Welcome to another addition of Platinum News! I am your friendly neighborhood Guild Master Wayne posting this edition from my brand new PC!
The new PC is on the left, which is about 6 times more powerful than the colossus on the right, amazing how much technology advances in 6 years, and I thank
SANTA for the wonderful early Christmas present!
Now onto the News! Ghostcrawler recently gave an interview to
Gamebreaker.tv concerning upcoming changes and balancing. Luckily as always,
MMO-Champion has given us a nice overview that we can
gank re-post for your reading pleasure!
World
- Mists of Pandaria daily quests have shown that
competing with other players for mob tagging and such is not fun. You
should be excited when there are other players around, not grumpy!
Blizzard is still actively looking for a solution to make it a nice
thing to have other people around.
- It isn't likely that
the concept of servers will ever disappear, but solutions for low
population realms are still being looked for.
- There is a
lot of variation in realm population as new patches come out, so
merging and unmerging realms as the population goes up and down wouldn't
make a lot of sense.
Questing / Reputation
- Blizzard may have overdone the daily quests a little
bit in pursuit of the goal of always having something for players to do
when they log in. If they had to do it again, something like the Golden
Lotus unlocking more and more areas would have been changed to just
unlock a new area that replaces the old one, keeping the number of
quests that you have to do every day the same.
- Golden
Lotus and Klaxxi have enough daily quests to burn players out, while
August Celestial and Shado-Pan have a more reasonable amount of quests.
- Lowering
the rep requirements on some of the rewards was an attempt to make the
amount of rep required before you could spend Valor Points more
reasonable. If they had to do it again, it might have been nice to lower
the requirements on some of the gear more so that there were some
things to spend Valor Points on without grinding so many reputations.
- Historically,
players would use alts as something to do after they were mostly
finished with what they wanted to do on their main character. Mists of
Pandaria's goal was to provide enough to do so that you never ran out of
things to do, which is nice with one character, but less nice with
many. Solutions to this problem are being looked at, but they want to
avoid the extreme of giving every character everything or making
everything account wide.
- One alternative being considered for reputation leveling is bonus reputation from your first scenario of the day.
PvE
- The difference in difficulty between 10 and 25 man this time around was much smaller than before.
- When
looking at raid DPS parses, you have to be aware of sampling bias. If
all of the good players are playing one spec, then the DPS of the other
two specs will be lower, as those players are messing around or don't
know what they are doing.
- It isn't okay for a class to
be really really bad on certain fights, but it is okay if some classes
are somewhat better on some fights. It is more important to have fun
encounters than it is to have an encounter where each spec is the best.
- Ideally we will never see a 5 or 6 boss raid tier again.
- The
new loot system has worked out well, as players don't have any reason
to be mad at each other over loot in LFR anymore. It is possible that we
could see it being used in dungeons as well, but that is still under
discussion.
- One thing being considered is offering
another choice to players that get the same item from a boss repeatedly.
This would be some consolation prize like loot, not another item from
the boss.
- The use of PvP gear in PvE is okay, as
grinding points to get an item rather than relying on a random drop is
an idea that some players like. The item levels are lower than what the
player would get in PvE, so the gear isn't overpowered. Players
shouldn't have to go and do PvP to get gear to use in PvE or vice versa.
- Patch
5.2 is going to take a look at what talents are very popular or very
unpopular and try and bring them back in line. Overall though, the new
talent system is working out well. Ideally there should be at least two
talent choices per tier that are good, if not three.
PvP
- PvP will never be perfectly balanced, but it can be
balanced enough to be fun and fair. The balance in Mists of Pandaria
still has some tweaking to do before it is at that point.
- Hybrids
could see some PvP power going towards their off role damage or
healing. It is okay for a DPS to throw out a few heals, but not okay if
they are as good as a healer for their team.
- It is
possible that base resilience could be increased to compensate for the
PvP Power increase on Conquest weapons, but they need more than a few
days of observation before a decision can be made.
