Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Will BG XP bring PVE to PVP?

With 3.2 sitting in the background loader and my low level warrior slowly munching it's way through a few dozen quest mobs I started to think about one of the newer features that will be introduced with the next patch. To quote the allmighty patch notes:


Battleground experience has arrived!
Players will now be awarded experience for completing objectives and actions that yield honor in Battlegrounds (honorable kills not included).
Players who do not wish to gain experience through PvP can visit Behsten in Stormwind or Slahtz in Orgrimmar - both located near the Battlemasters in either city - and turn off all experience accumulation for the cost of 10 gold.
Disabling experience gains will prevent a player from gaining experience through any means available in the game.
Players with experience gains turned off who compete in Battlegrounds will face off only against other players with experience gains turned off.
Behsten and Slahtz can reinstate experience gains for players, for a 10 gold fee of course. Any experience that would've been accumulated if experience gains were not turned off cannot be recovered.


No indication was given by blizzard how much XP you actually stand to gain other than it being less than questing xp. Given the fact that HKs do not yield XP it leaves only a handfull of objectives that will actually give XP per BattleGround.

Add to that the fact that different BG's have different amounts of objectives for which I assume the XP gain will be balanced enough to not favor certain BG's right from the get go and I have to come to the conclusion that we really don't know anything at all yet.

But let's not jump the gun here. If BG XP is 'poor' than most people will ignore it for the large part and the net result will be is that we simply won't have to deal with overgeared twinks in lower brackets anymore which you may or may not find helpful.

If however BG XP all of a sudden becomes a decent way to level up your character, or if nothing else provides a suitable alternative to questing all day then we should expect to see an increase in Battleground activity.

Unfortunately much like holiday event achievements the people going into a bg for the purpose of levelling their characters will be there for just that: The XP

They will stick to objectives that give decent xp like glue rather than focussing on the absolutely vital (*caugh*) task of exterminating the enemy. In fact I can see this giving rise to a whole new slew of win trading where people will cap an objective only to stand there and wait for it to be capped back so they can re-cap it just for the purpose of xp.
You know those people in BG's that would rather do the turn-in quests or sit there and fish all day long? Just imagine that, only far far more of them.

There's some merrit to the idea of course. Why should people that are primarily interested in PVP be bothered with such trivial things as gaining XP through questing when they can just cap,recap and rerecap things ad nauseum. But the worry I have is that BG XP will either be completely trivial or worse, good enough to merrit scamming and abuse.

There's also a social aspect to the whole change. Sure, people flock to 'free xp' like flies to crap (euh... moths to light) but will someone who is primarily interested in PVE even consider PVPing for XP? Will the hoped for larger numbers in the battlegrounds materialize if you throw a handful of XP at the issue?

So the question for the time being seems to be: Will BG XP bring the PVE crowd to PVP and if it does how long will it take before someone gets the bright idea to win-trade WSG?

And what about you? will you BG for XP if it's decent enough XP?

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well the fact is: leveling 1-60ish is solo play nearly 90% of the time. It's boring, I've done most of the quests/zones multiple times already. Not exciting, and it feels like a waste of time to me. I mean, I pay money each month to play online WITH OTHER PEOPLE. I really wish they'd just do some kind of scaling for dungeons much like WAR did for the RvR battles so that lower level people could do the upper level dungeons. I know, far fetched idea, but still...playing alone for upward of 100 hours just get to level 80 is not worth my monthly fee in my opinion.

Misamane said...

Well, I think that Blizzard basically wants you to RAF from 1-60, which takes 2-3 days of serious play, is really friggin' easy, and requires a friend (or three computers.)

As far as BG exp, yeah it'll keep twinks out of regular BG's, but I don't think the exp will be enough to warrant a switch from PvE to PvP, especially with said RAF being so much better that even leveling alone.

What this will mean, however, is that if i get bored at 45, I'll be more likely to pop into Org and queue for a couple BGs, knowing that the 49 twinks will have exp turned off and won't be anywhere near me.

I think that all this will do is separate the twinks from the regular players and make random BG days a thing that will not make me want to throw my laptop at anyone. It won't be a replacement for leveling, but it will make BGing before 80 un-twinked a bit more fun.

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Captain The First said...

@Anonymous: Aye there should be a definite way to make it possible to dungeons on your levels. Whether this is by allowing 80's to scale down to relevant levels for an instance or otherwise. At this point it becomes more and more of a lonely trip until you hit northrend and even there 'normal' runs are few and far between.

@Misame: Personally I think RAF is an atrocity that should be put to the wall. If you're going to speed up levelling anyway why not do it across the board rather than handing it to those who can/want to pay for it? Or make it an outright payment plan.
You're probably right about the bg xp... although it's reasonable to assume that even that will receive the RAF boost.

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ziboo said...

BG xp so far has been fairly decent, obviously more xp in the bigger AV, IoC, Strand than AB or Warsong.

Still for those of us that like to PvP, its not just a time sink with no level gains now.

It's actually nice to see the different levels revitalized. What I've also noticed longer protracted AV matches as people do spend more time whacking the enemy midfield for honor/xp than rushing to kill the boss.

BTW - Misamane you can join a BG from anywhere on your Pvp hotkey.

So glad they borrowed from Warhammer on some of this.

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