Warmarrer

World PvP is fine. Sure, horde have numbers, but they're not used to fighting even matches so when you do get a few Ally together usually the horde lose. BG PvP is being hurt by two main things. AFKers and pug vs premade. There should be an easier tool to report AFKers and bug abusers (like right click name ---> report). Then start handing out frequent and escalating bans for people who habitually AFK in BGs. Not AFK as in "my cat knocked over my food so I left, went afk, and the bg kicked me", but AFK like "I stood at stables with a jump macro the whole game, not contributing to fights and letting the flag get capped in front of me while I was watching netflix" Ques need to be handled fairly. Queing as a raid can be fun. Queing with friends is a desirable part of the game. But it shouldn't be putting 15 warlords against 8 pugs all day. Make the system bracketed by the que size of the group with four brackets. 1-4 players queing are pug/filler, you can have both sides filled with these without unbalancing it too bad. 5 players are a group, used as fillers for larger groups or matched against other groups of 5 with pugs. 6-10 players queing get matched with another group of 6-10 and then fill the rest of both sides with pugs. 11-15 get qued against another group of 11-15 and then fill with pugs. Make it mandatory for groups of 5 and over to be balanced by another group in their size bracket before their que will pop. Now we have groups over 10 fighting another group over 10. Even if some pugs get pulled in to fight a premade, at least they have a premade on their side too. This will result in longer ques for premades. So what? If your goal is to have epic premade battles then you know you're going to have a good fight on your hands against another premade instead of a boring pubstomp. If your goal is to maximize honor then either get good and beat other premades or que as a 4 man and co-ordinate the pugs you get put in with. Now the pugs learn how to play, honor farmers keep pug games interesting by adding SMALL groups of organized players into the mix, and you have at least a chance of fighting off the other side in each game. And premade players can still have a challenge and competition.

Even based on this, my warlock friend and I were killing an afk horde who was somewhere around 8 levels higher. I was able to hit most of my white swings, and he cast corruption once a second for a full 1:30 and every single one resisted. That's even with the talent points to reduce chance to be resisted.

Horde do somehow seem to outnumber alliance anywhere from 2-1 to 4-1 at times, but I think a part of it is also the horde base placement. In many zones like Desolace and STV the Horde have multiple outposts directly adjacent to quest hubs, and the paths between those bases take them through additional quest hubs. This causes travelling horde to be walking by all the time which leads to more ganking. Then there are zones like stonetalon, thousand needles, and shimmering flats that either have more quests for horde or are just more accessible for horde due to again, flightpath and base placement. I'm not complaining though, the alliance have zones like redridge, wetlands, and ashenvale that cater more to alliance in terms of available quests and base location, it's just that alliance has its heyday earlier and then horde have some logistical perks in the 30-40 range. The other big part is the Alliance attitudes towards world PvP. I quest with 2 friends and the three of us often end up getting in fights with small groups of horde. The thing is, other horde will flock from all parts of the zone to start a rumble and horde that just happen to be in the area will often switch from questing to brawling at the drop of a hat. Alliance seem to farm a bit more and try to ignore the horde if they can. I know our group had a a 15-20 man raid come up against us in Hillsbrad after only about 10 minutes of fighting, but despite the fact that the chat log was absolutely stuffed with alliance complaining about being ganked we couldn't get our counter-raid over 10 people, and it was only that large for about five minutes. Basically, Horde are red mobs with a 5-10 minute aggro duration and alliance are yellow mobs with a very small aggro range. I'll say two things though Zauhet, one is that it does tend to level out a bit once you hit 45+. Instead of tons of disparate questing areas everyone does tend to flow through places like Tanaris, Ungoro, and the plaguelands, so finding people to group with for protection is easier. Two, even if you just aren't having fun with the current zones, once you hit level 35 you can do the bulk of your leveling in dungeons. There are nonstop SM farms going on which can easily take you to level 40+, Then you have Ulda or RFD to run into the mid 40s, then it's ZF, Mara, ST, and BRD all the way through the 50s. You actually gain a pretty decent amount of EXP in dungeons, and you come out with some pretty great level 60 starter gear. Not to mention the BoE and trash drops mean you'll be well on your way to buying your epic mount. I know I used to make between 25 and 100g from a full BRD clear depending on how lucky I got with drops. Even if you have no luck with BoE drops, some of those blue weapons from bosses vendor for 5g or so and it adds up over time. There's one great bonus to the struggle to 60, you meet awesome people and build up your friend list. I have an addon to put notes on friends and I already have a good variety of tanks, healers, and other world PvPers who gave me the OK to call them in when there's a good fight going on. Back in retail vanilla the war for the contested zones got real, but it was mostly orchestrated by individuals with a knack for getting other people to group up and take the fight to the Horde. Even if that isn't you, pay attention to the guilds that spam their "world pvp focus" recruitment adds and send their members a /w to let them know when a zone is being overrun by the Horde. Be the change you want to see in the game.

