After shipping players off to a new continent and even an entirely different planet over the last couple of years, Blizzard has gone full steam ahead with the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm expansion, which brings the world's most popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game back to its roots. And then it takes those roots, grinds them up, and serves players an entirely fresh experience in the world of Azeroth. Join GameSpy columnist and WoW-head Leif Johnson as he travels through this whole new world (of Warcraft), exploring new zones, beating new dungeons, and enjoying what may turn out to be the happy medium to unite diehards and casual gamers alike.
"Are we going to let them win this time?"
These were not words I wanted to hear. It was my first time on the island of Tol Barad, World of Warcraft's new outdoor player-versus-player raid zone, and I expected to spend at least half an hour chasing down objectives, capturing bases, and shattering scores of Horde players with my mage's trusty frostbolts. Everything thus far had led me to believe that I was in for an epic battle, down to the huge line of players outside the zone's gate before the battle began, and I looked forward to seeing how the new zone fared against Wintergrasp, the outdoor PVP raid zone in the game's previous expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.
It was not to be, and my experience only underscored the issues that currently plague Tol Barad in general. I zoned in as a defender atop the safety of Baradin Hold and almost jumped down into the red mass of Horde players scrambling below, before noticing that none of my fellow Alliance players were moving. Almost every one of them stood there at the top of the tower, some idly switching between mounts, some crafting potions or other items bound for the auction house, and some just watching the carnage while the Horde crushed one of our bases after another. To jump down into the fray alone, in other words, was utter suicide. One paladin yelled, "What are you idiots doing?" and sprang off the tower toward one of the objectives that the Horde was attacking. It didn't go well. If you can imagine what that powerful scene near the end of The Return of the King where Aragorn charges into the mass of orcs and Uruk-hai might have looked like if no one had followed him, you might have some idea of what I saw in Tol Barad that day.
The battle ended in something like four minutes. This was "win-trading," a dubious practice in which Horde and Alliance members trade off Tol Barad wins for honor points (used for buying faction weapons and the like). Put simply, Horde or Alliance players allow the other faction to win one battle and control the island of Tol Barad for two hours -- allowing access to the a player-versus-environment instanced raid dungeon and several daily quests -- and then they lose when the next battle starts so the other side can win. The motivation? Following an outlandish hotfix on December 27, successful attack victories in Tol Barad granted 1,800 honor points (a huge number), while successful defense victories only netted 200 honor points. This idea was to give players an incentive to win as the attackers in a defense-oriented battleground, since the previous award for offensive wins was a paltry 180 points... but players quickly caught on that it was better to lose one round and attack on the next. So Blizzard soon caught on to the win-trading madness and implemented another hotfix on January 3 that changed the number of honor points for wins to 380. Suddenly, win-trading was pointless (although I hear some servers still do it), but the fix dragged the flaws in Tol Barad's strategic design back into the spotlight.
A word about that design: Tol Barad is a level 85 battleground on an island that players can easily port to from the Horde or Alliance capital cities. In Blizzard's attempt to balance the battlefield, Tol Barad only allows a maximum of 40 players on either side during the actual battle, but this number is sometimes lower, owing to coding that keeps the attacker/defender ratio as close to 1:1 as possible. The upshot is that you don't always get to play. You must enter a queue to join the battle, but you can't join if the raid is already full (or if smaller numbers on the opposing side skew the number of people in combat). Of the maybe 15 times I've queued for Tol Barad, I've only managed to enter the fray five times. In fact, if you try to ride into the southern half of the island during the battles that take place every two hours, you get kicked out to whatever inn your character's checked into. On the surface, this balanced approach is a massive improvement over Wrath of the Lich King's similar PVP zone. My server's population favors the Horde enough that Alliance players rarely held Wintergrasp, since the comparative lack of restrictions allowed Horde players to swarm the zone and easily overwhelm the Alliance.