Blizzard Deny's players are exploting Tol Barad

[Adam-Savage]

Sounds like they just give us Tol Barad..

[Adam-Savage]

I've been following the battle net forums and I came across this post that offers another explanation to the overwhelming reports of being outnumbered. I've never heard of this before but I do remember my guild mate confirming the number of people in the raid group to match the /who results. This does seem plausible..Wondering if this can be verified or not? The post I found was on page 9 in the thread.

Actually it's worse than that. I was testing a /who the other day and showed 21 alliance in all of Tol Barad, plus 16 alliance in Tol Barad Peninsula (by putting the filter to Zone, obviously). However we had a full 40 person raid in my raid frames. Slag, ICG, and WV each count as their own ZONE for purposes of /who (which, if you use XPerl, you can verify by mouseovering in raid frames and seeing where the player is listed).

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1827305886

[Troubleshot]

This is in no way meant as a flame or as a "boy are you a noob" statement at the OP.

Over the last 5 years of play (particularly in BGs) I have found that people's perception tends to be tainted by thier "at the moment" experience.

As a for instance, just before Cata hit, I had 3 level 80 Horde toons that regualry ran AV to gear up in some PvP gear. According to the stats pages, I did over 1000 AVs between them and had a roughly 31% win rate... this was likely accurate, and I never left a battle early, so I feel that it is a pretty fair sample of my battlegroups performance in AV at that time.

So then I started doing the same thing on the same server with an 80 Alliance toon. I soon noticed that EVERY TIME we started losing, someone would inevitably say "Do we EVER win this battleground? I have been losing all day."


I honestly think that losing has such an emotional impact that it sometimes taints our perception.



Could Bliz be fibbing here? Sure. Since I can not completely trust my judgement here, I will have to give them the benefit of the doubt for a while and see what happens.

It is also important to note that the "/who" function is not the end-all-be-all of data statistics... I have used it before in zones with someone standing next to me and they did not appear on the list.

[Kalliope]

One of the biggest "fixes" to the seeming outnumbering problem will be the removal of mining and herbing nodes from TB during the battle. If you can't run around and gather, then you're either going to have to focus on the battle or find a sneakier way of afking in TB.

(That said, I am a bit sad about the change, since I won't have a gathering alt at TB level before it goes in. Gathering is a nice way of passing the time waiting for a loss when your side is just too clueless to attack/defend properly.)

[Adam-Savage]

I was not aware the /who did not work as I thought it did. I may be wrong here so I'm going to have to digg into this and see what I come up with. If was truly just groaning about loosing all the time then I would not admit that I may be wrong. One thing people will notice about me is I will not simply make stuff up and if it turns out I was wrong then I will admit to it. I don't know what to think about the /who thing but I can say that when I joined a battle yesterday you would see someone ask to be invited in. This followed by someone dropping raid. I can't remember if a new person joined the raid or not as I Was trying to focus on the battle.

[Sukurachi]

for the last few years, every day, in Dalaran, all I would read was "damn, Horde suck on this server, we always lose Wintergrasp".

The thing is, every day, at least once, I would read:
q) "Did we win WG?"
a) "yup, have had it for 2 days now"

So obviously, someone's perception is faulty.

By the way, to the OP:

Somehow, I don't believe that one side is using a "cheat" to win a battleground, while the other side isn't.
If there's a cheat, BOTH sides will use it.

You're attributing some pretty bad characteristics to one faction with your accusation.
And I find it very difficult to believe. Sorry.

[Adam-Savage]

for the last few years, every day, in Dalaran, all I would read was "damn, Horde suck on this server, we always lose Wintergrasp".

The thing is, every day, at least once, I would read:
q) "Did we win WG?"
a) "yup, have had it for 2 days now"

So obviously, someone's perception is faulty.

By the way, to the OP:

Somehow, I don't believe that one side is using a "cheat" to win a battleground, while the other side isn't.
If there's a cheat, BOTH sides will use it.

You're attributing some pretty bad characteristics to one faction with your accusation.
And I find it very difficult to believe. Sorry.

I should edit my OP actually to reflect both sides now that you mention it. Your 100% correct that BOTH factions are raid dropping. Now the question is what happens when 10 Alliance raid drop and only 2 Horde raid drop ? Does the game bring in 10 more Alliance players and 2 horde or does it know how many people are in the zone despite the number in the raid groups ?

[Adam-Savage]

Ok so I went to a match and people where dropping raid like crazy to bring in more people. Who had more players ? I don't know. I don't think anyone did. The horde where in 2 groups with each group having 15 players max and as little as 10-5. I did the /who several times during the battle and while in subzones and at one point there was no more then 5 of us in the sub zone but the number of players in Tol Barad itself was like 30. So It's looking that when you do a /who it is for the entire zone not just subzones. This would make sense as I did the previous /who while in Stormwind. I do think the game goes by the number of people in the zone and not the raid group. The match did not look like the horde had more players then we did at all. You put 15 people in the very small area and it will look like there is more. This can increase when you add in warlock pets, hunter pets, mage pets etc etc..