Alliance of Rampage Battlegroup. WTH happened to you?

Last battle, Rampage Battlegroup: Horde 627, Alliance 0.

At that point there is no difference between at least trying and boycotting.

Continued Alliance losses means the Horde get better and better (gear, and morale) leaving the Alliance in worse and worse shape.

Which means Horde will win more and even more. This is where the pumps can no longer keep up with the water coming in and your ship is going down. No matter what you do.

What happened? Alliance used to always win. Always. The map is the same. It’s been made easier, in fact. (None of those pesky tower guards.) The one difference, perhaps, is that sitting in the cave is no longer a viable means of earning phat honor. So the Horde actually try now. Alliance always tried. Why not? They were always winning. Horde were going to lose, so why bother? Earn your honor in the cave. But they’re all out of the cave now. And man for man, or orc, Horde are simply better players? And previous Alliance gear advantages were due to exclusive use of Paladins in raids prior to the introduction of the Blood Elves?

And how can this even be turned around? If it’s all 70′s, then the difference is gear, and if they’re earning, consistently, 4x to 5x the honor, you can see the obvious problem.

Now I’d say Horde are better players, but then you haven’t played Horde in the Vindication Battlegroup. Where Horde are the losing side more often than not. And it all just reinforces itself. The winning side just gets stronger and stronger in relation to the losing side. There is no “reset” until the Expansion comes out. (This isn’t Warhammer where it’s going to reset after every strategic win. And then what kind of “reset” is Warhammer going to have? The winners will bring nothing to the next campaign from their previous win? What, meaningless titles and tabards and stuff? Is that going to fly? Of course, if you’re just in it for the challenge, maybe it would. The Arena Server that WoW is going to introduce will be just that from the sounds of it. Everyone gets everything, and it’s skill vs. skill. Guildwars PvP for the masses. And paying for it rather than playing free.)

The next match after writing the above, we actually scored a 125 honor loss against the Horde’s 500 something. Hey, hey.

P.S. One positive note: Queues only take less than a few minutes. No more 40 minute waits. (Maybe more Horde have server transferred to a winning Battlegroup and with equal numbers, albeit a low number of actual battles, the waits are down.)

P.P.S. It ain’t getting better the later the day gets.  If we hadn’t killed Galv in the last moments of the last match we wouldn’t have gotten the 62 we did get.  Otherwise we were slated for another shut-out.  Stunning.  Absolutely mind-numbing.  And there is zero reason to expect this to change.  It’s not me.  It’s not the individual fault of every BG player on the Alliance side in AV on the Rampage Battlegroup.  But, damn.  This is really pretty sad.  Zero points given for taking a graveyard (which I did).  Zero points for defending it (which I did).  Zero given for capturing a mine (which I did).  Unless I’m pumping arrows into targets, and getting killing blows and honorable kills, strategy be damned, I’ll get no honor whatsoever.  Zero points if you’re Alliance.  QQ, yeah, but this really is to the point of ridiculousnessity.

Getting my PvP gear, is going to be a long road.  (Positive note is I’m sitting on 100 AV tokens (everything I’m getting lately just sitting in the mailbox expiring), 54 AB tokens, and a handful of WSG tokens.  I’m set to get the Gladiator’s Shoulders in a day or two.)

 

It must be the common denominator.

On my Alliance 70, on the Rampage Battlegroup, he loses 9 AV’s out of 10. This was the battlegroup where the Alliance boycotted for a while because they always lost.  Still do.

On my Horde 70′s, on the Vindication Battlegroup, they’ve lost 9 AV’s out of 10.  It’s known to be a “Horde loses battlegroup.”

Can I pick the servers or what?

Just interesting how these servers, populated by players all starting with the same characters and classes and gear, can be so very different one from the other.

 

It’s the Level 60 end-games all over again. RIP, Sunwell Plateau.

Have you noticed:

Progression:

LBRS/Scholomance/Stratholme/UBRS -> HFC/Auchindon/CFR/CoT/TK

T1 Molten Core -> T4 Karazhan/Gruul’s/Magtheridon

T2 Blackwing Lair -> T5 Serpentshrine Cavern/The Eye

T3 Naxxramas -> T6 Mt. Hyjal/Black Temple

And as sideshows:

T1+ Zul’Gurub -> T4+ Zul’Aman

T2+ Ahn’Qiraj -> T5+ Sunwell Plateau

Do you remember how much effort Blizzard put into Silithus and Ahn’Qiraj?  And that lasted all of what?  A few months?  Does anyone even remember going there?  Do half of you even know where it is or what the story was?  What was the loot like?  Garish, colorful, odd.  What’s the loot like in Sunwell Plateau?  From what I’ve seen at mmo.champion it’ll be garish, colorful, and odd.