- We
may see some changes in the future to make things better for people who
PvP on multiple characters, as far as earning Conquest Points goes.
- Many of the changes in Patch 5.1 were to address issues of PvP balance, and most didn't have a big impact on PvE.
Recently in 5.1 Blizzard made some changes to old raid content, where you may enter old raids without forming a raid group and made some encounters easier to solo, they did have to offer this clarification however:
We believe there was a lot of confusion when we originally announced
this change and we're certainly at fault for said confusion. The
original patch note was very vague to the point of being misleading. It
was never our intent to weaken old raid boss encounters to allow anyone
to have a chance to solo them, regardless of class, spec, or skill.
What we did change were encounters that were mechanically impossible for
one person to accomplish, solely for the purpose of ensuring players
have easier access to the hunt for the new rare companion pets -- the
drop rates of which are actually set to account for a group of three
players, not one.
Moving forward, though, we do not plan to adjust encounters for tougher raid bosses to be solo’able by all classes and specs.
Also there appears to have been an issue with groups using an addon to get into random battlegrounds as a way to bypass the "random" part, Blizzard has since patched, and offered the following explanations:
if you break it down, what does a full oQueue premade bring to the table that is unfair?
I’ll try to break it down as clearly as I can:
Any addon that enables a full, organized Battleground group to queue
against a randomly assembled group is creating a scenario where that
coordinated group has a huge advantage. That is not in the spirit of the
experience we want to provide in the normal Battleground queue. Playing
with friends is fun and important, but it shouldn't come at the expense
of the spirit of the game nor the fun of others.
The normal Battleground queue is for players to jump in and play against
other players in a similar situation. We realize that it's not a
perfect system, and we're still looking at ways to improve normal
Battleground queues further. Regardless, it's not meant for organized
groups to "pug stomp" and get quick Honor. We have built in outlets for
players that want to organize--if a competitive, social experience was
really the goal, then there are clear ways to achieve that.
The ultimate effect that this kind of queuing has had is to drive
players away from PvP. Perhaps it's been a long time since you've been
in a random group, but a lot of players will see that they're up against
a premade and simply quit. At best, they suffer through it. To an
extent premade groups count on this. Heck, one of the popular addons
announces opposing players that appear to have rage quit.
Addons aren’t really a viable solution for botting issues, but we do
take those issues seriously and we'll continue our work on improvements
to the Battleground system, including better ways to deal with botting
and other exploitative gameplay.
Now let us be honest, due to these addons and people like Rathamus
and Tiny, regular Battleground PVP had picked up and was growing by
leaps and bounds. That is what alerted you. More and more people were
turning to the "coordinated" PVP and fewer and fewer "random groups"
were being formed. The BG's were no longer sitting idle.
False. That is neither what 'alerted' us, nor were Battlegrounds ever even close to sitting idle.
What is true that there's been an increase in pre-made groups disrupting
the PvP experience for other players, though. Pre-mades in the normal
queue, however they are formed, are not something that we've ever been
particularly fond of. It had become more of an issue of late, so we
addressed it accordingly.
I know for a fact, that more and more of our games were against other
"coordinated" opposing players. Battles became longer, harder and a
whole hell of a lot more fun! They were not the Farm fest you claim they
were, they were true Player vs Player games. Not scripted, not forced
on anyone, not the repetitive grind of the normal wow game.
Perhaps this seemed to be your personal experience, but I assure you
that this was far from generally the case. Regardless, what of the games
that you played that weren't against other pre-mades? Just hapless
casualties to your fun, I suppose?
Based on your enthusiasm for "true Player vs Player" combat, I'm sure
that you'll find War Games and Rated Battlegrounds quite compelling.
You gave us everything we needed, including the idea, but then turned
around and slapped our hands, pointed a finger, called us a name and
said, this is NOT for you, it is for the REAL players.
