Got me. 50/50 win as a Horde in my experience so far and AV has 10x the number of active instances going than any other single BG on our server. There is usually 10+ AVs running and 1-2 of the others. I have seen AV get upwards of 40 instances going since 2.3 launched.

I think the problem is in the adjustment. Horde has always had to take the slow route in AV. There was little adjustment needed for the new AV, other than Horde can win this way now.

Alliance were always "go faster go faster" and they seem to have made no adjustments to this game plan for 2.3 AV. So, they go in, rush, get killed, and then get stuck behind a wall of Horde.

Sadly, neither side plays any differently than before 2.3. It is still "rush to SH" for the Horde and then work your way towards Vanndar, but now the games just end before you get there.

It wouldn't surprise me to see Alliance boycotting, but I doubt it's anything more than a minority. Same with the Horde ever since AV went live and the map was horribly imbalanced.
 

The map is asymmetric, and certain aspects that were detrimental to Horde (like the chokepoint before Stormpike Graveyard and the bridge immediately afterwards) are now contributing to their victory. In those old 10-hour AVs Horde could be stuck there for hours battling the constantly respawning Alliance. In real-world warfare, such a chokepoint would cause heavy losses to the attacker, but because Horde got used to fighting as the underdog in such a situation, they can now mow down Alliance reinforcements with relatively minor losses.
 

My experience confirms the reversed situation: indeed, Horde wins most of the time.
As heartless_ says, Alliance rush forward, while Horde often tries to defend... which often works very good.
I must agree with Shalkis: the map seems to be the problem. Horde is forced to stay as a group because of the pass leading to Stormpike Graveyard an the bridge after. Alliance have the possibility to enter the Frostwolf-Village by different ways. Players end up going in one by one and getting killed inside by defenders.
 

I find it's been fairly even, maybe slightly favoring the Horde, on my battlegroup (whatever it's called). The horde seem to win when they keep a small to medium sized force of defenders back, and lose fairly quickly when they don't. Horde wins always seem to be much more drawn out as their route to the NPC Boss needs a steady advance (while the alliance can rush, due to the reasons others have stated).
 

On my battle group I wouldn't say horde wins most of the time. My experience is probably much closer to 50/50. However, I was farming honor and marks for the gladiator weapon before the patch came out, and trying to get the 40 marks for it I only won one match, and had to get the rest of the 37 marks one by one as a horde. It's a huge improvement, but not big enough for alliance players to boycott the battleground. It usually comes down to which team has more trigger happy players who can't wait 4 minutes to capture a bunker/tower/graveyard, and which side has more people afk in the starting cave, which is a much more serious problem at very off peak hours like 3-7am which is when I mostly end up pvp'ing because there's no one else online to do anything else with.
 

In my experience, Horde are now winning close to 80% of the AVs I go into. What has happened, quite simply, is that, as mentioned previously, the horde's previous weakness in AV has now become their greatest strength. Where there was a chokepoint they had trouble breaking through, there is now a slaughterfield where alliance is trapped and killed by the droves to mark another easy horde victory with neither vandar or drek seeing the light of day.
 

It used to be that AV was my favorite battleground, I am not that much into PvP and since Alliance had a very good win ratio it was quite enjoyable.

Now I find that right after 2.3 Alliance was still winning most of the AVs.

I cannot tell you the exact moment that changed, but it sometimes takes me more AVs than I can bear to suffer to win me the Daily PvP Quest. Currently I prefer WS (which I used to hate).

I do not really have an explanation it just seems, that Horde is much more organized and that they are much better at capping towers.

Also I often see "rush" games without any defense and here the Horde seems to be just a little bit faster on average. I have yet to recap a tower in the Alliance base but I often seen the East and West Frostwolf Towers return to Horde.

I am a little frustrated by my formerly favorite AV but not even AV beats the horrible ratio I get on Eye of the Storm.
 

