Objective-based PvP in WoW

How would your system handle morale? When the opposite faction decides that it isn't worth the time to push from 4x to 2x, and quits, leaving the main force at a disadvantage.

Now that they have Cross-Server Battlegrounds, I can see how games refill quickly, but a person walking into a game that is at 5x when they need to get to 1x is just going to leave and find a better game.

The x1 -> x5 in sequence to win makes sense. It keeps the BG focused on a true war-like scenario. This is actually how everyone tried to play AV at first - resulting in the 4 hour games and probably 2 hours of that was spent sieging an enemy base. At an enemy base 40+NPC's+2towerstocap+1graveyardytocap+boss was just too much to fight through.

The allied NPC's were meant to be the solution to this. There was a giant boss you could summon, ram/wolf riders, elite soldiers and some flying riders. Combining these with a siege usually tipped the balance enough to get the next capture. But it would take 15 minutes to get the materials to summon them. And AV being formed of random players rarely managed things like organising troops and giving them tasks. Saying "Team 4 to mine pls" just didn't result in anything.

For solutions you just need to look at like-minded scenarios. There was a mod for Warcraft 3 called Tides of Blood, where NPC's automatically spawned at towers at random intervals and then marched accross the map. There were 3 paths and two bases for each path. (one halfway, one at the player base). This meant losing your base on one path wasn't an immediate failure (no npcs marching) you could still support the other two and defend the lost path. Upgrades could be bought for your npc's (a new unit in the mix, a better weapon) forcing fighting between players to earn the gold to pay for it and ensuring the gameplay slowly headed toward fights that resulted in greater significance. If a base building was ever lost it stopped spawning the soldiers, making that area a liability.

The key to that mod's success in my mind was the automatically spawning npc's. You didn't need to pay for a spawn, just for the upgrades. It in many ways ensured you knew what your goals where (destroy the enemy buildings) , focused the fighting around those areas, and by gradually increasing the power of the players/npc's ensured that one side would eventually win.

One side must reach a point of overpowering force, or underwhelming defence. In the case above it was overpowering force, but it could just as easily been based on increasingly damaged armor for each death, making defence harder and harder and resulting in a team that doesnt have the resources to defend itself. Real war is based on 'wearing away.'

Have you taken a look a Unreal Tournament 2004? Onslaught and Assault's game modes might have the type of gameplay you're describing already. Though they are less focused on "kills by the hotspot", the nodes and objectives shown automatically draw opposing players to those locations.

Sounds like a good idea, though it still leaves the issue of making battles shorter. For the other WoW battlegrounds, WSG is shorter simply because it is a much smaller battlefield with easier to achieve objectives, while AB is essentially timed. In Alterac, the only idea I can think of is to make the battle more... unstable. There are several quests that can spawn various NPCs that are exceptionally strong and can sometimes turn the tide of battle. Is there a way they could perhaps be modified to make the battle able to swing to one side's advantage in a huge way while still being fair?

One of the subtle reasons that WoW PvP is often just PvE in a BG, is that defense slows things down. Everyone has experienced the dreaded turtle, the opponent that makes no effort to win, but makes it impossible for you to win in any kind of timely fashion. As an opponent of a turtle, your best move for accumulating honor is to duck out, take the deserter debuff and join another Battleground after the debuff wears off.

I am not sure why more people don't play defense. The team that plays more defense will win, but eventually, with the time the game takes inversely proportional to the total defense played by both sides. The Battlegrounds seem to work under a sort of unwritten rules that prohibt defense so that the game times are shorter and honor is gained faster. This despite the fact that cheating on the agreement more than your opponent by playing more defense would guarantee a significant increase in your team's win rate.

Your idea is interesting but I think it would take a very long time to finish a BG, time that some players simply can't commit to. I think the best solution to the problem would be to limit the number of resses per player. If you know you can destroy the opponent's forces, you have incentive to do so. If you cannot, your only incentive is to destroy the boss, so you bypass the other players to go kill him. If each player had a maximum of 5-10 resses at the graveyard, unlimited by priests, not only would teams have the incentive to engage each other, but they would also have the incentive to strategize and play like a team to reach their goal. As it is, people charge at insurmountable odds and blame the #&*%ing noobs around them for not doing likewise. If there were more serious consequences to dying, these brave souls might strategize a bit more and muster forces before attempting a valiant albeit foolhardy charge into fire and steel.

Nowadays we are having problems with honor farmers in most battlegrounds. Although I have to agree with AV being solely about rushing each other's bosses, farmers today are the cancer of AV, even in a pug. As soon as the gates open, I see 5 or 6 running to Frostwolf Graveyard and they stay there even when Relief Hut is being taken. The alliance seems to do the same as they stay at their own graveyard. Sometimes they fall from the bridge and tilts back and fourth under it... free kill anyone?

Anyway, my point is battlegrounds need to award players by their effort. Bring a statistic system and award the most kills, or more damage, or more finish moves. They shouldn't be there only for a senseless bragging right. You would get mediocre points by parking your character isolated by a cliff, but you would get something good for assisting, killing, or taking objectives. Being active and part of the battle is the reason true players queue in the first place. Honor is, somehow, just a sweet consequence sometimes. Anyway, AV is dead... Battlegrounds are on limping ever since BC came out... and Blizzard won't fix anything anytime soon.