Arena Update, Official forums issue, Blue posts

[Boubouille]

Arena System Update
[blizzquote="Zarhym;http://blue.mmo-champion.com/11/14578687862-arena-system-update.html]Earlier this week the Arenas were temporarily disabled while we investigated rating calculation discrepancies. After thorough research, we have identified and created a solution to the issue, and we will be bringing the Arenas back online following off hours maintenance with the fix in place. Please be aware that because the rating issues were extensive, we have decided to reset Arena team and personal ratings to last week’s status. In addition, items and achievements which were gained illegitimately with incorrect ratings will be removed, and the spent arena points refunded. We thank you for your patience while we worked through these issues related to the Arenas. [/blizzquote"]
Kalgan also made additional posts about the arena rating system.

- The team/personal ratings and the hidden ratings are related to each other. Your team/personal ratings essentially drift toward your hidden rating, so if you deliberately lower your hidden rating and remake a team, your team/personal ratings simply won't get up to high ratings until your hidden rating does. His exploit as proposed simply doesn't work because his assumptions about the relationship between the visible and hidden rating are incorrect.

- Yes, a group of good players could still deliberately stomp nubs by intentionally losing lots of games to lower their hidden rating. A rating system won't stop that, but it still solves most cases of high rated players beating up on lower rated players. First, many of the cases where high rated players were being matched against low rated players wasn't because the high rated players were deliberately trying to stomp people, it was often accidental as high rated players had normal/natural reasons to change teams on occasion (helping friends, trying out new players, new comps, new strategies, etc). Second, it takes far more effort to deliberately deflate your rating down to low levels than it did to simply create a new team.

- Something that many of you have mentioned is that the rating adjustments are now not always "zero sum". However, a rating system doesn't need to be zero sum in order to prevent inflation. The new system uses a bayesian prior distribution in order to prevent inflation, which in simpler terms means there's math that enforces that players won't have ratings outside of some range (when working without bugs, of course). For the population size we have for arenas, this means we should see ratings range from around 600 to 2400 (again, assuming no bugs).

- There were two bugs with the system that we're in the process of fixing before we reactivate arenas (should be soon) that were causing serious problems (and distorting everyone's perspective on the system). One was in the functionality that seeded everyone's hidden rating based on their pre-3.0.8 patch performance, causing players to "drift" toward wildly inaccurate ratings, the other being in the way that personal ratings were adjusted.

Effects of rating changes in the middle of the season
I think you say that with the assumption that if it had been the start of the season, the bugs wouldn't have been there (not a good assumption in this case imo). The new system (when working) doesn't significantly change how hard it is to get the gear or who you have to beat to get the title/mount/etc (that's still entirely relative). It also tends to be mid/late in the season when the problems with the old system were the most exposed (with highly rated players starting new teams, helping friends, etc).

"Hidden" rating
It is not like personal rating. 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.

Rollback
Yes, I'm implying that we hope to roll back team/personal ratings back to what they were right before 3.0.8 went live.

Gold selling ads on official forums
There was a ... small issue with the advertising on official forums today. For a few hours the forums displayed gold selling ads, of course this was an error on Blizzard side and they have been removed quickly. Selling/buying gold is still forbidden and isn't a good idea.

Recently, there was a temporary error with our forum advertisements that caused a gold-selling ad to be displayed. At this time, we have resolved this error. Our stance, which is fully explained in the statement below, remains firmly against the buying or selling of gold, and we may take action against accounts that are involved in these activities.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/antigold.html

Blue posts

Burst damage in PvP
We think PvP is too bursty. What we haven't announced is what we are going to do about it. Risks of making ill-conceived changes include just shutting out classes or specs without a lot of CC potential, or perhaps having long stalemate-ish fights where nobody ever dies. But that doesn't mean we won't do anything.

We are also still discussing whether this is a problem only with certain classes (rogue, mage, paladin, DK and possibly Feral get mentioned the most) or whether damage is just too high in general.

Resilience will still make a difference. When you talk to players sitting at say 500 resilience they can notice a difference and by 800 or 900 they feel like they can stay alive (caveat: this is a very generalized statement and obviously isn't going to apply to every player or every situation).