“The bugs are coming.  THE BUGS ARE COMING!! Oh, look, Outlands.  Nevermind.  I’m sooo out of here.  Race you to 70.”

Who goes to Zul’Gurub unless it’s on some lark?  You can get better level 62 greens real cheap on the Auction House that run rings around the epic drops in ZG.

Naxxramas.  I’ve heard they’re just going to recycle it like some summer-time rerun.  That’ll fly to a discerning Blizzard player, eh?

As soon as they offered 61-70, all the 60 content was punted like diseased gnomes and players raced to 70.

As soon as they offer 71-80, all the 70 content will be punted like diseased gnomes and players will race to 80.  They will race to 80, race to max crafting levels, race to maximize gear/equipment/epeen. And two weeks later wonder to the rest of the world ”Is that all there is?  I’m so disappointed with Blizzard.”

Last expansion they offered a two part expansion.  1) Race to 70 in a new world, and 2) explore four brand-new zones in the old world, with a new race for each, from 1-20.

Is the next expansion going to offer similar two parts?  1) Race to 80 in new zones in the old world, and 2) some new PvP action?  Siege engines, an entire PvP zone set in every world?  (I don’t think 95% of the playerbase exploring Gnome Deathnights with pink pony tails should count as a “part”.)

And it’s just a shame about the Sunwell Plateau.  Requiescat in pace.  We hardly knew thee.

 

Control pads.

DM Osbon over at Sweet Flag prompted us to show our work/play spaces.

Droonda’s:

Highlights include a nice Sony high-contrast 19″ flat screen.   And, yeah, she’s got a thing for Chivalry (that’s  Edmund Blair Leighton’s God Speed) and Middle Earth.

Msaker’s:

Highlights include a nice signed Roger Dean print, Floating Water.  (He did most all of the Yes album covers.)

And that’s just a small part of my book collection.  What you see ranging from Calvin and Hobbes to historical treatises and The Complete Peerage and the histories of ancient peoples.  To be honest there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. 

 

My Valley is not your Valley.

Alterac Valley that is.

In my old battlegroup, Rampage, the Alliance got to losing AV so often they basically stopped playing.  They actually boycotted Alterac Valley.  Poor Vann.  Nobody to defend him.  Literally, we’d have 2 or 3 Alterac Valley’s going on at a time.  My Horde character would wait over 30 minutes to get into one.

My new battlegroup, Vindication, I’ve won one in about ten AV matches.  But at least we have 30-40 matches going on all the time.  And pretty much every match goes: 1) Rush Balinda with a few, 2) Rush Stormpike, 3) cap (and somehow burn) the bunkers on the way.  It’s an out and out race.  Sometimes the Alliance hold us at Stormpike Cemetary, one time they kept us from getting Balinda.  When five defenders can put a stop to something, you can kiss momentum goodbye.

Last night we finally won one.  We got their bunkers slightly before they got our towers, we got their Aid Station just before they got our Relief Hut.  We killed Vann before they killed Drekk.  It was probably very close.  Did they remove all NPC’s but the Captains?  You always had to defeat the Tower/Bunker commanders.  You always had those wandering guys to defeat.  They’re all gone.  It’s pretty much a wide open race.  They might as well just remove Balinda and the Horde guy now.

In fact, why not just remove it all.  All NPC’s.  All guards.  All bunkers and towers.  Make it 40v40 Arena match.  And rather than have us work for them, why not just equip us with epics just for entering?  And if the Alliance don’t have enough Horde to fight, just do 40v40 Alliance vs. Alliance.  It’s just an Arena afterall.  It’s just bloodsports.  Give us our gladiator matches, let the masses eat bread and cheer the emperor Blizzardicus.  All hail, Caeser.  We who are about to die in AV salute you!

Now where was I?  Ah, yes.  My point was that different Battlegroups have different cultures.  That was kind of interesting for me to discover.  On Rampage Alliance lost so much they stopped playing.  On Vindication Horde lose a lot, and yet there’s a lot of AV action happening.  People are people.  But servers and battlegroups develop to become quite different.  They’re born like twins, identical in every way, and yet one becomes Emo Boy and the other Testosterone Titan.  And it’s all based on how the people on those servers/battlegroups grow up and interact with each other.  Kind of like a social experiment played out by test subjects.  Our own little Lord of the Flies.

 

WoW’s Armory has been borked.

As of the morning of the 2nd, if I want to check out an Armory entry, I get:

“This page is parked free, courtesy of GoDaddy.com.”

Interesting. It’ll be curious to see how long it takes to fix.

What’s more sad is that all 10 Sponsored Listings are for gold and account sellers.

GoLawyers.

Edit: All better now.