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Armory Stats - Ashran
Today we are taking a look at some Ashran achievement stats. The total sample used was 3.1 million players in the US and EU. As always, keep in mind that this isn't every single player, so the numbers aren't perfect.

Feel free to leave suggestions and requests for stats you want to see in the comments.

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Name Percentage
Just for Me Activate a Class Specific Book Epic Item found within Ashran.
28.77%
Grand Theft, 1st Degree Loot 100 Artifact Fragments from enemy players.
29.87%
Grand Theft, 2nd Degree Loot 500 Artifact Fragments from enemy players.
13.44%
Grand Theft, 3rd Degree Loot 1000 Artifact Fragments from enemy players.
6.53%
Ashran Victory Kill the opposing faction Commander while controlling all points on the Road of Glory.
10.27%
Tour of Duty Complete each PvP Event at the following areas listed below.
10.24%
High-value Targets Defeat all of the creatures within Ashran listed below.
4.33%
Divide and Conquer Kill 5000 enemy players anywhere outside the Road of Glory within Ashran.
0.08%

Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
PvP Feedback
I see my "why do you play Heroes but not WoW PvP" tweet appeared on MMO-C. I'd like to clear up a few things. (holinka)
We very much value highly committed PvP players and their feedback about game balance is invaluable. Thank you for all your help. (holinka)
My original question was specifically directed at people who I would have thought don't PvP in WoW because they don't like PvP games. (holinka)
A side conversation happened and I probably didn't communicate with that person properly about how we do think balance is very important. (holinka)
Anyway, we are always striving to make a great game for you to play and we do very much appreciate your support. Thanks. (holinka)
I'd also like to add I received lots of great insight from my original question, so thank you. (holinka)

Game Design
It's been said before - an idea is only as good as your ability to execute on it, or get other people passionate about it. (craig_amai)
In my experience, real talent often comes in recognizing the great ideas that will fit cleanly with the rest of your game. (craig_amai)
And good designers know how to let ideas go quickly and keep looking, rather than getting attached to something with too much baggage. (craig_amai)
This year, I'm going to challenge myself to get a lot of ideas out, to learn to sell them in a small space (gg twitter), and to let them go. (craig_amai)
They won't all be great and I don't care if you don't like them. Hopefully some inspire something. (craig_amai)

It's all or nothing. One guided goal sets an expectation for structure vs. fully free-form.
Yeah, that's usually the case. You can tutorialize without specific goals though. (craig_amai)
And I personally think there are ways to set long term goals without explicitly spelling out the game along the way. (craig_amai)
I know you can't talk WoW but this is the exact issue why I don't like the Apexis hubs. No framing device (text). No fun.
Yeah, WoW has set an expectation for information that makes open POIs and puzzles prone to feel uncomfortable. Hard problem. (craig_amai)
I think THAT comes down to pace. When you have a cinematic flow driven by story, sudden halts in game play are jarring.
That's fair. Taking control of the camera from the players is easy to make painful if done in the wrong place or too often. (craig_amai)

Adding explicit hand-held goals to an open world game fundamentally changes the way players experience it. (craig_amai)
It changes the pace, the potential emotional investment, the expectations. It's a legitimate approach, but it's a dramatic design choice. (craig_amai)
I'm very interested in seeing more devs hold back in the hand-holding. On-board players gently, but let them unfold the game on their own. (craig_amai)
I wish the dev teams for CoD and BF would understand that. they don't even let you open your own doors.
Hah! Yeah. It's somewhat core identity for them though. Extremely approachable and very cinematic. (craig_amai)
Yeah, I'm probably not the target audience for those games. I prefer long SP campaigns because I don't do MP apart from WoW/HS.
Yeah, I can identify with that. I like CoD campaigns, but I LOVE a nice long campaign of Fallout: New Vegas. (craig_amai)

Heroes of the Storm - New Skins and XP Boost
Heroes is getting some new skins and mounts, along with a week of a 25% XP boost. Check out the full preview on HeroesNexus.



