More balance to the bracket

[Sammael]

On Aerie Peak we're currently doing arenas and hopefully soon wargames with 19s. Everyone has the same gear level, so it's pretty awesome. I'm looking forward to unlimited WSG with no hunters and balanced teams. I love Kochi for organizing it! Check out the link in my signature if you're interested!

Nice. I didn't know. I'll check it out.

Edit: I'm on EU.

 

[Bowwow]

Is there any way to lock your EXP at 19 so I can have a chance?

You wouldn't have a chance at 19 either, hated when trials played the 19 bracket.

 

[Crit]

Is there any way to lock your EXP at 19 so I can have a chance?

^^^ where the road to playing down leads.



Sent from my DROID RAZR using Tapatalk 2

 

[Holypowah]

Personly, I don't see the point of this thread other than adding insult to injury to the F2Ps.

 

[sevenohseven]

rolling a demo lock as my next project. this should give the f2p's a fighting chance.

 

[thurghul]

You wouldn't have a chance at 19 either, hated when trials played the 19 bracket.

How's the queue times for the 19 bracket? Oh, non-existant................. thats always a blast!

No matches > having f2p in the bracket?

 

[shanker]

F2P 19's when they were able to play XP off, if they turn off XP at 15, later at 19 and pre geared before entering XP off 19 bracket were able to do better against twink 19's than F2P 20's fair against 24 twinks

F2P 19 disco/holy priests, arcane mages, holy paladins could punk many full pimped 19 twinks

the blatant statement of F2P 19's having less than 1000hp is a lie, based on a few players....P2P 19's right now still have issues of 600-800hp players still popping into BGs, but no F2P's to blame

i still have four F2P 19's i never leveled on a F2P account i only do DMF's with
- Level 19 Blood Elf Mage | WoW World of Warcraft Armory Profiles | Masked Armory
- Level 19 Gnome Rogue | WoW World of Warcraft Armory Profiles | Masked Armory
- Level 19 Blood Elf Hunter | WoW World of Warcraft Armory Profiles | Masked Armory
- Level 19 Blood Elf Priest | WoW World of Warcraft Armory Profiles | Masked Armory

note the HP...unbuffed. also the priest was never finished, blizz nerfed turning XP off the day i was planning to get 3 horde quest reward rings and SFK leggings that would have added 100-110 more HP to her.

i started all these player in BGs at level 10...turned off XP at 15-16, got geared, turned XP on and continued BGing till 19. would only do WSG's cause AB had more XP and faster leveling and less honor. by the time they hit 19 they had alot of honor built up

F2P 19 rogue has a equal chance to sap expose a P2P 19 rogue/druid
F2P 19 feral druid in stealth has a equal chance to get a opener on a P2P 19 druid any spec in stealth

if you claim F2P 19 vs P2P 19 is so imbal with no chance....then saying:
- F2P 20 vs P2P 20 (fully twinked) is balanced....is a lie
- F2P 20 vs P2P 24 (fully twinked) is balanced....is a total outright lie

 

[Crit]

@shanker

Totally agree. The P2P 19s crying out to Blizz were moronic. Not appreciating the activity F2P brought, nor anything else for that matter, they doomed one of the things that had a chance to help them make a comeback. Now the 19s are on the ropes and they have only themselves to blame.

However, Blizzard bumping them up certainly was not about fairness. F2P PvP should either be its own thing or keep them at the lowest end (10-14). Even then noobs will be ruined by those who put more effort into gear and skill but the divide would not be so great. I am happy for them being here and see the bigger picture. Many F2P players who are not already subscribers will decide one way or the other at some point on subscription.

It is my hope that many of them see an opportunity to have fun with us and help establish a bracket free of disrespectful people demanding respect too dense to understand that to be respected you have to give it first. Well ok, would settle for greatly reduced camping and afk'ing but you get the idea.

Sent from my DROID RAZR Maxx using Tapatalk 2

 

[Umpteenth]

Some of you are still forgetting that with a new expansion, there is always a chance for the the F2P's to get moved up to 30 or whatever Blizz desires.

 

[Srs]

Why even discuss PvP balance in this PvE game? The whole notion of an xp-off "bracket" is the definition of imbalance. It can't be called a bracket when no one plays levels 21-23.

Level difference is the easiest variable to control for balance purposes -- easier than gear -- you just put players of the same level against each other in PvP. It felt silly just saying that, but it so painfully obvious, one has to wonder what the hell Blizzard was thinking by keeping brackets going once they discovered the twinking problem. Maybe it they thought people would get too spread out, turning xp off at random-ass levels.

