Or IoC, as it will soon be known.
In short: WANT.
In long: holy jiminy christmas people will complain about anything, won’t they?
The new BG is announced, and all the forums are alight with complaining, filled to the brim with tears, people will who will go to any length to shout how much vehicles suck.
In light of me being smarter than you (it’s true! Check Wikipedia if you don’t believe me!) allow me to address the primary concerns behind your unintelligible hatred of vehicular mechanics.
You could say that IoC is like AV and AB meeting for a SotA party in WG. While an apt description to get the jist of the battleground across, it’s not what it actually is. Too easily does such a description lead to the sentence “Blizzard can’t come up with anything original, so they’re just recycling their old ideas.”
In other words, rather than coming up with a new, original battleground, Blizzard just stole ideas from their previous ones.
I can’t even begin to describe how faulty this thinking is, but I shall try anyway.
Let’s say that Warsong Gulch was the original battleground.
Arathi Basin, then, is just WSG with five bases instead of two and a bunch of flags that don’t move.
Alterac Valley, then, is just a much larger Arathi Basin with a bunch of NPC’s tossed in.
Eye of the Storm, then, is just WSG and AB shoved together.
On and on it goes.
IoC is not, in fact, a AV/AB/WG hybrid. This is simply the best way to quickly describe an otherwise complicated and unfamiliar concept with conventions that are already familiar.
For instance, a motorcycle can be described as a car, but with only two wheels. It’s nowhere near an accurate description, it’s only purpose is to get the idea across.
And, of course, since it’s a human being doing the describing/simplifying here, the description itself is going to suffer from things like opinions and biases.
Who knows? Maybe IoC really will play exactly like a horrid hybrid of AB and AV with WG slathered all over it. I suspect it won’t, considering this is BLIZZARD we’re talking about, but who knows? There’s a first time for everything.
Point is, if you write it off before trying it, you suck. Or something.
Sadly, for those of you who don’t actually like vehicles, there’s really nothing I can offer you in solace. They are in the game now, they are part of the game. If you don’t like it… tough.
I didn’t like facing down Warlocks in PvP last year. I could QQ as much as I want, but those ‘locks aren’t being removed from the game. I could argue as hard as I could, but I could never get those damn warlocks removed from my battleground.
I don’t like Death Knights cluttering up my battlegrounds either, come to think of it. Does anyone actually have fun fighting these guys? Bah! Bah I say! This expansion is lame! REMOVE DEATH KNIGHTS FROM PVP IMMEDIATELY!
If your vision of the game doesn’t agree with the developers vision… you basically have four options: ignore it, complain about it, offer constructive feedback, or quit.
Saying “Malygos phase 3 is the suck!” does nothing but prove you aren’t all that skilled with grammar.
I understand there’s a difference between disliking one aspect of a game and disliking the entire game, but whining about it does nothing. If you need to vent, that’s what friends and blogs are for. If all you decide to say is “gg blizz, you suck” all you do is make yourself look like an unintelligent, arrogant douchebag.
But I digress. We’re talking about vehicles in PvP, not the futility of QQ.
Look, if you don’t want to drive a vehicle, then don’t. There are those of us who will, do, and likely are better at it than you are. Fact: you do better at something if you enjoy it than if you hate it. Those who enjoy vehicles are, naturally, going to perform better than those who don’t.
It’s not like vehicles are horrendously overpowered or anything.
Vehicles are designed with specific purposes, fulfilling a specific niche in vehicular combat. And just like in the real world, somehow they never quite phase out raw infantry.
These vehicles don’t revolutionize PvP combat in any way. All they do is fill a specific niche for a given battleground, and complement the forces already at work.
Sure, they are a focus of PvP combat, but never in exclusion to everything else.
Vehicles are a focus of Wintergrasp in the same way that controlling the towers and machine shops are a focus. Vehicles are a focus of Strand of the Ancients in the same way the flag is a focus of Warsong Gulch.
It’s part of the battleground. Just another strategic element to be taken into account, and then used effectively (or not, as the case may be).
Anyway, for those things where everyone is forced to be in a vehicle (FL, Malygos, etc) that I can at least understand. I mean, essentially, you’re learning a whole new class system from scratch.
Not that it’s hard. You have… what, five buttons, tops? Except those biplanes in Icecrown, I suppose.
Anyway, it’ll be interesting to see how this newfangled Glaive Thrower thing fits in with our current trinity of anti-infantry support, battlefield support, and siege.
Oh yeah, one other thing I want to get clear in this post.
There is no such thing as a fair fight.
