Battle for Azeroth Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Shadochi]

That's why when saying to consumers "this product will come in summer", you use the universal meaning of summer and that meaning is June / July / August.

I think we talked enough on that topic though, let's let it go.

And that's not the unviersal meaning for summer, for people near the equator summer is mid/early may to mid/early sep. For most European students summer is July, August, September. For people working in the agricultural sector summer depends on the weather in their area.

The astronomical calendar is the least subjective definition of seasons there is.

[Fahrad Wagner]

And that's not the unviersal meaning for summer, for people near the equator summer is mid/early may to mid/early sep. For most European students summer is July, August, September. For people working in the agricultural sector summer depends on the weather in their area.

The astronomical calendar is the least subjective definition of seasons there is.

Shadochi is right on many things here. For example in France, if you say "summer", some people might think "June July August", but most people will think "June 21st to September 22nd/23rd" so basically astronomical summer. I guess it depends where you are in the world, as some people probably prefer refering to the astronomical summer (that's what I usually do) and other like to refer to a more "generalistic" summer representating the "hot months".

[Shadochi]

Shadochi is right on many things here. For example in France, if you say "summer", some people might think "June July August", but most people will think "June 21st to September 22nd/23rd" so basically astronomical summer. I guess it depends where you are in the world, as some people probably prefer refering to the astronomical summer (that's what I usually do) and other like to refer to a more "generalistic" summer representating the "hot months".

And the "hot months" are also not just June, July, August, sometimes it's also may/september while sometimes it's only July and early August based on the weather.

[Deleted]

For most European students summer is June, July and August

that looks more real compared to what you wrote

[Shadochi]

that looks more real compared to what you wrote

Nope, in my region (countries surrounding my country) the earliest you can take your exams for the 2nd semester of the year is during June, and the next semester starts in October, so for us the summer holiday is July, August, September (if we finish all exams by the first deadline). But if you were to look by the weather, then summer this year in my area started in early may and ended in maybe even mid October.

Now, what you edited is partially true for highschool pupils and lower, for whom summer is 2nd half of June, July and August.

[Phunkle]

We translate videogames articles with my youngest student, he's a real nerd and it helps him getting really interested in English!

--

Also, I'm glad to see people are still fighting over the definition of summer and autum.

Can't wait to get the Alpha/Beta thing started. Some guys in here will pop a nut about that one.

[Shadochi]

Can't wait to get the Alpha/Beta thing started. Some guys in here will pop a nut about that one.

Oh, we already had that discussion/argument last week...

[Phunkle]

Oh, we already had that discussion/argument last week...

Good to know that there is still some reliability in this dark world.

[plz delete account]

September isn't summer. It's only summer if you are Blizzard and desperately want to call it summer in order to look better than you really are ("hey, we released in *summer*"). If you think it's OK to call September summer, I hope they stretch it more and adopt some obscure old calendar which will allow them to proclaim that 2018 ends on March 1, 2019 or something.

It is amazing what kind of shit Blizzard can sell to people who perhaps look and act mostly rational in real life.

September *is* summer.
Fall doesn't start until the 21st.

[plz delete account]

There is always the chance that Blizzard decides not to troll us and does F&F Alpha to Closed Beta as they used to do.

I've already told you guys thats what they are doing.

[serra2]

I've already told you guys thats what they are doing.

Like, the only reason they did the Alpha thing with Legion was because of how much of a shitshow Draenor was. Legion is in a way better place so there is much less of a need to have something out there immediately.

[Eurhetemec]

Seriously if someone says that tanking has not changed since Cata, they obviously have never tanked since then. Active mitigation completely changed the tanking gameplay, the fact that more so then ever before a good tank is expected to do solid dps changes the performance metrics of the role completely and M+ in Legion being a viable endgame content makes tanks the complete stars of the show.

It does and as someone playing tanks since MMOs existed, I can't pretend I don't like that.

