Update (3:00 PM EDT): Celestalon made a post about Shadow Priests, his first post in 7 months.

Solo vs. Group Play, PYWT: “Stone Age” Barbarian

Popular Decks of the Week, Viagame House Cup Finals + Decklists

Dustin Browder Tweets Round-Up, Madeon at the Launch Event, Plays of the Week Wombo Combo

Armory Stats - Blackrock Foundry Progression
Today we are taking a look at the Blackrock Foundry progression of players in each difficulty. Now that achievements are account wide, we can group characters by account and get an idea of what percentage of players (not characters) have defeated a boss on each difficulty at least once, based on progression data.

The data used today is a sample made up of 2.1 million accounts, with at least one character active after April 1. The sample is slightly biased, as players who are not in a guild are much less likely to appear in our sample.

The second chart uses the number of players that killed Gruul in each difficulty (except Mythic, which uses Beastlord) as the base of participating players for that difficulty. Each difficulty can be toggled on and off by clicking the name in the legend.

We looked at Siege of Orgrimmar stats in January 2014 and May 2014. You can leave suggestions for future stat posts in the comments!

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Blue Tweets
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Flying
Not posting on your site, and only having one response to a player made thread about it was a bad move
Yeah, it's obviously caused a lot of friction that we hadn't anticipated. Clearly a mistake on our part. (CM_Lore)

Q&A
By "legitimate" you mean the ones you are willing to field, probably not the onese most find important.
We will definitely be talking about flight in the Q&A. (CM_Zarhym)

Will you please confirm that flight IS something that will be addressed in this Q and A? Thanks.
We will definitely be talking about flight in the Q&A. (CM_Lore)

Classes
Are there any considerations to lower passive Parry and Dodge again in 6.2?
Certainly if needed. Will look into it. (holinka)

Art
Indeed Zarhym. Wouldn't want those poor underpaid artist to actually do a good job I guess? Really miss the old Blizzard Quality.
It's not at all realistic to design ALL armor to fit ALL char models just in case. But look for any reason to take issue w/ us. (CM_Zarhym)

Misc
Apparently selfie cams were an appropriate use of dev time. Not farahlon though.
So you admit you only count additions to the game YOU care about. This is helpful. (CM_Zarhym)

Ghostcrawler Tweets
While the developers have been pretty quiet since @WarcraftDevs appeared, Ghostcrawler still occasionally talks about WoW. Remember that he no longer works for or speaks for Blizzard.
Originally Posted by MMO-Champion
Developer Communication
What's your view on how silent the WoW devs have been on classes changes since you left?
I'm obviously not privy to their thought process. Do remember there is a difference between individual intent and company policy. (OccupyGStreet)

Yeah Just seems like a lot of "we want feedback" *gets feedback* "lol jk we wont do that"
That is something I have worked on articulating my whole career. We want your feedback but we still design the game. (OccupyGStreet)

Understand and respect your customers/players should be important to devs.
I think it almost always is. Players sometime mistake disagreement for neglect. (OccupyGStreet)

Greg, always wandered if Activision and Cata where the breaking points when the Buddy GC had to stop to chat in the boards.
It became Blizzard policy, but it wasn't from Activision. Not sure what the policy is now of course. (OccupyGStreet)

Reputations
Hey greg what do you think about reputations in wow being as dumbed down as it is now with little to no useful rewards
I'm afraid I'm not familiar enough with the content. Reps were always challenging to strike a balance between fun & mandatory (OccupyGStreet)
As I like to say, it's really hard to make fun and rewarding content feel optional. (OccupyGStreet)



Computers - Setup of the Month
Each month or so we will post a couple of hardware setups for those of you who are thinking of upgrading their computer!

This month
The current SSD prices are trending slightly downward again over the past few months, with most SSDs under $0.50 per gigabyte when on sale.

New GPUs from AMD may be coming in the second half of this year, but no official announcements have been made.

Depending on how much you want to overclock, you may need to spend a bit more for a better CPU cooler like the NH-D14.

Unless you are doing a lot of video rendering or streaming, you do not need the 4790K and should spend that money elsewhere.

Make sure to keep your AMD and Nvidia drivers up to date.

