LoDBlog

WoW is just a game, but like anything else in life it still requires a bit of common sense. Nothing irritates me more than the absolutely ridiculous things people do in Battlegrounds that completely defy any amount of common sense I would expect most people to have.

When I first started playing WoW there was a lot of talk about why the horde was so much better at Battlegrounds than the Alliance; “The Alliance has a lot more kids” they’d say. The Horde was mature and filled with adults. Or perhaps it was that the Alliance was so much more populated that playing BGs with experienced people was rare. I don’t really know the answers but for a time I played an undead mage horde side when queues were just realm based and horde didn’t have to wait for queues. I would guestimate that we won 80-85% of the games we played, and it was true that most of the time it was just the same team of us over and over again. We didn’t have to adjust to many new faces; people knew their roles and played to them.

I haven’t played Horde lately but I’d imagine things are much different. With the onset of battlegroup queuing and blood elves I’d guess that the Horde side looks a tad closer to the Alliance side these days, so while my perspective is based upon my experiences in general, most of them have been from the Alliance point of view. With that being said, let me get right into the annoyance that I often feel when PvPing (which is relatively frequently).

People are dumb. In my experience there are more dumb people than smart people in this game world and perhaps that is jaded of me to say but it just keeps being demonstrated over and over again.

Battlegrounds are simple and I would have imagined most anyone could grasp the concepts of each different game relatively quickly but that doesn’t seem to be the case. In its simplest of forms Warsong Gulch is a game about Flags, Arathi Basin is a game about Nodes, Eye of the Storm is a game about nodes and flags, AV is a game about Towers and generals, Strand of the Ancients is a game about Walls, Wintergrasp is a game about walls.

Now obviously nothing is simply black and white but those are the general ideas of the battlegrounds that should be the basis for everything you do in that game. None of those games are about killing as many opponents as you can though this single thing is what drives so many people who enter battlegrounds even to the detriment of the match itself. The interesting thing is, however, that most people play battlegrounds for a purpose: they want honor and badges, but, I can only assume, also want to have fun and certainly you can still have a lot of fun while losing, but in my experience that gets old very rapidly. Honor and badges come quickest when you win, so why is it that despite this basic knowledge people don’t do what is necessary to win? I can only surmise that it is because they’re dumb.

How many times have you been in Wintergrasp watching some idiot in a demolisher firing catapults at horde players while we haven’t even broken through the outer wall yet? And with a limited amount of vehicles and time, getting through those walls is the most important thing you can do but isn’t it more fun to shoot the bad guys? Apparently so. And if you aren’t in a vehicle you should be supporting the vehicles. Destroy guns, stop people from destroying the vehicles, pound the same part of the wall. Sure there are other important parts like defending towers and these things help buy time, but they don’t win the game.

Warsong gulch is a simple game of get their flag and bring it back to your base. If you aren’t the one with the flag your job is simple. Support your flag carrier and kill their flag carrier. You support your flag carrier in any number of ways but one of the most effective is just slowing people down. You don’t have to kill them; you just need to make them stay far away from your guy/girl until the flag is capped. Most classes have varying ways they can accomplish this with reasonable efficiency.  Conversely slowing down their flag carrier so that your team can gang up on them is also a great idea. Oh, I know some of you reading this are thinking .oO(“well obviously”) and yet when you enter a WSG game, see how many people actually do that; heck even if you DO slow down their flag carrier see how many stop fighting midfield and come get em.  They don’t because, i can only assume, they’re dumb.

Fighting on the road instead of near nodes in AB, getting hung up at the stables instead of riding past to other nodes, not defending nodes in EoTS, holding onto the flag with three nodes waiting for four so you can get an achievement, turtling at Balinda, not defending towers for 3 measly minutes, not manning yellow gate guns, the list can just keep going on and on.

For Elune’s sake people, REMEMBER what the game is about and stay focused on that!  Get a clue and stop being a noob, I’m tired of playing with you.