[World of Warcraft] Battlegrounds has been around a little over a week now. Most blogs seem to be blasting the system, but I’ve been a big fan of it. Yes the system has a lot of flaws that I will get to. However, battlegrounds has done what new raid instances (which cannot be experienced by anyone who is a casual to moderate player) never could. Battlegrounds has brought people who had stopped playing and considered cancelling their subscriptions back to the game. During the past week or so I have been seeing a lot of people that I quested with way back when. Admittedly, many are there just to see what the fuss is about, but those who have gotten into battlegrounds, like myself, are pulling all nighters again just like the first week we had the game.
As mentioned earlier, while I personally enjoy Battlegrounds, some people are put off by the many bugs and poor design choices. The top 3 seem to be:
1) Lack of any organization: I mentioned this in my previous posts. When you enter Battlegrounds you are not placed into any sort of group unless you were already part of a group when you enter. I’m not sure if its laziness or selfishness, but most people seem content to just kill things on their own or with a small group. Even when a raid group gets going, you can be sure that about half of the people on your side in the instance will just continue to go about doing their own thing. When you do get a decent sized group, it is another monumental feat to get more than 3 people to charge with you. Despite the lack of any penalty for death (aside from a walk from the graveyard) a lot of people aren’t willing to put themselves on the line.
2) Queues/Game time: They can’t really do anything about the wait times, but I agree that the games take way too long sometimes (more so Alterac than Warsong). This is a problem because certain NPCs in Alterac that give side quests do not respawn. On our server we’ve had a battle going on its third day now where the Alliance has not lost one bunker and have been at the gates of Frostwolf Village since day one. To win and reset the instance they must kill our leader in Frostwolf Village. They’ve summoned their calvalry and elemental and yet the Horde have held them off for 3 days. The Horde’s chances for victory, with the Alliance still having all their bunkers in tact, is slim (although it has been done on our server under similar conditions before), but those who need to turn in quests to dead NPCs are pretty much out of luck until one side finally wins.
3) Imbalances: Alterac seems fairly balanced as far as player classes are concerned. Warriors are still getting most of the killing blows, but I’ve gotten quite a few and I’m a priest. The map is, I think, a bit unbalanced, although I think that may be part of the design. In my experience the Alliance base has been very difficult to get in to (without an elemental anyways), but once we took out the two bunkers and crossed the bridge, it has fallen easily. The Horde base, on the other hand, has been breached many times by the Alliance, but getting to that final room where the Captain is has been difficult for the Alliance. In Warsong, the map is balanced, but both sides must employ a different style of play. The Alliance has the paladin, who, when paired up with a priest or two, is a pretty unstoppable flag carrier. When a guy who wears plate armor, can heal himself, can become temporarily invincible, and can cure himself of damage over times gets the flag, it is pretty hard to stop him. While the shaman’s ghost wolf form is useful, the shaman is much weaker than a paladin and must rely more on the team’s ability to keep enemies away while he makes a run for it compared to the paladin who is more of a walking tank.
Well, that’s just my two cents on the issue. I’m sure I’m wrong about some of it and there’s probably much deeper problems out there that I missed, but for me these have stood out. Despite this, I am a big fan of BG and they have reignited my interest in the game. Blizzard will be getting my $15 for at least another month. More are said to be on the way (hopefully one with the Undead as faction leaders), plus siege weapons are in the planning stages.
On lower pop servers there usually aren’t enough horde around to spawn an Alterac Valley instance.
Make a level 1 on Khadgar, do a /who alterac 60 or a /who warsong 60. Last week we had 1 Aterac Valley instance all week. A few others tried to start, ended up with 40 alliance vs 15ish horde, then shut down from lack of numbers. The little pop up that tells you the battleground is ready for you now only lasts 1 minute, I suspect a lot of people just miss it while afk and alliance has enough backup people but horde doesn’t.