The Arathi Bassin experience

walenkryx

Upon entering the splendid land of Arathi Bassin, an indescriptible feeling progressively surrounds your entire body.
An overwhelming feeling of void, and emptiness.
Once you are inside that battleground and get your usual team (made of 4 ret paladins, 5 rogues and some starters) you start believing that a part of the server's algorythm is specifically made to increase your chances to be queued with rets and rogues.
The BG starts, you go to Blacksmith and you will use all your cd's because you know how important that base is for your team. During that first fight, 2 of your ret paladins will bubble hearthstone.
So I won't talk that much about that first Blacksmith fight. As we all know how balanced they always end up being. How the player can engage in a truly stimulating epic fight that can sometimes last for hours and hours, requiring all your attention and skills.
Could you imagine how sad it would be if every single Blacksmith fight would end after 15s, with one team running away, violated in their proud and ashamed, being chased by an army of elementals shamans and flasked warriors, killing them one by one as their egos get bigger while yours becomes inexistent.
As for Arathi Bassin's objective, I'm actually not sure of what it actually is anymore as I feel like it's been redesigned in a collective and genius effort of the entire playerbase of Retro-wow over the last 8 to 9 months.
Indeed, in their urge to run tirelessly around the painfully long Arathi roads, to either gank or (and it is most likely) to avoid that said gank, well, in that so burning desire and way of experiencing the game, players I feel actually transformed it in such a way, that once an Arathi Bassin ends, most of the playerbase won't look at the ressources of their team versus the ennemy's team's ressources to know who the winner is. No, instead, they will look at the scoreboard to see their kills/death ratios. I find that fascinating. Creativity or compensation mechanism to extract some joy out of their amsculinity being crushed ? we'll never know. In any case, Arathi bassin's objective today, in Retro-wow, is completely transformed and transfigured, and there is probably as many objectives as there are players. Wich is bad, as vanilla pvp (and vanilla in general) only truly shines as teamplay game
So eventually, this is what Arathi Bassin really is.
Behind those vasts and never ending lands of grass, and occasional light blue rivers, hides a poor gameplay with players that are driven by nothing but a shallow sense of cohesion, and united by nothing but the will of wanting to kill a target that has their name red above their head. If you were to ask me the main reasons behind it, I would probably say that it's the fact that points in arathi bassin are going up no matter what you do wich is removing responsabilities from players and a sense of active way of seeing the battleground, making people not defend, not do calls for incs ennemy players.
Also, defending is most of the times boring for players wich I can understand and this is a core part of arathi. And mainly, playing and losing in warsong gets you killed more often; while losing in Arathi just means that you lost; you never get killed/farmed as much, as you can just run away for a very long time from people.
Overall, Arathi Bassin offers a shallow gameplay whith groups of players being packed, taking bases after bases and losing the very same bases they just took 15 seconds later by a rogue.
And while warsong is definitely not a perfect battleground either, at least it offers an actual gameplay and fights to fight for that have less chances of being unbalanced as the map is smaller, and wsg doesn't force you to defend or run for 30 second before finding one player. Wich is kind of great.
i get that arathi bassin offers shorter bgs and so, more stable gold income, but retrowow offers relatively fast gearing process already, I think that you, as a player should enjoy your experience more than you actually are right now, without being patronizing.
But I also believe that the system should be revamped to make warsong a bit more compelling, as at the end of the day, you can't really blame players for choosing the easy path.
Hope I made at least 1 player want to try warsong more often,
Cya ig

Khaozx

yes please buff warsong

odinplus

2000000000000% agree. ppl on retro so brainless for Arathi.

mentos987

AB has become the go-to BG because people associate WSG with lack of people and "this battleground will end in 5 min..".
Two years ago vise versa was true, AB was never up, and the gold rewards was the same back then.
The ideal would be if the server could sustain AB and WSG simultaneously, but it seems it can't, due to low population. In lieu of more people, further incentive to switch battlegrounds every once in awhile could be made, indeed it has been made: "BG weekends".
The only problem is that these weekends don't function nearly as well as they could, as the logic behind this feature isn't thought through, as has been mentioned before, in other posts...
A solution here would be to replace the increased gold rewards during BG weekends with a doubling of marks granted for each game during the weekend.

walenkryx

Indeed @mentos987, how can having 15 people zerg around a map (a map way too big btw) and with noone defending (because defending is indeed boring), be fun ?
People queue Arathi Bassin because there's a time limit upon wich that bg will end, wich is comforting and a stable way of seeing your gold farm, as there's a fix amount of gold after your pvp session. Indeed, the bg will on average end after 15 min.
Warsong Gulch on the other end can last 1 hour, sometimes more, and blaming players for picking the most efficient solutions makes indeed no sense.
But the staff could think about making the most challenging and hard bg wich is Warson Gulch be more rewarding. Arathi Bassin is a passive battleground that has a ressource system that goes up no matter what the player does. Wsg needs players to be active to defend their flag and cap ennemy's flags. Wich is also why it's more fun.
One could argue that increasing warsong gulch's reward would make premades issue reappear and be even worst if the reward is higher, making people's experience bad, and even worst than AB's experience currently is.
Wich is why we should cap warsong's queue to 5 men, making premades way less powerfull, and giving people hope that they can make team aswell without having to gather 10 men. Cap it even to 3 men, it would be better, if that's possible.
We would see a lot of 3 men groups running around wich would be insanely good for the community and overal pvp experience
So yea, that's my take on it. At some point you cant blame the players but the system that's in place just like you can't blame someone for taking the easy way, you got to show people how much more interesting the other way is by giving that other way just a little bit more love.

mentos987

"Indeed @mentos987, how can having 15 people zerg around a map (a map way too big btw) and with noone defending (because defending is indeed boring), be fun ?"
I never debated any fun-factor, I much prefer WSG myself. Though for the last 6 months I'd estimate that 80% of my BGs have been AB. This is due to lack of players in WSG.
This lack of players in WSG is so common that I never join WSG queue if I am already in an AB, because the likelihood of getting a solid game is below 5%.
FYI, GMs have responded to "downsizing premades" with "Can't be done. Either full premades or no premades at all".
So, premades would have to be removed entirely, which would be fine by me.

vieros

Having Warsong back would be nice, I queue but there's never enough players unless playing at prime time and you might be lucky to get 1 or 2 games.
I was all for small premades of 2/3 people for all BGs but as previously mentioned by others and confirmed by GMs this can't be done.
Removing premades completely and a small reward increase would probably help.