You've made the assumption that all those things were accomplished
expressly so that you could queue into battlegrounds as an organized
group against disorganized opponents? That assumption is mistaken. If
you want organized PvP against organized opponents, as you claim, that
experience is readily available.
No one's wrist was slapped. There have been no suspensions over this
issue. We're just making our stance on the subject clear, so that
there's no room for misunderstanding.
Fix the bot problem and you'll see the premade "problem" fix itself.
Bots are a separate problem, with a separate solution. Please stop
conflating the two, because, and I'll say this as respectfully as I can:
this is complete nonsense.
Put simply, this argument is a red herring. For as long as there's been
Battleground PvP, there have been players looking for a way to destroy
their enemies to quickly and easily get fast rewards with a minimal time
investment. That's the bottom line here, or the variety of other
options available would be more compelling.
Bots aren't an issue in War Games or Rated Battlegrounds.
We love a premade PvP, and we love challenges. You guys could've come
out with a premade PvP random battleground where we can match against
other 10m/15m/40m premades PvP and go all out. Provide less honor
point/conquest point. It's like an RBG, but without the ratings
involved. Doesn't this solves all the problem everyone's having?
We're open to exploring the possibility of creating a pre-made queue for
Battlegrounds, or improving the War Game system in some way.
And now for some random blue posts, with a small mention of the farm improvements considered in an upcoming patch.
Battle.net Balance and Blizzard Store
Using Battle.net Balance for more goods and services is certainly
something we're working toward. We're kind of in an in-between stage
where we have some services working together but not others, and
unfortunately it's just not a simple thing to get as many systems and
platforms (some dating back to the original release of WoW) as we have
updated and integrated into a more cohesive experience. We'll get there
though, and in the meantime I do apologize you weren't able to get the
Cinder Kitten yet using Battle.net Balance.
Purpose of X.1 Patches
You forgot to mention those patches took months(I think ulduar was 5
month after Wrath launch) where as 5.1 was release in 2 months time.
This was never meant to be a raid teir especially considering most
people have not even downed most of the normal/heroic bosses.
Yeah, the main difference is really timing. In our quest to provide
content faster we've been shaking up the patch cycles and how we
approach our content roll out through the life of an expansion. Not
wanting to speak too soon, but it looks like the cadence of this
expansion is a lot closer to what we've been promising for years. It
makes sense to me that if most people are not progressed through the
initial content that the first x.1 patch (if it's going to arrive as
quickly as 5.1 did) doesn't include an additional tier. And if that then
means there are regular content releases thereafter... I don't know, at
least for as much time I have to play and as progressed as I am, it
sounds pretty good to me.
Patch 5.2 Farm Changes
How about a fishing pond, where we can chum the waters and get a
school of fish we want/need? Dunno if that current pool is deep enough.
Pfft.
That was actually mentioned in our last meeting with the development
team. While I can't make you any promises, I can tell you they geeked
out a bit thinking about that one.
WoW Graphics Engine
If the game had received absolutely zero graphical updates since
release, I could definitely get behind the idea of a complete revamp.
But that's really not the case. There's been a steady stream of updates
over the course of WoW's existence. A huge number of models and textures
have been improved. Yes, character models are still on the to-do list,
but we've acknowledged that many times and have said we're working on
them. I'm as eager to be sharing news on that with you as you are to
hear it, trust me.
Upcoming Transmog Restriction Changes
Yup, definitely planning to lift this restriction down the line. As
Zarhym said, we're currently hoping it'll make 5.2, but that's not 100%
yet. We're working to allow you to transmogrify items that share
animations, such as polearms and staves.
Also worth mentioning that the Celestial Steed, Winged Guardian, and Heart of the Aspects
are all 50% off on the Blizzard Store this week!
On a side Note: Any suggestions for the blog are greatly appreciated, I aim to make this site a destination, not just an afterthought, feel free to leave a comment or send me a mail in-game with any ideas, thank you!
-Wayne
