When Mists of Pandaria was announced, it was said to have a new Battleground called Azshara Crater that would be based on the A.R.T.S style of gameplay
For those who do know, A.R.T.S is short for “Action Real Time Strategy” and it is used to classify Dota, League of Legends, Heroes of Newerth, and many other games where you and your teammates form and execute a strategy to overwhelm the other team and destroy their base, this is while both bases spawn an equal amount of low level NPCs to aid in the assault or to give gold and exp to the enemy when killed.
For a game that has a very limited map it offers a lot of play time
Last time I checked on the Beta the new battlegrounds (that I talked about earlier) are not implemented on the servers yet. While news have been some news about Tower of Power and Silvershard Mine, I haven’t heard anything about Azshara Crater.
As sad as it may seem, I am going to call it and say that the ARTS battleground is the one thing that Blizzard will fail to deliver in Mists of Pandaria (I wrote a post about this topic a while ago)
I think that killing Azshara Crater is for the best, the testing and balances that would be needed would be so great that it could warrant it’s own game.
Oh wait….
And there would be so much problems with this one particular battleground.
An ARTS battleground would need to be dumb down every class/spec down to 4-5 spells just to ensure that some player with a move combo, that the developers would not think of, that would break the game.
This would cause so much problems with NPC farming in that Battleground
Also half of the ARTS is leveling up your character throughout the course of the fight, and you get to customize the Armor and Weapons your own way, something that could be different than any other player.
(Although there are cookie cutter builds that you are almost forced to used when you get to the higher levels)
Also the fun of playing League of Legends is that you can change your role and playstyle between each game. One game I can play as a range caster that specialize in AoE spells while other games I can play as a melee tank that can handle two enemies at a time.
I can play these two polar opposite game styles and without spending hours leveling up these characters and then grind the honor to get their great to an adequate level to finally go toe to toe with other people.
I’m glad that this project is dead, it means less hassle with balancing issues in future patches and it will reduce the development time for Mists of Pandaria.
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“you and your teammates form and execute a strategy to overwhelm the other team and destroy their base, this is while both bases spawn an equal amount of low level NPCs to aid in the assault or to give gold and exp to the enemy when killed.”
pst… I know Azshara Crater was supposed to be different than this, but based on your description I would say they already tried this. It’s called the original AV.
Just thought I’d bring that to your attention
Yeah, but I meant as NPC that goes on the offence. But thanks for that, i forgot about AV