The game itself is designed in such a way that each side starts off on even footing. Ideally, at the start of each and every engagement, each side is in perfect balance.
Then, Blizzard slathers everyone with as many abilities as possible to make it an unfair fight.
Mortal Strike immediately cripples the opposing healer. That’s not very fair. Polymorph knocks a person completely out of a fight, as does Blind, Cyclone, and numerous other abilities of the same variety. Affliction Warlocks have this Unstable Affliction thing which puts an opposing dispeller in the awkward position of being impotent.
None of these are fair. All of these are designed with the implicit idea that they make things as unfair as possible.
You give your side as many advantages as possible, and take away as many from your enemies as you can.
The whole point of winning in PvP is to make things as unfair as possible in your favor.
More than anything, I think vehicles take one outside one’s “comfort zone”.
PvPers and PvE-ers share that common trait. They just don’t like to talk about it at cocktail parties. This has brought it to the fore, though, and tears flow like … tears. Something.
I used to be a vehicle hater. I couldn’t stand them, the quest in borean tundra where you bomb the fields and rescue people? not one of my favorites. neither is the one in Ice crown. Dragons in Wyrmrest Temple, for that daily are not particularly fun either. And then when our raid leader decided that we should all go out of our comfort zone and try something that we haven’t done before – instead of being a passenger, I got to drive a bike for a leviathan fight in Ulduar. I loved it! zooming around, dumping oil on the ground, speeding up twisting turning playing with danger by zooming in and out again. it was soooo much fun!
and after leviathan lay in ruins, I realized what I personally disliked about vehicles. they are just too darn clanky. they don’t move as smoothly and quickly as my own character does – its almost like moving through mud, in the majority of cases – all you do is mash one, maybe 2 buttons. in other words – they are boring to me. there’s no rotation, no cooldowns to watch, you cannot jump (I like jumping
) At least with the bike – I could “woosh!” all over the place.
Outstanding points. Leave the comfort zone and like or dislike an aspect but don’t hate the whole game, Blizzard, or people based on one aspect. I hate the Maly 3rd phase but I get it done.
As Leah said they are clunky. no strafing whatsoever. Hard to get used to but Leah also stated the fun finally had on a motorcycle. Find your fun where you can but don’t call it stupid before tried. More important give it a chance and try to enjoy it!
Random tip for the Borean tundra Demolisher quest: when you go to rescue people, rescue a goblin engineer first. They speed up your demolisher to epic mount speed.
There’s something to be said for driving a huge tank around far faster than it should be able to go, and that something is “WEEEE!”
As a creature of habit I find the whole driving thing difficult but like any changes in the game, we adjust. I applaud Blizzard for creating variety for folks. I think its needed to keep folks interested in the game.
I hope more women do this new BG..since ya know…women are better drivers:P
Personally I fricken love vehicle combat. nothing makes me manically cackle more then using the ram in WG and watching alliance toons go flying back. I want blizz to institute vehicle combat for raiding capitols. I mean who wouldn’t want to take a siege engine of 40 and lay waste to Stormwind. Give me a bunch of those goblin tree cutting robot things and let me at Darnassus. Give me a mack truck and a street full of politicians. whoops private thought there. ignore that last part. I just like the fact that in a vehicle i get to cause wanton destruction and no one grips that I’m not healing them.
It doesn’t seem like they got the controls and handling for vehicles down when developing this expansion. Kalgan himself said it like this:
“You’ve played that shooter, that shooter that is fucking awesome… and then it’s got the one gimmick vehicle level, which you can tell they didn’t know what they were doing with vehicles, and it felt all floaty and things didn’t shoot right. The same mistake happened in World of Warcraft.
Lots of these vehicle quests, they’re more fun for the designer than they are for the player.”
That said, I’ve recently become quite a fan of vehicles in pvp, particularly SotA. My warlock is my pvp character and since he’s only got about 280 resilience right now I’m finding that being on top of a vehicle controlled by someone else is the best place in the world to be to pew pew without dying every other second.
There’s a reason why that whole flying combat thing we were promised upon the announcement of WotLK never made it into the game.
The WoW engine isn’t very good at properly handling 3-dimensional movement, but it’s managed to handle ground vehicles alright.
Better than all those gimmick shooter levels.
This is about the smartest thing I’ve read all night.
I am a machine hatah myself but there are other parts of the game I can play. I found it amusing you mentioned Unstable Affliction and not the mages very own Living Bomb spell.. although I admit the added silence is much nastier than the living bomb damage.
Anyone who finds themselves in a fair fight didn’t do nearly enough preparation beforehand.