Arathi Basin - PvP At Its Finest

irst we had Warsong Gulch - a 10-man, team-oriented PvP capture-the-flag battleground that forced players to create dynamic strategies and challenged them to defeat their opposition. Warsong Gulch required each team to capture the enemy team's flag three times and bring it back to your own. Some people disagreed with the idea - saying it didn't fit with lore. Horde and Alliance wouldn't really have "wargames" like capture the flag - they would be too busy killing each other. Probably a different carnation of the CTF idea would have drawn more popularity to WSG, which is now dead on many servers due to:

• Honor farming. Guilds plow through PUG's with their epic sets and organization via vocal communication using a program like Teamspeak or Ventrilo, which is faster then typing and frees up your hands so you can do more fighting. PUG's would almost never get any honor or reputation, and WSG was considered a waste of time if you weren't in an organized guild.
  
  
• Due to the reasons above, only organized guild groups entered WSG. Certain alliance and horde groups would even sit there and let each other get honor kills, capture 2 flags each, and then let one of the sides win. They would alternate wins and kills so both sides could farm honor since PvP is split by faction.

Next came Alterac Valley - the epic 40 man battleground that Blizzard promised us from a long time ago. One of the Warcraft III cinematics depicts a huge army of humans charging at a similar amount of Orcs. People in WoW wanted such a battle - large numbers at an epic battle for dominance between the Alliance and the Horde. Alterac Valley now does not accept people to "Join As Group" anymore because organized 40-man teams could win a game of AV in as little as 25-35 minutes, and get the full 10,000 honor (approx.) for winning, plus reputation and quest hand-ins. This resulted in players who were in these groups to gain numbers near 100,000 honor and more just by running several hours of successful Alterac Valley. Alterac Valley lost a lot of its appeal because guilds could no longer go in together.

Then came Arathi Basin. Slightly larger in player scale to WSG, and a lot smaller in comparison to AV - this 15 man strategic battleground is by the far the best in design and ideal. The "Join as Group" function lives on with this battleground - encouraging even random people to pre-form a 15 person raid so they can make sure they have everyone in the same group as well as guilds to get groups going and practice their strategies.

However, one of the *BEST* features of Arathi Basin is that there isn't one strategy that if executed perfectly will work everytime. Players saw a lot of cheap tactics in Alterac Valley being practiced to perfection and resulting in success 99% of the time. In Arathi Basin, this does not occur as often.


How Arathi Basin Works:

The premise of Arathi Basin is by far the most intriguing. Warsong Gulch has players fighting and dieing to capture a flag, Alterac Valley is a bit more sensible because players are fighting for the right for land - the Alterac Valley. Arathi Basin, however, makes the most sense. Players are fighting for resources.

There are five resource nodes - The Farm, The Blacksmith, the Stables, The Gold Mine and the Lumber Mill. Each side has a resource very close to their core graveyard. Alliance has the Stables, while Horde has the Farm. In the dead center of the map lies the Blacksmith - considered the best node in the game because of its centralized position on the map. At the south end of the map there lies the Lumber Mill, perched on a high bluff overlooking the battleground. At the north lies the mine, which is dug lower then ground level. The mine and mill are basically opposites.

All resource nodes collect resource points at the same rate. However, the more nodes you control at the same time, the faster you will gain points. The rate at which you gain points increases and decreases exponentially as you gain/lose resource nodes. Holding 5 resource nodes can end the game in minutes, but holding only 3 can draw the game out for longer.

I won't go into detail on the dynamics and gameplay of Arathi Basin because LQGaming will publish an Arathi Basin guide (following the release of the up-coming Alterac Valley guide), but I will comment on why Arathi Basin has exploded in popularity. Sure, many of you think it's the new battleground and will obviously have a lot of people playing it. Yes - that is true to a large extent, but its appeal goes much farther then the fact that it's new. Arathi Basin requires players to be dynamic and flexible - to be able to make quick decisions on their own. All Alterac Valley really requires is the masses to listen to a leader who knows what he is doing - Arathi Basin forces individuals to perform. A negative factor is that gear makes that much more of a difference in AB - in small 3v3 fights which you will have many of, if one of the sides has epics and yours doesn't, you will have a tough time winning the fight.

Where Arathi Basin shines is the fact it is solo-friendly. A player can just single-queue himself/herself for a few hours and run into some Pick-Up-Groups (PUG's), and even if they don't win they gain bonus honor and reputation. The difference in bonus honor in a close match is only a few hundred honor. The only thing that might be drastic in increase if you win is the reputation you gain, and that is the way it should be IMO. In the upcoming 1.8 patch, Blizzard is adding incentive for players to stay the length of a battleground match. Specifically for Arathi Basin, players receive a token if they lose and 3 if they win. Handing in 3 tokens at a time to an NPC will give bonus honor and reputation - but AFK'ing out when you see your team is losing halfway will not afford you this token, so people won't leave as often and you will see less leaving.

Guilds can farm Arathi Basin - but not to an unstoppable extent. My guild and I were getting matched up against some PUG's and won a few rounds of AB, but then were matched up against one of the top PvP guilds of the Alliance. They gave us a butt-whooping the first time, but after we were matched up a second time we knew their strategy. They didn't recognize us, and used the same strategy they always do. We made them waste man-power on nodes while we pushed their weaker nodes with our larger numbers and ended up losing by only 100 resources. This is a regular guild just observing an enemy strategy and countering it. This means endless possibilities because no two AB games are the same.

Arathi Basin, first and foremost, keeps the casual/hardcore barrier in perfect order. Hardcore players are already exalted with their respective AB faction and are raking in hundreds of thousands of honor points every week and ranking up, while the solo player now has new battleground rewards he can slowly (but surely) edge towards. As long as a player steadily increases his reputation, he can reach exalted and reap epic rewards in time, while the hardcore can do all that, plus rake in a lot more honor and get access to the same rewards much sooner.

I guess the real reason I love Arathi Basin is because it will always be changing. Alterac Valley always seemed the same to me, and it didn't make a difference if I was fighting or sitting in a pond fishing. Here - the difference between winning and losing can be that one person who was too lazy to run to a location when he had to. Arathi Basin has restored the fun of PvP with good rewards and great bonus honor for winning AND losing.