Patch 4.0.3a Shattering preview, Wintergrasp Balance, Rated Battlegrounds, Fan Arts

[Eleveneleven]

The first pic just looks like some random anime art. What's it doing here? Also it's BS you are restricted to a bracket every week. Why don't they do that to Arena? It's bullshit.

[Zokten]

good job blizzard with 4.0.3 patch
- 5v5 wintergrasp over whole day because alliance is lazy on my realm (they always played with 15+ tenacity) || sometimes never receiving invite ... In that case its almost impossible to take base with few players to kill and few that helps. I'm punished because somebody else is lazy?
- ok... 1:1 ratio balancing system in wg ... then implement same into battlegrounds. Just lost 3 last IoCs because 40 alliance vs 30 hordes

This is what I call - finding problems there where they are none. Wintergrasp is world PvP. You can make it instance right now, because after 4.0.3 it lost the last signs of world PvP zone.

World PvP has been fucked for a long while now, might as well get over it by now seriously its what I had to do.

[Deleted]

This is what I call - finding problems there where they are none. Wintergrasp is world PvP. You can make it instance right now, because after 4.0.3 it lost the last signs of world PvP zone.

Exactly. This is just another perfect example for retarded decisions at Blizzard.
Sometimes i wish i could post on the WoW US Forums with my EU Account, i would flame those retards at Blizzard on a daily base...

This screenshot made me lol.
http://media.mmo-champion.com/images...rspring_08.jpg

Naughty Bear... muahh

[ultimar235]

So are rated BG's only horde vrs alliance? I can't seem to find a straight answer to this.

If they are what happens if the top 3 are all the same faction? Will they essentially be farming a weaker 4th place team to try to hit top instead of playing each other?

[Elween]

So are rated BG's only horde vrs alliance? I can't seem to find a straight answer to this.

If they are what happens if the top 3 are all the same faction? Will they essentially be farming a weaker 4th place team to try to hit top instead of playing each other?

Great question, i would also like to know this.

And thumbs down if we cannot always play 10v10, i have a 10 team with my guildies and will be hard to get a 15. Not looking forward to pug it :\

[Sulika]

The only way to achieve population balance on realms is if there is a disadvantage to being on the side with the higher population. The way wintergrasp used to work was totally backwards, if you were on the high population side you always won wintergrasp, meaning you got 5% more damage, 5% more xp, free honor while farming your heroics in the form of stone keeper shards and access to an extra raid instance. With all those advantages for being on the faction that had the population advantage on your server huge amounts of people took faction transfers.

The saddest thing about this change is that it comes way too late. Many realms (my own included, Bloodfeather-EU) which had pretty close populations at the start of WotLK (mine was about 55-45 horde alliance) have been destroyed by people on the low pop side faction transferring, now the realm is more like 90-10 on population. Once the shift starts at all it gathers momentum, you get other disadvantages, with low population nothing sells on AH, it is very hard for guilds to recruit, it's impossible to find arena partners etc. etc. etc.

Once people find they can't get into Tol Barad on population imbalanced realms they will start to faction transfer back to the low population side. This is a nescessary thing. Wintergrasp has had a profoundly negative effect on realms with many realms gone to having ridiculous imbalance because blizz got the rewards wrong. You have to reward the underdog, that way people want to be the underdog and the realms auto adjust on population such that there is no longer any advantage to either side. This is a good thing.

And yes, if you were the underdog it is kinda sweet to go to the forums and see the same (in my case) horde who were crying "alliance sucks" because you couldn't win wintergrasp when you were playing with a 20-1 ratio of players now crying because their own faction can't win wintergrasp. If you can't win with equal numbers on both sides it is because you are bad. Luckily this system also balances that and a lot of the bads will faction transfer because they think they alone are skilled and their faction sucks. Either way, balance will eventually win out. It is a fantastic change and one that should have been made years ago.

[Pumps]

They have changed too much. All the old places gone

[Eleveneleven]

It has everything to do with who got the prettier race each game. In Vanilla Alliance were at least 3x the pop of Horde on pretty much every launch server. In BC the population began to tip toward Horde because we finally got a non-monster class (BE) and they look cooler than NE. No new races in Wrath so the problem just snowballed for another expansion. Werewolves are far more popular than Goblins in this Twilight generation so you'll see a shift soon enough.

[TheMobGoblin]

They have changed too much. All the old places gone

For one who want a game to stay exactly the same for so long .I'm playing the PTR and everything's amazing.
The change of all the places are great.Go before it releases and take screenshots if it means that much to you.

Also there a bits of places that are still the same the crossroads for example is pretty much the same.
It's also neat to be like =O this place used to be under water or omg this place is now covered by water.
So use your love of the places as they used to be to spot out things.It makes it fun to be a Vet player.
The changes are awesome it's like WoW was a child that grew up and made you proud..
Blizz did a fantastic job quest pacing it perfect now drop rate for quest items no longer really annoying.

