I mentioned this here, but just in case you were wondering if it works:

Be aware battlegrounders. There is a new bug in AV that allows flags to be capped through walls and from 10 to 40 yards away. Possibly even farther if you are a hunter and use Eagle Eye. No word on if the Spyglass affects this. This is primarily a problem in Alterac Valley, but also in Arathi Basin. At the Blacksmith location in Arathi people have been hiding in the building and capping from inside.

People are capping through hills and from behind trees. Hunters are reporting standing at the flag, with their pets on aggressive, and the pets do not aggro on the cappers. That’s how far away they are.

So widen your defensive patrols and watch for the golden swirlies to appear on your flag. Someone, somewhere is trying to cap it.

Update: Patch 2.0.4 fixed the bug.

AFKZero is a very simple application with only one purpose - to publicly shame those who enter Alterac Valley solely with the intent to leech honor while staying in the cave or elsewhere.

To this goal, AFKZero traverses the scoreboard and finds players who meet three criteria - more than 100 bonus honor, no damage done, no healing done. The list of such players can then be either just enumerated locally (on your screen) or sent to the Battleground.

This is a first, 20 minute code, start at something I was wanting to write since the new honor system was released - a meshed shaming and blacklisting application. Version 1.0 will not only list and print the offenders, it will also sync offender lists between players who have the AddOn installed, allowing those who are on the same realm as the offender to take appropriate action (imagine my surprise to be informed by a beta test version of 1.0, that one of my former guildies is a honor leech).

There will be some common criticisms of this. First, of course, the fact that anyone can evade the AddOn by simply killing a wolf/ram and add to the damage done listing. That is correct and something I might make configurable in the next version, maybe a threshold of 2x Ram/Wolf or so…

Secondly the reverse criticism. There’s the AFKers whiny response that, indeed, they are not “idle” but are “coordinating” assaults from the cave. It’s a hollow defense and anyone who’s been in an AV since the honor changes knows that. Secondly the “defender” defense. People will claim they are “on D” and not seeing any movement yet. After 100 honor, Horde is usually past Stonehearth (no idea about Alliance, I’d assume the same distance) and Alliance is on Galv. With Alliance on Galv any defender worth his or her salt will be there, stalling Alliance approaches by helping Galv. If that’s not the case it’s akin to AFKing, just outside the cave.

Under all circumstances, you do have the ability to simply show and verify AFK behavior. Print the offenders to the screen and verify they’re really AFK and not “defending the poison goods vendor” or something equally pathetic.

Usage:

Drag the AFKZero folder into your Interface/AddOns directory. In-game type /zero show (or /afkzero show) to locally display all offenders. If you are comfortable with the list, you may report it to /bg by typing /zero avreport.

That’s it so far. Enjoy. If you happen to hate AV AFKers as much as we do, would like to be in a guild with people who love to code, love to theorycraft, and love to progress (all the while not having a GM, long story), come to Kul’Tiras (US), Horde site and look us up. We’re always in the market for more cool people.

You can find AFKZero on Curse Gaming.

This is a repost of something I wrote on the Blizzard PvP Forums. I wrote it to maybe, elicit some kind of reaction, but … alas … “hord r ghey” is a more popular topic, lolz.

It’s my story…
(more…)

Just got this e-mail about what might be the biggest world PvP event ever, and if you aren’t on Dark Iron then you missed it.

I don’t know if you guys are hip to this yet, but last night the guilds that compromise the Penny Arcade Alliance on Dark Iron launched the largest offensive in World Of Warcraft history.
After several days of planning and reconnaissance the members of the Penny Arcade Alliance were told to meet up in Darnassus for a surprise.

At 7pm server time everyone was told that the Penny Arcade Alliance was launching a full scale attack on all three horde cities.

Everyone immediately began forming raids and awaited their assignments. Groups were sent out on diversionary raids against the Orgrimmar gates, Brill, Tarren Mill, and Crossroads, while the elite PVE raiders (who cancelled their AQ40 and BWL runs) were summoned into the capital cities for assaults on the racial leaders, as well as every single NPC we could find.

By 7:20 Cairne became the first racial leader to fall. Within minutes Thrall, Vol’jin, and Varimathras were joined him. Sylvanas herself was down to 50% when the stress of having over 300 people inside the Undercity brought the eastern kingdoms down completely.

But we weren’t done.

