PvP Chat Channels

I have recently come to the conclusion that PvP guilds are doomed...at least on Normal servers. I make this sweeping generalization off of my own experience, YMMV, but I have generally found the following rule to be true:

When someone needs a group, they go to their guild for PvE content, and to their friends for PvP content.

Nobody says "Hey guys, let's all get together and go raid BH!" Well, ok, maybe they do and I'm just not seeing it, but I think by and large the first impulse is to go to your guild chat first. And it's a simple reasoning -- I think people are selective (reasonably) about who they put on their friends lists, and usually when you open that up you don't see 9 friends all online at the same time, in a capable level of gear, to go run something for PvE. But you can PvP with any number of people.

And precisely BECAUSE less organization is needed for PvP(on balance; rated BGs are a different animal), people are loathe to sacrifice their PvE guilds to join a PvP one -- how will they advance their PvE game, EVER, if they're stuck in a PvP guild? Especially when they could (or perceive that they could) meet both their PvE and PvP goals by being in a PvE guild? Speaking as someone who has both tried to create a PvP guild, and also someone who has been a part of (I think) most of the attempted PvP guilds on my server, all of which sputtered out and died, it doesn't look like a format which works. It is possible that rated BGs will change that, once they acquire a secure place in the community. In the meantime, I would like to share with you a story about me. It's a successful community story, and it's about PvP. Rare, I know.

Once upon a time, there was a group of friends. They liked to PvE together, but unfortunately they also all had a lot of alts and it was kind of unreasonable to try and have every one of them friended so that you'd know when they were on. This was before RealID -- I can see you with that suggestion on your lips -- and so we created a custom channel, joined it on all of our alts, and thus we could communicate together in that channel no matter who you were on, without having to devote 30% of your FL to one person's alts. Thus was born /KITTEN* chat.

*not the real name.

My wife was in a hardcore raiding guild at the time, as I recall, and their healing team used a custom chat channel to communicate during raids if they didn't want to clutter up normal raid chat with their healing nonsense. Or maybe they were using it to convey subtle healer-wisdom like "Person X is going to drop really low on this fight, but that's because he's an idiot who stands in fire, so don't heal him." One of the things that worked well with /kitten was that it gave us a way to communicate with several friends at once -- instead of whispering each individually -- who all happened to be in different guilds.

And I got to thinking...well that's an awfully useful device. And not very many people use it, I don't think. How could I use a channel to my advantage?

I think you can probably see where I'm going with this -- when you PvP with friends, or are trying to on a large scale, it would be nice if you had a way to grab them all up at once instead of having to whisper several people one at a time. So the next time I ran some premades (that went well, incidentally), I suggested at the end that they all type

/join pvppremade

so that we could join up again the next weekend. Which we did, and it was also successful. It started small, but the more we did the more people we got into the channel. Inertia carries! The real astonishment of the channel is that taking a two-month break from WoW, I came back to find the channel still in existence, with several people still in it. I don't think it was being actively used, but the point is the network was still there for me to pick up the pieces and start reassembling premades fairly quickly.

I highly recommend this strategy -- it's low-risk, most people will join a channel if you invite them. It's not like they're leaving their guild, after all. You don't need to do any special /create pvppremade -- just type /join pvppremade (or whatever you decide to call it), and if you're the first person there it will create the channel automatically.

The downside is that you can't control it; the "Owner" of the channel seems to be the person who's been in it longest, devolving to the next-longest once that person leaves. And you can't keep people out, except via the headache-inducing method of implementing (or changing) a password on it, and then informing everyone you want to keep in the channel of said password.

That's my method, and I thought it might help other PvPers out there struggling to find groups to run with. I'd be interested to hear what other people have done to cope with the general "I can't leave my PVE guild for PVP" sentiment!

What will you require?

This is not a long analytical post...it's a short, thought-provoking post. With luck, I will suffer the fate of Gnomeaggeddon and Cynwise will turn it into a fantastic post for me later ;-).

Cataclysm will offer us the chance to put together full premades for rated battlegrounds. It stands to reason that people will have more requirements for these premades then we do currently. What would you require, if you were running one? What are you working on now, to prepare for trying to meet other people's requirements? I think the major options are the same as they currently are for raiding --

I. Guild Runs
II. PUGs with a GS requirement
III. PUGs with an achieve requirement
IV. The always-popular PUG with no requirement whatsoever

I'm not going to discuss I & IV. If you are lucky enough to have the former, or idiotic enough to do the latter, in either case you are not going to receive any help from this blog.

