Spooncraft

Lake wintergraps (as most of you know) is pretty much one of my main drives for the expansion pack. A player named Azurai in the Beta wrote a VERY good post with tons of feedback fully knowing that Wintergrasp is still in it’s infant stages for development. She got a reply from Blizzard not too long after the initial post.

Great feedback. We’re hoping to get the zone into better shape in the next couple patches. Here’s a few things that should be coming in the next build:

• All vehicles should be despawn after the battle ends
• Demolisher and Siege Vehicle health has been reduced by 50-75%
• Demolisher and Siege Vehicle ram attacks no longer knock a player high enough to kill them
• Jet & Bomber health has been reduced
• Bomber damage has been increased
• Players in Bombers should no longer take damage
• Reward for holding the keep has been added
• The Goblin Workshops in the North and South now also supply players with land mines that deal bonus damage to tanks

We also hope to have a system for rewarding only players that participated in the battle working soon.

Thanks! (src)

After the break I have the entire opening post for those that maybe cano’t access the forums from work. It’s worth the read.

Let me preface this by stating that I know Wintergrasp is far from done, however I feel that some feedback earlier in the development cycle might help.

Siege Weaponry:

1. I find that it makes little sense to offer the only anti-aircraft unit at the same rank that the aircraft themselves are offered. A good pilot can destroy any non-vehicular enemy with impunity (though slowly), and droves of them will be able to massacre an entire battlefield.

2. The siege engine turret is far too weak because it takes damage from aoe, even if it isn’t being ‘targeted’. Even one hunter can tear it down and turn the siege engine into a useless pile of slag incredibly quickly.

3. Passengers in/on vehicles seem to take siege weapon damage. I’m hoping this is unintended because, well… you’re basically an even bigger target in one of those, and certainly slower than if you use your regular mount.

4. Vehicles need to despawn if/when the zone ‘resets’.

5. If its possible, aircraft would become a lot easier to shoot down with other aircraft if their cannon attacks detonated on a target in the line of fire, even if it was before max range. Also, max speed on fighters should be increased slightly, as should the refire rate and projectile speed of the cannon.

6. The siege engine ram attack doesn’t do nearly enough as the only primary weapon. Siege damage should be much, much higher as it can only be done in proximity and not from 200 yards away well outside line of sight.

7. Catapult and Demolisher projectiles should be given some sort of priority loading so that people can discern where the shots are coming from. Currently at extreme range all you see is the impact site and
damage. A big reason why traditional siege weapons and artillery were so vulnerable is because its very easy to see where fire coming from, so they need to be defended.

8. The shredder should be able to destroy a person in 1v1, right now it does less dps than a level 65 hunter pet (and no that is not an exaggeration).

Terrain:

1. So far all the battles seem to be at the fortress as there is little point to actually taking any of the outside areas. This strongly devalues involvement by infantry, because the main courtyard in the fortress quickly devolves into a giant firestorm of instant-death. I’m assuming that the actual victory condition will be somewhat more involved than just blowing the door to the fortress in the end and that it will be necessary to dominate the center courtyard for a period of time to win.

2. Towers. There are two rear towers that have no point. Obviously the middle rear tower should always be the allegiance of the faction opposite the fortress, in order to provide some sort of a starting point. The two back rear ones are less useful, however, in their current implementation. My suggestion is to make them resource nodes (like AB where owning them generates resources over time). Then, add a repair system where players may purchase a squad of engineers from a vendor at either base in order to repair stuff. This provides a good balance to the dominance of the fortress, because in order to keep the walls up and siege factories online, the owners will have to trek outside of camp to two resource nodes closer to the enemy. This makes for much more dynamic, decentralized combat. In addition if they are mines that you must take inside, infantry suddenly has a very important role in the scenario.

3. The cannons on the towers are useless currently, they need to be moved out to the tip of the platforms in order to have a decent arc of fire. Also, I assume by the fact that they autoattack for 150 (with no animation) they will eventually have some sort of auto-defense capabilities so one person in greens can’t take out an entire tower’s defenses, right?

