Reflections From The Pond

Posts Tagged ‘pvp’

Some days ago, an achievement announce popped up in gchat. It was a guildie who had managed to snag 25 000 Honorable kills.

For me, this is an insane amount of kills, even though you don’t have to get the killing blow yourself anymore to get credit for the kill. And although 25 000 sound like wholesale slaughter there are 2 more achievements, 50 k and 100 k kills. According to WoW-achievements about 0,7% of all players have managed to commit this kind of almost-genocide, which for me is a surprisingly large number.

I was born and raised on a pvp server and although I hate world pvp (mostly because I suck at it I guess) I managed to level 6 chars to 70 there before I saw the light and moved to a normal server. Between those chars, I have about 8 000 Honorable kills, about 5 of which are from world pvp when I actually managed to kill the Horde who attacked me, and the rest are from battle grounds.

I was there when the old bg system was in place, where the honor you gathered decayed so you had to keep playing more and more every week to keep your rank. There were 14 ranks if I recall correctly and I actually managed to get my rogue Tessye to Sergeant Major (rank 5) before that title/rank system was scrapped. (I met a Grand Marshal, the top rank, in Dragonblight some weeks ago, and complimented him on his title and he replied he could to this day still not understand how he managed to put himself through that ordeal of basically playing 24/7.)

My playing in bg’s was mostly for the rewards, the Electrified Dagger for Tessye, a whole truckload of stuff for my druid Joaquime, especially when the Gladiator stuff that were so perfect for a feral druid became available through honor points, the Mooncloth robes for Jools the priest and a long long WSG grind for Paynne the warlock’s Vindicator’s cuffs.

While I have enjoyed this bg’ing, especially when playing with friends, I’ve very rarely felt an urge to go bg’ing just for the fun of it. If there has been no reward that I want, I usually have found other things to do in-game.

However, bg’ing is useful in that it prompts you to use all of your talents more dynamically than when you quest or do dungeons or raids. Well, it is for me at least. Even the dreaded sudden attack from Horde back on my old pvp server made me rethink my action bars and spell placements, so although I hated it I got some use from the unprovoked attackings.

It was pvp who made me put Vanish on a hotkey, and to have Faerie Fire and Entangling Roots within reach in any forms, for example.

And then there’s the really fun parts. Hibernating a Horde bear is hilarious, so is MC’ing someone off a cliff or down under water til they drown (not sure if this works anymore though with the looong breath bar you’ve got nowadays). A tip though: if you have put Psychic Scream on your usual Fade-key bind, do remember to switch back when going dungeoing.

So, I am not totally averse to pvp and battle grounds, I just have not had the time and/or skills for them very much. As I keep saying, I am a type 11-pvp’er.

 But now I read the latest test realm patch notes, and I got rather excited!

Battlegrounds

Battleground experience has arrived!

Players will now be awarded experience for completing objectives and actions that yield honor in Battlegrounds (honorable kills not included).

Yay, this means I can bring my levelling characters to the different battlegrounds and still feel like I’m progressing level-wise. It will hopefully also bring about that the bg’s will be slightly more dynamic, since clamping down on one node and sitting there for the duration won’t give you much xp. It may also mean that more players will seek out the bg’s to see what it is like and that the long queues will probably be shorter.

Players who do not wish to gain experience through PvP can visit Behsten in Stormwind or Slahtz in Orgrimmar – both located near the Battlemasters in either city – and turn off all experience accumulation for the cost of 10 gold. Disabling experience gains will prevent a player from gaining experience through any means available in the game. Players with experience gains turned off who compete in Battlegrounds will face off only against other players with experience gains turned off. Behsten and Slahtz can reinstate experience gains for players, for a 10 gold fee of course. Any experience that would’ve been accumulated if experience gains were not turned off cannot be recovered.

The dedicated twinks are sure to disable their experience gains to not level out of their bracket, and the bg’s will be more segregated. For good, I think. Let the levelling players keep to their experience-giving bg’s and the twinks keep to their more hardcore pvp-oriented ones.

