WoW Journal - 21-August-2005

Raslebol did his first "serious" PvP yesterday, spending several hours in Alterac Valley, and racking up hundreds of honorable kills. That is a lot, compared to his previous lifetime score of 22 honorable kills. The main reason the score was so high was that I was in a raid group, sharing all the HKs in the vicinity. That is a lot fairer than fighting individually, because the classes aren't well balanced in respect to honorable kills and honor points.

But even if the point distribution is fairer in a raid, that doesn't solve the main problem of Alterac Valley: Lag. Of course me currently being on a laptop doesn't help, but most of it is server lag. Often I would press a hotkey and the action from that key only happened a full 10 seconds later. As long as I was in a lonely corner of the battlefield, things were fine. But as soon as I approached the main battle, where over 50 people are usually fighting, action slowed down to a crawl. Anything you did was pretty much random.

And that is a technical problem, which is the responsability of Blizzard. PvP big battles were extremely laggy before the battlegrounds, and making a battleground for 80 players didn't help. No wonder there are rarely enough people to get one started, everybody prefers Warsong Gulch. I hope the next battleground they are working on is also small and lag-free.

After the first raid group turned out to be unorganized, only good for sharing the kills, we split off into a guild raid group on the battlefield. We liberated a mine from the kobolds, stormed and destroyed a bunker, and were generally a lot more efficient than the unorganized players. Nevertheless that only got us to control both graveyards around the Fields of Strife. The next target was simply too well defended by both NPC and players to take. The Horde not always having 40 players, at times going down to 28, while the Alliance always was at full strength, didn't help either.

Well, I'll see what rank this will result in. I want to be sergeant at some point, they get a nice cloak. A first success was that I'm now friendly with the Frostwolf, which is the clan guarding the battlefield. But except for allowing me to buy level 35 potions which I don't use, there isn't much of an advantage to it.
- posted by Tobold @ 1:50 PM Permanent Link