Blizzard Art Update
Blizzard has added more pieces to our World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor Art gallery.

This article was originally published in forum thread: Armory Stats - Ashran, Blue Tweets, New Heroes Skins and Mounts, Blizzard Art Update started by chaud View original post
Comments 59 Comments
  1. Buu's Avatar
    I'm baffled that so many people did Ashran.
  1. SlyPaws's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Buu View Post
    I'm baffled that so many people did Ashran.
    Are you horde or alliance?
  1. Felrane's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Buu View Post
    I'm baffled that so many people did Ashran.
    Since it was forced down everyones throat for the conquest cap week after week its not that suprising plus it was kind of fun at first.
  1. SlyPaws's Avatar
    I really hope that blizzard makes more changes to Ashran, for alliance it is completely useless to farm honor/conquest. I doesn't make any sense why they would lessen the reward for defeating the main captain.
  1. Rósa's Avatar
    Holinka needs to get of Twitter, the hole he is digging just gets deeper and deeper
  1. Schmilblick's Avatar
    Ashran needs to be deleted, that's all.
  1. mmoc420d930b3c's Avatar
    ugh... another wasted masterskin on Sylvanas. Just adding spikes and stuff to it, does not look cool :/ sorry I'm not 6 years old anymore.
    Thrall and the Lost Vikings have really good masterskins which add flavor or change their theme. Why not something similar? Sylvanas could have had a skin that resembles her Warcraft 3 design or the WoW-launch design with a robe etc. :/
  1. Dendraki's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by SlyPaws View Post
    I really hope that blizzard makes more changes to Ashran, for alliance it is completely useless to farm honor/conquest. I doesn't make any sense why they would lessen the reward for defeating the main captain.
    Just fine as alliance on the Oceanic realms to farm honor/conq.
  1. Mormolyce's Avatar
    But that Mecha-Tassadar looks the sa... HOLY SHIT!!!
  1. Thelonicus's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Rósa View Post
    Holinka needs to get of Twitter, the hole he is digging just gets deeper and deeper
    haha what? Is this about one man causing all the trouble in the world, like the case was with Ghostcrawler to some?

    "Contact @WarcraftDevs with feedback and questions related to World of Warcraft" their personal twitter accounts says.
  1. zekobunny's Avatar
    I went to Ashran once, after 10 minutes inside I wanted to rip my brain out. Never went there ever again. Warsong Gulch is 100 times better then Ashran.
  1. Battleborn's Avatar
    Would like to see Horde/Alliance statistics for Ashran Victory achievement.
    But at the moment there is no way i go back to Ashran as horde, because this commander spawn timer "nerf" made alliance dominate at events too. Everywhere you go there is all alliance members stay inышву their raid leader, victoriuos formation.
  1. Ryken's Avatar
    Of course Bounty Hunter statistics isn't listed in the achievements for Ashran, considering the Alliance version has been bugged 'cuz Forsaken Brains don't drop, even though its been reported since the expac launched and not fixed.
  1. Darksoldierr's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by zekobunny View Post
    I went to Ashran once, after 10 minutes inside I wanted to rip my brain out. Never went there ever again. Warsong Gulch is 100 times better then Ashran.
    The problem is, he keeps using twitter for posts like these whenit was proved time and time again that twitter is a terrible place for normal conversation. Use blog post or forum post but do not use twitter for questions like this for god's sake
  1. Shiroh's Avatar
    I did a lot of Ashran until I got all achievements and I actually enjoyed it whenever battles actually happened.
  1. ablib's Avatar
    I doubt this is possible now, but I wonder what the stats were for Wintergrasp, 4 months into Wrath. And the same for Tol Barad in Cataclysm.
  1. mmoc68db2f40c0's Avatar
    Whats Ashran? That place where before the 6.1 patch i could almost never get in and never heard of the horde winning?(litteraly never, ofcourse we must have won 1-2 times) and after 6.1 i can always get in but there are never more than 10 players in? Also thats not a pvp zone, its a whatever-zone, with no rewards and people just run here and there til they die from something and return to the base. I used to enter Ashran before the reset ever Tuesday, sticked around till i had 4000/4000 honor(about an hour or so) just so i could exchange it for Seal of Tempered Fate. Now i cant even do that since there are NO people there. But, you know, i got the selfie cam, many toys, i can play music to that garrison thing so everything's fine
  1. MrExcelion's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Buu View Post
    I'm baffled that so many people did Ashran.
    At the start of the xpac, the 660 conquest gear was really good at the time and was competitive with other sources, especially with some classes having good PVP set bonuses on top of that
  1. Ghost1987's Avatar
    They tried to recreate world pvp via Ashran but it's still not the same as it was in Vanilla and here are my reasons.