As for PvP I think there is one fix that is most crucial of all. Blizzard needs to reward failure in PvP. In PvE you can play at a difficulty you are comfortable with and failure is extremely unlikely. In PvP you have far less control of your gaming experience which means you can spend a lot of time and get no reward through no fault of your own. In PvE there is a dungeon journal that makes what happens very clear; in PvP if a new player (or someone who doesn't PvP much) enters a BG they are not familiar with, they have no way whatsoever of knowing what the actual objective is other than *shudders* reading through instance chat. So Blizzard first needs to create proper tutorials or give information about PvP in a better manner and they need to adequately reward time spent, whether you failed or not. If their issue is rewarding bots, then fight bots, not bad players. And ffs, PvP needs its own UI elements, not to constantly piggy back on PvE UI.

Yep, pretty much exactly.

I get what they're afraid of to some extent - they don't want bots and AFKers ruining things for other players and even boring the people who are "playing" them. But it's ludicrous at this point, that I can go do some faceroll WQ and get gear that's an upgrade even before TF/WF, but doing PvP, where I have to put in literally 10x as much time (15-30 minutes instead of 90 seconds to 3 minutes, as most WQs seem to take), have to actually play my character, maybe have negative experiences from people yelling at each other, and so on, for a CHANCE, a CHANCE at a downgrade, a big downgrade and maybe if RNG likes me, 1-3 tokens to buy old PvP armour sets and the like.

It's like, what the fuck is this? I get that RBGs and Arenas presumably don't have the risk of bot'ing and so on, not with organised teams but come on Blizzard, this is ludicrous. Just re-do PvP if it's really that bad. They could start by deleting half the BGs, and focusing on making the others more dynamic. It was a lot harder to AFK or bot in Warhammer Online's BGs, I notice, because they were designed in ways that made them less susceptible to that. I know 2008 was a long time ago, but Blizzard seemed to entirely fail to learn from those (despite Chilton or Kaplan or someone praising them).

[Fahrad Wagner]

Can't wait to get the Alpha/Beta thing started. Some guys in here will pop a nut about that one.

Definitely. It can't come soon enough though...

[Drekmar]

Definitely. It can't come soon enough though...

Mfw people will start shitposting about what qualifies as Alpha and what as Beta.

[Shadochi]

I've already told you guys thats what they are doing.

Wouldn't we be able to see if the F&F servers were up tho? (Hopefully @Marlamin can clarify)

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Mfw people will start shitposting about what qualifies as Alpha and what as Beta.

Must... resist... impulse...

[Marlamin]

Wouldn't we be able to see if the F&F servers were up tho?

They moved everything around since last beta phase so we can't really tell what servers are alpha/beta servers right now. They're likely to be close to PTR servers, though.

We'd more likely notice the client being up. They can very easily do a very limited and closed alpha by encrypting the client like they did with SC: Remastered. We needed someone to give us the key to be able to datamine that.

[Yarathir]

I just really want to see the pretty new models datamined, build by build. Ever week is like mini-Christmas at that point.

[rda]

As for PvP I think there is one fix that is most crucial of all. Blizzard needs to reward failure in PvP. In PvE you can play at a difficulty you are comfortable with and failure is extremely unlikely. In PvP you have far less control of your gaming experience which means you can spend a lot of time and get no reward through no fault of your own. In PvE there is a dungeon journal that makes what happens very clear; in PvP if a new player (or someone who doesn't PvP much) enters a BG they are not familiar with, they have no way whatsoever of knowing what the actual objective is other than *shudders* reading through instance chat. So Blizzard first needs to create proper tutorials or give information about PvP in a better manner and they need to adequately reward time spent, whether you failed or not. If their issue is rewarding bots, then fight bots, not bad players. And ffs, PvP needs its own UI elements, not to constantly piggy back on PvE UI.

Yep, pretty much exactly.

I get what they're afraid of to some extent - they don't want bots and AFKers ruining things for other players and even boring the people who are "playing" them. But it's ludicrous at this point, that I can go do some faceroll WQ and get gear that's an upgrade even before TF/WF, but doing PvP, where I have to put in literally 10x as much time (15-30 minutes instead of 90 seconds to 3 minutes, as most WQs seem to take), have to actually play my character, maybe have negative experiences from people yelling at each other, and so on, for a CHANCE, a CHANCE at a downgrade, a big downgrade and maybe if RNG likes me, 1-3 tokens to buy old PvP armour sets and the like.