Resilience on pets
I understand that players want, and think it is good design for, their pets to have resilience. That might still be something we do. Our concern has always been that players need to be able gang up and kill pets when they really set their mind to it. It can be very frustrating to hack your way through the hunter or warlock pet, finally dispatch it, then still have to deal with the master (who, to be honest, have ways for bringing their pets back sometimes). I understand the situation I described isn't at all happening now, but with enough resilience there is a risk of very tanky pets. (Source)

Queue mechanics
This is basically correct. There is a hard cap for maximum allowable players on a realm. The queue begins once the capacity has been exceeded. The estimated wait time is based on the number of people who have recently logged out of the realm, and subsequent players who have been allowed to login. You'll notice the number will sometimes fluctuate drastically before stabilizing again. This is usually due to a number of people logging out at once, quickly allowing more people on, or a lack of people logging off for a few minutes, causing the wait time to inflate. (Source)

[EU] ACcount-Wide Death Knight Creation
We believe this is not an issue at this time. Please note that a realm needs to be at least 90 days old before you can create a Death Knight there or you need a character on that realm of level 55 or higher. Character creation in general also needs to be enabled.

If you are unable to create a Death Knight on a realm where you are certain that it should be possible to, then please be sure to contact a Game Master in-game. And please be aware that "Chamber of Aspects" is currently not 90 days old. (Source)

Paladin (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Glyph of Light nerfed in a hotfix
This glyph is vastly overpowered. We are hotfixing the range from 20 yards down to 8 yards. In its current form it has basically become "proc a Circle of Healing" in the same patch that we nerfed Circle of Healing. (Source)

Glyph of Light - Explanations
Whether it was smart or not, the fact was that it was showing up as a gigantic component of paladin healing to the extent that it was having the impact of adding a whole additional spell to your rotation. That is far beyond the power that we want a glyph to have. Glyphs should be bonuses, about on par with passive talents. It is cool when they change up what you do a little bit, but this one crossed the line, especially at a time when we are trying to make AE damage not be such a trivial challenge for groups to overcome. We think it will still be a helpful glyph. (Source)

[EU] Arenas temporarily disabled
We have temporarily disabled all Arena matches while we investigate current rating calculation discrepancies. Further updates will be provided once we have additional information to share. (Source)

Priest (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Exciting changes for priests in 3.1
We have some exciting changes planned for priests. Many of them will make it in 3.1 (Ulduar). We hope to have them finalized enough to be able to announce some in the next couple of weeks, but that date might not work out for a number of reasons. The community has a way of overlooking all those caveats such as “at this time” or “assuming nothing changes” and suddenly we are “breaking promises.” (Source)

Rapture and Power Word: Shield hotfixes
We are hotfixing these -- the fix may be out already. We are looking into the PoM issue. Just after a patch we get a ton of reports that other players can't always reproduce. There are several "Hey, did my damage / healing go down from a stealth nerf?" posts. It's the Onyxia Deep Breathing phenomenon. (Source)

Healers rotations
When I say we want healers to have rotations, that doesn't necessarily mean you always press 112311231123 forever and install cooldown timers so that you don't go insane. Some dps classes are closer to that, but dps classes in general don't have to be as reactive to situations as do healers, so they can handle it.

What I am really getting at are things like Swiftmend and Riptide. Swiftmend is a very fun spell -- IMO one of the best ones in the game. But you can't spam Swiftmend. In fact, you have to be pretty smart about when you set it up and when you use it. And yes it has a cooldown. Riptide has a similar mechanic where you want to X when Y happens and you can come up with a lot of other examples. Riptide is fun. Swiftmend is fun. Greater Heal... eh, it does the job. But it's not a particularly fun button to use.

Disc gets this vibe with some of their shield mechanics, Grace and Penance. I do think that Holy could use a lot more of it though. The main "interesting thing" that happens with Holy is Holy Concentration and its Improved version. That's not bad, but we're not sure it's enough. I don't think we would actually use this specific example, but imagine a talent that sped up Greater Heal's cast time when you cast enough Flash Heals. Now you have a reason to "weave." You have a mechanic that rewards you (but doesn't require you) to switch from one thing to another. Another idea (off the top of my head) is that CoH healed more on targets with Renew on them (this steals too much from the Resto playbooks IMO). These don't necessarily have to be random procs or cooldowns, though sometimes these systems end up using those specific mechanics.