4. I can’t help but think the inside of the keep is wasted, is it possible to open the second door, maybe make it a bit more involved by providing several areas to capture to have to research? It would be very cool to have a section near the outside of the keep destroyable to reveal a secondary entrance for the attackers to invade from the inside as well, so as to provide another avenue of attack and further diminish the total domination of the siege machines.

5. Siege weapons can move through tiny passageways because they have the same footprint as your character (seemingly). I’m assuming this is a bug, but if its a tech limitation than the interior walls of the keep should be changed perhaps so they still provide protection.

Rewards:

I feel its important to discuss this because I think everyone knows that the reward structure basically dooms or secures wintergrasp’s future. The basic issue with the zone is that in the end, people will gravitate towards a more rewarding activity. Also, population imbalances (with active population on some servers being severely different) cause issues.

Ideally, this means that the reward structure should have:

• A. A long term component to make people want to come back. It also has to interact with other parts of the game. This gives it staying power.
• B. Rewards for BOTH sides (above HKs) that provide a very lucrative opportunity for even the undermanned side. This gives the zone popularity.
• C. Additional rewards for interaction, such that AFKing is dumb, but contribution feels very rewarding.

Currently there is an honor/arena point reward for taking the fortress. This is good. It gives an impetus for the opposing team to want to take the fortress. Yes, though it may be an unpopular opinion, offering arena points is a good idea. It keeps more people interested in spending time in Wintergrasp. It doesn’t have to be a large amount at all, but it would be a great way to help people with lower point teams work towards older arena gear and also provide a way for you to get that 12 points you need towards a weapon now instead of next week.

OK, so we have a reward for taking the keep only. What does that lead to? Trading keeps for reward farming. This is bad. That means there has to be rewards given over time for keeping the fortress (haha punny). But, if there are only these two rewards, that leads to the dominant faction afking a lot near the fortress with roving death squads stamping out the opposition and farming endless rewards. Also bad.

So this leads me to the next idea, which is that the rewards granted over time should be changed from holding the fortress to other parts. Ideally, this would be the various interior research parts of the keep and the two resource nodes. Thus even if a faction can rarely take the keep, they can at least capture nodes or invade the interior of the keep in order to gain some honor/ap. The way this should work is by providing a buff upon zoning in which is a reward ticker. Certain actions would lower the reward ticker and grant you the rewards faster, and the expiry of the reward buff would grant rewards based on the amount of nodes you hold. Thus, the afker would be getting a paltry amount every 15 minutes or what not, and the active participant could be getting 10 times that much.

Things like:

• Being in a capture zone when it goes to your side = 3 min.
• HKs in a capture zone that is on your side = 1 min.
• HKs on foot = 30 sec.
• HKs in a war machine = 10 sec.
• etc.

Ranks:
As for the ranking system, the buff is fine, but what about a system with a little more permanence. A lot of people miss the idea of ranks from the old pvp system, even if the methodology was utterly frustrating. I would suggest a new reputation for either side called ‘Alliance Armed Forces’ or whatever and have each reputation tier provide a rank, title, bg privileges and wintergrasp privileges. The ranks can be different than the old pvp system so as not to diminish past accomplishments. The rep rewards could be throttled so that the effort required would be considerable to reach exalted.

By tying in old battlegrounds and adding perks (like a really, really good selection of temporary zoned weapons in AB, or purchasable zoned sprint pots or huge buffs in WSG) the entirety of non-arena pvp can be combined into a system that provides long-term rewards for those who participate and can give a breath of life to old battlegrounds which are stale from a lack of interactivity. Imagine being able to use a demolisher in AV or rent a jump pack for eots. These kinds of crazy interactive things are what battlegrounds need, not gear dominated points farming that people quit 3 weeks into an arena season. Arena is competitive, BGs and wintergrasp need to be pure fun.

Anyway these are just my thoughts on how to improve Wintergrasp and the BG system overall, hopefully some of them prove useful.