you enter an all-server queue and end up playing with and against players on other servers. This idea isn't original with me. I actually got the idea from an acquaintance who is a GM at Blizzard who told me two months ago that a cross-server battlegrounds system was being worked on. I got very excited about the idea when he told me about it, but two months have passed, and I haven't heard anything more. I now worry that the idea of cross-server battlegrounds was scrapped, tabled, or relegated as a low priority item. I write this open letter in the hope that it will encourage more discussion of this issue and encourage the development of cross-server battlegrounds faster, because cross-server battlegrounds is something that is needed now instead of months from now.
The benefits of cross-server battlegrounds are as follows:
1. There will be battleground games happening all the time everywhere! People can log in day or night and see dozens of games up. This would encourage more people to play the battlegrounds, because they can play them at their own convenience.
2. The bottlenecks will be removed. As it stands, if there is only one match of a certain battleground going on and if the participants are fairly evenly matched, then anyone waiting in queue will have a long time to wait before they ever get in a game. But if there are dozens of games going on, then there will be a constant flow of games ending and starting, so having a few games bogged down by evenly matched opponents won't cause any inconvenience on those waiting in queue. Understand that cross-server battlegrounds will not eliminate queues, because obviously at any given time one faction or the other will have more players trying to enter the battleground queue than the other (probably most of the time, there will be more Alliance players than Horde players overall). However, because there will be a constant flow of games ending and starting, the queue line will constantly move.
3. Severe faction population differences will be smoothed over. While there is an overall higher population of Alliance players over Horde players over the World of Warcraft universe, some servers have much more severe population differences than others. Some servers have as large as a 2:1 Alliance:Horde ratio, which makes it nearly impossible for Alliance players to get in the battlegrounds on their servers. Meanwhile, some servers actually have higher Horde populations or at least higher populations of Horde players interested in battlegrounds. By linking the servers, these severe population disconnects would be smoothed over, and players on these servers could experience a more rational queue rather than the severe queues that they have been experiencing.
When I've mentioned cross-server battlegrounds to others, some people have said that technical problems may be the issue -- such as perhaps the server architecture isn't set up to handle that kind of system. According to my GM source, however, that's actually not true. The technical details are supposed to be actually quite simple, because the battleground instances for many different servers are already hosted on the same machines. Instead, he said that the main problems were working out minutia like naming conflicts (e.g. What happens if two Neriads from different servers join the same battleground instance?). I don't want to minimize the task that I'm asking for. I realize that it would take several programmers to work out all of the details of the system to get it working properly. However, I also know that this kind of system is possible to implement, and I want to emphasize to the developers and the WoW community at large how important that this feature gets implemented as soon as possible. I don't care if my name in the battlegrounds has to look like Neriad_Tich or Neriad_0015. I just want to be able to play in the battlegrounds whenever I get the itch to play in one.
(Note: There could also be an issue with a cross-server economy. That is, one could make farming characters on low population servers and use the cross-server battlegrounds to transfer supplies and cash to characters on high population servers. If that is considered a major problem, then one can either disallow trading in the battlegrounds altogether or just allow trading of conjured items like mage water and warlock health stones).
The problems with battleground queues are severe, and with a third exciting-looking battleground to be released soon, splitting an already too small PvP crowd, the situation is only unfortunately going to get worse. I encourage you, as World of Warcraft developers, to work on implementing cross-server battlegrounds as soon as possible in order allow more people to experience the fantastic content that you are creating.
Sincerely,
Neriad aka MongoJerry
Tichondrius