The solution to that is retardedly simple: to keep people from getting too spread out, only let players turn off xp at certain levels, say every 5 or 10, to keep people grouped together in order to have enough people to PvP. Blizzard's half-assed attempt at quarantining twinks was so badly executed, one might wonder how could they have possibly screwed it up more.

Then they introduced BoAs that reintroduced what they were trying to get rid of in the first place, players with overpowered gear in xp-on battlegrounds beating up on the poor levelers in whites. That is irony. And after all of that, can anyone say they really improved anything?

I hear the collector's edition of GW2 come with a sweet Charr statue...

 

[Kearbear]

Then they introduced BoAs that reintroduced what they were trying to get rid of in the first place, players with overpowered gear in xp-on battlegrounds beating up on the poor levelers in whites. That is irony. And after all of that, can anyone say they really improved anything?

Actually I think it was the opposite. They didn't make xp-off to protect the levelers from twinks, because there essentially wasn't any leveling in bgs at that time. They added xp to battlegrounds so that people could level through pvp, then they added xp-off in the same patch so that people who wanted to stay in the same level bracket could, but they separated it out from the brackets that would now earn xp. The creation of xp-off brackets was more of a "twinkers will bitch at us if we force them to level up in order to pvp" thing than it was a "oh we should protect the xp-on players from the twinkers."

/agree on the rest tho. Blizzard just does not care about low level pvp, and doesn't care to try and balance it. Personally I don't think the brackets are even on their radar, max level is too much of a handful for them as it it is (although this in itself is perplexing).

Yay GW2, if only they were making a mac version : /

 

[Holypowah]

Therefore balance lowbie pvp

 

[Kearbear]

To realise the true answer to this, you need to take off your twink hat and put on your business hat, so to speak.

You misunderstand me. I was replying to a post which made it sound as though it was concern for non-twink players or twinking that caused this change to happen.

The brackets were not separated simply because twinks needed their own bracket (and they did, don't get me wrong, but when has twinking ever initiated a specific action from Blizzard?). The brackets were separated because they were adding xp. They didn't add xp to separate the brackets, separating the brackets was a byproduct. Without the xp add, the separation would never have happened.

I would like to disagree however that Blizz is concerned about the experience a new player has when they are exposed to being stomped the first few times they try bgs; otherwise they would be more proactive about balancing the travesty that is current low level PvP.

 

[thurghul]

To realise the true answer to this, you need to take off your twink hat and put on your business hat, so to speak.

It's quite clear that Blizz wanted to segregate twinks from regular levelling players because the twinks were destroying everything in their path, and therefore destroying the expereince of potential new subscribers who were still sizing the game up. There can be no doubt that a number of new players entered a bg, got stomped on repeadely by twinks, and thought "Screw this. I don't like this game anymore. /unsubscribe /uninstall". That's not something Blizzard wants, since bleeding new players will lead to a sizable loss in revenue. Blizzard may not care about balancing low level pvp, but when it comes to losing new customers, they always care and so do their shareholders. Something had to be done, so they split things up which imo was better for everyone, including twinks.

A simple Blizzard solution to this would be to Buff lower level players health, damage, and to hit to a base level. Kind of like what they do in SWTOR and Warhammer Online.
Personally, I think they just don't really care and are maintaining focus on end game PVP.

 

[Srs]

Yay GW2, if only they were making a mac version : /

I was running the original Guild Wars on a Wineskin mac port http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/guild-wars-client-for-mac-t10488969.html up until the point that I had seen and done everything there is to do in that game. It ran really well; couldn't even tell it was a port.

It looks like the people are already working on a GW2 mac ports Guild Wars 2 (Beta) - The Porting Team, so it will probably be possible to run on a mac assuming you have enough overhead in your system to do a little "emulation".

 

[Kearbear]

I was running the original Guild Wars on a Wineskin mac port Guild Wars Client for Mac - Guild Wars Forums - GW Guru up until the point that I had seen and done everything there is to do in that game. It ran really well; couldn't even tell it was a port.

It looks like the people are already working on a GW2 mac ports Guild Wars 2 (Beta) - The Porting Team, so it will probably be possible to run on a mac assuming you have enough overhead in your system to do a little "emulation".

I can't say I haven't been considering it, been super excited about this game for a while now. I am a little concerned that my poor laptop won't be able to handle running windows stuff simultaneously with the mac os, so I'll probably bootcamp it. Just seems silly to take up at least 50 gigs of hard drive so I can run one program lol.