Actually, there is a reason that Horde, generally speaking, plays better than Alliance in PvP. Most of the 'hardcore' PvP players selected classes and races based on every available advantage. And since new races have been released, you've seen many of the serious PvP players reroll on the Horde side.

AV has gotten a lot more even since the change, but in my battlegroup, every BG is in play. During the day, Horde mostly wins...at night Alliance.
 

Seems pretty even to me after a weekend spent playing AV in EU-Conviction.

Less rush games now than when 2.3 was first released, and there is a fair bit of holding / recapturing of towers on both sides (I'm ally). People with deadlybossmods installed seems to be helping with this.

One notable match stalled early with a major horde defence outside of Galvagar, causing much milling around and confusion for alliance 'what we just don't go in like normal and get our free honour?'.

But we regrouped, bypassed the horde defense (all horde in their half) and went for drek (we were way behind on reinforcements by here). Almost took Drek down too, but sadly ran out of reinforcements with Drek halfway down. Epic match tho, and plenty of variation from the typical match and plenty of thinking of new ways to deal with it.
 

AV is crap now. Not because I'm alliance and instead of winning 80% of the time, I now loose 80% of the time....that sucks also. The main reason AV sucks now is that it is no longer the quickest, and easiest way to obtain honor. Prior to 2.3 I could cost into AV, while watching a movie, and I would following the raid around downing bosses. Each boss was 20k honor. It wasn't PvP as much as it was a mini-raid.

There was very little PvP because it delayed the end of the game. Ending the game was important because it let you queue up for another game. It didn't really matter who wins or looses, as long as each faction kept killing bosses then they would get lots of honor. I used to get around 500 bonus honor per game win or loose.

AV now? I get anywhere between 0 bonus honor, to 600 bonus honor. 600 is super rare...the average I'd say is 300 bonus honor, and the matches last longer.

Matches where I get 0 bonus honor seem to be because horde captures and holds grave yards...all alliance spawn in dun baldur and no one tries to go capture towers, they just sit there fighting horde like idiots. Those matches take forever. I /afk out.

My last gripe on the new AV is that I always seem to log into a match that is half way over. Meaning I miss out on a lot of bonus honor, and since there are a lot more turtles....I seem to log into a turtle...I basically waste an hour.
 

For me, it seems like Horde is winning about 50% time nowadays. Which is a huge improvement from the past where Alliance was winning the majority of the time.

I think any time that the "balance" is tuned in the other directions, you'll get a lot of screaming from the side that's no longer winning as often.
 

In my battlegroup, alliance still wins at least 50%. I consider it an easy daily when its an AV day, and the honor is nice and easy. 400-600 for a win in 15 maybe 20 minutes.

I play on a pvp server though, so maybe that has something to do with it.Maybe there isnt alot of change in pvp servers where the roles reversed on pve servers.
 

It's actually pretty simple. As Horde, launch a concerted effort to thwart the Alliance at Galvanger. Not that bad, was it? His fears along with his other abilities actually make him a fairly easy boss to keep up. Even if most of the Alliance are there, Galv doesn't burn down quickly.

Now log on an Alliance character and launch a concerted effort to save Balinda. Oh, wait. You can't. She's got no real defenses and is about as dumb as an NPC can be. You basically have to defend her in spite of herself.

I have seen a small handful of Horde (5 or so) ruin and wipe multiple Galv attempts. I have NEVER seen a Balinda attempt wipe.
 

It sounds like the same issue blizzard has had with content fixes since release. The wait so long to adjust something that everyone gets used to the situation, works out their goals with the current reality in mind and then are forced to suffer through the pain of readjusting everything because of a fix that took so long in coming no one expected it.

With PVE this isn't so bad but with PVP it really sucks because it can be months before everyone gets with the new reality and starts to adequately perform. As usual the really good PVP servers adjust quickly and the servers that have poor PVP communities will take a month or more to adjust and figure it out.

