Hi everyone,
Long time player and fan of retro here (aabcdee the warlock).
Have been very happy with the server for a long time, though there's one itch it hasn't been able to properly scratch - spur of the moment world PVP. Hunting people down in the open, stalking them through the trees, and setting up the perfect ambush. And then their friends showing up for revenge!
Alterac Valley games sometimes have elements of it, but the PVE zerg overrides all. The place you can *sometimes* get a dose of it is from Azshara Crater - and I suspect this is what it was designed to be. Every so often I do a /who z-"Azshara" to see if anyone's in Azshara Crater, and if they are I go a-hunting.
The problem: there's rarely anyone there, and most of the time it's a party for Dracolich. The cause is obvious - there's not enough incentive to go there on an ongoing basis. You get your ZG and Naxx enchants once, then you go home. And the other quests in the zone are convoluted and difficult to solo with low rewards, so nobody does them.
The Suggestion
Here's two changes I propose to improve that, with minimal development effort required (because I know we all have lives):
Some ground rules to keep things balanced:
The idea here being that it's a great place to farm gold, but not to the point that it undermines the BG population. BGs should still be the faster way to make gold. This should just be a viable alternative for when you want some variety or are too undergeared to have much fun in BGs.
Addressing Criticisms / Doubts
1. This will stop people playing BGs
Long time player and fan of retro here (aabcdee the warlock).
Have been very happy with the server for a long time, though there's one itch it hasn't been able to properly scratch - spur of the moment world PVP. Hunting people down in the open, stalking them through the trees, and setting up the perfect ambush. And then their friends showing up for revenge!
Alterac Valley games sometimes have elements of it, but the PVE zerg overrides all. The place you can *sometimes* get a dose of it is from Azshara Crater - and I suspect this is what it was designed to be. Every so often I do a /who z-"Azshara" to see if anyone's in Azshara Crater, and if they are I go a-hunting.
The problem: there's rarely anyone there, and most of the time it's a party for Dracolich. The cause is obvious - there's not enough incentive to go there on an ongoing basis. You get your ZG and Naxx enchants once, then you go home. And the other quests in the zone are convoluted and difficult to solo with low rewards, so nobody does them.
The Suggestion
Here's two changes I propose to improve that, with minimal development effort required (because I know we all have lives):
- Allow turning in the Azshara Crater tokens for gold - moss tokens, kobold tokens, scourge tokens, etc.
- Give a gold reward each time you kill a player (just like in Gurubashi Arena). (This might already be the case)
Some ground rules to keep things balanced:
- The gold rewards should be better than the existing solo gold quests (which are very slow), but shouldn't outshine BGs. For example: 30 kobold tokens = 300 gold, 30 scourge tokens = 450 gold, somewhere in that ballpark. Should include all token types which the zone has (e.g. water and furbolg tokens).
- Keep Azshara Crater a PVP zone (obviously).
The idea here being that it's a great place to farm gold, but not to the point that it undermines the BG population. BGs should still be the faster way to make gold. This should just be a viable alternative for when you want some variety or are too undergeared to have much fun in BGs.
Addressing Criticisms / Doubts
1. This will stop people playing BGs
- Only if the rewards are too high. I believe it should generate around 75% of what you can make from back to back BGs, for the average player playing a non-mage (that is, not AOE farming).
- Reverse of the above - only if the rewards are too low. This is the current problem.
- This is a genuine risk.
- Personally I consider it acceptable for a few reasons: other people can kill the mages to stop them, and I don't really mind mages being able to get gold quicker if we get active world PVP in return (and it's just a property of classic wow that mages have an advantage whenever farming is involved).
- Or if you really don't want it, you can be a little evil: give the mobs in Azshara Crater high frost and arcane resistance, or make them immune to immobilizes and slows. Nullify the AOE farming advantage.
- This isn't really a problem - that's the nature of World PVP.
- They can always farm gold elsewhere.
- The zone is big - they can try to find an uncontested spot.
- Yes, it will, but not beyond reason - getting 10x kobold/moss etc tokens is still going to be pretty easy. Same for the 100 scourge tokens - there's a lot of those mobs.
- You only need to get them once per toon.
- Encourages players to kill each other to get tokens to themselves.
- Don't underestimate the resourcefulness of someone hungry for PVP. I *will* track you down .
- If that were true I wouldn't be creating this post.
- I'll happily spam the news in global chat if it happens. It will be a personal mission for people to know.
- Maybe - it has been a while. I don't blame them, I'm sure they have their own lives to live.
- At the same time there's more players still here than I ever expected after classic - the server's actually going pretty strong - so I have hope that they might listen.
- The suggested changes are intentionally as simple as possible.
- It doesn't hurt to try.