Don't hesitate to post any feedback in the comments of that news post, and don't forget to visit the Computer Forum for any extra questions!


Peripherals/Monitors
ComponentPuppy Dolphin
MonitorASUS VS228H-P 22-Inch Monitor - $117ASUS VS248H-P 24-Inch Monitor - $155
KeyboardKensington Pro Fit Media Keyboard - $22Cyborg V.5 - $45
MouseLogitech G402 - $41Razer DeathAdder - $55
SpeakersCreative A250 2.1 Speaker System - $27Logitech Z313 Speaker System - $35
ComponentNarwhal Unicorn
MonitorDell P2414H Monitor - $235Dell U2412M - $250
KeyboardLogitech G510s - $85Corsair Vengeance K70 - $120
MouseLogitech G502 - $61Razer Naga 2014 - $62
SpeakersLogitech Z323 2.1 Speaker System - $55Logitech Speaker System Z523 - $85


Puppy and Dolphin
All of these parts can be mixed and matched to create a build between Puppy and Dolphin.
ComponentPuppy Dolphin
CaseNZXT Source 210 - $48NZXT Source 210 - $48
Power SupplyEVGA 600B - $60EVGA 600B - $60
CPUAMD FX-6300 - $97AMD FX-8320 - $136
HeatsinkCooler Master Hyper 212 EVO - $31Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO - $31
MotherboardASUS M5A97 R2.0 - $68ASUS M5A99FX PRO - $103
MemoryKingston HyperX Blue 4GB 1600 - $318GB G.Skill DDR3 1600 - $66
Graphics CardMSI R7 260X - $110ASUS R9 270X / GTX 960 - $160 / $190
Hard DriveWestern Digital Caviar Blue 500GB - $57Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB - $70
DVDAsus 24X SATA DVD+/-RW - $21Asus 24X SATA DVD+/-RW - $21
Total$523$695 - 725


Narwhal and Unicorn
All of these parts can be mixed and matched to create a build between Narwhal and Unicorn.
ComponentNarwhal Unicorn
CaseCooler Master HAF 912 - $70Corsair Air 540 - $120
Power SupplyXFX PRO 750W - $114XFX PRO 750W - $114
CPUIntel 4690K - $236Intel 4690K - $236
HeatsinkScythe Mugen 4 - $52Noctua 6 NH-D14 - $78
MotherboardASUS Z97-A - $153ASUS Z97-A - $153
Memory8GB G.Skill DDR3 1600 - $6616GB G.Skill DDR3 1600 - $110
Graphics CardXFX R9 280X - $260XFX R9 290X OR ASUS GTX 970 - $330
Hard DriveWestern Digital 1TB Caviar Black - $70Western Digital 2TB Caviar Black - $125
SSDCrucial BX100 250GB (Review) - $97
OR
SAMSUNG 850 EVO 250GB (Review) - $100
SanDisk Extreme PRO 240GB (Review) - $140
OR
SAMSUNG 850 Pro 256GB (Review) - $143
DVDAsus 24X SATA DVD+/-RW - $21Asus 24X SATA DVD+/-RW - $21
Total$1139 - 1185$1384 - 1430


Overwatch - Symmetra Gameplay
We got another look at Overwatch gameplay with the release of some Symmetra footage.

This article was originally published in forum thread: Blackrock Foundry Stats, Blue Tweets, Setup of the Month, Symmetra Gameplay started by chaud View original post
Comments 107 Comments
  1. chaud's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by kamuimac View Post
    "The data used today is a sample made up of 2.1 million accounts, with at least one character active after April 1. The sample is slightly biased"