Just increasing the distance between thier progression and the good PVP servers progression.
 

Games will even out somewhat once the average Alliance player learns to account for the newly successful Horde strategies. The faction that captures the forward mid-map chokepoint (Iceblood or Stonehearth graveyard, depending on your faction)and rebuffs the enemy at the rearward mid-map chokepoint has the game in the bag.

The ticketing system has neutered the classic Alliance home-base turtle that demoralized Horde players and drove them to zerg on offense. Coincidentally, the time-honored Horde offensive zerg is now most effective in securing Stonehearth GY and setting up a quick win. Alliance forces who were used to being able to split up and simultaneously kill Galv while securing Iceblood GY are finding themselves spread too thin.

Galv/Balinda should be killed after the enemy has been bottled up behind their SH/IB chokepoint.
 

As alliance, once you die and res at dun baldar it's all over.

Horde on my server play it smart and have a denfensive team guarding the area between Icewing bunker and Stonehearth GY, blocking Ally players from advance further down the map.

Common mistakes for allies I find are not waiting the 4 minutes to cap towers and GYs, and leaving GYs undefended after being capped.
Horde rogues usually take the Allies mine before the allies do.
AFK's don't bother me as I'm sure the horde have the same problem.

Then match turns into a turtle and then there's too much typing and not enough fighting on the alliance side as the BG turns into a bitch fest of how everyone sucks, except for the player typing.
 

I must confess that I haven't tried AV after 2.3 basically due to not having an active account. ;)

I must say though that horde has had the disadvantage in AV for so long so it would only be fair if alliance got to try to have it like that for a while also. I'm sure that if it really is tilted to the advantage of the horde it will be fixed much sooner than this change went in since it's alliance that gets to cry for a change. Personally though I really doubt that it's true. Alliance was used to winning like 80% (yes a number pulled right out of the air) of the games and now they don't, then they automatically must be at a disadvantage.
 

On my battlegroup its about a 1/3 - 2/3 split on horde wins vs. alliance wins in AV.

I'm going to have to give you some "alliance plays better than horde" crap, because that's simply what it is. If the entire horde raid zergs on offense while the alliance does a 30/10 or 20/20 split, Alliance wins. Every time. If nobody plays defense on either side then its generally a toss-up as to who wins.

If Horde actually plays defense we have a very good chance of winning. The longer horde defense holds the more alliance players switch to offense, allowing the horde offense to progress.

So of course on our battlegroup, 2/3 of the time everybody zergs. I have frequently been the ONLY person on defense. :b
 

Just as an added note, winning about 1/3 of the AV matches is a huge improvement for my battlegroup. Alliance used to win 90-95% of all matches with anywhere from 10-25 horde AFK.
 

It's all about the group makeup; 10-15 organized defenders on either team will almost always win the day. With the new importance of towers; the defense can make their first stand there while everyone else zergs, and the reinforcement count will fall quickly for whomever doesn't defend their towers. The Alliance can still hold that last graveyard before the bridge indefinetly, but if the Horde has all the other towers destroyed/defended they are already ahead by 200 reinforcements. The Alliance zerg can still be split apart after that last graveyard, but if they destroyed all the towers along the way; they are ahead. If your team knows that towers are important, and the oppostie doesn't; You will win. If both teams know the importance of towers it will be a no holds barred smashfest.
 

I'd like to interject here... It's not so much the gameplay things, but more the metagame systems here that are making the alliance stop playing.

Previously, when the horde lost most of the games, they still came out of Alterac Valley with 200-300 bonus honor per loss, easily. The alliance would get 400-500 honor for a win, but that was usually offset by their longer queue times. When the 2.3 changes came, the emphasis went towards winning, and the majority of the bonus honor came from late game objectives, rather than front-loaded ones.