    Back in vanilla, world pvp was usually in any questing zone and usually began with a 1v1 encounter. I played a druid at the time so I was able to scout out where the players were quickly. Anyway, once we began to fight, it became personal as they'd call in some of their friends or utilized the local defense chat. Then I'd call in some of my friends or used the local defense chat and we'd be fighting for hours protecting our egos. In Ashran, it's too anonymous so if you die, you don't necessarily have the urge to find some way to retaliate because you're mainly killing and looting. I also enjoyed how the local defense chat worked because it listed your PvP title before your name so you can gauge the caliber of player that is having trouble or is responding to a help call. For instance, if a high warlord asked for help on local defense, you can safely make the assumption that he is getting outnumbered as opposed to a scout who might just be having a problem with 1v1.

    I don't think I've ever met one person who likes to get bulldozed by 10 players at once but that's generally the case if you stray away from any of the groups. There's no environment to begin a personal vendetta against someone because everyone stays in packs. You're either bulldozing others or getting bulldozed and that's not really entertaining.

    Holinka asks why people don't PvP. Well, as someone who only does PvE now, have a few reasons for that.

    Originally, I got into WoW for the PvP. I geared myself up in PvP gear so I could go harass the opposing faction in world pvp settings. I didn't really care much for organized pvp, although AV was pretty fun due to its suspenseful nature at the time. Maybe I was on more of a balanced server back then, but I used to see the opposing faction quite often while travelling through a zone. Now, the servers are either horde dominant or alliance dominant so it's a rare occasion that you come across someone from the opposing faction to PvP. Unless I want to do organized PvP, I don't really have much use for the PvP gear anymore. PvP gear was like a concealed weapon for me, if I felt that I was going to engage in PvP soon, i'd swap to my PvP set just to be ready.

    Organized PvP is pretty bland. The bgs are creative but it still has that bulldoze element to it. You're either the team doing the bulldozing or you're getting bulldozed. There's not a lot of freedom of choice because you pretty much have to stick with your group or get picked off as a straggler. For premade PvP such as arenas or RBGs, the community there seems to be a little childish. In RBGs, everyone seems to forget that they're adults and spend the entire time screaming in vent or mumble. Arenas can be fun but it's discouraging if your arena partner stops playing the game for a little bit and then you're left to have to find a new arena partner who you have to establish that synergy with again. In PvE, you don't really need synergy, you just have to know your role and the mechanics. If everyone knows their part then the bosses go down so I find that PvE is easier to get into.

    Anyway, long post but these are my thoughts about the whole ordeal.
  1. mmoc68db2f40c0's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Jastify View Post
    Would like to see Horde/Alliance statistics for Ashran Victory achievement.
    But at the moment there is no way i go back to Ashran as horde, because this commander spawn timer "nerf" made alliance dominate at events too. Everywhere you go there is all alliance members stay inышву their raid leader, victoriuos formation.
    I feel you. Before the spawn timer nerf, they stayed in front of our base (or inside) and we could atleast do some events.

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