Patch 6.1 - Primal Spirit Changes, Rep Mount Prices, Bots, Blue Tweets, FinalBoss #68

[chaud]

Season 2 Start, Update to 4-Piece Sets, Carnevil Build Tip, Fire Raekor's Barb

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Patch 6.1 PTR - Trader NPCs
Patch 6.1 adds some new trader NPCs that randomly spawn in your Town Hall. They have a daily quest that allows you to turn in ore, herbs, Raw Beast Hide, Draenic Dust, or Sumptuous Fur for Primal Spirit and other crafting reagents. These are mostly daily quests and are all flagged as Engineering quests in the database, but they are completable by everyone currently.

These Traders also sell the new recipes added in Patch 6.1, as well as Primal Spirit, for 5 x Raw Material each (Hides, Fur, Ore, Herbs, and Dust). Keep in mind that this means the things Primal Spirit can be exchanged for will likely drop in price, including Savage Blood and crafted gear.

Name	Rewards
A Bit of Ore Daily	Pick one: 15 4 4 4
More Ore Daily	Pick one: 15 4 4 4
Lots of Ore	Pick one: 15 4 4 4
Raw Beast Hides Daily	25
Raw Beast Hides Daily	Pick one: 15 4
Some Dust Daily	Pick one: 15 4
Some Dust Daily	Pick one: 15 4
Some Dust	Pick one: 15 4
Sumptuous Fur Daily	25
Herbs Galore Daily	15

Patch 6.1 PTR - Reputation Mount Prices
Forum readers may have seen that the latest PTR build significantly increased reputation mount prices. It turns out that this is a bug!

For people that don't know the prices for the rep mounts are going up substantially from 5k to around 40k / 50k. I find this change very unreasonable and not needed. Hopefully this isn't intentional, but right now would be the best time to provide feedback on this change.
The change to gold costs for certain mounts currently on the 6.1 PTR isn't intentional. The modified gold cost was part of a change that's still in currently progress to make the mounts/items vendor refundable for gold. Once those changes have been fully implemented, the gold costs should return back to its current levels on the live realms.

TL;DR, there are currently no plans to change the cost of the mounts in question when patch 6.1 goes live.

Patch 6.1 PTR - Slagworks (Raid Finder) Open This Weekend

The Slagworks wing of Blackrock Foundry (Oregorger, Gruul, and the Blast Furnace encounter) is open over the weekend on the PTR. Please use this thread to discuss and provide feedback.

World of Warcraft Bots

There's a lot of threads on this topic in here, but this one had the most entertaining premise, so this is where I'll say this.

We wage a constant battle against bots. Blizzard has an entire department devoted to tracking down bots, hacks, and the like, and punishing those who make use of them. In fact, if/when you have something to report, you can email that team directly at hacks@blizzard.com. They'd absolutely love to hear from you.

That goes for more than just bots, as well. Exploits, cheats, hacks -- any such behavior you see, send our Hacks team an email. Any evidence you can put together is great as well, video in particular. Toss something up on Youtube (can be unlisted) and send us the link. Make sure character names and realms are included. Getting in-game reports of bad behavior is good, but it's even better to have hard evidence of said behavior.

We probably can't completely wipe bots from existence. We sure as hell try, but the fight continues. We can, however, punish as many of those who use them as we can catch. And the more we catch, the better our ability to detect them gets.

And seriously, if you catch someone in the act, email hacks@blizzard.com.

(Also, juuuuust to be clear, we did not "create bots to speed up the BG queue process." That's silly.)

People are told SS/videos are not enough proof.
We won't outright ban someone out of the blue based on one screenshot. But typically, players that are using these sorts of obvious exploits have several reports against them as well. It's often difficult for us to catch those players in the act, so seeing visual evidence really helps. Videos also help us learn more about how a hack or exploit operates, so we can know what we're looking for in the future.

In short, screenshots and videos aren't enough proof on their own, but they certainly help us pull the trigger.

If an individual cheating or exploiting, and we record videos or take screenshots. They "cannot be used as evidence". Many years ago (2 at least) I stumbled upon a thread with two blue posts backing up that screenshots and videos cannot be used as legitimate evidence since they can be easily be modified.

Can you please; confirm or deny is this is still true in 2015? Regardless of PvE or PvP. I do understand calling out individuals on the forum is against the CoC/ToS however; if one were to properly follow through with a proper report, could said images and videos be used against the accused party? Or do we only give you guys our word and from there you do your investigation?
I've only been at Blizzard just shy of 2 years, so I'm not sure what the policy was before I got here. I just know what it is now, which is what I said above.

Calling out individuals publicly on the forums (aka "naming and shaming") is against the ToS largely to protect innocent players from harassment. As you can imagine, there are a lot of false reports. We'd hate for someone to be subjected to harassment in-game because some troll is pretty good with Photoshop, for example. It also helps us fight back against the bots if the surly individuals who create them are less aware of the exact evidence we're given.