    "slightly" when its 2.1 mln accounts out of 7 mln -_-
    You ignored the rest of the sentence and ignored the fact that ~half of the 7 million "subscribers" are in Asia, which we don't track. We track a total of ~3.3 million US and EU accounts, which is likely the vast majority of them.
  1. beanman12345's Avatar
    Who gives a rat's ass if someone thinks anything in this game is "mandatory." Just make fun and rewarding content for everything. Period.
  1. Shiroh's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by beanman12345 View Post
    Who gives a rat's ass if someone thinks anything in this game is "mandatory."
    Those that think something is mandatory do give a rat's ass, obviously. You are contradicting yourself. Then again, mmo-champion is flooded by self-entitled millennials, so what did I expect.
  1. beanman12345's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Shiroh View Post
    Those that think something is mandatory do give a rat's ass, obviously. You are contradicting yourself. Then again, mmo-champion is flooded by self-entitled millennials, so what did I expect.
    My point is they shouldn't care about those people, cause those people are dumbshits. There is no contradiction in what I wrote at all. Then again, mmo-champion is flooded with dumbshits, so what did I expect.
  1. Gadzooks's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Kektonic View Post
    "It's not at all realistic to design ALL armor to fit ALL char models just in case. But look for any reason to take issue w/ us."

    Yeah because you guys have done such a bang up job with this entire expansion that everyone should just sing your praises right? Give me a fucking break.
    Zarhym is going to pull a Tseric. He's close. You can feel it. He's being openly antagonistic to his customers. He's taking it personally, and lashing out. His boss should be pulling him out of a public position right now and saying "You need time off the front lines, big guy", and let Lore and Bashiok take over for a while. Simply for PR reasons, they need to keep him away from customers. He's being openly rude. That's not his job.

    As for the issue at hand, i would not have brought up Farahlon, but instead brought up the useless transmog sets from salvage crates that have no transmog ability, that they took time to design for "completeness". Well, why does that principle apply to other sets? Why do items nobody wants get so much attention, and the ones people do want, like Admiral Taylor's sword, or this helm, require a fight to get?

    They need to learn that if you treat people like children, they'll act like children. I have ZERO sympathy for Zarhym. He helped create the tension that's biting him in the ass right now. I care, as a human to another, that he needs to step away for his mental health, but I'm also laughing at the chaos they created, and how he's accusing everyone of having an agenda.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Bogrim View Post
    This expansion is becoming a signature of poor communication and subscriber drops. At this rate, it won't be remembered as "the expansion that brought WoW back" but as "the expansion where WoW lost tons of subs and also decided to kill flying in an interview." Blizzard needs to be much more forthcoming and stop leaning back on their arrogance, such as "the subs will come back for new content" and "only we know what's best for the game." Wasting development on the "selfie cam" is a completely valid criticism when your players are starved for content, and the attitude to simply not care for keeping subscribers but just wait until you release the next expansion is the attitude of a defeatist.

    It was never hard to win back their players. All they have to do is make content at a more regular phase. For some reason they seem to imply that's not possible. How is not possible? Have they even explored the possibility of releasing patches more frequently? People wouldn't be complaining in the first place if they weren't stuck in their garrison whenever there's nothing to raid.
    In years to come, this will be the era that is never discussed in the halls of Blizzard. (Yes, they'll still be around, but WoW might not be). If new hires mention it, the topic will be changed, or people will just groan and walk away.

    Their collective "tone" changed as soon as WoD was announced. Clearly, the voices on the team and within the company that vote for more communication got outvoted or shut down. Seen that happen a million times.

    Also, I'm starting to wonder if Zarhym's pissy attitude and Ion and the other devs belligerent tone are a result of not just the players complaining, but pressure from within. There's a lot of devs in new positions who have to prove themselves, and there may have been a lot of pressure to not take the direction they did, and they're drowning, and are trying to pull a win out at any cost. Seen that a million times, too. Zarhym may be on Team Ion, and is reacting to criticism within and from outside the company. I'd LOVE to be a fly on the wall in the hallways of Blizzard these days, to see the mood and where the factions are, and what's really going down.

    It would explain a lawyer being the mouthpiece of the most disastrous expansion ever. The other lead devs like Kosak and Chilton may have said "hey, you wanted this, bud, it's yours to defend, leave me out of it. Go do interviews, see what happens to you."

    My only hope is, if that's true, the brain trust (/sarc) that came up with WoD is told to go sit on the bench, and a different team designs the game moving forward.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by chaud View Post
    You ignored the rest of the sentence and ignored the fact that ~half of the 7 million "subscribers" are in Asia, which we don't track. We track a total of ~3.3 million US and EU accounts, which is likely the vast majority of them.
    Interesting. Chaud, it's true half the subs are Asian? Blizzard hasn't released hard numbers on that in years. Not a HUGE revelation, but very interesting, and good to know to put numbers into perspective.