There's no organized boycott at all. Given that each Battlegroup has at least 10 different servers in it, any sort of organized boycott is doomed to failure. The Alliance players pretty much stopped playing Alterac Valley because there's no honor in it anymore. If they spend 20-30 minutes in Alterac Valley to only earn 0-120 bonus honor, they might as well go play any of the other BGs, where the honor per hour rate is higher. So they do, and as a result, queue times get bigger for the Horde.

What you end up with is a "Prisoner's Dilemma" situation. The Alliance don't care if the Horde wins a lot, as long as the get honor, much like the Horde didn't care if the Alliance won a lot, as long as they got honor. Currently, the bonus honor totals in Alterac Valley in my battlegroup end somewhere between 500-600 honor for the Horde, and 0-60 honor for the Alliance. Obviously, this is a far cry from the old 3-400 Alliance and 2-300 Horde.

The real interesting part is how the feedback behavior affects this. The Horde, saddled with ever-increasing queue times (I've heard it's been up over an hour on some battlegroups) are determined to wring every last drop of honor from Alterac Valley because of how long it takes to get in. This means that they secure every tower, quash every Alliance attempt, and generally reduce the Alliance honor gain to as little as possible, in order to maximize their own.

The result? Even more Alliance get frustrated, take their ball and go home.

These are all metagame implications. Nobody *really* cares whether people win or lose, they care about how much honor they can get from the battleground to buy their new shiny purples. Alliance and Horde players are mostly looking to maximize their honor gain. If the Horde would not begrudge the Alliance the honor gains in AV, then they'd have a lot better queue times. However, since that would involve sacrificing some of their earned bonus honor, it's far less likely.

Prisoner's Dilemma, as I said.

--Rawr
 

My battlegroup is either the same as AFK gamer or has the same situation, because on my server AV queue times are now up over an hour. Pior to the patch Horde won maybe 1/3 of games, but now Horde is dominating. During AV weekend right after the patch Horde won most games. In my opinion Horde lost before the patch due to terrain causing bottlenecks in the Ally favor, allowing them to defend with fewer people, and win the race every time. Now due to the reinforcements number ticking down a large horde defense is a possiblity, and they are able to turn back the Alliance at the choke points that used to cause Horde such issues. The Horde now stops them before they are able to invade the Horde's much easier to attack base. So as Rawr said so well above, the horde is milking the points as much as they can, and alliance is throwing their toys because they are getting no honor during increasingly long queues. I think it will end up only being active during AV weekend at this point. It is sad, because the new rules actually make the bg epic without taking epic amounts of time. It is heaps of fun because you now get the epic battles of old, without the race of last round, and the huge game length of the original AV. I think the Alliance could find a working strategy, as other battlegroups are clearly having more equal matches, but they will need to spend time in there trying different plans and at this point they have given up.
One additional note, I think blizzard making the bonus honor completely dependent on the game objectives, with the possiblity of having zero bonus honor if you don't cap anything is probably bad. People don't like losing, and losing and getting nothing for it after an hour in queue will never sit well. On the other hand I think the zero bonus honor given when you lose completely is not a clear indication of the honor rate, people are used to the old race AV, where you didn't get hardly any kills. In the new AV you tend to get 100 kills in a match now, so the bonus honor isn't the complete picture.

Basically people need to to adjust to change... yeah that will go well.
 

Rawrasaur nailed it.
 

Rawr hit the nail on the head.

It's not the fact that Alliance is losing AV more now that causing people not to queue. It's the fact that you get nothing when you lose.

Even when we win, the honor isn't as high per minute as it used to be.

Combine that with the fact that there's no consensus on what strategy works. It used to be that everybody logging in would know exactly what to do in AV - sometimes it let you win and sometimes it made you lose, but it was a Plan.

Now the beginning of every AV is an argument over what strategy to use and why everybody else is a total noob for suggesting a different one and people are yelling about Galv and insults are flying and it's an exercise in frustration and lack of coordination.

And once you're dead you're *stuck* at DB.

