PVP is the aspect of WoW I always cared the least to partake in. To me, the purpose of those games is to pursue the story, which unveils itself through PVE environments.
I'd always thought that if I wanted to PVP, I'd go play something like League of Legends or something similar to that where you condense the MMO experience into an hours worth of gameplay. I might just wait until BfA goes on sail, at least then I'd feel like I didn't flush 50 bucks + a subscription fee down the toilet to reaffirm what I already knew anyway. I get suckered into every expansion because I believe I'm chasing those nostalgic feelings I had during the earlier days -- I still remember how much fun I had leveling my druid in TBC (running through Nagrand 5:00AM completing the kill quests to try to power run to 70) and how fun and new everything seemed back then.
Even the communal aspect WoW once held seems to always be viewed with rose-colored glasses -- for every friend you made by helping someone out in a low level area or instance, there existed a troll or asshole in a guild who relished their first semblance of authority in their life and berated others for the amusement of the crowd back in the ventrilo raiding days.
Yeah, okay more on the PvP thing -- basically you have War Mode (which allows for PvP throughout world) while providing a 10% bonus to XP and rewards. You can only turn War Mode on or off in your faction's capital. It makes sense to have this on while leveling outside of BfA, since you will likely never encounter other faction members (rarely) until you hit the current release material.
Because of an imbalance on Alliance vs Horde players, they made the bonus scaling per week -- I think it is based on the number of folks PvPing from each faction -- and Alliance was running for some weeks with a +30% bonus (vs Horde +10%) as the underplayed side, as an incentive to get more Alliance. This was kind of annoying. [There was a lot of horde bitching about it in the chats. I can't say I disagree, there's a lot of shit about BfA that feels Alliance-slanted.] Also, like the "Invasion" points from legion (which would appear randomly every so option and run for 5-6 hours, with special 5-6 quests + and ending cap quest, and completing means a free item drop + other rewards), they instead have "Assault" events running six hours, one event for each zone. However, they are designed to be PvP events -- usually 1-2 of the 5 quests for each faction overlap, so you are essentially forced into PvP to complete the quest. You have to complete at leave 4 out of 5 quests to trigger the end quest and finish the assault.
Having played both factions in the Assaults, I still feel like it is slanted towards Alliance based on the quests that appear and where they are in location on the map -- one of them literally happens within the gates of Boralus (the alliance "capital" for this expansion) or right outside the city. The Drustvar assault forces Horde right up to the gates (and even inside) of Arom, the major Alliance town in that region. I've tried to do the Arom assault as Horde and typically no longer do it unless I am with a 20 person group of Horde because it's pointless -- it's basically just "swarming mass of Alliance murders Horde players," it doesn't matter how good you are, you simply are not gonna survive when it's 5 vs 1 or worse. it's just a lot of needless pain. And the Voldun assault (which is horde territory) still typically results in Horde being at disadvantage -- it's near the major staging alliance town on that entire island, and there's one quest there I never waste time doing, and the others aren't exactly fun either. I honestly don't see anything comparable from the other end -- the DESIGN of the quests, the locations, the terrain, really does scan as "allliance favored".
[Which of course just pissed Horde off more. There were talks about turnign off War Mode for extended periods to make a point and ruin Blizzard's methodology, and maybe that happened because Alliance only has +15% now on their bonus for the last two weeks. And just yesterday during the Boralus assault, I heard a lot of alliance players saying Horde never shows up anymore. Well yeah -- tilt the board too far and as a matter of principle, one side will quit and do something else.]
There can be a lot of griefing with war Mode. They had to give a 30-second "no honor points" buff to at least some of the flight paths because groups were camping flight paths in the other faction's territory and murdering solo players regularly. I also regularly see raids camping important WQs or turn-in locations to murder anyone who goes there to turn in their WQs dailies. Like I said before, 5-8 on 1 isn't a fair fight no matter how good you are -- either you have a build that allows you to disappear or escape at a moment's notice, or you're pretty much screwed.
I'm more of a Horde sympathizer in the sense that I think Horde would like a fairer PvP setup where skill matters, and I think Alliance includes a lot of kids or n00bs to the game. I have played both sides in BfA PvP and think that Horde players generally know what they are doing. I have almost beat the pants off a solo or two-team or Alliance folks with my Disc Priest (which is reedic), for example; and typically when Alliance wins a fight, it's because they just get together a 5-10 person team and run through and murder Horde soloists, then they run off if Horde puts together a counter raid. I really hate when I'm just passing through and a group of ten chase after me and murder me, and I have to do a corpse run when I was trying to get somewhere. Anyway, both sides do have some skeevy and/or inept players, I do think Horde overall has more experience with PvP and it shows both in what they do and how well they play. Alliance tends to just make Murder Crowds and run the board.
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All my bitching there, so the positive ... I am not really a PvP player, I rarely even played the battlegrounds or warfronts, etc. Never dueled. So I've been learning about my classes in terms of PvP based on my experiences in this release. I think the griefing is annoying, but I can't totally call it griefing because Blizzard rewards it so I understand why it happens -- people are doing what makes sense based on what the game rewards now. This is what Blizzard wanted, and if they don't, they should change it.
However, I've also had a lot of fun with impromptu PvP when it's not simply a "screw over other faction players in the most unfair way possible." Like, on occasion a legitimate fight breaks out with equal numbers on both sides and it's pretty cool.... especially if more players on each side happen to come by and jump in.
Once there was a WQ elite that you need a small raid group to kill... and an alliance and horde raid group showed up at exactly the same time to kill the same elite boss. It was just insane -- a massive PvP free-for-all while this elite mob boss was charging through the center of the melee smashing through people, etc. So everyone's trying to take each other out while also taking out the boss and get credit for the kill. One of my friends talks about a raid that kept scaling up -- each faction built a bigger response, culminating in a raid of Alliance soldiers using gliders to land on the horde force in their city, and it was just total mayhem. I also once had this cool moment with my pally, where I rode away from a crowd of 6-10 Alliance chasing me -- and I kept stopping and turning to see where they were, and when they saw me do that, they kept coming -- and they chased me right THROUGH a Horde outpost (both crazy and audacious, as they are blowing through 120 gold elites to catch me) right to the edge of a tall cliff as I'm trying to sprint in Plate -- and I jumped off the cliff and popped a glider and rode the whole way to the 'port out point. It was crazy and exhilarating. That's the kind of open world stuff that is cool.
I also would say that some times people show honor. I have seen both factions wait for a lone player to finish kill a WQ mob, rather than just murdering the player who is already wounded from the fight, and folks also not attack the other faction folks who are waiting nearby. (Of course, I've also seen the opposite -- and I guess part of the adrenaline is not knowing which it is going to be by the end).
Basically if you hate War Mode, you can turn it off. But then you can't participate in anything involving PvP, unless it's one of the specific PvP things (like the battlegrounds, etc.)
