Infinite Alterac Valley

[ Alterac Valley sometimes lasted days or even a full week ] [...]

On Kronos the longest Alterac Valley battleground I have heard of was 8h long. And that was an outlier. Most of our AVs are much shorter, mostly because players are doing the exact same thing as they are on retail, that is : they stack up, run to the other faction base, get the closest graveyard, summon everyone (I like feeling useful and doing this part), break the two towers and stack in them, overwhelm the few defenders, get the last graveyard before the faction leaders, aggro them and the job is done.

Here shown : The tower strategy

Obviously there are a few players that stand out of the pack and get some kills or run to cap other graveyards, but they don't make much difference. In the end it is a matter of who can get first to the towers and cap the graveyard. What changes from battle to battle is how much defense there is on one side or the other. If the defense is high then the battle staggers until players leave, abandon or some (lucky) strategy leads to a graveyard recap. Assuming this situation persists then the battleground will still end in hours due to the server population being too low to accomodate for constant 40x40 PvP fights.

A typical 1h AV with Vanndar rush and a couple defenders. Hint : We lost to a couple seconds.

It is likely that longer Alterac Valleys could happen, but with the current conditions (zerging, population limits, stable playerbase) such will not happen in the short term. And as long as zerging the other faction's base gives the quickest amount of honor there is few incentive to change strategy. Thus I expect most future AVs to be shorter than 3 hours, likely never more than 24h.

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