I interpreted that to mean that if there were 600 Horde and 900 Alliance waiting to play, the Alliance would have to wait.
I honestly cannot conceive that there is going to be only one battleground instance per server. The concept staggers my imagination. If there’s only one, why instance it at all?
I read it as “one instance.” Particularly since that part about the queue followed the part where they said “We know it would be problematic if the battleground had too many people in it.” If there were multiple instances, you’d think they would say “So we’re making multiple instances to spread people out,” rather than saying “So we’re putting population caps on and you can adventure in the world while you wait for the queue.”
Re: Why instance it at all, because that way (a) you can enforce a population limit; and (b) you can have all that mayhem taking place on a separate server.
If too few people (even high level people) can take advantage of it, I don’t see the point. I mean, that’s a lot of work to do to let a few hundred play for a few hours. I’ll be very very disappointed if that’s what it is.
Lorini
So if there really will be only one copy of the battleground available, is it a technological limitation, or is Blizzard under the impression that one is “enough”?
I don’t see how the former could be, and if it is the latter, well, they’ll be disabused of that idea soon enough.
Yeah, that part is good.
I also wonder since it’s instanced if they just couldn’t run more than one at a time? It might make playing with your buddies hit or miss, I’d rather get in faster.
I get the feeling that the reason there won’t be multiple copies of the battlefield is because some truly uberepic loot will be dropped as part of the quests in the battlefield, and Bliz doesn’t want it streaming out in large numbers into the server population.
Which, if true, is unfortunate because every other game that has tried to do the same thing has failed miserably to do so. I suppose Bliz might be the first successful one to do so, but somehow I doubt it.
I don’t know why you think a reset would be neccessary… evidently you have not played Planetside, for example? A game in which every battleground is a single copy instance, completely persistent, with no resets?
When one side has smashed the enemy base and there is nothing left to do, you WILL see an exodus of the winning (and probably the losing sides as well) side’s players from the battleground. They won, they are finished, and now they will go somewhere else.
That in itself will speed the queue along.
Who wants to be a Level 60’s lackey? Although the idea of giving lower levels a chance in this battleground is admirable, in the end, it just doesn’t seem right. Who wants to be the waterboy; the person doing all the chores while the big guys do the fun stuff? The battlegrounds really should be level restricted so that lower level people can have their day to shine too in their own battleground. Don’t forget the manta of MMO’s: “Everybody wants to be the hero.”
The lack of instancing seems totally bizarre, however…
The same people who played Engineers in Team Fortress or Planetside? The Galaxy Drivers in Planetside? Sometimes it’s enough to be a part of a team or providing a service knowing that you’re helping the greater good.
If this is the model it should be used completely to build “units”. You have a goal and a set time, once it’s over it’s over.
Making the players leave of boredom makes no sense. One model goes in a direction, the other goes in another. Or they use the persistence as a quality and they have only one instance or they remove the persistence and they have independent units.
An hybrid makes absolutely no sense to me and it doesn’t add anything to one of the two models.
I’m sorry what models are you talking about? What I see is essentially a Planetside-like battleground. Base and tower capture. Only thing that is different is more NPC action, and you cannot completely eliminate the other side’s foothold on the battlefield.
It’s not that players leave due to boredom: it’s that the fight is essentially done for the time being, and you go elsewhere and fight another battle.
IMHO they DO need to carry it to the full extent and implement multiple battlegrounds, so that players generally do have another fight to go to… but since they have alreadys aid that is what they are doing it is not very worrisome to me.
An organic, dynamic, fully persistent PvP is guaranteed more interesting than an long sequence of “one-off” capture-the-base style games, that jarringly reset after each match.
I should note that NOWHERE in their implementation is there any kind of “RTS” quality. Players do not “build units” or buildings or anything else. It is persistent PvP, not some whacky RTS hybrid.
What it does resemble, is the DOTA style maps from War3, and the one level in the Frozen Throne expansion where you had to fight against wavs of opponents using automatically generated waves of your own and your heroes.
Does it? The impression I get from the desciption is that the NPCs are all static “objectives” or “defences”, like Planetside automated turrets. I think the players themselves do all the real fighting. Could be wrong of course.
There are mobs to, for spice, I suppose, but thats neither here nor there as far as comparing it to RTS’s go.
They’d still need queues (wouldn’t want to boot up a new instance until you had a reasonable fill # of players). Playing-with-buddies could be partially overcome through groups and raid groups (like regular instances).
Brian
Models following these two cases:
1- The battleground is a unit with a goal (destroy the base) and a time limit. Like UT2004 done in WoW. Once it’s done it resets.
2- The battleground is persistent and unique, following the rules Blizzard described. Once it’s done there are middle-term stages before it goes back at the original state.
An organic, dynamic, fully persistent PvP is guaranteed more interesting than an long sequence of “one-off” capture-the-base style games, that jarringly reset after each match.
Oh, I agree. But I believe you are looking at the wrong game. WoW won’t deliver this. Ever.
It’s definitely not an RTS hybrid, but having read the description my first impulse was “Cool! Now I can be a peon, just like in Warcraft III.”
I’m imagining that the other Battlegrounds (and there will be others) will have different goals (perhaps not a straight out ‘capture the enemy base’ objective) and different quests. And, of course, different rewards.
This will be what moves people along after a fight is done, they’ll want to move along to the next fight, a different instance, etc…
This will not all be in place immediately, but I can certainly see the future picture: you’ll have a choice of several battlegrounds, many of them level appropriate, all with different layouts, quests, goals and rewards. Alterac Valley may be full, but you can choose to PvE farm while you wait, or try another Battleground. In return, you get a relatively balanced fight, and hopefully one that will be video lag free due to the limitations on character models you’ll need to deal with. This won’t be 300 person DAoC style relic raids to turn your machine into a slideshow, it should be 100 person per side (max) fights that the client is fine tuned to handle.
/Eph
HRose: Ok I went and read the article again.
There is one exception to this, and that is that the destroyed home base rebuilds itself over time. The battlefield does not otherwise “reset”. In short, the battlefield will NEVER return to its original state.
There is no weird half-implementation of models as you imply.
Yes, it’s the second “model” I described.
I was commenting why I believe there won’t be multiple instances. If they go with multiple instances I’d choose the first model because it works better that way.
But from the article it seems that the model is the second one, thus, with just one instance available per battleground.
The only good thing about it being -one- instance, and not one of many, is that at least you feel like you are fighting for THE important place in-game, you’re not off in some silly arena, of which there are infinite clones.
Hmm, hope it works.
HRose: But you say “Once it’s done there are middle-term stages before it goes back at the original state.”
I am not sure where you are getting this from… it seems clear to me that the battlefield never returns to it’s orginal state.
Given that it is persistent, dynamic, PvP your statement that “WoW won’t deliver this. Ever.” also seems weird.
For all the world this seems to me like a Planetside-style implementation.
I am not sure I understand all their mechanics. If I do, then there are goinng to be serious gameplay problems.
My question is: Does the ‘destroyed’ base rebuild as the winning faction or opposing factions base?
If its the opposing faction, then since this instance is perminit then what keeps the winning faction from continuously beating it down?
If its the winning faction, then the loosing faction must beat it down and hold it for hours while it rebuilds?
If battlegrounds to not reset, then doing the quest to rescue the goblin or get the syndicates on your side is perminit? How is this supposed to work again?
Finally, if these battle grounds are perminit, do people just sit around for 3 or 4 hours while one base gets fixed?
So far it seems like a few hours of fun for the highest levels and a lot of nothing for everyone after the fact.