Thursday, January 04, 2007

Most Horde are Done with PvP for Now

For the last week or two I noticed that the queue times have worked their way slowly back up to pre patch 2.0.1 numbers. There still seems to be a million alliance players wanting to earn the pvp rewards but they seem to be having trouble finding opponents. The near instant queue times for the majority of horde players has quickly gotten them all the rewards. In fact from my horde character's experience the major roadblock to earning equipment was not honor but Alterac Valley tokens. Luckily most of the epic armor only requires Arathi Baisin tokens which are easy for my orc warrior to earn.

However, the majority of horde players have already completed their epic sets and stopped participating in battlegrounds. This is bad for most Alliance players since some servers now have 17-25 minute queue times for AB and WSG. This makes it harder to form PUG premade teams. Plus long queue times guarantee that some people will be AFK and not join a battleground when it starts. Arathi Baisin is especially terrible since some games will start with only 7-9 alliance and a full 15 horde. WSG and AV are less effected by this since the first few minutes of the game does not effect the outcome as much as it does in AB.

The only good thing about most of the horde population having already earned their rewards is that it has significantly reduced the number of well equipped horde playing. I see end game items on my opponents a lot less often now then I did a few weeks ago. Though yesterday I did run into three tauren warriors with Askandi, Dark Edge of Insanity, and Thunderyfury. Still for the most part the remainder of the horde seem to be those with blue and tier-1 who missed out on the pre-nerf honor rush. So my pvp forecast for the future until January 16th is:

Alliance: Queue times back to normal but with a better chance of winning battlegrounds. Chance of raiding guild pre-mades around 20% for the most part. Expect queue times to increase as more horde complete their pvp sets.

Horde: Queue times down from a couple of minutes to instant. Chance of raiding guild pre-mades around 40%. Expect a large range of gear quality in your opponents since many hardcore alliance have yet to save up to the 75,000 honor point limit.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bad luck to people who rolled alliance to try and take the easy way out :D

Anonymous said...

It caught up with them eventually

Relmstein said...

The problem was that horde side only contained what most people would called monsters. Sure the Alliance has small monsters called gnomes but as previous MMORPGs have proven the humans are always the most popular race.

At the moment I am not even sure if the adding of the Blood Elves will encourage an evening out of the factions.

Anonymous said...

It never fails to amaze me how much Alliance pvp'ers /cry(TM) over battleground queue times. If they love pvp that much, surely they possess the brains to realise that rolling on Horde side is going to be better for their gaming needs?

Personally I can't wait to see the river of tears when Alliance start to come up against Loladins in the BGs ;)

Anonymous said...

Don't worry, in Outlands when the Alliance controls all the neutral cities and have access to all the quests and faction rewards you'll forget about your long queue times entirely.

Anonymous said...

You usually make very intelligent posts but I kind of think you have a streak "pro" aliance through most of your posts. Not really taking into acount the problems the horde have vs the aliance.

Relmstein said...

In general PvE posts its easy to be unbias but when talking about PvP topics I tend to lean towards whatever faction I was currently playing. Been playing an alliance paladin for the last 7 months as my main character.

Should have heard what I thought about the alliance when I was trying to level horde characters on a 1:3 ratio server.