    Woould it be sad to say that of the 3.3 million subs you track, 1/3 pvp, so they don't track in polls on raiding? What kind of numbers do you have access to there? I'd love to see a participation rate for Pvp, compared to this time last year. Granted, Ashran makes it all screwed up, and the bot issue doesnt help, but I'd love to know what percentage of the base primarily plays pvp, and if it's 1/3, they're definitely not getting 1/3 of the dev budget.
  1. mmoc4359933d3d's Avatar
    What helm are they talking about in those blue tweets? I checked the conversation but I'm none the wiser.
  1. perenor's Avatar
    I'm for once actually shocked by how out of touch Blizz CMs are with their customers, or by how badly they are at communicating properly...

    Here the removal of flying has been a hot topic for the whole of the expansion, and Lore (of all people) says they didn't anticipate what would happen with how they announced it? Lore, you co-hosted Legendary and had some damn insightful thoughts when you weren't on the inside. Now that you're on the inside, it's like you drank the kool-aid. I get that you have to be somewhat diplomatic, but "we didn't anticipate"?

    And Zarhym. That dude need to step away and take a break. Obviously the Selfie cam & twitter integration doesn't directly compare to a full zone and all it would be, but taking the bait like that is insane. It's just fueling the fire.

    As for the armor/race combo. Screw that, you put something like Transmog into the game, you need to do your best to make sure it all looks good on every combination. That's the whole purpose of the silhouette and static sizes of each race/gender combo.

    Unless, maybe that's what they want. Maybe the CMs hands are tied and there's a real serious breakdown of communication within the company that's far worse than we thought. I'm sure we've all gotten that new boss that just won't listen to anything being said or done. They're new to the position and they know right, and even if you've been there for 10 years you just don't know crap anymore. Maybe that's the point, piss off the customer base so badly that it comes to a head. That's what I'm going to go with. This is all a passive aggressive way to get the customers pissed off enough to enforce other change in the departments.
  1. chaud's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Gadzooks View Post
    Woould it be sad to say that of the 3.3 million subs you track, 1/3 pvp, so they don't track in polls on raiding? What kind of numbers do you have access to there? I'd love to see a participation rate for Pvp, compared to this time last year. Granted, Ashran makes it all screwed up, and the bot issue doesnt help, but I'd love to know what percentage of the base primarily plays pvp, and if it's 1/3, they're definitely not getting 1/3 of the dev budget.
    We only can see what you can see on armory. Achievements, ratings, season games played/won/lost. The other 1/3rd in our DB haven't logged in since April 1.

    Quote Originally Posted by Valarius View Post
    What helm are they talking about in those blue tweets? I checked the conversation but I'm none the wiser.
    Frostwolf transmog from a PTR build last week.

    Quote Originally Posted by perenor View Post
    As for the armor/race combo. Screw that, you put something like Transmog into the game, you need to do your best to make sure it all looks good on every combination. That's the whole purpose of the silhouette and static sizes of each race/gender combo.
    IIRC it is armor they added for NPCs during alpha/beta and players asked for it, so they made it available. They only made an Orc version of the helm, as only NPCs were originally going to have it.
  1. perenor's Avatar
    IIRC it is armor they added for NPCs during alpha/beta and players asked for it, so they made it available. They only made an Orc version of the helm, as only NPCs were originally going to have it.
    Bah. My thoughts still stand. There are tons of armor items that are NPC only. If you make it available to the players, do it right, or not at all. Certainly Zarhyms response is just moronic. Someone needs to take his keyboard away for a little while.
  1. Gadzooks's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by chaud View Post
    We only can see what you can see on armory. Achievements, ratings, season games played/won/lost. The other 1/3rd in our DB haven't logged in since April 1.



    Frostwolf transmog from a PTR build last week.



    IIRC it is armor they added for NPCs during alpha/beta and players asked for it, so they made it available. They only made an Orc version of the helm, as only NPCs were originally going to have it.
    Wasn't that the argument for the Stormwind set as well? Which the players finally got...9 years later.