Of course the bg split between people who actually know what they are doing (twinks, usually) and people who took a wrong turn and ambled in not knowing what a zerg is or why fishing in AB is bad will probably also mean that the frustration in xp-bg’s may reach astronomical levels. But hopefully the fabled Horde coordination and communication will go the way of the twinks and leave us xp-bg’ers to fumble our way through the bg with an equal amount of confusion on both sides.

Battlemasters in major cities affiliated with specific Battlegrounds have been replaced with a Battlemaster for each faction that will allow players to queue for any Battleground. Battlemasters for specific Battlegrounds will still be seen around the cities during corresponding Battleground holiday weekends.

Don’t really see the need for this unless it is plain old down-sizing or house cleaning, and I hope the poor Battlemaster won’t be swamped with queueing players.

When standing at a capture point that you control, you will gain a buff called Honorable Defender. This buff grants +50% honor gained from kills. This currently affects Arathi Basin, Eye of the Storm and Isle of Conquest.

While this in a way counteracts the offensive incitement from the xp gains, it will perhaps also persuade some other, more honor-seeking people to actually stay and defend.

And then there are some interesting changes in the battlegrounds themselves.

Arathi Basin

The time it requires to capture a base has been reduced to 8 seconds, down from 10 seconds.

The game now ends when one team reaches 1600 victory points, down from 2000.

Eye of the Storm

The time it requires to capture the center flag has been reduced to 8 seconds, down from 10 seconds

The game now ends when one team reaches 1600 victory points, down from 2000.

Strand of the Ancients

The faction starting on attack/defense will now be randomized at the start of each match.

Warsong Gulch

There is a now a 20 minute timer on this battleground. After that time, the team with the most flag captures wins. If this would result in a tie, the team that captured the first flag wins. If neither side has captured a flag, then the game ends in a tie.

These changes are obviously implemented to shorten the game sessions, which I think is a good idea. The tense, heart-beating eon-long seconds as you wait for that node to flip from neutral to blue will probably still feel as long though, but the general pace of the game should be quicker, more explosive, hopefully more intent on winning and not just sitting out a game to get a mark.

The WSG change is also a very welcome one. The long pug battles that sweep from one end of the field to the other, noone really pushing enough to capture a flag, noone really trying to follow some sort of plan, is just pure pain. The hiding of the flag carrier so the other team can’t capture it, the turtle-makings and all those things that just prolong the frustration will at least not be endless now.

While I am not playing this game for the pvp, I think these changes will make me and others much more inclined to go do bg’s. I think the experince gains and the shorter games will make more people come knocking on the doors and maybe discover a new dimension to the game.

And who knows, maybe I will get myself a shiny new achievement soon!

Please. Do that. Tell me why I still have some chars on pvp servers, and please tell me why I still play them on occasion.

I logged in on Tesz the other day. Tesz, my level 36 troll mage that I have on the Laughing Skull (pvp) server. I hadn’t played her for some time and wanted to give my hunter Cuddling some rested bonus, so I popped in to Tesz.

She was in the inn in Tarren Mill. I checked her quest log and she had quite a few quests in the area. I’ve been peeking a little on Jame’s levelling guide and he lists a lot of quests in Hillsbrad, so I had been questing a bit there and was looking forward to doing some more.

She ran out of the inn and died. A ?? stealthed druid oneshotted her. Haha, how hilarious.

Well, the graveyard run is not long in Tarren Mill. I decided Hillsbrad would not be fun to quest in today after all, so after Tesz had ressed she started casting a teleport to Orgrimmar, and then she died again.

After having played on a sweet normal server for some months now my hard-earned reflexes like “when you know gankers are about, find a safe place to ress lest you get ganked again” seems to have been lost.

Yes, it was the same ?? druid again, some sad person with a Challenger title, that had stealthed up and oneshotted her, then he shifted into cheetah and ran away from the guards.

Elapsed time since log-in: About a minute. Number of deaths, gank-related: Two. Amount of affection felt towards pvp servers and gankers in general: Zero.

Third time up I ressed inside the inn and teleported away.

