Battlegrounded

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Loading... It's your inner monologue only in a really sexy voice.

First, the Ten Ton Pulse, your finger on the beating heart of the MMOG industry.

If the Top 10 isn't enough, we now show the Top 20 and Top 50 lists as well, available to everyone on our homepage. (What is Pulse?)

Age of Conan - 200 BPM
World of Warcraft - 84 BPM
Lord of the Rings Online - 43 BPM
EverQuest 2 - 25 BPM
Warhammer Online - 21 BPM
Vanguard - 20 BPM
Lineage 2 - 18 BPM
EVE Online - 18 BPM
Guild Wars - 13 BPM
Tabula Rasa - 12 BPM

Mabinogi has officially launched. Congratulations Nexon!

WoW PvP Epics, some call them 'Welfare Epics' while others swear that they are the greatest advancement in gear since Blizzard introduced the paint by numbers guide to the worth of an item.

As I mentioned in a previous column, I recently got my first WoW character to 70 (and subsequently got a second to 70. I had a lot of 60s.) and starting my quest for epic items. I don't have enough playing time to commit to a guild, so if I want great gear then I need to PvP. I don't expect the same level of gear as the guy who spends hours taking out the baddest mobs in the game. I don't expect the same level of gear as the guy who spends 10 hours per day playing PvP. To be frank, I don't expect very much.

First I joined a 3v3 team for Arena with two other casual players. Not only were we shown the door in 10 straight matches, we were shown the floor, the insides of each others bellies, how hard it is to compete when you have inferior gear, how hard it is to compete when you don't have PvP experience, oh and how hard it is to compete, period. We got annihilated, but it was fun. We expected to get sliced and diced and that is exactly what happened.

Battlegrounds were not what I expected however. I played on a Horde character, which in my limited battlegrounds experience in the past meant that I was part of a cohesive, well spoken, organized team. Where oh where did those days go? Getting three groups of five players to take and control three nodes in Arathi Basin was like setting up the invasion of Normandy. Arathi Basin is a straight-forward strategic and tactical fight, yet Horde teams in my battlegroup seem to find the joy of fighting on the roads, far from the nodes that actually win you the game to be the strategy of choice. It was almost as if most of the team were blindfolded and a few of us were walking them through a minefield. One player even asked what "Incoming" meant. When we explained it, he had to ask again, but he still didn't understand why we would care to tell him that the enemy was attacking a node.

Alterac Valley was always a battleground where the Alliance rushed their entire force to the opposite end of the map, killed the boss and won. Times have changed. Now the Horde rushes to the Alliance boss and kills him while 10 Horde players hold off the 40 Alliance that are rushing the opposite direction. I don't think that I lost an AV match. Why can the Horde organize 40 people into a cohesive team in AV, yet can't organize 15 in AB?

Warsong Gulch, the capture the flag battleground was again an Alliance guaranteed win. I watched in wonder as nine Horde players fought in the middle of the battlefield, oblivious to the Alliance flag carrier who ran past them three times per game to capture the flag and contribute to the win.

To be fair, there were Horde players who were trying to win, using their brains and who inevitably became frustrated by playing on the team filled with drunken monkeys. That's the problem with drunken moneys; they are funny, but dangerous to your mental health.

Byron Mudry posted an editorial today on this very topic. He commented that if you lose you should get nothing. I tend to agree that losing shouldn't be rewarded, but when you put players into a team game that affects individual progression you have to give players like myself, who actually come out closer to the top than the bottom of the honorable kills chart a reason to play. If I have to spend time on teams that are getting hammered, I need some reward for the attempt. Otherwise, I'm not going to play and when the rest of players like me make that same decision the other side will have nobody to play against.

The bottom line is that because I'm in a battlegroup where my team loses nearly every match I receive less honor and less badges. It will take me far longer to get my gear than an Alliance player of equivalent skill. That is my penalty for choosing Horde (the very first choice you make when starting World of Warcraft).

Am I right, or should losing in PvP be a harsher mistress? The The Loading... forums await you.

Do you feel the need to contact me personally with naughty pictures or derogatory comments? Here's my E-mail.

11 new MMOG hand-crafted articles today! 192 in March! 705 in 2008!

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Last Updated: Mar 13, 2016

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