This is the kind of thing we'd like to do to Holy. (Source)

Discipline Tree
Disc is a really strong spec in PvP and PvE. We talked about it a lot today, and we are convinced that if healing meters showed absorbs and damage negated that Disc would be up there with everyone else. It's just hard to really get a handle on how much damage you are preventing.

I asked everyone around the table if they would feel comfortable having a Disc priest on main tank duty even with no paladin. Every one of them said yes.

(I know the tree still has some bugs and a couple of awkward areas in the tree. I was reacting more to the thought that having Holy and Disc as separate healing trees was doomed to failure.) (Source)

Shaman (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Elemental fixes in 3.0.8 and plans for patch 3.1
We do not plan to overhaul Elemental's spells in 3.1 so we need a longer-term fix for them. (This does not mean Elemental is getting no attention in 3.1.) We do plan on changing hunter abilities so we will have to rebalance them anyway. (Source)

Shaman role in raids
This was in reference to why we let Elemental shaman damage be low in Sunwell. Our old design for shamans was that they couldn't do damage or heal as well as other specs because they could do both and because their buffs were so good. We retired that dated philosophy and now intend for them to do competitive dps -- just below the pure dps classes. (Source)

Healing stream totem
I just thought I'd follow-up briefly that the Healing Stream Totem should in fact be 30 yards instead of 20 and is a bug. Also the Elemental Mastery is also currently bugged and the cooldown is not starting at the correct time. The cooldown should in fact be starting at the time it's cast. Both of these are anticipated to be fixed with an upcoming patch. (Source)

Warlock (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Haunt bug hotfixed
The problem where two warlocks cannot both Haunt has been hotfixed. Hopefully you will see it very soon. (Source)

[Xylia]

I've never seen the ad's on the forums because i have ad block plus, but i always though blizzard were advertising their own products, but instead they have third party adverts?

what are they so desperate for cash or they're trying to milk this cow dry?

[Deleted]

"We have exciting changes for Priests. Unfortunately everyone tells us Priest is great so we will nerf it to the ground but give a new shinny and ofc useless Tier set".

I wonder which people answered they would take a Disc Priest to the raid.... Well maybe when there is NO Holy Pala around. People take Discs because this content is soooo terribly easy. Ulduar will be different. GIVE Discs Priest ANY usefulness in the raid ffs!

Also advertisment was probably put there after some kind of "hack"... Well... it doesn't look good. What's next?

[Xacez]

[EU] Arenas temporarily disabled
We have temporarily disabled all Arena matches while we investigate current rating calculation discrepancies. Further updates will be provided once we have additional information to share. (Source)

Quite certain that aint supposed to be in the Paladin section.

[Izichial]

Hahaha, class on the goldselling ads. Well deserved.

[Odmanex]

loled so hard on the gold selling thing
GG blizz

[immalek]

It can be very frustrating to hack your way through the hunter or warlock pet, finally dispatch it, then still have to deal with the master (who, to be honest, have ways for bringing their pets back sometimes). I understand the situation I described isn't at all happening now, but with enough resilience there is a risk of very tanky pets

We're currently working hard to find a way to solve this problem without making Warlocks PvP viable.

[Iridiel]

Eheh, they nerfed the CoH abuse because it was too powerful, so all the CoH spammers respecced to Discipline (90% of the priests on my server are Discipline now), you don't need a paladin for MT healing, you don't need a Discipline priest for MT healing, all you need to do is an healer with common sense and a bit of knowledge of his class. A discipline one maybe useful for one or two fights in the game, but it's not "THAT" needed.

[bbr]

hilarious!
a gold selling ad on blizzard's own forum.

Shows how secure that is...
Just imagine if someone manages to stick a trojan or bad link into one of those ads.

[LavaDuck]

That shows why ads should never have been there in the first place.