[Kaeyoss]

Im tired of the people claiming the WG change is good. they are ONLY ever from those factions that for the most part dont care about WG. when 99.9% of your pvpers on a server CANT do WG, its worse than losing. at least with the old system, you could at least get honor. now? we have a less than 1% chance of ever seeing a WG battle ever again. And less than that of winning. why? Because if on, say, Blackhand, an alliance guild decides to join up as 15 players, with maybe 5 more random players, that leaves 15 organized alliance vs a random setup of horde that will invariably hold abut 4-5 farming bots, no healers, and the rest undergeared. Its happened most of the times so far. How is that "fair and balanced?"

[mafain]

Whats the situation on BGs with more than 10 and 15 people?!

[Deleted]

I'm sure Blizzard will offer free transfers or faction changes for realms with balance issues. Before no one took these offers, because they wanted to be on the winning team. Hopefully now they will understand balance is better and do take the offer.

Transfer is not a solution. WG is dead for now on many realms - you can have 10k horde vs 10k alli realm, but there is no guarantee that same amount of players want to play WG.
Solution can be - making it instance and add it to cross-realm battlegroups, so more players can queue from both sides.

I have written ticket to GM, his/her respond was like - we know about this problem, development team is working on it. Default, but at least they know about it.

[zeemeerman2]

And where is Deadwind Pass exactly. Does it still exist in Cataclysm?

[sulfuric]

amazing more titles and mounts to store away in the title/mount warehouse, thank you blizzard

[The Doctor]

With the shattering... will that bring the new pets in the zones?


for example, will the chimpanzees appear in STV after the shattering or are we going to have to wait for dec 7th?

[_Fire_]

In 4.0.3a can we fly in Azeroth?

[Calaba]

In 4.0.3a can we fly in Azeroth?

Only with a Cata account, and only after launch day.

With regards to WG, this should have been balanced from the start. WG was clearly broken on almost all realms, to the extent that you'd have 10 alliance vs 100 horde or something, even on a "balanced" realm, since alliance just wouldn't show up since they'd always have 11 stacks of tenacity and be ganked at the graveyard. So next match there'd be even fewer, and fewer after that, and so forth.

And so, after an entire year or more, only 1 player from the losing side turns up, even during peak hours, since everyone else *knows* that there's no point bothering. This fix was needed, the sides needed to be balanced to stop graveyard ganking, it's as simple as that.

[Sulika]

Im tired of the people claiming the WG change is good. they are ONLY ever from those factions that for the most part dont care about WG. when 99.9% of your pvpers on a server CANT do WG, its worse than losing. at least with the old system, you could at least get honor. now? we have a less than 1% chance of ever seeing a WG battle ever again. And less than that of winning. why? Because if on, say, Blackhand, an alliance guild decides to join up as 15 players, with maybe 5 more random players, that leaves 15 organized alliance vs a random setup of horde that will invariably hold abut 4-5 farming bots, no healers, and the rest undergeared. Its happened most of the times so far. How is that "fair and balanced?"

It is still as "fair and balanced" as it was, or to be precise it is as unfair and unbalanced as it ever was, just now the imbalance favours the other side. The important thing is that now the faction transfer trend will be one that fixes the problem as opposed to one that exacerbates it. I have gone three weeks at a time without doing VoA because it was never alliance controlled between 5pm and 1am.

On my own server, Bloodfeather-EU the book in VoA reveals the following:

Alliance: Keep Defended 265 times.
Horde: Keep Defended 2555 times.

A year ago the difference was less than 100 times. Thats an extra 7000 hours+ or about 300 days of game time where horde had access to VoA, where horde got free honor via stone keepers shards, where horde had 5% increased damage and xp gained. An extra 2300 times that every horde on the server who cared to join got the extra 1.5k or so more honor you get for winning as opposed to losing. It was a ridiculous and broken system and worse it was a system that was designed in such a way as to exacerbate the problem. It encouraged people to do exactly the worst thing, transfer to the high population faction.

So now, I don't think anyone is arguing it is fun to be unable to get into wintergrasp (and if you think people are crying now, wait until they can't get into Tol Barad at lvl 85) but at least now what will happen is that the people who are unhappy will change to the underpopulated faction. This is what the servers need to encourage healthy population balance. It is a good change.

[manniefaces]

Amazing! I'm going to love 7v7 Wintergrasp on realms like Burning Steppes, really fun.

And 200 to 7 was fun?

[Buckwald]

amazing more titles and mounts to store away in the title/mount warehouse, thank you blizzard

And you care because? People will have the same things as you? Now, that might make it "less epic" for you but for someone else it might be "super epic". Plus it goes to the top 0.5% of players. That is an insanely small amount compared to the entire Community. What's the problem with giving a larger portion of players access to gain something? Plus, why are you still ranting, I thought you quit?