get rid of twinking in battlegrounds ASAP

[Moonswallow]

@mathmajor
1) Two things about Bgs and exp. Firstly, the past is not some holy bible you have to unchangably follow. If people want to level through battlegrounds, let them do it, to a reasonable amount. If does not have to be faster than questing. Most people will do both.
Secondly, getting exp from Battlegrounds is very much intended, since the Warmode challenge exists, which gives bonus exp to battlegrounds. But you can't play battlegrounds because they are being camped by twinks, only getting worse the higher your level is and the more you might want that battleground exp.
2) Twinks have always been issue. That does not mean it should stay like this.
And obviously it will attract more people doing low level battleground pvp. Most people are having a bad experience in battleground due to twinks and therefore stop interacting with it. If twinks are gone, people will have more fun, and over time new life can grow. Twinks behave like a cancer that takes too much for itself and derives environment of nutrients. Without twinks, the fun is more spread among more players, therefore reinforcing the behavior of queuing up for pvp, growing the community. If people have fun, they want to do more of it. More people, better queues. Eventually.
3) Give twinks their own queue. Gear templates are bad and soul sucking, removing the uniqueness of your own journey, of your own character.
Spreading twinks would maybe change the win rate somewhat, but not the experience of the non twinking players, since they still don't have a chance and are just hoping to get carried, passively, unengaged.

[Nandieb]

1) BGs were never supposed to be there to provide easy xp. The main source for xp is supposed to be questing, not dungeons or BGs. You can increase the xp gained in BGs, but it will destroy the deliberate slow pace of the game (it's predecessor was called Turtle Wow for a reason). Questing is supposed to hurt a little bit and carry some risk of death, mitigated by grouping up and questing, high xp BGs would just encourage players to sit in capital cities and queue BGs. I really enjoy PvP, but this game shouldn't cater only to the desires of PvPers.

2) Twinks have always been an issue on almost every server I have ever played on. I can understand the desire to get rid of twinks, but realistically, if you do that, you will in fact make BG queues longer. I don't agree with the fact that getting rid of them would somehow decrease queue times, because "people don't want to play with twinks." I don't deny that this may in fact disincentivize some people from queueing BGs, but I think you'll find a greater loss of people playing BGs if you get rid of the sizable number of people who enjoy twinking; while it may be argued that it is some sense toxic/anti-social, in all honesty the Wow community has never been a toxic free environment.

3) There may be some solution here, although I am not certain if it is doable within the scope of OctoWow's development teams time or what the technical challenges may be to implement it. i) Scale everyone up in BGs with gear to match the general level of gear (this may present an issue as people come and go within a session though) or ii) make sure to evenly distribute twinks between teams, so that no one team has a completely lopsided advantage in BGs. I think that last one is probably the more doable one from a practical standpoint as well as not disincentivizing twinks to queue (as I mentioned queues would probably be longer without their participation).

4) Again, just to reiterate, I understand the desire to do what is being suggested by the OP, but it simply isn't very feasible from a practical standpoint.

1) my proposed solutions have ZERO implications for gameplay outside of battlegrounds. I know some PvE players have reasons to lock their exp, so I did not propose to get rid of this feature, rather, to make it impossible to queue for BGs with disabled experience gain. This would still allow for soft-twinking, locking exp outside of battlegrounds to farm your gear, but to join a battleground you would have to enable it again, so you WILL get experience in battlegrounds. This will filter out the extreme twinks that have /played times that rival full fledged level 60 raid veterans.
ZERO implication for PvE!
The other softer solution would be to make teams 100% random in battlegrounds, to at least force twinks to play against each other more, instead of teaming up, which is most times the case.

2) Longer queue times without twinks is a myth! It's a fact that twinks discourage players from queueing. In fact, without twinks, leveling battlegrounds would be alive and buzzing.

3) I propsed some technically VERY simple solutions in fact.

4) Did you read at all what I wrote? It seems you are missing the point every time.

[Mathmajor]

@Nandieb

I was replying to multiple people's post, so not all of my replies were directed specifically to you. I was also addressing a person who felt that BGs should reward more XP.

On to point 2 though, I'm not certain who's correct here. Could be I am incorrect, but it also could easily be you are also incorrect. In my experience, a lot of players of various pservers I have played over the years don't really enjoy PvP that much. Most players are by and large PvEers. Imo, if you get rid of twinks, you will probably decrease the number of people playing BGs. Again, I could be wrong about this, but I think the reason you may get the impression that BGs were drawing a lot more people to them than they usually would, was probably because people saw them as an easy way to farm XP. If twinking was stopped in BGs now, I suppose we would see who's right (naturally, I believe I am). I will point out, however, at this stage, if twinking has really hurt BG participation that much, it may already be past a point of no return in terms of getting the majority to re-engage and you may finally kill off what level of BG participation there is by doing this NOW. It could be given long enough, the numbers of people participating would go back to previous levels (although I doubt it), but that's if the server can last long enough to gain critical mass in that space.

