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World PVP – Nagrand

Posted On Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 By Jay

I was really excited by the prospect of the Nagrand PVP daily. I tried it out and was sorely disappointed.

Pretend La la land!

Defeat ten baddies, not too bad eh? Earn a wee bit of honor, 200ish and a couple gold. What do you have to do? Defeat 10 enemies in Halaa. Super easy!

Actual Result

Unlike BGs where players consent to PvP, in the open world players rarely commit 100% to pvp. That is an issue in and of itself, perhaps another post in the future. On to Nagrand! Here are the problems with Halaa:

1. Grave yards are not close if you don’t hold Halaa. Considering the defense spawns directly in town(which is a huge benefit), the distance of the graveyards on the attack are a huge deal.
2. Players are accepting this quest with the mentality that it is a quest and is easy to accomplish. The issue here is player expectation versus perception.
3. The open world pvp quests are competing with the new dailies. Why bother spending 15-45 minutes getting ten kills when you can spend that exact amount of time earning 150 gold. Risk versus reward isn’t a good way to describe that behavior. Value judgement is a better term. Players value 150 gold and there is more return on their time then 10 gold and 200 honor.
4. If you are attacking Halaa, you aren’t just fighting other players, you are also fighting NPCs. Should the killing blow come from an NPC, you now have to pay repair costs.
5. Finally, and here is the biggest one of them all: Holding Halaa gives no team any actual benefit, horde or alliance. The rewards suck. The quest rewards suck.

Considering these observations, I’m sure its just my server. I play on Destromath, horde pvp.

Possible solutions:

1. Create lvl 70 rewards that are worthwhile from the halaa vendor. Blizzard just made honor rewards available from badges, maybe make them available from combat tokens. That would totally bring back large scale world PVP in a large way.
2. Combat tokens are a cool idea, but I’m already trying to earn honor, why should I gather an additional resource for a crappy reward? Yes 10 resilience gem is really cool! 100 kills for the gem is actually a small price. See above for why I think the reward is hard to earn.
3. Move the attacking graveyard closer to Halaa. In fact make 4 of them, and only allow characters to spawn there, if they died in Halaa. Can’t be too hard to code in.
4. Put defending guards by the defenders graveyard. This will give the defenders time to regroup. Make those guards respawn.
5. Make the reward for holding Halaa more worthwhile. Perhaps earn double combat tokens. Maybe increase the xp zone wide like in Terokkar. The idea is make it contested. Make the reward worth getting. Both Terokkar and Nagrand are huge stopping grounds for any player, horde or alliance, on their trek to 70. XP modifiers are really cool.

I want to state that I don’t think the new pvp daily quests are a complete failure. I think they are a great idea and have the possibility of introducing more players to the wonders that are pvp. The core issue that the above bandades are attempting to address is that pvp is player based. Give the players a reason to pvp and they will come. That means give the players more shinies.