As soon as the eastern kingdoms were back up the group that had successfully razed all of Orgrimmar (and Razor Hill, and Sen’jin village, and pretty much everything else in Durotar/The Barrens) hopped on a zeppelin and redirected their attack towards the Undercity.

After a long battle to her throne room, we were ultimately felled by massive lag and another server wipe.

The PAA however, was comfortable with the fact that we’d just wiped out every single horde NPC, in every major horde city (and their outlying towns) in a surgical strike usually reserved for bombing civilians in Iraq.

The gauntlet has been thrown down. This is the face of world PVP now.

-Manif, representing Team Hurricane, and The Knights Of Arcadia.

Official forum threads with personal accounts and screenshots can be found here, here, and here.

I’m posting this on metblogs rather than the WoW forum because the crowd here seems pretty open-minded, and there’s something I’ve been planning to do for a while– take on the indefensible position of justifying Twinks.

I’d like to take this forum to clear up some common misconceptions about twinks, and maybe give y’all some insight into what makes us Twink. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get a few of you to try your hand at it.
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I’ve recently discovered PvP. I’ve always refused duels, never rolled a character on a PvP server, and always sniffed at guild members who spent most of their non-raiding time in the battlegrounds. But then, during one of those periods where I couldn’t face grinding anymore and all of my quests were either too high-level or involved dungeons, I tried both WSG and AB. And you know what? I absolutely, totally love it.

In the beginning, of course, I was abysmal; I was everyone’s meat. But I got better, and am becoming addicted to the adrenalin rush. I can actually do some damage, my kill-to-death ratio is finally on the “good” side, and I’m learning a lot more about playing my class. I do, however, have a few questions…
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So today was my first day PvPing in BGs as Horde. I tagged along with my trusty priest friend and had an absolute blast. I’d never enjoyed PvP really, but this was a whole new ballgame. I never actually successfully queued for AB either — it just hasn’t popped. But both AB and WSG were one right after the other all evening and far into the night, and it was incredible.

As soon as we hit 29 we decided to do the BGs, and below is what I ended up with today starting at 238xp into my level, 0 rep, and 0 HKs for the day. My only complaint is our server is only two weeks old, and our battlegroup is composed of day one servers — so we’re facing a lot of twinks. It’s tough to kill a warrior with 2500 HP when you’re just a regularly geared group, but we managed to face whole raids of them time and time again and come out on top.

I’m sure these numbers aren’t astonishing for old-school Horde, but for someone who’s come over from the land of pointy ears and pally bubbles, it was astonishing for me.

Cross Server BGs? For the Horde? Yes, please.

Until this week my advice for Alliance friends who were complaining about long BG queue times was simple - roll Horde. Horde side I’ve never not been able to get into a BG in a matter of minutes, and usually have to choose between several popping all at once. I’d often play AV just wating for AB to come up. Eitrigg is in Battlegroup 6 ( Aegwynn Akama Chromaggus Drak’thul Draka Eitrigg Garithos Hakkar Jubei’Thos Khaz Modan Korgath Kul Tiras Malorne Mug’thol Muradin Rexxar Runetotem Thorium Brotherhood ) and after a few days of these cross server BGs I can outright say they totally suck. I’ve seen a lot of Allinace folks jumping for joy that they no longer have multi hour waits but as Hordie who didn’t have that problem, they’ve just turned to crap, for several reasons:

1. LAG - In the last year I’ve never seen such constant lag in BGs. It’s unending and brutal. Frequently I’m dead before I even know I’ve been attacked.
2. ZERG - AV is now all zerg all the time. I’m not complaining about 15 minute AV rounds, it’s fun once or twice, but 90% of the content in AV is now useless since 100% of the people just rush in and cap it.
3. WHO? - With this many people now playing, the chances of playing with, or against, the same people over and over again is completely lost. Previously upon entering BG you could scan the player list and get an idea of what your teams strengths and weaknesses were just by who was there, as well as size up the opposing team. Likewise everyone knew who to follow and who to ignore. Now since it’s 100% new people on all sides, it’s complete chaos. People barking conflicting orders at each other and most people having no idea where to go.
4. WSGRIP - 3 days, not a single WSG yet. WSG was like old faithful before, if nothing else you could always play WSG. No, not a chance in hell.

Most of these could be written off to it being a new thing and once the novelty wears off it might balance out a bit but for the moment, my PVP grind just got a lot more annoying.