People enjoy winning and people enjoy being dicks. It may be toxic, but I think you'll find that if you remove people's ability to artificially create a scenario where they can feel "superior" to others, a lot of people will find the game no longer enjoyable, and you will probably find that a fair number of people will stop not just playing BGs, but the game entirely (which will hurt the population, the in game economy, PvE participation). From a practical standpoint, the server has to try and keep its numbers as high as possible. I saw some other post in the forums arguing against mulitboxxing, and its the same issue, the server won't probably do it because they would lose numbers. Outside of blatant cheating or bots, this is probably going to be a lost cause. Not just on this server, but on almost any server you go to.

[Mathmajor]

@Moonswallow

Perhaps, I did not phrase it in a great way, but my point is not the BGs are not supposed to reward any XP, but it is preferable that BGs reward less XP than questing in general. The game is fundamentally supposed to be a social experience and to my mind that doesn't mean people sitting inside captial cities waiting for the BG to pop. I wasn't on the server at the time when it was implemented, but I imagine that is why BG XP was cut in half. They didn't want people playing BGs all the time and not being out in the world. Tbh, that may have always been the plan from the beginning anyways, to draw people in with good BG XP and then cut it in half when they felt the time was right.

PvP players have never in my experience been a majority of the population and this is not due to twinking. Some people just don't care for PvP, they don't like having to compete against people in those kinds of scenarios. I do and probably yourself as well I'm guessing, but a lot of people don't actually enjoy the potential frustration that comes with fighting against a human player. If you setup a scenario where people who primarily do enjoy PvP are encouraged to play BGs too much, then they won't be in the world questing, helping to feed the in game economy, etc. From the long term perspective and goals of the server, it's not actually ideal that PvP players have too favorable of a situation. Kinda sucks, since I love PvP, but that isn't just this server, and in general it isn't even just this MMO. You will find most people aren't into PvP across most MMOs, if no other reason, people don't want to lose games (otherwise they'd just play call of duty). Playing a game with low effort, but a high sense of accomplishment is precisely the recipe that makes the game still draw a certain number. Classic+ players like to fool themselves, but they really aren't that far from the average retail player in this regard.

[Vectorus511]

Devs have already done a great job of destroying Bgs. Thanks for 50%exp nerf... And now you're suggesting to remove twinks from the Battlegrounds, which will lead to even longer queues. Thank you very much, but I'd rather play with twinks than wait 2 hours in que.
I don't think twinks are a problem, except when they que BG in a premade group. If you want to be effective in PvP, you need to invest some resources and time. Buy some green gear on the auction house, lvlup your engineering, buy cheap healing potions, and you'll be fine. I leveled up 5 characters on BGS on Ambershire and I didn't have a single enchant except Armor Kits. It was enjoyable.
I'd rather get rid of all those useless creatures that enter BGs without a mount or PvP trinket at level 50 and equipped with 30lvl gear. They cannot even hit enemies with spells due to the level difference. They're too lazy to go through a couple of dungeons or level up a PvP profession, but they always have the energy to whine on the forums. Just look at this huge wall of text...

This is wrong! I know for a fact that MANY players actively avoid queueing because of twinks, or stop queuing if they run into them

First of all, have you ever been on Ambershire? That server had a million twinks, but people kept playing low PvP 24/7 even early in the morning with 2-3k online. Second, you cannot kick them out of BGs even if devs remove the expoff function. They will start making characters with the 'Slow and Steady' challenge instead of stopping exp, and after a couple of BGs, they will just kill themselves in the open world to roll back their exp progress They will also become much, much angrier at you)
But I have a solution! Instead of separating groups of players devs could motivate people to queue for battlegrounds and reduce the gap between twins and levelers with one simple solution - introducing low-level PvP sets that players could get in PvP boxes given for turning in WSG/AB marks. When you open one of these boxes, you have a good chance to get some useful equipment for your class or part of a PvP set(green), and small chance to get a rare piece. They could also add various transmogs and mounts with a very low drop rate. Instead of getting trash from pvp boxes, we could gear up on BGs. Can you imagine how hyped Lowlvl BG would be? People who truly love PvP, and not just free exp, will support my idea.
The main problem of most players is that they don't want to spend time farming gear. Every time I inspect my teammates, my eyes hurt. People complain about oneshots, even though they don't have a single item with stamina. Introducing PvP sets could solve this problem. And everyone would be happy. I'm not gonna lie, I would levelup new characters non-stop with these rewards, even if they nerfed exp gain even more.

