PvP in World of Warcraft is in a very bad state. This isn’t an opinion, this is a fact. When I said that I expected the problems to become critical six months down the road, after the release of the battlegrounds, I was way, way optimistical. I could have said six weeks and I would still have a good margin of error. Right now the battlegrounds are already unplayable. The very first problem is actually the result of a long list of other parts gone wrong, so, as always, what is under everyone’s eyes is just the final step of a process:
the battleground instances are closed on almost all servers.

I mean, it cannot go worst than this. Blizzard invested a lot on this part of the game, it’s since release that they justify the extremely slow release of patches because the primary focus was about developing the Honor system and the battlegrounds, the E3 was all about them and now that they are released the result is that the instances are not even open. I won’t be surprised if in the future Blizzard shifts their focus completely on the PvE, leaving behind the PvP as a bad dream. In fact if you go look the “In Development” page you can see that they removed the upcoming feature of conquerable towers and graveyards outside the instances. That’s a first step, we’ll see if the third battleground announced will be ever released.

There isn’t really anything salvageable in this implementation of PvP, not a single feature. And it’s not that I can say that I didn’t see this coming. It’s since the last year that I rant and suggest constructively what the PvP can become in this game. Because the very first point is that PvP in this game has a *huge* potential and it could have become the main driving force of the game. If Blizzard “failed” on this aspect it isn’t because this was an unavoidable conclusion, it’s just the result of series of horrible choices in the design. Choices that I tried to anticipate and criticize because it was obvious that the system wasn’t going to work.

What works are the mechanics themselves, the actual combat. I also believe that they did a good work on the gameplay in both Alterac and Warsong. But what is wrong is about the structure, the ruleset that regulates the meaning and purpose of the PvP. The Honor system, the diminishing returns, the dynamics of the instances and so on. I’ve analyzed all this ad nauseam so I’m not going to repeat myself. What I believe is that PvP is fun and has potential when it’s part of the “world”. Where it is something *completely different* from yet another advancement path. When it is directly connected with the fabric of the game and not alienated from it as it happens with these instanced zones where the two factions play silly games like the CTF. It’s not that the CTF isn’t fun. It’s just that it’s not appropriate for the potential of a mmorpg. It doesn’t fit, it comes from games that have completely different goals, premises and potential.

Ofbac on Corpnews makes interesting observations:

Ofbac:
The PvE game is immersive. It has a storyline, quests things that you do to progress and sollow those stories. The world has continuity in the way you travel and explore.

Battlegrounds is a “click here to be ported to external PvP arena to work a ladder to win rewards” implementation that just goes against the grain of everything the PvE game is about.

Instanced dungeons are a way to handle overpopulation and avoid crowding and contention for resources (mobs, quests, bosses, etc). Battlegrounds is a wholly different game that’s been connected to the WoW PvE with duct tape.

This is absurd from my point of view. The PvP is naturally a “world” element. I decided to play on a PvP server exactly because it’s a way to move away from pointless grinds and go toward a game where are *the players* to become the focus. Were there is space for the choices, where the organization matters and where you can finally become content and define your own experience. Triggering all sort of gameplay relations that are way more interesting and compelling that collecting experience points and grind for loot at the endgame. The PvP should be all that. It should be an opening for adding the “world” component, to give a purpose to the game and let the players become the real driving force instead of moving artificially on a defined path.

The first stab to all this potential arrived with the Honor system, rewarding the players for ganking each other and transforming everyone in a “bag of points” to collect. Reducing the fun complexity that was slowly forming up in just an irritating gankfest with no purpose. Ruining completely all the potential that was there, waiting.

But as I said at the beginning all these steps are hidden for most of the players and what is evident is just that the instances aren’t accessible. So what’s Blizzard’s answers about this? Here it is:

The introduction of Battlemasters should help this problem somewhat, but that’s not the only solution we’re pursuing. We’re investigating ways of changing the queue to allow for lower number requirements while still keeping the teams even. There are also other methods in the works, still in the conceptual stage, to attract players to a particular Battleground at a given time.

Now, about the Battlemaster we knew already since they were leaked with the patch notes long ago. We also know that this won’t really help since the problem is structural and not just about the “interface”. The other two solutions also sound weak and disperse the last hopes about getting this core problem fixed at the root. Coming up with a “power hour” for the battlegrounds is stupid and will further discriminate those players that cannot choose when to play. Probably as a way to mimic FFXI, where the PvP is about scheduled events and not a persistent system always active.

This remind me directly Mythic’s way of design. They steal good ideas but putting them out of context and missing in the first place the reasons why they worked. The result is always awful. Again all those ideas are just workarounds for a system that just doesn’t fit and isn’t appropriate and so will never deliver the potential that the game has. As always it isn’t acceptable to arrive at this point with the hands empty and without a solution. Us “players” were already anticipating all these problems and also discussing better solutions more than one *year* ago. We know that the same solution (Battleground instances to collect players from all the servers, in order to be always active no matter of the population) was discussed recently at Blizzard but now there is no mention about it, not even in their long-term plans.

My guess is that they investigated the technical difficulties to allow that and decided that it wasn’t doable. Of course. This is the same problem of the crashing servers. You cannot fix radical network issues NOW. You cannot start to consider these basic *design* elements seven months after release. It’s too late. Guild Wars is the example here, it has none of these issues because the technology has been developed AFTER the design. They planned ahead what they needed and started to work to build the premises of what was supposed to come later. You cannot invert this process. You cannot be “surprised” when these problems start to become more and more radical and you cannot expect to find a good solutions at that point. It’s another design shortcoming from something that was highly predictable and that we were already discussing long ago.

Ultimately there are so many different points of view, all extremely important and all strictly tied together. During this year I tried to cover most of them and anticipate what was going to break and suggest an alternative. Not that this was of any use, but I tried. The basic flaw is still that the PvP has been alienated from his natural site: the fabric of the game. As I wrote somewhere else in WoW noone cares about anything if not his character. Even the PvP becomes just another grind to improve your power and nothing else. I always repeat that this is not what it should happen. The PvP should be about the communal goals, having a role. It needs persistence and it needs the players to be the focus. Sadly, the game took a path that leads in a completely different direction, one of the most obvious demonstations of this is how the guilds have absolutely no role in the PvP. This already hints how much the advancement is completely focused on the personal level and is only marginally about “the other players”.

To conclude I want to repeat some simple fixes that could start to move the game back on track and go on from that point. Because I don’t want to just rave about abstract concepts without suggesting directly and in practice what can be done with the premises that the game has right now:

– REMOVE the “diminished returns” on Contribution points inside the BGs.
– Boost up the goal-based rewards to a level that farming consensually CPs points outside won’t offer a benefit.
– Save the persistence of a BG, preventing it to reset even if there are no players inside. (Alterac)
– Add dynamic structures to slowly realign/reset the BG (like temporarily boosting the defenses of the losing faction till they are able to recapture their headquarter).
– REMOVE the points for direct kills outside the BGs.
– ADD goal-based PvP systems to the world outside the BGs like conquerable graveyards, towers, escort/assault missions etc..

All these points have been explained and discussed extensively along these months.