Reintroduce AV with some tweaks.

[ludvigpasse]

Hello fellow players. I think a big reason of the low population is the monotany of the bgs. How about if we were to introduce AV again but slightly modified to create some excitement and uniqueness for the server and make more people wanting to play? The main problem with old AV was of course the lag it caused to all players, even those outside of AV. Another problem was that it needed 20-40players to support it so often AV games closed due to lack of players. It also didnt provide any weapon fragments or other intressting rewards outside of AV marks. My suggestion is to re-introduce AV with some slight modifications:

Reduce the min-max number of players per team from 20-40 to 15-25 or even 15-20, perhaps slightly lower the stats on the NPCs to compensate, however due to everyone running around in s2-4 here as opposed to alot of trash gear on retail nerfing the npc;s might not be needed. Its supposed to be a team effort to kill the faction bosses. Reducing the number of players should also help abit with the lag problem aswell as help slow down the phase of the matches abit.

Another suggestion is rework AV in such a way it makes more sense to summon the horde/alliance bosses (forgot name) aswell as doing the in-game AV quests more rewarding for winning the bg. But this suggestion would require alot of work/balance to do it right, simply reducing the number of min/max players seem like a much easier idea to implement and would do alot just by itself aswell as adding in wep frags.

Introduce weapon fragment reward for winning AV aswell as adding it into the standard BG rotation.

A bonus idea is to introduce the loot crates for winnings all bgs aswell as crossfaction but these have already been suggested and thought of so.

[Paniz]

Introduce weapon fragment reward for winning AV aswell as adding it into the standard BG rotation.

For the first win in AV you get wep fragment / boj, same as any other bg.
edit: i mean call to arms: AV quest was allways there.

[Bigballs]

This sounds very good, like you say with S4 gear im not sure if bosses will need to be nerfed, maybe the last bosses would or it would just be endless, i dont think that would work.

[Henhouse]

The primary reason we can't bring AV back currently is the issues regarding the map. I've not looked into it since removing it from rotation, but there's something drastically wrong in the coding for that map causing immense server lag for no reason. That's a major issue that needs to be fixed, but also we only recently regained the population amount to sustain the BG at some times, but it's still very minor compared to what AV should be (80 players).

We did not reward it with fragments due to it being too heavily biased towards Alliance. The map is somewhat flawed in terms of design, and there's always been a higher win-rate for Alliance. If we implemented hybrid CFBGs, it is something I would consider adding since it would be more randomized, I suppose.

Anyway, we do have a bit of things in the pipeline currently to work on, and release, but it's something I definitely remain interested in bringing back some day.

[Grimjoe]

Peak hours usually between 90-130 players on weekdays, and 150-200 on weekends from what I've witnessed.

You could also export the AV map in VMaps so it's a world-map and not a BG, maybe make a World PVP zone style deal out of it similar to old servers like ChaosCrusade as I suggested previously.

Odds are there are some scripts in the BG that flood the server causing the lag.

Besides, I'm pretty sure players wouldn't hate a proper open-world PvP zone if it's done right. Even if it isn't AV, something would be nice, for instance Tyr's Hand like Cruel did back in the day on their Wotlk server circa 2013-2015 iirc

If you're looking for help on creating such a thing, I'd be willing to donate some of my knowledge and experience from my 10 years of playing pservers, both as a GM/Dev and as a player. Smolderforge has been a part of my life for a long time and I think if it has something fresh and new that old and new players alike could enjoy, it would rejuvenate it and perhaps attract new players, because as it stands right now, the population is our major grievance.

The cause for that, I believe, is a lack of things to do outside of BGs and Arenas and dueling. It gets stale, and players get bored. BGs become 1-sided and players vastly above the average skill-level farming 2v2/solo 3s scare off lesser-skilled players, leaving them with little to do.