[Cairenn]

Battlegrounds

Philosophy of Design

· Destination for PvP Rewards.
· Object based team PvP
· Reinforce the Horde vs. Alliance conflict. This conflict is a core concept of WoW. The designers wanted to enhance the sense of conflict.
· Warcraft 3 meets Battlefield 1942. You get the strategy of War3 with the single unit control of BF1942
· Must compliment the game world. Lore and game play must integrate. It must fit into the are it is placed in.
· Eventually the actions inside the battlegrounds will effect the outside world. The general game world will be buffed or adjusted based on the actions. They don't know when yet, as the details are still being worked on. They want the results of a battleground to feel meaningful.

Alterac Valley

Alterac valley was the first battleground worked on. It went through a lot of changes to get to the form we see today.

The original valley was a non instanced persistent zone, like the tram system. The good thing with this, is that battles would be meaningful, as the results of the battle would be reflected on everybody who entered this zone. The largest downside is that you could not control or predict how many people would go into it, reflecting the population imbalances to greatly.

Quests and NPCs were sprinkled through out the zone to persuade other players to enter the zone.

Winter Axe Hold, a large troll section with bosses and awesome loot was removed from the zone.

Due to the popularity of the battlegrounds, the worry of server stability, and the demand for balance... it became an instance.

They learned quiet a few things from Alterac Valley.

· Dying to players is ok... Dying to NPCs is bad. They toned down the power of the NPCs.
· Quest objectives need to meet the battle goal as a whole. Quests, like Korrak, did not contribute to the winning or losing of the battleground.
· Don't make the players compete for loot in the battleground. They made the turn in tokens in AV shared faction when they found people loot stealing from other players.
· Capture and respawn points need to be further apart from each other. Graveyard zerg camping is a very bad thing. Clusters in the graveyards were bad.
· An attainable resolution in a reasonable amount of time to play.

Ashazara Crater was put on hold when AV was done. It was 3-4 weeks behind AV... but repeated all of the mistakes from AV. It was the same flaws and ideas.

The Lunchtime Battleground

· Wanted to have a short battle.
· Beat in the time of a lunch break
· No quests, no NPCs, one objective
· Small teams, non epic. The worth of a single player is diluted in 40v40
· Geographically a small map


They made Warsong Gulch.

They started prototyping WSG very early. This was something new from AV where they did not test things until later. The early testing ended up being a awesome idea.

During plays testing they tried different styles and ideas, but capture the flag fit the best

They made the symmetrical bases, a “balance”, since in a small battle, any terrain differences or imbalances would be magnified. No external focus, its all about the players.

There was a lot of thought put into the design. A staffer who did a lot of Quake 3 mods and I think was famous for them??? finished up the bases and designs.

After prototyping they tried to find where it would fit in the world. They wanted to place it somewhere on the border of conflict, Not in a max level zone, and somewhere very accessible.

The biggest problem with WSA is that the graveyards are to close to the flags. They wished they had moved them further back, making the clearing of the base worth something.

“Birth of the Zerg”... the current WSG strat of a 10v10 zerg was unexpected by the developers. On the test server, they did a balanced strat, of 3-4 on defense with the rest on offense. On the live realms, it started this way, but quickly changed to the zerg that is currently the winning strat in the game... two groups of 10v10 grab each others flag... meet in the middle to fight.

Casual can turn hardcore. This was originally meant to be a casual game, something done easy. They have watched some of the WSG games last two hours.

WSG is very gear dependent.

Losing was not fun... you (originally) got nothing at all for losing.