Real Time Strategy

So at Blizzcon this year, Blizzard finally announced something that will likely cause me to buy their upcoming expansion. I am, of course, talking about the rated battleground system that is set to be one of the main features of Cataclysm. Since early TBC, Blizzard has been promising that this would happen; and only two years later, it finally will happen. I’m not sure how many people actually played competitive BGs back in the day, but I for one can tell you competitive WSG back pre 2.0 was the most fun I have ever had playing WoW.

Every night after a raid, our team would queue WSG on the super competitive battlegroup: Reckoning(lol). A lot of people complain that WSG was all about who could cheese the other team the hardest by GY camping. However, fortunately that was rarely an issue, as most of the competitive teams never resorted to such cheesy tactics. And while we might have spent 10 games stomping pugs, every time we ran into another organized team it got our blood pumping. Over the span of about a year, my team only ever lost once when we ran full 10 players(props to team Fusion with their hunter Plopz, for showing us how cheesy a Horde team could be with entrapment <3). But anyways, this post was not meant to reminisce about the old days.

And now, after all these years, competitive BGs(namely: WSG) is making a comeback. But! As the title suggests, this is about my thoughts & ideas for the rated BG system.

The rating system: Probably the one issue I am torn about. I would like to see something other than the way arena ratings work, so that rated BGs does not become a “grab 9 other people and grind rating so we can get gear.” But I am unsure of how the best way to do that would be. Right now the current arena system is just ridiculous. Any team can get top ratings, despite having horrible W/L ratios, simply because they had a high MMR in a previous season(if you want proof of this, just look at how many bad DK/Pallies are still getting gladiator after S5). One idea I have come up with for this is simply to put a much higher penalty on losing. Getting a high rating should be based on how many games you play without losing–not how many games you play. But like I said, this is one issue that I am having trouble coming up with a solution.

Casuals: Simply put–this should not be made for casuals. Blizzard has done so much this expansion to make arenas more appealing to casuals, such as VoA, more specs being made viable(lolprot), and even being able to buy 1-season-behind-gear with badges. This is all fine to me, but I sincerely hope they keep rated BGs for the more hardcore crowd. Getting 9 other players together to queue at the same time will be a hard enough job–please make it enticing enough for the hardcore crowd.

Match-making system: Perhaps this could have been stated in the rating system section. Anyways, I would like to see an MMS more like that of WC3. To somewhat go along with what I stated earlier, I would like to see matching based off of your W/L ratio. This way new teams that start out beating a bunch of noobs, will soon enough find themselves facing other undefeated teams.

Restrictions: Probably the biggest issue I could see with rated BGs are cheese teams. An example of that would be a team of 9 healers and 1 Prot warrior. Sure they could never kill you, but you for damn sure will never get your flag back if they do get it to their graveyard. I think there should be spec restrictions set in place for each team. Say, if you wanted to queue for WSG it would check the specs of everyone on the team, and prevent you from queuing with more than, say, 4 healers(just throwing that out there), or no more than 1 tank, etc. And then, once the team has the green light to queue, it locks everyone from being able to do a talent respec while they are in queue.

Consumables: This is an area where a lot of people will likely disagree with me, but I stand strong behind this, and that is that I think all professions, and all consumables should be allowed(with the exception of things like MC cap). This will do two things. Add a much more room for tactics. And even more important(to me) keep the casuals away. As I said before, I would really like rated BGs to appeal to the hardcore PvPers, rather than casual players. I don’t know about anyone else who used to play competitive WSG back in the day, but whenever WSG weekend rolled around, I would spend usually an entire day farming for flasks, and several hundred free action/living action potions. I really think consumables/professions would make things a lot more interesting, so each game is not played just like a 10v10 death match.

Time limit: Another issue that I am a little unsure of. To be honest, the 25 minute time limit would have to go. I’m sure most people would hate such a thing, but I think the longest WSG I was ever in lasted about 6 hours, and while that is a little absurd, the point is that 25 minute just is not enough time to decide a game of WSG. I would say that there should be no time limit, but place in certain rules that prevent people from turtling. Ex: team A caps team Bs flag, team B then decides to turtle all 10 players inside their base just to annoy the other team. One way to prevent this would be to have inactive penalties. Say, if your whole team stays inside your base for x amount of time, each player will receive a 5 minute debuff that increases their damage taken by x%. The same would go for GY campers. I would even say anytime you hold the enemies flag at your own GY, you take 50% more damage.

Anyways, that is all I have for now. Feel free to provide your own ideas, or point out flaws in my ideas(I’m sure they are not perfect). But I would really like to see everyone’s opinion on this!