I was close to deleting the char and never look back but I decided to give it a last try, and flew off to Desolace instead, and after having completed a few quests without anyone bothering met here I headed off to Arathi Highlands, where I kept questing for yet a few hours.

In fact, that entire day I saw no Alliance chars at all save that sad druid in Tarren Mill and a lvl 31 warrior in Arathi who snuck away when he saw me and Tesz was just a few hundred xp’s away from 38 when I logged out.

And to remind myself: I play on these servers because I have some friends there, both real life and in-game ones, and although I still quest a lot by myself I don’t want to lose touch with them entirely.

So as I was playing my druid Joaquime today, and was on a flow in AV in the special AV weekend, on my sixth or so consecutive win, I was rushing down to Frostwolf Keep with some others to get and defend the grave yard and towers while the most of the crew were beating down on Galv. I came to a halt at the Frostwolf Graveyard where some horde was chasing down a gnome warrior. The warrior seemed to be on top of things and I threw him some heals to keep him alive long enough to get the job done.

Now this is me, in my catsuit, in my feral spec, healing because I can and because it seemed better to heal the warrior than go cat and dps at the time, when I suddenly get a whisper that just stops me in my tracks.


This is not something I usually encounter while bg’ing. For some reason this player has taken his time to target me, whisper me, taking care to spell noob the correct way, showing how good he is at communicating with people, and to include a profanity.

But he also forgets to include what he wants (a heal) and then he takes his time to whisper me again, adding this wish to be healed to his earlier statement.

For some reason he thinks its more important that I heal him than the warrior the two hordes are beating on.

I am at a loss of what to do, I see no other than the warrior in sight, and even if I could have seen the whisperer, his chances of getting a heal from me now is slim, to say the least. Non-existant, would be more truthful, even. Not-gonna-happen, is another way of putting it.

Anyways, the horde have reinforcements coming, the gnome warrior die, I die, and I have no idea if the unseen whisperer is dead too, and frankly I couldn’t care less.

However, as I am at our grave yard, waiting to be ressed, I get another whisper from the sweet talker.

So I assume that he did die too.

He may have whispered me with more but I by this time I had welcomed him to my ignore list and was blissfully uninterrupted by hostile whispers out of the blue for the duration of that AV. We lost, by the way.

Now losses in AV do happen, but I can’t help to wonder if maybe they are more frequent with players like this in them, players who actually spend time and efforts whining about things, rather than getting them done.

While in the AV, I checked him out in the bg tab, and he was listed as a shaman. So after the AV I was actually curious enough to check out this guy, and he was listed in the Armory in four different guilds (none of which had any other members than himself) and he was shown to be an elemental/resto specced shaman.

Now, last time I checked, a shaman can heal themselves pretty well, and this guy had about 750 +healing bonus. Me, in my cat gear, I have +0 healing bonus. It would have been better if he had whispered himself to get a heal. But maybe he was out of mana, in which case healing him up would be pretty useless anyways since it would mean I would have to stop healing the warrior.

This guy had netted about 3500 honorable kills in his days of playing. Me, on my druid, I have about 2300. I have not played very much BG’s with her, I joined the general honor craze before TBC was released and have played a little since the Arena S1 gear became available for honor points, but that’s about it. So, I am no BG expert, but I usually help get the job done without being a sad little moron like this new addition to my ignore list.

And think about the time and effort this guy spends on whispering people calling them things. Well, maybe he had never whispered anyone else and this was the first time, but somehow I get a feeling this was not the first time he did something like this.

What if he could make something useful out of that time instead? As most of us know, if you type something while fighting at the same time, both things get a little unfocused…

Ah, well, this is not really anything I wish to dwell further on. Morons and jackasses are sadly all too frequent in the WoW-universe, but at least this place has an Ignore-list.

My gnome warrior Dizzie is happily lvling up nowadays. She is fury specced and its one of the cutest things I have ever seen, watching her charge away to a mob and start hitting the tall ugly thing with her glowing [Phantom Blade] (made for her especially by my adorable <3 husband) and some off-hand axe.

