Original AV’s appeal and success was largely because of the following factors and they all blended together very perfectly to make the ultimate brawl
Winning took time, regardless of teams quality
The map funneled the majority of opposing players into each other, there was basically one main road from each base and players run it, knowing full well they would clash
Fighting each other in this mass melee was a much much appealing form of satisfaction than actually completing the objectives of the game
A few players would also wonder off and try to ninja gy’s and win objectives, keeping the game dynamic
It had legitimate PVE objectives to suit those tired of the dying
Even AV’s 1.12 version does not offer this sadly. I don’t think blizzard realised what a gem they had with AV. There was nothing wrong with it standing alone, being the BG that was different. But instead they nerfed it into fast quest style…inkeeping with the rest of the game
With the introduction of Epic Battlegrounds, AV has become a 2-3 hour BG again.
What happened with AV was that the mobs in the zone didn’t scale with gear nor with the character power improvements via overhauls over the course of vanilla, thus it became progressively easier to zerg the enemy NPC’s. As a result people did, and over time the BG became shorter and shorter.
After a while the BG was added into the random battleground rotation. Like any other random map system, there is an implicit assumption that clicking the random battleground button will take this and this amount of time. If AV still took 10 hours and WSG took 20 minutes, there would have been this problem of a player joining a random BG in the hopes of a lootbag within an hour because he has to go to work in an hour, only to then cross his fingers that he didn’t get AV, and if he did that would’ve been a waste and he had to leave.
“Fortunately” the zerg had become so easy by this point that nobody really noticed this fundamental shift; but Blizzard could have buffed the mobs. They didn’t, and they didn’t because of the random BG system.
That, to me, is the real tragedy of it all. Blizzard has systematised everything. All the dungeons have got to be about the same length, many BG’s are the same, all loot has to scale to all item levels, and on and on it goes.
It’s really quite frustrating when a game all about exploration gets so systematic, and I would say that AV is a victim of this more than anything else; because the reason people wanted it done quickly is because of the random reward for completing a BG plus AV being in the random rotation. It’s exactly the same issue we had with the badge system in tBC and Mechanaar.
The biggest appeal of original AV was that it was actually a battleground. Later AV does not even require PvP, just a PvE raid boss rush.
What baffles me is how it can happen. I understand there will be tweaks and changed through the time. But when a big scale PvP battle gets turned into a 10 minute PvE boss kill race, why is there no developer or game manager or whatever that realizes the insanity and nonsense of the whole thing the BG turned in to?
No one with any sense can call the late AV a PvP battleground anymore. How does that happen, turn one of the PvP core designs, Battlegrounds, into a PvE happening?
They do what make the most business sense for them obviously. If the 10% you mentioned all quit because of it, they would at least retain 90% of their player base. If they listened to the 10% and the 90% quit because the devs listened to the 10%, the game would sooner or later start having a negative return of investment (remember studios like Blizzard pour large sums of money into development and upkeep of these sorts of titles) and the game would shut down as it is not financially viable to run it anymore. The 10% would then move onto the next title and WoW will only be remembered for its spectacular failure and irrational decisions of its development studio.
