Well it wasn’t really Blizzard but it’s someone high up enough to give this statement a bit more “oomph”. Blizzard’s VP for Game Design and WoW mastermind Rob Pardo recently had an interview with Warcry.com on his view about the 5 years of WoW. It was here that he talked more about how the game has been evolving from a more hardcore game to a more casual friendly game where more players can see the content they come up with. He explains that this was because a lot of designers including himself came from being hardcore gamers in other MMO’s like Everquest and it was this hardcore gamer in them that made them think that’s how things should be. But as we know they’re learned that it didn’t have to be that way to make the game fun.

Anyway, it was in that interview where Mr. Pardo said it outright that the Arena Tournament was a mistake. To clarify, he mentioned that when they thought it up before they never expected how much it problems it would cause in terms of balancing classes especially when taking both PvE and PvP into consideration. These his words:

We didn’t engineer the game and classes and balance around it, we just added it on, so it continues to be very difficult to balance. Is WoW a PvE cooperative game, or a competitive PvP game? There’s constant pressure on the class balance team, there’s pressure on the game itself, and a lot of times players who don’t PvP don’t understand why their classes are changing. I don’t think we ever foresaw how much tuning and tweaking we’d have to do to balance it in that direction. source

Mr. Pardo even said that if he could go back in time, either he would go back to before the game came out and changed the rules to make the Arena easier to implement or he would just scrap the idea. Of course they can’t scrap the Arena Tournament now so we just have to live with it, taking the good with the bad. Right now I’m just have this happy feeling that what I was thinking all this time ever since it came out was right all along.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

item level 239 arena weapons

Making season two gear available for honor back in the day just killed my desire to do any arena matches since I could just do battlegrounds for the gear I want. I really wanted the other gear from the newer seasons but I just didn’t want to do any matches especially when they made rating requirements for some of the gear.

I know this is an old topic but the subject of rating requirements for arena gear is still relevant even today and it just got a bit more relevant after Blizzard Poster Crygil came out with news about a change they’re implementing. It actually seems like this change is already in effect based on his words.

The current arena rating system allows more players to have higher ratings in the 2v2 bracket when compared to 3v3 and 5v5. We are preparing an in-game update that will be improving the rating system of the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets to allow all three of the brackets to have a similar number of players able to achieve ratings on par with what’s currently possible in our 2v2 arena bracket. As a result, we are changing the personal and team rating requirements for the item level 239 weapons from 2200 to 2350, but keep in mind the tooltip will continue to show the requirement as 2200 until patch 3.1.2.
source

note: To see Crygil’s entire post, just click the link above.

This means that it’s going to be much harder for players to get these arena weapons, with the rating requirement being raised. Some teams were probably trying to get that 2200 rating just for this and now they’ll be disappointed to see it’s been raised. I guess it’s all for the best anyway since these weapons are the best pvp weapons available at the moment, being compared to weapons you can get from heroic Ulduar. If it gets too easy to obtain then the welfare epics discussion from the past may be revived because of this.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

replenishment

One of the newest changes made in the hope for more balance concerns the Replenishment effect in the Arena Tournament. Replenishment was changed through a hotfix so that it will only affect the player and not the rest of the group inside Arenas. It will continue to function the same way anywhere else. CM Zarhym mentioned that replenishment remains balanced for bigger groups but not for smaller groups. In my experience, arena matches are supposed to be fast enough that players should not really need replenishment anyway. But making it work for the whole team could really provide make players go all out with the damage and healing without worrying about resources.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

pvp toggle

The past few days I’ve been wondering about a problem my mage has been having. He got flagged the other day and while I’m not totally sure how, it might have been when I dueled a friend. Anyway, for the past few days I’ve been trying to get rid of that flagged status and up to now it’s still there. I’ve tried toggling pvp on and off and the countdown to turn off pvp doesn’t start. Taking a flight path didn’t work but it’s supposed to. I tried going in an instance and while it went away inside, the second i stepped out it went right back.

This is really the strange occurrence that’s been bugging me the past few days and I’m glad I don’t really play my mage much these days. I think it’s time to put in a GM ticket but the strangeness of the situation is keeping me from doing so right now. Have any of you experienced anything strange like this while playing WoW?

update: Learn something new everyday. Thanks to a guildie, I was able to get rid of this problem. Apparently if you have a pvp daily in your quest log (which I wasn’t aware I had), you won’t unflag until you remove it from your log.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Every Arena team profile on the Armory (http://www.wowarmory.com) now includes Arena Records, new tools that track and measure the performance of every Arena team in World of Warcraft. These tools comprise the Match History tab, the Opponent History tab, and Match Reports.

* The Match History tab displays every Arena match that a team has played during the season in an interactive graph showing the date, opposing team, and result of each match.

* The Opponent History tab displays a team’s Arena matches in relation to the opposing teams faced, which helps track performance against particular team compositions.

