This sounds like what the CEO, Lars Koschin, of Frogster America(publishers of free-to-play Runes of Magic) refers to as Horizontal vs. Vertical gameplay.

He says RoM is shooting for a more horizontal gameplay giving access of more content to more players without the need to take a vertical climb to attain it. Whereas WoW is a vertical based game steering players to need to continue to climb vertically resulting is statisitics that he quotes: “55% of WoW players will never see 85% of the games content”.

Wintergrasp was indeed meant to be an open world battleground. But the access is severely limited, getting dismounted while touching the border of Wintergrasp can be annoying. Battles are on a timer… I somehow feel that the original concept envisioned eternal combat, and not miners fighting over ore between the battles.

Wintergrasp should become a BG. The fight for Archavons Vault got old pretty quickly. I bet in 1-2 expansions the door is open all times anyways, as nobody will be fighting there anymore.

The entire area could be recycled for something new, or they could bother to turn it really into the mentioned odd “open world pvp” zone. I just imagine eternal combat, players coming from all directions into Wintergrasp, … where a few players are still standing and fighting till they say: “OK, let’s call it a draw and let us do something else!” – I guess this could happen, as fighting without end will even exhaust players who actually cannot have enough PvP. Fascinating…!

Edit my own comment:
What the hell is an “open PvP ZONE” anyway?

It’s like a free speech zone. An area set aside for an activity that’s supposed to be done everywhere.

Wintergrasp lag is so bad, I can only play early in the morning, when there are like 30-40 ppl in the zone. During evening hours only classes with meaningful AoE can hope to do any damage, as you practically cannot target anyone. And I play on a pretty dead realm, cant imagine the lag on overpopulated realms.

Makes me wonder, given the Battlegound-ish look of Wintergrasp, why the hell didnt they make it instanced?
It practically is another battleground anyway, because the way you access it is not much different than a “port-in”. So just remove the population cap, and put the whole thing on a dedicated server, so you can at least fix the lag issues. But I guess you must call it an open pvp zone, for it to be one, right?

Also, flying mounts did kill open world pvp, aaaand… WotLK was supposed to fix that by introducing flying combat.
I can still see the anouncment for that on the cover of my WotLK copy, with screens of cool flying, shooting roflcopters and whatnot.
So… yea, lets just forget that ever happened, right?
Never mind false advertising and such, us working on a major patch, without even bothering to work on a removed, pre-announced feature of the original expansion, is completely justified.
Nothing to see here, move along…

I read Blizzard wants to give us more opportunities like that, but I fear: their servers just can’t handle it.

Yep, the world server performance starts going down the drain at around 100 players, and at 300 players lag is measured in tens of seconds if the frequent disconnects haven’t took hold yet.

To be fair, scaling up server performance in such crowded situations is extremely difficult. The number of messages goes up exponentially as the number of players increases, because everyone needs to be kept up-to-date on what everyone else is doing. While one can improve message throughput with low-overhead techniques like non-blocking IO or stackless microthreads, the core problem remains intact.

Then we had TBC, with funny variants of open world pvp targets. People never really fought for the hellfire towers, but capped it clockwise, even waited for the horde to cap a tower, so that they could cap it and finish their quest. Then we had the Zangar Marsh, and I dare to say some players still do not know what they are supposed to do there! Then we had Halaa in Nagrand, this worked out best. On lower pop servers, the dominating faction had it almost for eternity, which caused problems for the dominators, too: They rarely got enough Horde/Allies to finish their killquests!

Then we got “raid the city” achievements in 3.0 and a black war bear mount as reward.

I participated in an organized giant raid well after midnight and was in one of 7 full 40 man raid groups.

The Horde knew of the raid and tried to stop it. After half an hour of mass disconnects due to a battle of 7 alliance and 3,4,5 dunno Horde raids before Orgrimmar, the raid leaders of both factions agreed that the Horde should raid Stormwind and Ironforge while we went for Orgrimmar and Thunderbluff.

Of all participants, some formed another raid days later, as they did not credit for all boss kills due to disconnects and sometimes for no apparent reason.

I read Blizzard wants to give us more opportunities like that, but I fear: their servers just can’t handle it.

I think flying mounts killed open world pvp. Basically, pvp of opportunity. Someone passing by, or you getting jumped by someone. I always attacked rogues on sight, as I think Warlock and Rogue have a Snake versus Mungo relationship. There are reasons why people cannot fly in Wintergrasp, not only because they want us to storm the fortress rather than flying in like paratroopers.

Okay, so if you were actually trying to quest in & around Hillsbrad at the time, I could understand the frustration when 250 players kept killing your Questgivers, but that’s WAR for you. And it’s not like anyone was forcing you to be in Hillsbrad; there were other areas where a level 20’s Toon could go to quest.

I find it amusingly ironic that when players were engaging in large scale world PvP, in a game called World of WARcraft mind you, the Devs did everything they could to put a stop to it. Then in both XPacs they introduce their own version of world PvP and it’s a huge flop.