Tobold's Blog
Monday, April 07, 2008
 
I hate WSG

Well, hate is too strong an expression. But of the 4 available battlegrounds, I like WSG the least, by a large margin. Even in spite of the 2.4 changes, far too often one side turtles somewhere with the captured flag, and the game goes on forever and forever. A reader wrote me complaining why Blizzard "forces" people to play battlegrounds they don't like. The PvP rewards cost some amount of honor and some amount of victory marks, and if the item you want cost 20 WSG victory marks, you'll have to do WSG, whether you like it or not. Since recently you can also exchange a set of one of each type of victory marks for some honor points, which again prevents you from playing only the battleground(s) you like.

Well, I can see the advantage as well as the disadvantage of the system. If all the battlegrounds gave the same type of victory mark, sooner or later people would find out which of them gave the best honor and most marks per hour, and the other three battlegrounds would become increasingly deserted. And although I don't like WSG, I'd rather do a mix of battlegrounds than the same battleground all the time. Blizzard is forcing us to diversify for our own good.

But what I could imagine would be a vendor where you could exchange marks at a 3 to 1 ratio. So if you really, really don't want to visit WSG but needed 20 WSG victory marks, you could just give the NPC 60 victory marks from other battlegrounds instead. So for people who are after the fastest way to marks, diversifying would still be the best solution. But if you just can't stand one specific place, you'd have a costly way to avoid it.
Comments:
Fits right a long with the trend they have now going of interchanging PvP and PvE gear with tokens and trading tokens for honor.

On that note, jesus blizzard, now my druid has 6 choices on what to spend his token on, and yeah, I've PvP'dd and PvE'd with all 6 combinations at one time or another...
 
I'm quite surprised that I don't regularly see trade channel spam for WSG pre-mades whose sole purpose is to throw the match, just to get as many tokens per hour as possible. Let the other guys win, who cares -- you can make more tokens per hour with 1 token every 5-10 mins than trying to win a 45-min long match for 3 tokens. Need 30 tokens for that chest piece? Easy if you throw a night's worth of WSG matches and get the honor from AV.

Then again, maybe people do that and they just don't advertise the fact.
 
People do form premades in order to lose fast. I personally see it more with AB than WSG (especially because you technically can't MAKE the other side win WSG), but they're out there. Frankly, the idea kind of disgusts me, but the new PvP system has led to this.

Actually though, since 2.4 I've had a much more enjoyable time in all battlegrounds. I think the fact that you can trade in marks for honor now has made people more willing to play diverse battlegrounds, and try harder to win. It's been a nice change of pace. WSG still has its problems, but I like how you can be down 0-2 and still win if you can turn the momentum around. It's pretty much the only battleground where that is the case.
 
I hate WSG too. Infact, WSG is the only daily BG quest I've always avoided. I'd say most BG's in my battle group are very evenly matched. 50/50 win/loose. Except WSG. WSG is like 90% horde wins. I blame it on racials.

Recently the WSG daily became worth it however. Since I have close to 100 marks for all the other BG's, when the the WSG daily pops up I grab it. Thanks to the unlimited "honor for marks" quest. WSG is almost worth it. I get about 100 honor from WSG, mostly from honor kills. I get one badge. Making one WSG = about 400 honor. The same the average AV brings in. If I win WSG(which I don't) then I really hit the jack pot with the daily quest and three badges.

If it wasn't for the mark quest, I would never do this. I spent the whole weekend trying to win one WSG on my alliance mage. (well not the whole weekend, but about 3 hours each day on fri,sat,sun). NOT ONE WIN. I still have the stupid quest. I got really optimistic late sunday night when the match started 10 alliance vs. 6 horde. The match ended 10 alliance vs. 8 horde. We lost.
 
Dropping WSG for good would be awesome. There really is no reason to keep it alive, especially with a new BG coming in WOTLK. EOTS is essentially the *fixed* WSG anyway. Please Blizzard, let WSG die.
 
Is there really a need for different BG tokens? Why not award a single type of token upon the completion of a battleground? It makes much more sense to me. Is the only reason Blizz doesn't do this because people may completely stop playing one battleground (WSG) or more? If that's the case, then it should be welcomed as player input and they could remove the abandoned BG(s). If a new BG will always be introduced with each xpac, then the older ones become irrelevant anyway... much like how pre-BC endgame content is now.
 
Capture the flag is BY FAR my favorite objective type PvP match.

And yet, I hate WSG and almost never play it. It's partly the reward thing, but when I sit back and think about the gameplay I can't help but draw three comparisons to why WSG is not fun.

1) Flag carrier is too hard to kill relative to other games (FPS genre for example)

2) Matches dont have a time limit. Other games often will have a 15-20 min timer and whoever is ahead when the timer expires wins. Draws are allowed.

3) After death, everyone has the starts with the same spawn gear. In other words, the gear level is of equivalent value and only skill differentiates players.

4) Servers typically cycle through 5-10 different maps to provide variety.

#3 and #4 will never be addressed. #2 could go A LONG way towards fixing it.
 