Blue Tweets

Classes
Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Any plans on adding new odd pets for hunters to tame in 6.1? thanks in advance.
Anything in 6.0 that you can't tame that you want to tame? (Muffinus)

PvP
What class/spec do you play and what is your 3s experience?
I never answer this as it would only become a distraction to actual feedback. "X is good/bad because you do/don't play it" (holinka)
But I really try to play as many as I can time permitting. (holinka)

Have you played any 3s arena games recently, or any arena recently? Are you aware of the state of the game? Comments on scabbard?
I play arena and RBG regularly. They have always been my favorite part of the game. (holinka)

Trap Launcher indicator wasn't updated to recent changes?
Requires a client patch to fix. Will be correct in 6.1 (holinka)

Hey what do you think about having dampening start at the beginning of a match in 2v2? It's one of my key annoying issues right now
if both teams have a healer, it does start immediately. (holinka)

I hope you don't consider Ashran a failure. For all its flaws (which can be fixed!), it's the best wPvP in WoW yet. Thank you.
Thanks. We consider the queueing system a failure, which we intend on fixing.in 6.1. A lot of aggravation starts there. (holinka)

Poll - Patch Feature Usage
Which of these features are you using or planning to use? We recently showed off the Twitter Integration / Selifes and some of you may remember Patch 2.2 - Voice Chat. Keep in mind that these poll results are definitely not representative of the game's overall population.

FinalBoss #68 - Restoration Shaman
If you missed FinalBoss this week, you missed some Resto Shaman discussion! This Sunday at 4 PM EST is Balance Druids.

[moveth]

Voice chat was definitely the best. It was so good it didnt even work.

[bals]

why isn't none an option for the vote?

[Jin84]

How about none of the 3 Fave Patch Features?

[IIamaKing]

I vote, none all were/are a waste of resources.

[Darknessvamp]

Well considering voice chat is actually a feature (albeit one that doesn't work) that was added to WoW and the other two are fluff being added for things that can already be done, I think none of them are my favourite. (Though I voted Voice chat as that is the most nothing option I could see in the Poll)

[Auxora]

Agree, a better poll would be which of these 3 is the most useless feature. I don't know anyone who's used voice chat in years, and no I'm not spamming my Twitter with wow posts to annoy my friends to give Blizz free marketing. And I don't do IRL selfies, why would I do wow selfies lol.

[chaud]

Poll changed as requested.

[morph4037]

I vote, none all were/are a waste of resources.

^this

Poll changed as requested.

Thanks!

[Franzy]

Wasn't voice chat removed? Or is it back?

[robomatticus]

Who the fuck uses the in-game voice chat?

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

I voted for none, no and no. I wish they would work on a tabard and shirt tab instead of this shit.

[Deleted]

I'm not using Twitter so I have no use for the integrated twitter thing or the twitter camera. In theory the voice chat feature could have been great, but it never turned out that way. My favourite 6.1 feature is either the new Blood Elf models, depending on how they turn out, or the Heirloom tab.

I think Blizzard should work on integrating TeamSpeak next, to replace their voice chat feature. A Google Translate integration would also be great, for times when you end up in a group that doesn't speak English.

[papajohn4]

Thanks for this poll...and I am glad to see that I am not the only one that don't care about those features..There are so many things we have asked from Blizzard...things that was very popular and with tons of pages discussion and the answer usually was "do you want this or a new raid?" Now, even me that I am not fan of raiding, I don't believe that these features worth any of the resources spent on them.

The only feature that would be nice if done correctly would be the voice chat. If it was stable and quality feature and could reliable replace teamspeak/ventrillo...

[sociald1077]

If voice chat was reworked into the Blizzard launcher so that it would not go down when the client went down for what ever reason, it would be a lot better.

[Sathnick]

400 People use the voice chat???

[lolburke]

To anyone saying yes to the voice chat question: what is your reasoning? There are far better options, it's actually more convenient to use a third party program than to use the current in-game voice chat system.

[Deleted]

So what I fail to understand is how these features even got the go ahead!? We are consuming wow content quicker than ever and yet apart from a gated raid about to launch in nearly 3 months we have had nothing but quality of life changes and three useless features added! Black Rock raid and a few profession changes is not enough to justify another three to four months of no more content...surely dev time could have been spent on something better?

[thunderdragon2]

voted none, no and no, didnt even know there was a ingame voice chat, i dont have a twtter account and i dont want one and i dont care for selfies. what a waste of resources allmround

[dope_danny]

The trader seems like a really shitty way to try and patch over a crack in terms of garrisons ruining server economys for mats. Once again solo player solutions to a problem in an mmo. Thats not inspiring confidence.