September 3, 2005

Mouthing Off - Blizzard and Battlegrounds

Mouthing off is a new column I'm going to be starting here. Call it a whine and call the whammmmbulance as I try to argue my way through pure anger.

Today’s Mouthing Off goes out to the wonderful team at Blizzard for producing such a stinky craptastic turd, known as battlegrounds, and force feeding it down the throat of every equal opportunity MMO gamer out there. If it wasn't bad enough that the honor PvP ranking system was falling apart prior to battlegrounds because the "newbs" were getting ganked around every corner Blizzard trumped it by dropping the battlegrounds on us.

Because we all know something like this was not going to happen...
This would never happen in WoW?
...after all there isn't a census this side of the Mississippi that doesn't show two alliance for every horde on the majority of servers. It must of taken some real hardcore internal testing to figure out that 40 vs 9 wasn’t any damn fun. Yet it never dawned on them to limit each side to only allow an EQUAL number of players in?

I quote...
Brilliant


With the next patch Blizzard got the grand idea of giving a “battleground holiday” to attract more people to play in the battlegrounds. HELLO! No amount of extra honor will get anyone to want to zone into a 40 vs. 9 match or wait three hours with their organized raid group for an actual match to compete in! Blizzard giving out more free honor to those who don’t deserve it!

Plus Blizzard deems it wonderfully cool to remove the ability to /afk and leave a battleground. God forbid you may want to give the spot up right away if you are not of any use... or hell why would anyone want to suffer through a match where it is 40 vs. 20? NO ONE wants to!

I can't believe Blizzard has let this run for so long. While people struggle to fight it out in bad Alterac Valley groups... there is players getting 10,000+ honor because they were lucky enough to log into a 40 vs 20 match or wait for a battleground to fill up with skilled players and then /afk out to take their uber l33t raid group to a 40 vs 20 match.

The fact is that Alterac Valley is the only place you can compete for rank anymore and it is blatantly obvious how drastically it skews contribution point totals and a players "contribution" to their realm. For example... my ZERO AV wins and hell of a lot of open world PvP vs. MR NUBSAX's 9+ AV wins and two times my honor.
The AV difference
During that time I saved many players trying to level from PKs, interrupted my sworn enemies from advancing their gold accounts and levels, and actually gave a damn about the world I play my avatar in.

"and actually GAVE A DAMN ABOUT THE WORLD I play" - Heartless_

Blizzard needs to get a clue and close Alterac Valley and Warsong Gulch for a complete rework. Allowing players with no right to their PvP rank, honor totals, or gear gained through them is just blowing smoke up the ass of every hard working gamer out there that refuses to submit themselves to constant abuse at the hands of an idea sketched on a cocktail napkin and pushed through internal testing the next day.

I leave you... as I wait...
Waiting...