I would think a better solution would be to make WSG a better battleground so people would want to play it, rather than force people to play it 'for their own good'. I suppose that would require actual effort though.
 
I'm with you, I totally hate wsg, but like all other things I don't like in this game, I put up with them. If I could trade in 60 av marks for example, for 20 wsg, I would never do another wsg again on my mains! Great idea.
 
WSG would be much more fun if they didn't force me to play on the same map every single time. I like playing CTF. I don't like playing CTF on the same map every time for 3 years.

--Rawr
 
I don't care for WSG either, even though it is occasionally fun.
I ran into the most premades in WSG, presumably since there are only 10 on each side. With the new 50-kill rule, I can imagine some really horrific scenarios.
It's the one BG where you *need* a flag carrier (EOS is much more forgiving), and I've been thrown in with PUGs that literally had no real carrier (no warrior - druid - rogue).
I wouldn't miss WSG if it went away. Been there, done that.
And I if there was a 3-for-1 trade badge trade, or 'generic' badges, I'd probably never enter WSG again (unless I was part of a premade).
 
I have to agree with this ! WSG sometimes takes forever, the new changes dont seem to do a lot.

Wouldnt it be simply fixed by returning the flag to it's place after 5 mins ? Or after 10mins, just give both teams a point, so a match would last max 30mins ? Plenty of ways to fix this I think.
 
WSG is a blast in a premade, which is how I do PvP 90% of the time anyway.

But, WSG is absolutely broken. Blizzards attempt to "fix" it was horrible and almost useless.

Here is how WSG can be fun.

1. 20 Minute Time Limit.

2. However many flags you've captured at the end of the WSG results in that many bonus marks.

E.G. If you capture 3 flags (by winning) you get 6 marks total. If you do not capture any flags, you get the default 1 mark. If you capture 2 flags and lose, you still walk out with 3 marks.

3. 20 Minute Time Limit.

And no, the repeat of the Time Limit was not an accident. It's for emphasis.
 
They should have 4 different tokens and rotate them so every week you get them from different BG's. Then the people who truly hate some BG's or are not in any hurry to get their honor gear can just wait until you get the marks you need from your favorite BG.
 
Always having resented to take up PvP, I was quite surprised by patch 2.4. Being in a very small but nice, supportive guild, I have never been able to take part in the end-of-game in WoW. Accordingly, my gear is mostly quest rewards, with the occasional dungeon drop or AH buy. On multple occasions, I tried my luck in all the 4 Bg's, but got trashed by T5/Arena set wearing Ubergods. I dealt out like 200 damage, while receiving 2500 myself with a single blow.... fun? No way!!
Since the introduction of patch 2.4 , I have been farming reputation to get the honored status so as to acquire the starter PvP set Blizzard now made available (most of all because I like to have a good-looking set than 8 totally different looking parts of armor on my character). I then gave PvP another try (those epics are tempting... lol) Result: In one day, I made as much honor as I did before in the whole 13 months I've been into WoW. I especially like the fact I can trade in unused medals against honor points, I now try to make the daily Bg quest to get honor, and although I still die a lot, I at least have the impression I can take on maybe 50 percent of the opposition in a fair fight and stand a chance to survive. And even if I lose, I know I still get my medal, so my time invested does bring me closer to my goal. Another positive note on Bgs is that (for the Alliance side at least), the waiting times into the Bg's have been drastically shortened. While I used to have waiting times of up to 20 minutes, I now rarely have to wait for more than 1-2 minutes.
As for general preferences, my favorites are EotS nd WG, followed by AB, then finally AV... can't really see why AV is so appreciated by many people, but may just be up to me...
So all in all, I'ld like to thank Blizzard for making PvP, at least in my eyes, better and more worthwhile than before. I got my first PvP epic last weekend, and I'm looking forward to more PvP'ing in my future play sessions.
 
"is there really a need for different BG tokens? Why not award a single type of token upon the completion of a battleground? It makes much more sense to me. Is the only reason Blizz doesn't do this because people may completely stop playing one battleground (WSG) or more? If that's the case, then it should be welcomed as player input and they could remove the abandoned BG(s). If a new BG will always be introduced with each xpac, then the older ones become irrelevant anyway... much like how pre-BC endgame content is now.
# posted by Anonymous Mama Druid : 7/4/08 18:54"

I agree with what Mama Druid posted. I actually posted the same comment on my blog. Make generic BG tokens. let us play what we like.
 
I'm quite surprised that I don't regularly see trade channel spam for WSG pre-mades whose sole purpose is to throw the match, just to get as many tokens per hour as possible. Let the other guys win, who cares -- you can make more tokens per hour with 1 token every 5-10 mins than trying to win a 45-min long match for 3 tokens.

I've done this a number of times with people on my friend list. WSG matches pre 2.4 could run as long as 1.5 hours with neither side capping a flag. But with all of us running around on mounts not really doing anything, the horde would destroy us in a matter of 5-10 minutes max. Not bad for badges, but don't count on much honor; both in game or RL.

-Wolfgangdoom
 
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