    Anyway, I don't care, my issues over WoW are larger than one helm. He could have been more pleasant saying no, though.
  1. Nuvuk's Avatar
    Lore in his tweet about flying sounds kind of sarcastic. That isnt good if it is sarcasm.
  1. Shudder's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by ChaosWolf View Post
    That's not what that number means at all. Blizzard is not down to 2.1 million, you dolt. 2.1 million was the sample-size used.
    Nah, they were using 3.1 million accounts to do the graphs before the huge sub loss. Now it's down to 2.1 million. You actually think that 7 million number is western accounts? Oh my, you're so adorable.
  1. Queen of Hamsters's Avatar
    Watch them kill an 8 year old feature for arbitrary reasons and then watch them act surprised that there's an outcry by people making it clear that they actually ENJOY said feature...

    They are so out of touch these days, I find it hard to believe that this company gave us wotlk and mop...only Blizzard can kill WoW indeed. And now they get pissy with players calling them out on their fucked up values and priorities... GG.
  1. Adamas102's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Buu View Post
    Wait, WHAT!!??? Blizzard finally admit they want us to compromise to THEIR VISION? We should care and want for the game what THEY define we should?
    Are we DRONES?
    NOOOO.... The costumer is right in caring and wanting whatever they feel. And it's the role of the company to attend to or lose the customer.
    The fuck is with this mentality? It's not YOUR game to design. It's their game. Companies are always open to receiving feedback, but they are in no way obligated to act on what the customer (or a certain segment of the customer base) wants. In the end it is most certainly THEIR VISION. It will always be the game they want to make, not the game their customers want them to make. If that drives certain customers away, then so be it. I'd rather them stick to whatever vision they have than try to cater to every whim of the player base (which is never 100% in agreement on anything anyway).

    If you don't like it (and you're certainly free not to) then you can fuck off.
  1. Stormykitten's Avatar
    I really miss GC. But at the same time, I wish him happiness at Riot, too
  1. Grevie's Avatar
    Biased Daata is way yo bias...... 0 data about $5 subs Asian Acounts.
  1. MrExcelion's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Krazzorx View Post
    Lol, ashes, ashes is an awful achieve. (Albeit extremely few do these achieves anyways. Which is why they changed it up in SoO so you didn't have to drag unwilling guildies around)
    Yeah, SoO chieves were easier [less annoying anyway], and you could just queue up for a wing in flex mode.
  1. Logwyn's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by moveth View Post
    Symmetra seems pretty great. Im excited as hot damn for Overwatch.

    #FreeMoveth2015
    Looks interesting.. but am I the only one that gets a feeling the people playing don't play FPS very much. Could just be me.
  1. Buu's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Adamas102 View Post
    The fuck is with this mentality? It's not YOUR game to design. It's their game. Companies are always open to receiving feedback, but they are in no way obligated to act on what the customer (or a certain segment of the customer base) wants. In the end it is most certainly THEIR VISION. It will always be the game they want to make, not the game their customers want them to make. If that drives certain customers away, then so be it. I'd rather them stick to whatever vision they have than try to cater to every whim of the player base (which is never 100% in agreement on anything anyway).

    If you don't like it (and you're certainly free not to) then you can fuck off.
    The fuck with YOUR mentality? So a game that gives ZERO interesting things to their customers, should keep people being customers WHY?
    Why the heck should people keep paying subscriptions and participating in something that gives a rat's ass about what they rthink and like?
    SPECIALLY when it's an MMO. A MASSIVE MULTIPLAYER that shrink their audience?
    You are set to be a cry baby, whining about empty servers very soon, fanboy.

    Geez, go open a business with this mentality to see how long it goes. EVEN BETTER. GO CHECK WHAT HAPPENED TO EA FOR KEEPING "THEIR VISION".
  1. frijoles's Avatar
    @chaud

    For system of the month, I think overall it's an awesome job, but why is a 1080p monitor still on there for the unicorn? Its clearly a system that can put out alot more power than most, and having a 1080p monitor and never dipping below 120FPS is a little crazy.

    I propose a 1440p monitor minimum at that level. I'd be more than happy to provide suggestions.

    edit- I don't really read the comments on this website, but I read almost everything posted, is everyone always this angry?

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