As she hit 44 she went to Tanaris to start questing there. Picked up the wastewander water quests and the ones that lead you into Pirate Cove. You would have thought she’d be 45 within some hours with all these easy questing and the rested bonus.

Well, think again. Tanaris seemed to be filled with sad no-life coward hordes and Dizzie spent more time running from the gy than actually getting any xp.

I never attack horde players when I see them, no matter what level or what they are doing. I just leave them be.

All (and I mean all, every single one I saw) of the horde players I encountered in Tanaris that day attacked Dizzie sooner or later. If they were of about equal level they snuck off when they saw her and waited until she was already in combat before they went for her, if they were some ?? lvl helping out some lower lvls they just attacked her on sight.

An all too frequent sight in the Tanaris desert :-(

(I know I am on a pvp server and should get used to it – I started playing here because the kids were playing here and by the time I found out that there were servers that didn’t allow ganking I had too many characters and too many new friends on this server to really like the idea of changing servers. I think many people are like me in this aspect.)

Dizzie has crap gear. She sucks at pvp. She generally just ambles merrily along, picking up quests and doing them cheerfully, not bothering anyone. However, this constant running from the gy was beginning to get on my nerves and I decided to get some revenge.

I logged Tessy, my rogue, flew her off to Tanaris and parked her in the Pirate Cove. She also has crap gear, she also sucks at pvp but she is a lvl 70 subtlety specced rogue, she doesn’t have to be good to kill lvl 50 wankers.

And kill them she did.

Some idiot lvl 51 priest, who did see Dizzie but skulked away and didn’t start dotting her until she was fighting some freeboter. Shadowstepping rogue = dead priest. He got oneshotted twice and then he got the message and disappeared.

A group of three, some lvl 65 pally helping a 43 or so warrior and mage. Killed them all once and then one-shotted the warrior and mage some times, sapping the pally when he was trying to ress them.

A moonkin druid, same lvl as Dizzie and hadn’t been trying to kill her at all so I was beginning to think it might actually be a human playing and not some sad loser al-quaida hangaround. But guess what, ofc he started spamming moonfire on her when she was fighting two mobs at the same time. This particular druid I followed all the way to Steamwheedle Port and made sure he didn’t get to turn in any quests. Had to run from the NPC’s a few times though, but hey, so what?

And then I asked myself…did this make me any happier? The sad losers were still sad losers, they were not gonna start acting like decent human beings no matter how many times I killed them. Dizzie was still dead and not getting any xp.

No, it was definitely not making me any happier.

It is said that revenge is a dish best served cold and I think I see the meaning of that proverb now. Revenge while being pissed off is not a good thing, it only makes you feel even more saddened and disgusted.

I just don’t get it. Yes, its “only” a game and yes, its “allowed” to kill characters in the game, but do you always go around doing everything just because its “allowed”? CS is a game where the only objective is to kill the enemy players, WoW is not. You don’t lose anything by letting enemy players live (ofc they may be sad gankers as well and come back and try to kill you, but that is not likely if you are of a higher level).

Ok, you might wanna do it for the honor (if ofc you even get honor, guess its more than probable that some of the morons don’t realise that you don’t get any honor when you kill players that are grey for you). So you get what, 5 honor?, for killing me. If you want honor go play one of the bg’s, more honor there than you could possibly get by killing random world encounters.

Or maybe you want to show off how good you are at killing opponents? Well, if you think that its showing off killing someone several lvls below you or someone who is already engaged in a fight, you need your head examined. Maybe the results would show that you have a brain or at least some cognitive capabilities, but I really doubt that.

I think that those who go around killing other players in have the same mentality as those who don’t help people with prams or wheelchairs get on the bus, they are the same kind as those who can’t be bothered to hold the door open for you but rather let it slam shut in your face – hey! it would have taken me a few secs to wait and hold the door open, cba with that!

It just saddens and disgusts me that a game I like to play so much seems to be overflowing with such rude a***holes.

It’s a good thing I have met so many nice and friendly people too, otherwise I’d have no hopes left for humanity…