The same tool could be adapted into a bug report system as well. The only hard part would be integrating a screenshot function into the tool and then sending the image alongside the bug report. I think you'd have a lot more visual data and engagement in bug hunts though if there were an in game tool to report bugs.

I think it would be a great idea to have a player report system that doesn't require open tickets or forum posts. Reporting a player action only really requires three text fields. Character name, reason, and a text field for any additional info. That's not an overwhelming amount of data to keep track of, and if the "reason" field were a pre-set drop-down menu of valid report options it would allow you to very easily track how many reports a character has for what issue without having to dig through a lot of salty paragraphs. Reports could be organized under the name of the character reported, and in a drop-down menu with a number indicating how many reports in each category a character has. The report function could time-stamp as well which would make it incredibly easy to verify before taking action, and you could have a sorting option to prioritize characters with large numbers of reports (as well as a "resolved" bucket to dump cases that were dealt with). If for instance a character was gold spamming, this is how the system would handle it. -Reporting character navigates to the report screen -Reporter enters character name into field -Reporter selects the reportable offense out of a pre-set drop down menu (in this case gold-spam) -Reporter enters any additional info -Reporter clicks send -Database receives report and checks for existing tickets under character name -If no existing tickets, create ticket bucket using character name -Log time-stamp, category of ticket, reporting character's name, and text fields, adding +1 tally to reported category -If prior ticket exists, use current bucket and log time-stamp, category of ticket, reporting character's name, and text fields, adding +1 tally to reported category Optionally, you could set the ticket system to flag a character as priority and send an alert to a GM if they receive a certain number of reports, allowing you to prioritize really critical issues. You could limit reporting to in game characters, and limit reports per character per hour. This would help avoid any targeted abuse to the report function. I'm not very accomplished with programming, but this seems something as simple as spending a few hours creating a UI, a sorting function, and a table. It shouldn't be resource intensive in the slightest, and it would streamline the process for GMs allowing them to handle a greater volume of tickets and identify problem characters very quickly. I think the community really does want to help police itself, and assist the dev team in stopping gold sellers/botters/whoever. One good feature is that this tool would allow the devs to decide which issues to focus on, as the devs can control which categories are in the report tool. So if the community management team wants to crack down on gold spammers? Put it in the report function. Is chat getting super out of hand racist? Plop a category in the report tool. It's adaptable and lets you decide the focus, and then lets us help. *EDIT* Also, if adding this into the game files itself would be a pain, you could release it as an optional add-on via the forum for those who wish to help out.

So I may be wrong, but I can't for the life of me remember seeing yellow dodges/misses/parries on command procs back in vanilla. I know it could partially resist off higher level mobs/bosses, but I got a command parry on my pally and my brain just broke for a second. I tried looking it up and all I found was people yelling at each other without really coming to full agreement. Do we have concrete data on whether this is working properly?