We'll Do it For You, Blizzard

"...The issue is the amount of time it takes to create a battleground, and balancing that work time with other areas of the game. Battlegrounds are very labor intensive, Warsong Gulch which is probably the smallest of the battleground maps still has some terrain issues here and there. Playtesting, balancing, making edits, all require a very large amount of resources to ensure a successful battleground..."

Note: Full quote can be read at mmo-champion.com

He continues on about how much of Blizzards "resources" battlegrounds generally take, and how other areas of the game take up a much more substantial chunk of their time and effort. This basically caused every reader to assume that PVP is generally not even half of the priority of that of PVE(although he doesn't say that directly, the fact that they're ever approaching a pathetic average of 1 new BG per year tends to speak for itself) He also says that most of the team is completely focused on WoTLK now, pretty much making 2.4 the last major patch before WoTLK will be released.

I can understand at this point as to why creating another completely new BG designed with a competitive backbone in mind would be difficult and time consuming, but the promise for competitive guild vs. guild and rated WSG/BG was made at Blizzcon, before TBC was even released. The platform is there, the rating system is there, and you wouldn't even have to start from scratch to bring WSG to a competitive level. Now that the TTR is around as well, sponsors won't have to worry about transporting their teams anywhere. It's disappointing to see that Blizzard has followed a trend of having damage scale too quickly, balance get further and further away from what almost every hardcore PVP'er wishes for, and then erases the board for a clean start with a new expansion. With that being said, this is my third article in my series of rated WSG suggestions/content, and I've compiled every suggestion/idea that I felt was good and put them into a list for what I feel would be a pretty good start as to what would be necessary to bring WSG up to level 70 speed. A lot of these suggestions will address potential issues that have been brought up previously.

Rated WSG Suggestions:

Rating System
Option is to either leave it the same as the arena rating system or develop another, possibly based on win/loss ratio's alone.

Issue of GY Camping
Res timer increased from 30 to 60 seconds, or debuff for standing idle around GY area for too long (such as 1% stats reduced every 10 seconds.) A possible hard time limit on overall length of a match could be a good idea as well, or a time limit on how long a character could hold a flag. If both teams are in a stalemate, it might not necessarily be a bad idea to have both flags reset after a certain period of time. This would essentially add another variable for strategies and speed up a lot of games.

Also a lot of comments were left suggesting the GY's be moved closer to the center of the map so that it wouldn't be as close to spawn points/flag rooms. I'm not sure how I feel about this change but it was widely suggested so I figured I'd put it down.

Another idea is to allow flag caps even if you don't currently have your own teams flag safely stored at the base. You'd have to increase the number of caps required to win, but it could add a new speed factor to the game.

Consumables
A new issue, yet also an old issue, would be the use of consumables beyond faps. It was generally an accepted rules among "top" teams at 60 that using certain pots (absorb) and flasks wasn't allowed, so something similar would probably have to be enforced. Pot vendors at starting room/areas. There needs to be careful discrimination on new level 70 consumable type items or they could be gamebreaking.

Flag drop debuff
Recently added debuff upon dropping flag needs to be removed. Flag handling was almost an art form before, using Iceblock, Vanish, etc to throw your opponents off Guard

Resilience: 
The unknown in terms of how much resilience could effect matches. WSG designed around multiple respawns and death where as resilience/arena is based off of keeping you alive for one death as long as possible.
 
WSG Gear
New WSG only sets with bonuses that improve class efficiency in the WSG environment would always be a good idea in the eyes of Blizzard. You could add in a new token system that rewards tokens based entirely off only ladder based WSG, or even bring back old reputation rewards and offer new ones.

PVE Gear
Most people would like to see a complete removal of PVE gear in all things PVP regardless of it being preform competitive WSG or Arena. I personally think that the imbalance will only get worse as damage scales higher. However, full testing will need to be done, as PVE gear might become necessary to kill 494 resilience targets backed by multiple healers.

Maps
MOAR!~!

That covers most of the potential problems brought up in comments before, as well as some good suggestions in terms of fixes/additions to the level 70 version of WSG. If you have others feel free to comment and I will add them. Have a good weekend.

Tags:

World of Warcraft

Report Post