WoW Battlegrounds Report

Yesterday I spent over two hours to test the first type of the new battlegrounds in World of Warcraft, the Alterac Valley, where big battles of 40 vs. 40 players take place. Unfortunately I found it rather horrible, and pretty much unplayable. The main problem here is lag. My computer is pretty good, 3 GHz CPU, 1 GB RAM, and a Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card, but in spite of a 3 MBit ADSL broadband connection, my WoW client simply doesn't get all the information fast enough. Most of the time I don't see the other people moving, I see them "blinking". And sometimes I don't see them at all. That is *my WoW client* doesn't see them at all. Pretty annoying if you find yourself dead, you look in your combat log what killed you, and you find a line saying "Unknown Entity hits you for 349 points of damage. You die.".

The second problem is me playing a warrior. I racked up 5 honorable kills by shooting with my gun, and 0 by attacking with my sword. I mean, in real life, what would you do if a troll with a sword approached you? Run like hell, you would. And so does everybody on the battlegrounds. I'm lucky if I get one hit in before my target is gone, and the lag prevents me from following him. I never get the rage built up to hamstring him or use any special attacks. Due to lag I even had my charge attack not working, with the target gone by the time I arrived.

The third problem is that nobody takes PvP as seriously as PvE. People don't form groups, and if they form groups they don't stay together, which totally negates the advantage of a group. Utter chaos reigns on the battlegrounds. Random assemblies of players form, get into battles, and disperse again. The front is moving back and forth, with nobody willing to stand their ground, everybody is running around like headless chickens.

On the battlegrounds you can loot fallen enemies, getting loot like night elf heads or dwarven spines. There are quests for these, and the first time you do them you get a decent amount of xp and cash, but afterwards only reputation. Problem here is that everybody can loot any corpse. I didn't get any of the loot from my 5 honorable kills, but I got loot of corpses that I never did damage to. Probably the people with the most loot are those that spent the least time fighting, and concentrate on picking up stuff. You also get enemy blood as loot, and you have to bring that to the shaman of your side. When he has received a couple of hundred portions of blood, he will summon a big elemental for your side.

The battleground has a lot of nice ideas and side quests, but people tend to ignore them. For example you *could* get a group together and sneak through a side valley guarded by level 57 elite mobs and get into the back of the enemy lines. But nobody bothers. There are also mines guarded by kobolds, which you could liberate with a group, and thus give some unspecified bonus to your side. But in all the time I've been on the battlefield, I've never seen one of the mines taken, and if ever there were only single players there, never a group which would have been able to do it.

I think if you could get a *good* group together on the Alterac Valley battleground, you could do some fun things. Liberate the mine, help your cause by doing some quests, and work together in PvP for much greater efficiency. Provided Blizzard finds a way to handle the lag. But chaotic as that battleground is right now, it isn't much fun. There is no sense of purpose to it, you don't get the impression that your actions change anything, even your kills are mostly just random luck. There is neither tactics nor strategy, beyond moving with the bulk of your army for greater safety.

I'll check out the other battleground tonight. Maybe things are better on a smaller, 10 vs. 10 battleground.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:00 AM Permanent Link