Argh, Cata OT got closed while I was typing. So this is RE: tol barad being terrible, and Guild levelling being terrible.
Tol Barad was a clusterfuck before the win trading. On Mal'ganis horde got it like twice a week in the middle of the night, because it's just THAT badly designed. Enforced side-equality raises the question of why it isn't just a battleground in the first place - it's not like having a 'world pvp' zone that only 20 people get to participate in once every 2.5 hours is good design on any level. It's well established that it's unbalanced even if the sides were equally skilled, which because it's not instanced and has enforced equality they never are. The dailies lock out 15 minutes PRIOR to the battle, completely inexplicably, then they change after every one, meaning to optimize your rep/dailies/tokens you need to keep running back every time you fight over the zone just to see if more jail dailies popped up.
In fact, you keep spewing bullshit about the zone, I'd love to hear a single redeeming quality about it. It should be a standard battleground, and they can just put their daily quest 'hub' zone anywhere else in the world. The notion that it's a world pvp zone is a farce when you have to queue for it anyway, all it does is make baradin hold incredibly inconvenient to run and...that's it! SWEET!
As we like to say in guild "This is completely enhancing my fun right now". Blizz should consider that statement when they design things like this. I should note ALL of these issues were raised in beta, they just didn't fix them.
Guild levelling: Clearly simply broken. Designed at the speed a reasonable guild would level while doing guild achieves in beta, now horribly slowed down so that every guild with a medium population will cap at the exact same rate. THEN xp slowed down so we didn't hit our daily cap within 10 seconds (it still only takes 5 minutes though), yet it now hurts smaller guilds who at this rate will probably take nearly a year to cap their guild out. Again: This does not enhance fun at all. They should have simply left the guild achievement experience in and accepted that hardcore guilds were going to cap out very quickly due to already having credit for so many. Having guild achievements do absolutely nothing at all has sapped any incentive for them. I get that achievements don't 'do' anything for players either, but I don't think anyone is attached to their guild achievements like they are the player ones. My guild is FULL of achievers (one of our warriors would have been the first person int he world to have every achievement in the game if not for rng), and still nobody can be concerned with most of the guild crap, very few are actually 'fun' and most are grinds, but people should at least have incentive to go do guild instance runs in the old world or something. Basically they shot their whole levelling system in the foot just because they got pissy that people were going to be level 10 the first week (After which it would have slowed down significantly anyway).
Then there's rep. Taking this long to even use the rewards we've earned is ridiculous. We unlocked our Dark Phoenix mounts the second week, I won't be able to buy and use it for 3 more months, when it's no longer even remotely prestigious. That seems like a good design choice.
Guild achievement advancement in general: Clearly tuned incorrectly. Look at the glyph achieve and try to convince yourself they bothered to change that when they completely reworked glyphs. Or look at how many flasks it takes to make the 25 man cauldron achieve: You will have every guild perk related to cauldrons for probably 8-10 months BEFORE you can even get the cauldrons made if you have your guild make/supply 5 flasks per raider 5 raids a week. Still takes almost an entire year of that to make enough. This is just bad design.