It's like, what the fuck is this? I get that RBGs and Arenas presumably don't have the risk of bot'ing and so on, not with organised teams but come on Blizzard, this is ludicrous. Just re-do PvP if it's really that bad. They could start by deleting half the BGs, and focusing on making the others more dynamic. It was a lot harder to AFK or bot in Warhammer Online's BGs, I notice, because they were designed in ways that made them less susceptible to that. I know 2008 was a long time ago, but Blizzard seemed to entirely fail to learn from those (despite Chilton or Kaplan or someone praising them).

Disagree completely. Everything below is my own opinion, obviously, but keep in mind that PVP has been my mainstay forever.

The problem is not at all that there is no reward for failure. Unless you are talking about rewards in form of gear (which are a miniscule portion of the rewards or at least they should be), but then it's so screwed up that not being rewarded with gear when you are losing a BG does not even begin to describe it. For one thing, you are not rewarded in that way when you are winning either.

The problem is not at all that there are no proper tutorials. This is easily covered by videos / friends / just plain exploring on your own, BG maps aren't complex at all and arena maps are even simpler.

The problems are these:

1. Terrible balance. This has always been the case. We always had FOTMs / dumb setups which look the same / very little novelty. We always had patches that create one-button idiot wonders that you either reroll into or work terribly hard to counter or just decide to wait out. We always had completely stupid chains of CC and completely stupid burst windows. Things were always improving bit by bit during the expansion only to be broken again in the next expansion. Then again a series of tiny, turtle-pace improvements, then it becomes kind of sometimes playable, then folks start saying "it might be better than in the previous expansion", and then it all goes out the window with the new jump in levels, new spells, new items, new everything that doesn't care about PVP balance one bit (and sometimes doesn't care about PVE balance much either).

2. PVE invading PVP. If I PVP, I *have* to be able to get the best gear for PVP from that PVP, period. If I have to do PVE, it's broken. It has been broken initially, then we had a long series of back and forths with Blizzard trying to reduce that, then they reduced that to manageable levels in MoP / WoD and we at last breathed. Then came Legion and we are back to square one, you have to PVE or you are going to be behind. GG

3. Lack of modern mechanics. WoW PVP is a dinosaur. They bolted it on and then all their care of PVP got reduced to patching classes and sometimes adding BGs / arenas. This is a far cry from what they should have done. This is not at all giving the topic justice. Where's my SOLO QUEUE? We don't have EVEN that. I won't even talk about anything else, they didn't make anything good for mass fights, they didn't make anything interesting with world objectives (the eternal towers / posts which you have to "capture" and fight around are the extent of their creativity here, they have been doing them for 8 years straight), their "experiments" with PVP modes are laughable ("ok, we'll have a mode where you are going to jump really high, that's fun, right?" - no, it's stupid, it's clear that you only thought about this "mode" for maybe a couple of minutes and the amount of effort shows). They are just sitting there doing nothing, while watching the rest of the world go past them.

PVP in Legion died because (a) you had to PVE, and (b) the ability pruning was terrible.

BFA doesn't seem to correct any of that. It doesn't take an Einstein to figure out that PVP is not going to go anywhere as a result.

[Shadochi]

They moved everything around since last beta phase so we can't really tell what servers are alpha/beta servers right now. They're likely to be close to PTR servers, though.

We'd more likely notice the client being up. They can very easily do a very limited and closed alpha by encrypting the client like they did with SC: Remastered. We needed someone to give us the key to be able to datamine that.

Oh well, guess you'll need to get some quantum supercomputers to bruteforce encryption then... or have everybody that's viewing wowhead contribute to that.../s

[rcshaggy]

Did anyone see this yet?


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I just really want to see the pretty new models datamined, build by build. Ever week is like mini-Christmas at that point.

You will get them soon man...Hopefully...
Yeah really want to see the new models too...What has changed etc...