One way or another I will play it though! Just wish arenanet would make it easier on me D:

 

[shanker]

BOAs do not help the 'new player experience' and yeah Blizzard "claimed" split up battlegrounds predominantly to improve the experience for levelling players, but it did not.

leveling BGs are just like they were before where team with most twinks win, which is now team with most BOA/enchanted geared. roll a non-BOA player into BGs without having turned off XP and without BOAs....you will see what they are experiencing. also read the chat on what they are saying. the experience is rather piss poor.

last year i rolled a priest with 8 BOA's: cloak, helm, shoulders, chest, staff, ring, pvp and intellect trinket into XP on BGs. my staff alone had more stats than all of the gear of near most any 10-14 new account player which had around 200-300hp. my priest had like 800+ hp

 

[Srs]

So basically, my rant subsumed the last few posts.

But in terms of running GW2 on a mac, if you are willing to put up with a few minor video glitches, and have a decent video card, you can most likely run it on a mac port without too much trouble. Also, Mountain Lion is supposed to come with OpenGL update. I don't know if that will help with whatever GW2 is using, but it shows Apple is a least trying to stay current with graphics (I will not pretend to understand GPUs, just speaking from experience. I was completely surprised that I could run Guild Wars, on Wineskin, on a Intel GMA in the first place).

...i know only all to well the woes of gaming on a POS mac.

 

[Kearbear]

I'm afraid you've got this completely wrong. Any games developer will tell you Blizzard could have very easily allowed people to turn off their xp, yet keep the xp-on/xp-off player base together.

This is true, and I won't argue with the reasons for separating at all. I'm just saying that they would not have bothered to create twink and non-twink games without the xp implementation, and that it was more of a result of xp being added than a cause. If you disagree, that's your opinion *shrug*.

Blizzard are definitely concerned with the 'new player experience'.

Maybe it could be argued that they should care about the experience of new players in general, but they have stated explicitly that they don't try to balance bgs before level cap, and I think we can all safely say that the experience of a fresh player in pre-level cap bgs is anything but enjoyable. If blizzard is concerned about this fact, they certainly haven't demonstrated it.

Blizzard split up battlegrounds predominantly to improve the experience for levelling players, many of whome are new business to the company.

Theres a reason I remember this patch so vividly. It was my first major patch (I mighta been around for Ulduar but I don't remember it), almost 4 years ago when I first started playing WoW. If thats last time you can call to mind that Blizz did something for the low level bg experience they're so concerned about,... well then you're going to have to redefine "concerned" for me.

Low level pvp has been a wreck for months. Practically a year now in fact (not that it was good before, but maybe less of a wreck : /) If Blizz were concerned about it and a competent company they would at least said they were working towards a solution (beyond "we'll get to it in MoP"). We have to take this and assume that blizz is either incompetent at coming up with solutions or doesn't feel this issue is pressing. Since they still retain a large subscriber base I'm gonna say they don't feel the issue is important, although the case for incompetence could be made. Maybe they will fix it in MoP, and maybe they will demonstrate more of a concern for pre-max level pvp than they have, but frankly I think people will understand why I say "I'll believe that when I see it." Cause I haven't seen a lot to change my mind about the matter thus far.

Either way I don't pay them anymore, and for a free to play game it's not half bad. A free game team can take years to fix a balance issue and I guess I can't complain, you get what you pay for ^_^

 

[Srs]

I guess from what I remember reading, and I don't feel like going through Google Cache to research the battle.net forums, is that the reason xp-off was created is to separate twinks from regular players. At the time, players were complaining en mass about getting steamrolled when they entered battlegrounds with questing gear. I understand the addition-of-xp argument as a reason for the change, but I think that this goes hand-in-hand with the wall they wanted to build between twinks and levelers. That is, when they decided to quarantine twinks, they added xp to the xp-on battlegrounds because that was just another way to make the game easy mode -- which as you can see, they have continued to do in every way since soon after the game's launch (This is my opinion from what I've read, not being there at the time, but even if one was, it might have been difficult to know why Blizzard did what they did).

It is obvious that Blizzard cares little about balance in general, and none at all about low level PvP. It also goes without saying that Blizzard, in the Bobby Kotick era, cares about nothing but money. What I was pointing out in my above post, was that by the addition of BoAs, which Blizzard introduced to make leveling easier, they reintroduced to battlegrounds the very thing they tried to remove. Which is hilariously sad.

Going into the xp-on battleground as a new player, even a P2P with a new account, is just silly. Just go in an xp-on battleground at level 10 and you will see what I mean. For all the 24s who say they are doing it for the the feel of vanilla twinking, they really should check out the xp-on bracket with full BoAs. That excuse is much more plausible.