I must say the introduction of the new daily quests have had a huge impact on World of Warcraft. A lot of people seem to like the cooking one and I already see people running around with the "Happy" buff from the new cake recipe. The heroic daily quest also seems popular with groups actually using the LFG tool. I almost died of surprise when I got invited into a heroic group and found out they weren't doing the Mechanar. The normal dungeon daily quest is a lot less popular on my server and I usually only see one group forming in LFG for it. I'm guessing the reward probably needs to be adjusted a bit or perhaps people are unfamiliar with the purpose of the etherium prison keys.
Despite that one small set back Blizzard more then made up for it with how they implemented the daily battleground quests. The reward of 400 honor and 11 gold is nice but what I really enjoy is the effect its had on queue times for my battlegroup. Basically after the patch all battlegrounds in my battlegroup are being played equally. Even during the Eye of the Storm holiday not a single queue had over a 10 minute wait time. Plus the rewards for the daily quest seem to be influencing the drive to win in most battlegrounds. This weekend I didn't hear a single person shout out the Alliance motto of "Just let them Win". It seems a decent percentage of people in each of my battlegrounds also had the daily quest and thus needed to win.
The next part of this post is conjecture but I believe its probably similar to how Blizzard actually assigns the daily battleground quest in each battlegroup.
1 Battlegroup = 10 Servers = 20 factions
20 factions / 4 Battlegrounds = 5 factions per Battleground
If you have noticed, everyone on your server and faction will have the same daily battleground quest that day. This was probably done to encourage forming pre-made teams but in reality its helping each faction in another way. Its basically guaranteeing that people play that games to win rather then try to farm honor. Since battleground teams are form from different servers chances are that at least some of the people in your group have the quest requiring them to win. This was just the encouragement players needed since some people had very negative outlooks on being able to win. Nothing worse then spending a entire game guarding a flag only to lose and gain little honor. This is why just farming honorable kills became standard practice.
I honestly don't think the daily battleground quests would have had the same effect if Alterac Valley wasn't changed at the same time though. Both sides now use a much stronger defense in the game and as a result usually only the captain and the first few objectives are destroyed. Choke points have become widely used and every game I've been in but one has had victory decided by reinforcements. This makes the game about whose defense can hold off the attackers without dying. Unfortunately in this new Alterac Valley having level 61-66 players on your side becomes a huge disadvantage since they tend to explode against level 70s with epics.
However, while all of these changes make this battleground tougher on the lesser geared side it does have the effect of discouraging the farming of Alterac Valley. If Alterac Valley still gave bonus honor just for killing elites the alliance probably would not have dispersed to all the other battlegrounds even with the new daily quest. This is great news since I am seeing less people leave in the middle of the other battlegrounds because their AV queue popped. With the win/loss ratios getting better in the other battlegrounds the honor rate doesn't seem to have changed as much as I was worried about. Now whether the new system will continue to work after everyone has bought their Season 1 arena gear I don't know. But at the moment the battleground system seems to be working like a well oiled machine.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
Why I Love the Daily Battleground Quest
Posted by Relmstein at 11:18 AM
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4 comments:
Damn, sign me up for your battlegroup. Our queues, even on the EotS holiday weekend were horrible. EotS did not have a single BG open while I played. AB had two going on average, but queue times were still about twenty minutes. WSG was it's normal hit or miss... sometimes WSG is jammed full.
Of course, AV had upwards of 50 instances going.
I wish Blizzard put the same AV effort into AB, WSG, and EotS. At least balance out the honor to AV levels! 2 AB matches netted me shit for honor, but 10 minutes in AV got me 400? WTF.
Tehl you what. I havent won a single AV sine they implimented the changes. It seems every AV i get inot still has the morons touting "rush Drek" so the 90% of the same idiots run down and get tosted at IB by a wall of horde. I have yet to get much honer with the new system. Oh well I'll just roll through some more heroics and Kara and out fit my self in the very nice rewards that brings.
I hate BG any way. The only reason my rogue has any honor was when he drove to exalted with SP for the Lobotomizer.
Ah the lobotomizer that takes me back. For some reason it does seem that Alterac Valley has recieved the most love out of all the other battlegrounds.
WSG is probably the worst mostly because it so easily becomes a stalemate. It deffinitely needs a method to speed up games where the teams are too evenly balanced and stalemate each other. I just wish they would adjust the honor based on how much time was spent in a battleground but Blizzard is nervous about adding honor to the smaller battlegrounds.
They're already premade teams that sweep through battlegrounds earning outrageous amounts of honor and Blizzard is afraid of handing them more honor by adjusting WSG, AB, or EotS honor.
And what is your definition of "faction"?
Horde, Alliance, those are the factions...
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