[Yarmum]

First of all, have you ever been on Ambershire? That server had a million twinks, but people kept playing low PvP 24/7 even early in the morning with 2-3k online. Second, you cannot kick them out of BGs even if devs remove the expoff function. They will start making characters with the 'Slow and Steady' challenge instead of stopping exp, and after a couple of BGs, they will just kill themselves in the open world to roll back their exp progress They will also become much, much angrier at you)
But I have a solution! Instead of separating groups of players devs could motivate people to queue for battlegrounds and reduce the gap between twins and levelers with one simple solution - introducing low-level PvP sets that players could get in PvP boxes given for turning in WSG/AB marks. When you open one of these boxes, you have a good chance to get some useful equipment for your class or part of a PvP set(green), and small chance to get a rare piece. They could also add various transmogs and mounts with a very low drop rate. Instead of getting trash from pvp boxes, we could gear up on BGs. Can you imagine how hyped Lowlvl BG would be? People who truly love PvP, and not just free exp, will support my idea.
The main problem of most players is that they don't want to spend time farming gear. Every time I inspect my teammates, my eyes hurt. People complain about oneshots, even though they don't have a single item with stamina. Introducing PvP sets could solve this problem. And everyone would be happy. I'm not gonna lie, I would levelup new characters non-stop with these rewards, even if they nerfed exp gain even more.

Absolutely agree with all this. The entitlement required to believe that they are owed a level/balanced experience against players who invested the time and gold into their character vs. their greys and greens and their 0% effort brainless jaded grinding and 100% entitlement all leads up to insufferability, PvE players just want to suffocate out anything that has to do with PvP and snuff out any hardcore aspects that made Vanilla great because they are unironically softcore Weenie Hut Jr's pacifist perma losers and think this should be a card game where everyone is always equal and has the same exact adventure where the same thing happens every time. Your idea is pretty nice but the crying will never end no matter how many olive branches you hand to them it will frankly never be enough till it's all gone. Just look at OP lol, two level 60s and still not competent enough to throw together a nice kit whereas someone who is levelling can throw together a top 10% kit for each bracket quite easily and under budget just by farming the right things.

PvP is dead on private servers anyways, has been since the last virally popular server TWow died - everyone who PvP has gone to retail sadly. They know their crying will fall on deaf ears on blizz server so they raise their pitchforks here and kill what little is left, this angry mob sentiment of inferiority complex has existed on TWow and gotten worse on every server since. Before Classic first came out everyone on pservers just shut up put their character to the grindstone and made beautiful things happen, now it's just nothing but shitting and moaning all over the place but over here they demand changes that no one will even play because the environment is already well-dead.

[Nandieb]

@Nandieb

People enjoy winning and people enjoy being dicks. It may be toxic, but I think you'll find that if you remove people's ability to artificially create a scenario where they can feel "superior" to others, a lot of people will find the game no longer enjoyable, and you will probably find that a fair number of people will stop not just playing BGs, but the game entirely (which will hurt the population, the in game economy, PvE participation).

It’s not a lot of people! If we are being generous, the real twinks are 1% of the population, probably less.
That’s my entire point: it’s a very small minority of players actively worsening the game for a vast majority. You could argue that it can even have a negative impact on the server‘s population

[Yarmum]

@Nandieb

People enjoy winning and people enjoy being dicks. It may be toxic, but I think you'll find that if you remove people's ability to artificially create a scenario where they can feel "superior" to others, a lot of people will find the game no longer enjoyable, and you will probably find that a fair number of people will stop not just playing BGs, but the game entirely (which will hurt the population, the in game economy, PvE participation).

It’s not a lot of people! If we are being generous, the real twinks are 1% of the population, probably less.
That’s my entire point: it’s a very small minority of players actively worsening the game for a vast majority. You could argue that it can even have a negative impact on the server‘s population

You do not have the pop to split queues and persecute your own playerbase because you're too lazy and cheap to gear your character. Especially not enough pop or growth when Forever releases. Good luck!!

[Hfm1]

@Nandieb

People enjoy winning and people enjoy being dicks. It may be toxic, but I think you'll find that if you remove people's ability to artificially create a scenario where they can feel "superior" to others, a lot of people will find the game no longer enjoyable, and you will probably find that a fair number of people will stop not just playing BGs, but the game entirely (which will hurt the population, the in game economy, PvE participation).

It’s not a lot of people! If we are being generous, the real twinks are 1% of the population, probably less.
That’s my entire point: it’s a very small minority of players actively worsening the game for a vast majority. You could argue that it can even have a negative impact on the server‘s population

You do not have the pop to split queues and persecute your own playerbase because you're too lazy and cheap to gear your character. Especially not enough pop or growth when Forever releases. Good luck!!

Its not about that and u know it. Stop it.

Gonna roll a hunter twink myself and farm the shit out of people until nobody ever queues a bg. Then u the other twinks have enough time to think about action and consequences they have on others and the game modes u like.

Didnt u notice BG´s pop less? Nobody wants it. U guys destroying ur own soil and to egocentric to even notice it.

[Fb]

I am currently leveling my third character to 60, first time leveling since August though, and I have to say, I am shocked how leveling battlegrounds have developed and it's to a degree that is harmful to your product (the server).

A significant issue was raised in this thread, and there were many interesting suggestions for resolving it.
However, unless it is posted in the "Suggestions" section, it will simply remain part of the general discussion.
I think the original poster—or someone else—should create a topic in that section, outlining well-thought-out solutions for the developers.
As was rightly pointed out here, even if players who have halted their XP gain are barred from Battlegrounds, they will still find loopholes to participate—such as through the "Slow and Steady" method.