So I don't queue and my guildies that used to love pvp don't queue (and we probably have something like a 40% win rate on my battlegroup - but the 60% loss has so little honor that it doesn't make up for it) and I wouldn't be surprised if Horde queue times are insane.
 

zero honor for 45 minutes of AV isn't worth it. It doesn't happen everytime, but one of out three games seems to yield little to no honor.

If Blizz wants to fix AV, they should add extra bonus honor every 10 minutes of play. I'd ask for 100 honor every 10 minutes, but whatever really works. Get locked into a turtle? atleast I wont leave the game because I'm getting nothing out of this. I'll stay and get a few hundred honor...the fact that I'm staying also fixes the other problem I have of always logging into an AV turtle...so fustrating.

If more people are getting honor, then less people will /afk, then less people will queue into a bs game. Works for me...someone go write blizzard.
 

Just thought I'd like to add a few things:

#1. The reason that this doesn't happen in all battlegroups is because not all battlegroup strategies play the same. If the Horde and Alliance play DPS race to the end, you'll likely have a roughly 50/50 win rate, and both sides will get high honor throughput. In the more competitive battlegroups (Stormstrike, Bloodlust) this isn't happening, and it's a slippery slope to get back here.

#2: Blizzard could temporarily avoid the problems by randomizing the spawn. The problem with this is that it could eventually lead to whoever getting the north end to just afk and wait for when they get the south starting spot.

#3: The fix I actually had in mind changes the nature of AV. Instead of having towers be timed, you give them each some sort of 'power core' that's a killable NPC that doesn't actually do anything. Killing the NPC would destroy the tower. Healing the NPC can 'repair' the tower. The power core would not heal on its own, or it would heal slowly. This way, you get rid of the annoying 'ninja' gameplay and instead make it more of a focused effort to bring the towers down and move on. The graveyards can be held with the 'ninja' style gameplay to keep it around, but changing the towers to do this would make a huge difference.
 

Rawr has it right. Unfortunately the only tactic to counter a strong IB defence is too play for a drawn out win that offers little honor to either side. Once the pattern sets in it is self reinforcing as the better allliance players stop queueing first

Horde queue times are now 90 mins and for every 10 av's 2 months ago their is now 1.
 

Ah, AV, probably my favorite BG.

On my battlegroup, AV is quite active and see-saws based upon -- the number of AFKers. The new marking system is not stopping them; they're back, and often still sit in the cave. I open a raid window and mark them and for some reason it doesn't always mark them as inactive; I see "notification sent" and later they're still in the cave and not inactive. I'd rate Blizzard's notification system as a C-, and their effort in stopping BG AFK as an F.

I think I like the "last AV" better than this. I've played dozens of AVs in patch 2.3, on offense (from tower defense to the leading edge group) and I still don't know what the reinforcements are! I also miss the old strategies to bust turtles; I have a feeling I won't see those ever again.

Bottom line: AV is a great strategy wargame in a PUG-only environment. Kind of like if you put Kara raiders in a queue with the "Join as group" disabled.
 

It depends on your battlegroup. On Reckoning, Horde win WSG, AB, and EotS 90% of the time. I PvP a lot as alliance there, and seriously can go an entire night without seeing a win. Even when I have higher damage done and kills than anyone on the Horde team, and I'm playing strategically and trying to encourage others to do the same without bossing them around, I can't help what my teammates do and we still lose. I no longer take any PvP daily quest except AV because the odds of me happening to join the one BG that day where I'm lucky enough to have good alliance against non-stellar horde players is just too low, and not worth the time investment.

AV is about 50/50. Sometimes I'll get a string of losses or wins. It used to be 99.9% alliance wins before the patch in my battlegroup. That was the only place we could reliably win. PvP as alliance is pretty futile on reckoning unless you are in a guild premade.