* The Match Reports display the same end-of-match results and statistics that appeared in-game. For more details, visit the FAQs for these new tools:

* Match History – http://www.wowarmory.com/faq-arena-reports.xml
* Opponent History – http://www.wowarmory.com/faq-opponent-history.xml
* Match Reports – http://www.wowarmory.com/faq-match-report.xml
source

I can think of a lot of uses for this new tool. You can use this to aid in arena team recruitment, By showing others your history, you can show proof that you’re as good as you really say you are. Of course this can work the other way by showing others exactly how bad you are and get flames from the forums. I’m sure this tool should be handy in gathering more specific data about the best arena teams out there for each bracket. If there are hardcore guilds, I’m sure there are hardcore arena teams and this tool should prove invaluable to gain info about everything they need to get better. Or for the casual player, it should prove to be a cool new tool to play around with.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

The next change is the one to the resto spell lifebloom, the resto druid’s best friend in tank healing in groups/raids. The change goes as follows:

Mana costs of all ranks doubled. When Lifebloom blooms or is dispelled, It now refunds half the base mana cost of the spell per application of Lifebloom, and the heal effect is multiplied by the number of applications.

Of course all resto druids are pretty mad that their bread and butter tank healing spell will become less efficient especially since the practice of rolling lifeblooms negates whatever bonus was given to it blooming given that that’s what rolling lifeblooms is all about – keeping the 3 stack up at all times. Ghostcrawler’s forum post on the matter gave you a sense that they felt the spell was too efficient a heal especially if kept rolling but instead of nerfing the heal itself they decided to just increase its cost. After being assigned to raid healing a few times in 10 man Naxx a few times, I found out that I cast lifeblooms and let them bloom quite often so this might be a nice change for people who do this since the bloom will refund mana and get a healing bonus.

While this change is quite a sad one for PvE resto druids, it’s quite a buff for ones who do PvP a lot. People will think twice now before dispelling HoT’s especially in the arena tournament. This is quite a welcome change to complement the fact that the PvP resto druid’s worst enemy has been tamed because of the removal of the Death Knight’s ability to remove HoT’s through Plague Strike. These two changes just might catapult resto druids back to king status as arena healers.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Because of the extent of the problem in the arena, Kalgan has stated that they hope to rollback the arena ratings to what they were before the patch went live. It’s a bit funny that that talk about a new improved matching system has been implemented with the release of the patch but no one can really benefit from it yet due to the current problem.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

WoW EU Blue poster Wryxian wrote the following on the subject:

With the release of patch 3.0.8 we have implemented a new matchmaking system for arenas that will improve the overall system and help ensure that players will be matched against others of equal skill. The new matchmaking system uses a rating that you cannot see, and is separate for each of the arena brackets.

The rating changes at the end of each match are affected by this new system, and as it just came out, there may initially be some odd behavior in rating changes, but these will straighten out fairly quickly.

We will monitor this new system and update it as needed to help provide the best experience possible in arena matches. source

From what I understand, it seems like this system will be using more updated ratings in its matchmaking for each arena team bracket. This should make matchmaking more fair for all arena tournament participants.

update: Kalgan gives us more insight into the hidden rating talked about above.

The hidden rating uses a different approach to determining player ratings. It’s more complex, but it tends to figure out a player’s skill level far more quickly/accurately than an Elo system does.

However, changing player’s actual team/personal ratings extremely rapidly isn’t exactly what we want. So, we’re using an approach where we use the hidden rating (internally we refer to it as the GDF rating since it uses gaussian density filtering) for matchmaking since it creates better matchups than Elo and we use it as an anchor to figure out where the team/personal ratings should be moving toward. source

Post from: WOW Obsessed

I play a balance druid right now but only to get to 80 faster then I’ll be switching to Restoration. But I do know that that the stuns this talent brings can be pretty useful in PvP, especially with Starfall since you have so many stars amounting to potential stuns. I haven’t done any PvP on my druid and I don’t really intend to so I haven’t tried it but looking around in the forums and asking friends confirmed that it is a technique that balance druids use. I’d use it myself if I did any PvP.

But with the change coming in the next patch, not only is this technique no longer possible with Starfall but some people have even questioned Starfall’s viability as a 51 point talent. Starfall’s alleged horrible damage output and the fact that it’s on a 3 minute timer has it in the running in worst 51 talent point debates. Personally I still find it a bit useful especially when I’m trying to kill a lot of targets fast when I’m soloing.

What do you think about this change?

Post from: WOW Obsessed

As I said earlier, the Spirit of Competition event is a great way to foster the competitive spirit in everyone, so that we can be somewhat involved in what the Olympics stands for. Aside from the love for competition, the Olympics is about the honor and the glory. Competing in the different battlegrounds in the game sure fits the bill since it brings honor and glory to your faction and for yourself. But isn’t that what the arena tournament is also about? The arena is basically a duel between two groups, wherein the team that performs the best is awarded accordingly. The arena is a quest for personal glory. Yet the spirit of competition does not involve the arena tournament.

I know that this is just a minor rant but it really doesn’t seem to make sense that the arena tournament isn’t involved in this event in any way.

Post from: WOW Obsessed