Rambling: Player vs. Player (primarily Alterac Valley)

[kiya]

Long ago in the mists of time a standing PVP war rolled between Southshore and Tarren Mill. And this made the servers laggy and made it hard to complete quests, so the powers that be implemented player-combat instances.

The first two of these were Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley. I was in the level-forty range at the time, and thus unable to play AV, but I played a hell of a lot of WSG. (I had outlevelled teinedreugan and sstaten by a bit, so was just fishing and doing PVP until they caught up and we could quest again together.)

WSG is basically a game of capture the flag.

A bit later, they put in Arathi Basin, which was basically a game of old-style computer Warcraft: control the resources until you win. This was amusingly meta.

The one of the three I actually enjoyed the most was Alterac Valley, once I got big enough to be allowed in.

For one thing, AV had no pretenses at an artificial game structure. This wasn't the sort of counting-coup of the battle in WSG, or the abstracted duel over stuff (with bonus counting coup) of AB. This was a battlefield: there were fortresses held, allied and enemy commanders, prisoners behind the lines, resources to collect, gear stripped off enemy troops could be gathered into one's central base to help improve the gear on the NPC lines, call in air strikes against the enemy, or even summon powerful allies. It was an actual war skirmish, with the full resource management problem of that sort of thing.

And, like any warfare, the games could last forever. There was one notable one where I got in about two hours after it started, with Alliance pushed to the bridge (last chokepoint before our fortress), and ten or twelve hours later, after we failed to use a brief numerical advantage to take their fortress, I staggered off to bed in pre-dawn light. I have no idea how that one turned out.

Strategies often turned on the NPCs -- managing the enemy summon, if it came up, doing our own summons, getting our troops upgraded, calling in backup, using the NPCs as bonus force to push on things. Probably too much on the NPCs, as people didn't feel they could do anything without that extra backup.

The problem of the games lasting indefinitely was significant, so sometime in the last year or so it got changed. (I stopped doing regular PVP after one of the honor system changes and the expansion, and picked it up again recently.) AV now starts out with each side having 600 reinforcements -- and every resurrection takes up one. Controlling the mines can provide a slow trickle of additional troops, but not enough to hold against a major push. Killing an enemy commander takes out a big chunk of reinforcements. And so on.

Strategy is much less variable, though at least on Alliance side on this battlegroup much more poorly and inconsistently implemented. Take graveyards; hold them. Destroy each tower on the way to the enemy base. Maybe take out a commander, if one's convenient, and one has taken the nearest graveyard to supply new troops and slow down reinforcements.

All of the interesting stuff -- the rescuing the prisoners, the gathering armour pieces, the building up for the summons -- serves only to take a warm body off the front line. The time pressure of the limited reinforcements makes it inefficient to bother with, unless one's bottled up in the base anyway and has nothing to do but strip the enemy dead when one isn't causing enemy dead. There's no variety in it anymore, no, "Oh, no, they have an airstrike coming in, we have to deal with that" to shake things up, no option to summon the druids to do something clever -- not because those things have been removed, but because they are far, far too effortful to bother with when there's SHGY to defend, or IBGY to take, or the towers to wrangle over.

The strategies are always the same. The defeats come the same way each time (pretty much all defeats, playing Alliance, these days): they blew Stonehearth bunker, then swept over SHGY, then killed Balinda, then took the tower just north of SHGY, then SPGY, then the fortress bunkers, then ... While Alliance moths helplessly against IBGY or wipes over and over again on Galv.

One of the games I was in, someone said, just as it was ending, "Okay, next time, we summon Ivus!" It was a blatant joke; everyone knows that that's unworkable, unfeasable; the time it takes to bring up the summon has not, so far as I can tell, changed; turning in the crystals does not go any faster than it used to do, does not add up to something that can be accomplished in the twenty minutes before someone is overrun. Prisoners run from behind the lines all the time, and often get killed, because nobody bothers to escort them; their ability to call in strikes isn't worth preserving anyway. The mines get taken for their piddly trickle of troops, but the supplies from them don't get brought in. (If it brought in a lump sum of reinforcements -- and who knows, it might, I haven't had time to try -- perhaps someone might work them.)

I actually don't care so much that the Horde has a map advantage with the recast of AV, though it would be nice to win a game occasionally. I miss the interesting little fiddly bits, the way of engineering something that wasn't the same basic slog of all the other PVP games, the mechanistic progression of 'hold these points, run these flags, and that's how you win'.

While AV needed to be fixed to make the games finite, I truly regret what was lost.