World of Warcraft

While I’ve come across plenty of complaints about Alterac Valley and how the glory days used to be awesome are plentiful, but it doesn’t appear that Blizzard agrees, as a recent Blizzard CM stated that they are generally satisfied with AV in its current form:

This is partially true. Alterac Valley was originally going to be its own zone. We do feel Alterac Valley is fairly well tuned at the moment, though we would like to give players a different type of experience that will include large-scale PvP battles, destructible buildings, siege weapons, and more. These are some of the things planned for the new PvP zone Lake Wintergrasp.

There will be a lot of tuning and balancing of the zone done in the coming months. One thing we are looking to do though to help with population imbalances is impose certain benefits for the side with less players in the zone. For instance, since supplies will be necessary to unlock certain vehicles, the side with the population handicap may see a decrease in requirements. We may also offer increasingly more supply benefits for a faction if they are suffering from consecutive losses in Lake Wintergrasp. The goal is to even the playing field regardless of faction population balances across all realms.

We plan to give Lake Wintergrasp a definitive play time where the event may last somewhere around 45 minutes. The event would not start again for a set amount of time after the battle is won. We will tune these times as testing further develops. The plan, additionally, is to provide certain incentives for visiting this zone between battles.

We’ll be sure to provide more information about Lake Wintergrasp as well as the new Battleground as we get closer to releasing them for Beta testing.

Personally yes, I did genuinely enjoy the old epic Alterac battles that took days on old to complete, but there were some serious flaws with the system at that time. First, it took 2 hours just to get in, because players tended to never leave after they finally got to enter (at 2 hours a shot, no kidding). With the recent bout of afking, you’d likely see a huge increase in AV queue times, and your team could be half afkers as active players left only to be replaced by a botter looking to get days worth of honor for free. I like AV as it stands, even though it could definitely use some tweaking (let us summon lords and cavalry, I mean come on!). Additionally I think Lake Wintergrasp is really intended to be what AV used to be, and if that’s the case I think its perfectly fine to leave AV for the honor grubbers and people who actually want an epic fight can go to the lake and get it!