I believe the quest to collect artifact fragments should be removed from Ashran.
It’s creating a situation whereby a good portion of the team runs off to farm NPCs in some remote area, leaving the others to struggle in the middle, often losing key objectives such as the mage in the process.
Why add a quest which creates a tension between those who wish to win, and those who wish to complete a quest? The people fighting in the middle will even try to brute-kick the questers by reporting them AFK.
The whole BG has been one big mess since its inception. There are too many things in that map that players simply ignore.
All special areas are badly thought out, there are no proper graphical indicators on the map what is going on. All those special areas create nothing but confusion.
Maybe sounded fun on paper but the unnecessarry complexity Ashran has does not work or belong in PvP MMO.
Also even if you win it feels bad because you very rarely actually manage to kill the opposing leader.
It sounds more like it should be like a constant PvP War Zone instead of instanced BG. Holy Land in Allods Online was amazing.
Players are not playing the BG as intended since they don’t have to. We all take the lazy easy way to get these done. Most wins are achieved by killing the opposite faction till their bar is empty which is usually the Alliance. The quest would imo be better if it counted as a kill x amount of players in Ashran.
They probably should remove that particular quest since it only causes problems in Ashran as an Epic BG.
I never enjoyed those side quests areas, especially the one where you escort the cart around and around in a circle.
Mind you, a mass fight in the middle isn’t much fun for the melee guys who get bombarded with spells and arrows if they try to push forward.
A team that is pushed back to their base doesn’t often stand much chance of turning things around and steadily loses reinforcements until it’s Game Over.
I do wonder why it’s included as an epic BG in its current state.