II. Gearscore

I think this is probably as stupid as it is when running a PVE raid...it's easy to game the system by wearing the wrong gear (PVE in this case, despite the usual stereotype being to wear PVP gear to game a pve GS requirement). But maybe it has some value if you combine it with an inspection.

III. Achieves

This is where I think most people are likely to go; it seems to be the route of choice for PVE content currently also. The question is, what achievements would you ask for? Or are you looking for currently? Certainly I think a Battlemaster or a Gladiator title would probably net you an easy invite in the same way that posting a 25-man kingslayer gets you an icc-10 normal achievement faster than you can type it out. Is that extreme? Probably. I think I would gun for the individual mastery achieves, or maybe even just the veteran (100 wins) of whatever BG we're premading.

I recently put Ihra back into a pvp guild called We Met During Skirmishes, which is arena-centric. They are not going to let anyone into their rated premades who doesn't have a 2k arena achieve in some bracket. Allegedly there are "too many 1800 carries" for that to be respectable anymore. I don't think I approve of this -- I've seen too many well-geared arena masters in BGs who care about topping meters and not working as a team. I think arena encourages small-scale cooperation but that people for whom arena is their sole focus tend to miss the bigger picture cooperation necessary in BGs. On the other hand, rated BGs are supposed to be as SRS BSNS as arenas are now, or at least the rewards are the same. So maybe having a cross-achieve like that is useful. Or another thing that hasn't really been discussed, is that *rated* BGs implies that you're going to have some kind of rating associated with your name. More fluid than an arena team, I would imagine, but will they have formal teams associated (Maybe you can put up to 30 people on them?) with the rated BGs in addition to pugs? If so, maybe requiring that kind of achieve/rating would be a good idea instead.

What would you require?

A Lovely Weekend of AB

I think I had the most amazing PVP weekend ever. First I found a (temporary, normal is out of town) 2s partner and we've smashed our way almost to 1400 with relative ease. I suppose there is something to be said for running with an Accepted Comp rather than the I'm Challenging Myself comp...tree/dk has some amazing synergy, for sure.

I also compiled holiday numbers for AB...I lost most of them, until one of my networked pvp buddies invited me along on some premades he was in. Full premades, not the partials I usually run. We roflstomped AB all weekend, I think we ended up something like 30-0, made a chat channel so we could all reunite next weekend. AND we did the Resilient Victory come-from-500-points behind no less than three separate times, just for fun. The first time was a little off, and by the time we started getting points it was more like 650-0. But 4-1 bases still works for that. The second one was a thing of textbook execution, we all hovered around ST without tagging it while horde went up 4-0. Split into groups and fanned out at 350-0. LM, GM, and Farm all got tagged within 5-10 seconds of each other, and suddenly we were up 4-1 and rolled from there. I'm sure Horde was like... WTF just happened? OTOH, when they saw 15 alliance all huddled around the ST flag with campfires and nobody touching the flag, somebody intelligent probably looked at the roster and saw 14 people from draenor and figured it out.

The interesting thing was that the HPM on the premade wins was comparable to my non-premade wins. The real value in a premade is not that you get better winning HPM, it's your overall. B/c if you get a good one, like I got, then your winning HPM = your overall.

AB Holiday HPM (Cyclone BG, 54% win)
Winning HPM : 241.39
Losing HPM : 87.86
Overall : 171.28

So instead of 171...you get to say 241 is your overall. That's 70 extra HPM, or over the course of an hour running a good premade, 4200 more honor. Or looked at another way, a premade makes 140% of the honor (in AB) that running solo gets. Or looked at yet a third way, regular it takes you 5.84 minutes to get 1000 honor. A premade will get you that in 4.15 minutes. You can spend 71% of the time you would have spent soloing to get the same amount of honor.

I'm not sure why the losing HPM is so bad here, except to say that the average points accrued in a loss for my data is 786.86 -- there are not a lot of close games in AB. It's an interesting comparison to EOTS, where I've noted previously that the average points in a loss is about 650 (669 on nonholiday, 624 on regular). So at least they're closer than EOTS, but I would venture to suggest that this is due to the general rule of 2-3 games in AB (you lose controlling 40% of the resources) vs. the general rule of EOTS of having 1-3 games (you control 25% of the resources, and maybe the flag a few times).

However, EoTS rewards you more frequently, on the holiday at least -- you gain your bonus honor every 160 points in EOTS(H), but only every 200 in AB(H). So you need more points to get the bonus tickover, and maybe that's why it's so bad?