1800 for a win in Tol Barrad, and everyone seems to be win trading.
Not only that if you stand on the bridge in the right spot, and do a little bit of in and out you also get the honor, for not even playing.
Free pvp piece for the same honor that it takes winning multiple bg’s to get,
It’s gloves, it’s bracers, its a trinket, its 400 short of pants, and chest.
You can make my healing harder ” For the challenge” yet blizzard is handing scrubs better pvp gear. I guess life isn’t fair, and doing the right thing doesn’t reward you in anyway – so your the fool if you aren’t particpating because they will all be so much better geared then you when you do want to legitimatly pvp.
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Pugnacious Priest's Warcraft Blog 
Hopefully they’ll make TB less of an abysmal piece of garbage in the future. Why they thought changing the honor in that way was a fix as opposed to fixing the imbalance of the battleground is beyond me. I’ve seen Blizzard make some mistakes that I’d have no problem going easy on them for, but TB deserves them nothing but ridicule and shame.
Nice to see somebody agrees with me. Made a post about it on my own blog, even; http://goldpaw.blogspot.com/2010/12/state-of-tol-barad.html
Tol Barad was imbalanced from the start, due to the much easier task of defending compared to assaulting. Holding 1 base as opposed to capturing 3. But this “fix” is just horrible. It encourages wintrading, it makes the majority give up on purpose when defending. People that wish to win, can’t, because all the spots are taken by people who signed up just to stand there and watch the opposing faction win.
It’s no PvP in it at all. I understand Blizzard’s reasoning behind this poor “fix”, to make Baradin Hold available to both Factions, and not have it end up like VoA. On my realm, the Horde held VoA pretty much all the time due to their high population. But if the goal was only to give access to an instance, why put a world PvP objective in there in the first place? My point is that if winning a PvP battle grants access to an instance, then actualy PvP should be required to WIN that PvP battle. Not wintrading, which is against the EULA and a bannable offense.
That scrubs get free gear don’t really bother me, though. There’s no substitute for talent. Their gear won’t make them beat me. Their free gear will only make them scrubs in free gear. A n00b is a n00b by any name… 😉
Well if it makes you feel any better, not all servers are win-trading 🙂
On my server the horde’s attack tactic of all zerg one objective, then all move to the next is what’s costing them TB. To a degree that worked in their favor in WG [and in a few battlegrounds] but for once alliance has figured out how to counter that.
and your sever is probably going be better off when it does get fixed cause you guys will know how to play 🙂
I was going to comment at end but I had to disagree with this reply.
I think too that the state of TB is horrible.
It’s unbalanced and while giving free honor to everyone who felt like participating was bad, I think worse is seeing the dominant faction (hello, EU-Agamaggan http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php?serverid=226&factionid=-1&minlevel=85&maxlevel=85&servertypeid=2 ) keep the battle for prolonged periods. Even on more equally leveled realms, the defender tends to keep TB for ~11 battles before losing on average.
(http://elitistjerks.com/blogs/hamlet/520-tol_barad_prisoners_dilemma_cooperation.html )
Now to the claim that non-wintrades will be better off since they know how to play,
I’d say no, because:
– They are likely not as geared as a whole as the realms who could honor cap twice a day if they wanted.
– Not taking advantage of such blatant design is no sign of ‘knowing how to play’.
Lastly, keep it up, Pugnacious!
Long time email lurker commenting :>
well if the whole realm was not win trading then they technically would still be on equalish ground, and its funny watching real communication in TB now.. ( and its taking longer )
IMO it really is blizzard’s job to fix the silly honor gains asap – it makes no sense at all and I don’t blame people for win-trading. there should be an incentive to defend, losing shouldn’t be more profitable. it’s like a football team that gets paid more for losing, well of course then you’ll try a different tactic. we play for points, thats a reality. and it a choice you can take to play the tactic that way. it’s the system that’s broken.
it’s been the same in BGs for almost all of WotLK: “let’s lose fast’ mentality. how come they never called that an abuse? they even gave losing enough reward to encourage it. well thats exactly what TB is too at the moment.
only at the very end of Wrath they finally made losing a BG bad enough for people to want to win. and if you can’t make people wanna win a game, you fail at designing it IMO. i really hope this gets looked into for once, rather than calling people exploiters.
There are two problems here, fundamentally.
1.) As pointed out, if you don’t “cheat” you fall behind. The honest Joe gets screwed.
2.) You are incentivised to lose. You can either win two defends in a row for 360 honor, or lose one defend and win an attack and gain 1800 honor. Which would you do?
I’ve elaborated on why I believe blaming players for Tol Barad is the wrong way to go in a blogpost of my own today:
http://raging-monkeys.blogspot.com/2011/01/when-losing-is-winning-or-dont-blame.html
personally I just hope this gets a fix really soon.
I’m very unhappy at what’s happened with Tol Barad as it’s made a complete mockery of the PvP system and it’s rewards. The problem is that *everyone* is doing it so unless you do it as well, you won’t have good enough gear to compete in the BGs. It’s dreadful.
No need to share my feelings on the matter… whoops already have.
Sucked my desire to PvP since New Years.. which sucked my desire to play.. which just sucks