Why is AV in our battlegroup 50/50? Because we see a variety of strategies. There is a tendency for Alliance to post at least a token, if not heavy, defensive force at Stormpike, while until recently the Horde tended to have zero or near zero defenders. This led to the Alliance winning most "race" situations, where both teams just try to sprint to the general. Matches get a little more up in the air when the Horde put up more defense, and cap IB and TP towers behind the O after they've mostly moved on. In the worst cases, this leads to the loss of all forward GYs, causing all Alli to spawn at stormpike or aid station, resulting in a low-honor mess that is either decided by reinforcements (in favor of horde because they've capped towers and we haven't) or if enough Alli get past the Horde to try to O, eventually the D will fail and the O won't be able to keep up with the Horde.

Basically, Alli tend to treat every match like a race, which contributes to their ability to win when the Horde also races. But this makes it difficult for them to recover from a horde counter-strategy. The stronger strategy would be to leave defenders at IB, IB tower, and TP, but this runs the risk of losing to a horde all-out zerg.
 

This all reminds me of WSG about a year and a half ago. I remember the horde screaming that que times were lengthening and alliance was boycotting WSG. We weren't boycotting it. We just quit playing it because you rarely got any honor for the game. No one came back till they needed tokens.

Seems like blizzard hasn't learned thier lesson. With the loot centric design they've got if the losers don't get enough reward they just quit playing.
 

AV Battlegroup in question is Stormstrike on the US servers.

Which has become the laughing stock of Alliance servers as the alliance constantly lose on it for various debatable reasons.

IMO it's because the horde effectively defend ALL their towers,GY, Glav, etc and cause the Alliance to res at the aid station, creating a turtle.

Some have suggested the Horde should let the alliance capture GY, towers so the match doesn't take more then 40 minutes to play, but most of the horde posters I've read (not an arcuate poll i know) do this maximize their bonus honour by keeping all towers and capping all the alliances.

Being PVE tank on Stormstrike, I tend to avoid AV dailies now. Not because of some fictional boycott, but because the match takes 40 minutes to play and I'll end up getting 0 to 90 honour for my time. I can usually get 4 EOTS matches during the same amount of time and whatever the daily is.

Stormstrike also happens to be the most childish BG server as suggestions in BG chat, like: "lets defend stonehearth GY" or "don't leave! wait 'till the tower caps" are responded to with, "L2P nub! it's a zerg to Galv"

Stormstrike also made the "news" on EU forums:

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=1905501723&sid=1&pageNo=1

Besides the normal L2P quotes the best I saw was,

"I guess EU alliance just don't have to fight their way through all the burger and twinky wrappers to get to their keyboards."
 

Just to add to my above post.

I'd like to salute the horde on Stormstrike for dominating AV in the way they have. Maybe the question shouldn't be how crapy the alliance are on BG9 but how good the horde players are.
 

Stormstrike isn't BG9. BG9 is Bloodlust. Bloodlust is also having a similar queue situation for horde (I play on Bloodlust).

--Rawr
 

Before this patch came out Horde almost always lost in AV in every single game. Even when we seemed to be going well and fighting the last boss the Alliance would fell ours first. Nothing I did seemed to change that. I quit WoW before the patch came out though so I don't know the specifics of what they have changed, but I can give some insight to what was wrong.

Too many AFKers every battleground I entered there was a minimum of 5 Horde players afk. sometimes up to and over 10. This left us with at the most around 35 more often then not it was around 30. Many of my ally friends said that they would only have 5 maximum AFK players.

People played for themselves. Every battleground we would be caught up at one bunker where about 5-10 alliance could hold up the 30 of us. This I find because non of the healers were healing and non of the warriors were charging. Often I would find myself running foward tabbing and dotting like crazy but I would always die very quickly.
I have never played in AV as Alliance but they always seemed to be in groups and using the various strategic points to their advantage.

My only reason that Horde are winning now (knowing nothing about the patch) is that they have gotten rid of those afkers and reduced the strength of the bunkers. As much as I loved coming top at dmg in AV I hated all the noob warriors that only cared about staying alive.