[fr0hzn]

Shaman (Skills List / Talent + Glyph Calc.)
Shaman role in raids
This was in reference to why we let Elemental shaman damage be low in Sunwell. Our old design for shamans was that they couldn't do damage or heal as well as other specs because they could do both and because their buffs were so good. We retired that dated philosophy and now intend for them to do competitive dps -- just below the pure dps classes. (Source)

Funny :>
Enhancement Shaman are still one of the strongest DPS classes at the moment.
Weird philosophy

[Graviteh]

I am strongly convinced that Blizzard is just breaking WoW on purpose in order to make any future products more attractive. There are many changes that one has to be retarded to approve of.

[Dorky]

We think PvP is too bursty

Wow, really? So it had nothing to do with over two weeks of non-stop QQ-threads on the boards? ^^

[Pewpewarrows]

This is exaclty why "theorycrafting" fails so hard.

Whenever you get a bunch of geeks who claim that they are 100% correct (like elitist jerks for example) through maths, and then you get actual players who are doing the encounters for real and find better ways of doing things in practice, it blows all the theorycrafting out the window.

Too much maths and theorycrafting f**ked arena ratings.

Just let the players play ffs and screw you with your "people who are crap at the game deserves to do well too" attitude blizzard.

Scrubs will always be scrubs and they are scrubs for a reason. IF they play against top end players because that player rerolled team, then so f**king what.

Theorycrafting fails so much. And this just proved it.

If PvP is imbalanced then you fix it at the ROOTS of the problems, not create some retarded "hidden rating" system to cover up the fact PvP is imbalanced.

It's like putting a plaster over a 9 inch knife wound.

IT AINT GUNA STOP THE BLEEDING.

mmphing retards.


Blizzard are now going to come up with some retarded "fix" to try and fix the fix to the fix and screw everything up even more. Just quit already with trying to make everyone equal, let the players determine their own ratings, not have them determined automatically by some shi*ty system that calculates things before you even play ffs.

Someone's upset they got banned from the EJ forums for general idiocy.

How is this arena problem in any way a result of too much theorycrafting. Blizzard tried a brand new system without doing any PTR testing. Surprise, surprise that it broke everything.

And for the record it is very, very rare that someone manages to find something completely radical and new that's better than the theorycrafting performed on the EJ forums.

[Wintie]

Whats happening with this Warlock overhaul or whatever? Every time I read it there seems to be mostly irrelevant and rather rude comments by the developers. What with all these bugs you can't help but feel they're purposely trying to make us a joke.

[zsol]

Static Figures are never reliable with dynamic gameplay. Thats the point you failed to see.

... (complete nonsense about how good you are)

Manipulating peoples ratings so in essence crap players can win games is just a pathetic attempt at pleasing pathetic baby whiners.

... (complete nonsense about how bad others are)

By static figures you are referring to?

Crap players are still players. People normally like to play against others that have the same level of skill/gear, this system is there to help that happen. What is your problem?

[kambodian]

Whats happening with this Warlock overhaul or whatever? Every time I read it there seems to be mostly irrelevant and rather rude comments by the developers. What with all these bugs you can't help but feel they're purposely trying to make us a joke.

That!

+Swoosh is right
+laugh at the statement : "Pvp is too bursty" NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, RLY?

And repeating that resilience will make it better is getting really...old!!!

[zsol]

By static figures you are referring to?

Do you like being owned 10 times in a row by a much higher geared/skilled team with not a tiny chance of killing even one of them?

But to be honest, I think you understand what I am saying and just trolling on for the sake of "I'll have the last word". Go ahead.

[McCrank]

I am strongly convinced that Blizzard is just breaking WoW on purpose in order to make any future products more attractive. There are many changes that one has to be retarded to approve of.

Aren't they making a "next gen" mmo?

I'm pretty sure they would want all the 11.5+ million to buy that.

[deo]

regarding the rollbacks and enchants and stuff being returned.
I didnt do a single game this week, but instead used this week as an oppurtunity to grind loads of honor and buy the gear needed for myself.

I know that 75k is the honor cap and have brought 3 items this week using points from the previous week and grinded honor this week - will I be refunded back over the cap or is all that honor going to be lost? Because this is really cry-worthy if ive put in that effort and technically lose out on an item because of a fault at blizz's end.