Why Alterac Valley is the perfect Methaphor for everything that went wrong with WoW

So let me tell you a little story of a Battleground that wasnt like the others.

It wasnt a BG you joined to finish it ASAP, it was a BG you played to push your faction forward.
While Other BGs were usually over in about 15 minutes, AV could last for Days. For alot of people, AV was actually the definition of the Alliance vs Horde War.

There was stuff to do no matter what you were into, you could do PvE content and help your faction, faming Items to buff your NPCs, summon powerfull Elite Bosses… Think what Blizzard promised with Warfronts (what they PROMISED, not what they delivered) and imagine that, but bigger and in PvP.

It was a great map, but I will admit that most people didnt really care much for it. It was a niche experience, something totaly different from the other content in the game. But it had a good and loyal player base who loved the special challenge the BG offered. It wast for everyone, but for those who loved it, it was the only content in the game that offered it.

And it was all fine, until the people who didnt like to play it noticed that there were some AV specific rewards and said ā€œHey, we want that!ā€ and again, while we would have welcomed them with open arms, there was a problem, and that was the second part of their request: ā€œBut we dont want to play this BG!ā€

Let me put that in perspective:
Imagine WoW as a big school. 90% of the school loves to play Football. Its the no.1 sport and everything is based around Football at the school and there are about 20 Football clubs.
But there is a small amount of people on the school who absolutely love Basketball, and they have one Basketball club. Every Club hands out different T-Shirts for people who win games.
Now the Football players come and say ā€œWe want to win the Basketball T-Shirts too!ā€ and the Basketball club says ā€œGreat, come and play Basketball with us.ā€ but they say ā€œBut we dont like Basketball.ā€
So now they complain to the School board how unfair it is that they actually have to play Basketball to win the Basketball shirts, until the school board caves in and changes the Basketball club, so that it is still called Basketball, but they are no longer allowed to play games but only to do best of 5 Free Throws, so that the people who dont like Basketball can come in, win a T-Shirt and never give a damn about the Basketball club again.

This is what happened with AV.
It turned into a discussion between the 10% of the players who loved to play AV and the 90% of the players who wanted to FARM AV.

And Blizzard listened to the Majority.

The 90% already had everything else in the game, while the 10% only had this one BG, but Blizzard decided that the 10% were not important enough to have something the 90% couldnt farm like all the other content.
So they butchered AV, nerfed all the NPCs, removed most of them, removed most of the Objectives or made them not worth the effort, all to please the people who wanted to farm rather than play.

Theres a reason that after Blizzard started to nerf AV, the Meta became 2 giant Zerg waves that rushed the boss, because the people that now joined AV were not interested in the BG. They wanted to be done ASAP, get the rewards and leave.

And the Forums said ā€œWell, you can still play AV, its still there, just play multiple times to get the old experience!ā€ but AV was gone. Sure, the name stayed the same, but other than that, the Battleground was gone. What we got instead was a competitive Raid, where you tried to clear an outdoor Raif faster than the enemy faction.

In the end, the people who just wanted to farm won over the people who wanted to play.

And that is a recurring theme in the history of WoW.

Blizzard stoped caring about the people who loved the game and catered to the majority, the casuals who wanted everything fast an easy. Classes were gutted and robbed of individuality to please the people who didnt like that they actually had to think about Raid setup, Dungeons became linear non-Challenging experiences, Group finders became a thing, Epics were literally given away for free…

All to please the majority, who didnt really want to play the game at all, but just want to ā€œfinishā€ it.

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What I liked about the old AV was that it felt like consensual, object-based open world PvP with the same number of people on either side. Yes, I would often log out in the evening and join the same AV the next day, which made it feel almost persistent.

The experience was also driven by the community aspect: everyone was from your own server (which later on became a problem), and you’d even know your opponents. 40v40 felt gigantic and was breathtaking as I had never experienced a PvP battle on that scale.

I’m not sure that I think it was better than modern AV from a ā€œplaying a gameā€ perspective, but it definitely was memorable and immersive. A real experience.

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AV in vanilla is one of my fondest memories. I second the notion it felt like world pvp rather than a bg, albeit with objectives. Sure you could try and rush boss, but unless your team had some insane gear and their team were chumps, there was no way you were taking down the enemy boss without doing objectives.

It was actually my preferred method of honour farming. I loved defending bunkers on my dwarf priest, mind controlling horde to jump out and towards a cliff edge. You’d build up rapport with your allies while deffing a bunker or tower, or when planning to assault one.

I generally stayed away from the main zerg until the conclusion of the BG. And when I did follow the crowd I’d focus on harassing those mages, hunters and healers who were working from the back or sides apparently unnoticed.

I don’t miss much about vanilla honestly but the BGs, AV most of all I really enjoyed and I haven’t enjoyed pvp the same way since, closest I came was in Wrath but it still wasn’t the same. The idea that a BG can take nearly an hour these days is anathema. Back then it was a glorious sign of honour well earned.

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Vanilla AV - best MMO experience.

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Old AV was the only PVP mode I cared about.

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I really miss old AV, but can’t say I agree with your casual blaming in the end.
Seen enough of the ā€˜hardcore/esport’ types bring their own crappy requests to the game.

In the end it’s Blizzard who designs this game, blame them for certain things not the players.

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Until then you made good points shame really.

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I thought you were onto something there but it is just another ā€œblame everyone who plays the game differently to meā€ thread. Shame.

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It’s nothing more than a ā€œI’m a real gamer and fan, you are not, I’m better than you. Only I really love the gameā€ thread. OP is the reason why Classic gets alot of hate with their superiority complex.

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He who pays the piper calls the tune.

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Kaipaan sinua :hugs:

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Omg pls DONT , pls dont

I loved vanilla AV! Really involving and went on for ages making it feel like a real battle. None of this 15 minutes then done.

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Majority decides. The biggest problem in democracy and a even bigger problem in MMO genre.

Greed is also big problem. Company needs to make exorbatant amounts of income for all the shareholders and to keep emplyees paid… Especially the big names need money. Right?

Anyway. Majority bring big issues to forum. Big issues like mounts and class imbalances and all sorts of things that seem like game breaking…

Meanwhile real game braking issues for minority like visually impaired like me and other like me, the need of text to speech system to work on a game like WOW where everything is in text basically, gets lost in the noise of those seemingly big issues and sad thing is, the most noted posts are always those ā€œI wuitā€ and stuff like that. People help to keep them on top bt stating ā€œCan i have your stuffz?ā€ and real issues get lost in the void which being the end of forum posts where few have patience to scroll.

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The mistake was to put rewards that were bg specific. Should have had pvp generic rewards to begin with, and the people who liked wsg would have done wsg, those who liked av would have done av.

Amen!

/10c.

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I think the problem is that, nowadays, people seem to have much less time than they did when the original AV was there. You notice it in current AV when there’s a small setback and half the group leave, presumably because they can’t be bothered with/don’t have the extra time it’ll take to overcome it.

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heh

'tis not the casual who craves completion, nor is it the casual who demand change; the casual merely plays as inspiration strikes, and leaves as she wanes.

For all the ills of modern warcraft, I would blame none on the truly casual.

You lost me at wow being a big school or something like that

Agreed until the blame-game started, that sh*t is getting old.