We all know Alterac Valley in it’s current state is a sad excuse for a BG. Alliance win percentage is less then 10% mainly because off the imbalanced terrain. Another big problem is that you’re lucky if less then half off the squad is not a bot or a semi-afk leecher!
Either Blizzard adresses this imbalance and actively hunts down bots and starts handing out pvp bans to afk-leechers or they take the lazy route and just delete Alterac Valley. Knowing that Blizzard doesn’t really care about monitoring Classic it will most likely be the latter.
What?? I thought the alliance had the terrain advantage in AV. The alliance base is locked behind a narrow bridge where you get shot by the bunker archers while the horde base is protected by a fence that you can jump over. Idk if I’m missing something here.
Maybe if alliance would hide at the start, wipe horde and let some of them free cap SFGY, wipe horde again while SFGY is rolling free for the horde and finally after wasted time rush ibgy they would win more games too sad this is so rare tactic to be used
Just leave it and let it die. Would be cool if they make some version rotation so we could play the versions that existed throughout vanilla for some variation. But they are never going to do such a thing. Vanilla will end in a year or so anyway and they are pushing out a new exp so why would they care?
Just don’t queue for AV as Alliance. Just don’t. Get a Nef offhand or Jindo’s Bag. Get a quickstrike. Get OEB or the trash axe from BWL or destroyer of worlds. Do. Not. Go. To. A.V.
The real advantage Horde have is that you have to sit in 1 hour queues so you don’t mind turtling and defending with a full team for 45 minutes to win. Alliance have instant queues and it’s not really worth it for players to play turtle games if they are trying to rank. Which means AV is played by rep grinders who are only interested in hand ins and AFK rankers who are not really interested in putting effort into ranking or are playing while working with AV in the background.
Of course I’ll still point out that the Horde starting cave is a rather big advantage for Horde when it comes to defending IBGY and attacking SHGY. However it really doesn’t matter because as long as Horde defend in numbers then Alliance will give up due to poor honor per hour. This also helps rep grinders since they want to fight at SPGY and keep looting those rep items.
So while Horde may be content with the free honor and free wins as time goes by the queue time will only keep increasing to the point that it’s not worth playing if you wish to rank.
I would suggest 2 major changes to fix AV:
Remove rep turn ins - You only gain rep for winnings, destroying and protecting towers/LT’s and killing Drek/Van.
Add a time limit to AV - after 30 minutes maximum the game ends and the team with the most towers/LT kills wins. If both are equal it comes down to who has the most kills.
What would these changes bring?
Shorter queues for Horde since games won’t last 1 hour+
Bring solo Alliance rankers back to AV as they would know games wouldn’t last an eternity.
Rep grinders would actually have incentive to participate in objectives whether its attacking or defending.
The main problem they have to tackle is the AFKers in AV. They need to come up with a system where you have to participate to gain rep/honor and in all honesty I don’t know how they would do that. Blizzard have handed out bans for AFKing in AV and even this hasn’t stopped people, players generally don’t care about a short ban and the risk is worth the reward to such players.
Easy fix. Remove the automatic matchmaking for teammates. If you can only queue up as a 40-man premade for it, it then means that the players have the power and the will to police themselves. Would also dramatically increase teamwork and communication.
It’d also get rid of the botters and the afkers.
A compromise would be to only automatically matchmake players from the same realm for the same team. It’d still be possible to solo queue, but at least people would have a much easier time to recognize each player on the team and the server reputation would matter.
To clarify, it’d still be possible to face enemies from another realm, but only possible to be matchmade with players from your own realm for your own team.
Realm wars are the future!
(The compromise would be weak to premade exploits though, while the first option is the most optimal one.)
The fact is that alliance is losing because they cant bother to defend that damn SFGY, it is in a middle of the map and is main point of the game, having that will let you constantly pushing horde towards they frostwolf hut. When you say you cant push horde when they are respawning to ibgy thiss is false because this is the exactly the same they does to alliance when they choose to guard the stonehearth graveyard, the reason why this tactic is not in use is that it will lead to hours long alterac valleys but itt is almost only way to increase alliance win % besides rushing hut.
Alliance is headlessly following the wipe wipe ibgy tactic some streamers advertised to us at the beging of classic lauch for min/maxing their Rank 14 grind for viewers.
If you are not ready for the effort dont cry about win %.
Exactly for Alliance it’s either:
A) Try to rush Drek, succeed and win. It rarely happens because Horde are quite happy defending while sending a small force to an undefended SHGY so when they wipe Alliance at IBGY/south they respawn all the way back at the cave/SPGY.
B) Defend SHGY and wait for SFGY to be taken by the Horde then push to IBGY and defend till it’s ours then take towers and push further south.
C) Take SFGY and then push IBGY from there while defending it at the same time.
All of these strategies except for rushing Drek will take 40+ minutes to squeeze out a win and thats not honor efficient when you have instant queues. Rushing Drek can work but in general it doesn’t because Horde know to defend until Alliance are wiped then give up.
So what do Alliance do? They try to kill all the LT’s they can and destroy towers and then hope Horde will finish the game fast which they never do since they want to play for 30 minutes at least for the bonus honor and farm some HKs.
The problem at the end of the day is a flawed honor system which promotes gaining as much honor as you can as effectively as you can. If Horde had instant queues and Alliance had to queue for an hour then Alliance would be trying to turtle and Horde would give up as soon as they met resistance. It’s not down to one side being better than the other it’s down to both sides playing to maximise honor. The simple truth is Alliance WILL NOT defend whilst they have instant queues and so Horde will always have the advantage even ignoring terrain advantages.
The Horde tactic is really not hard it’s simply defend till they send Alliance back to cave/SPGY then push on with the SHGY choke point. Alliance could defend if they want and drag the game out for 2+ hours but then even though they will punish Horde for their turtling strategy they also punish themselves.
You what? The alliance problem is that they don’t work together. So many solo Alliance players in a team game. Don’t blame the horde for working together better.
That’s because (its my point of view) alliance players are more casual players who actually don’t care and they are doing what they want (reputation quests in the BG etc).
Its like vanilla players… you are just sitting behind your PC and doing… something and you have fun…
EDIT: oh its WoW Classic forum, it make sense now. mb
It’s not worth it to play the long-game for alliance with instant queues. It’s especially not worth playing AV for well-geared rankers when they can just roll horde in WSG/AB all day for much higher HPH.
Horde have an advantage in controlling mid due to spawn locations, alliance has an advantage in a straight base race. The current horde strat prohibits a base race from happening.
Unlike in Vanilla, there is much more knowledge and adherence to the meta, meaning that every game is roughly the same.
The main issue in my opinion is that we have no idea what the actual win-rates are and what the different metas across regions are, and how these are influenced by queue times.
I do think Alliance could win more games in US/EU with a hardcore turtle meta, but from what I observed doing a few AVs last night on my lowbie mage, the horde drastically outlevel and outgear alliance in AV now as well.
