From a comment. I’m writing a lot from forum to forum. And busy on RL stuff. I wish I had time to delve more, organize and move everything to archive it on the site…

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I really hate this decision of Blizzard to separate PvE character builds from PvP builds and armor sets.

I love BOTH PvP and PvE, I’d like to be able to experience BOTH, instead of being forced to choose just one option while gimping my character for the other.

I do not want to specialize because the fun of the game for me is the amount of possibilities it offers. Why I should have the PvE forbidden if I choose to get PvP skills and equipment? Why the PvP FORCES me to dedicate my full time to it by negating me the possibility to compete if, for once, I go play another part of the game? Why this segregation and specialization of gameplay?

And, in particular, what’s the reason that brought to the choice of adding this new barrier?

Back to what Raph concluded on MUD-Dev a year ago:

I think we can agree that designing a game that discourages players from playing regularly is probably a bad idea (at least in terms of mass acceptance–some games, like turn based games, PBEM, etc, have some flex here). Designing a game which allows players not to HAVE to play regularly, however, seems desirable.

This last move of Blizzard is severely damaging the fun and variety of the game. Just to run after the catasses.

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Rywill:
Are they really exclusive?

That’s where they are going.

The PvP ladder is simply not viable if you cannot dedicate your FULL time to it. So yeah, you can engage a BG and getting farmed. Sitting at the lower ranks with absolutely zero hope to move from there and achieve something.

At the same time the PvE is also being locked out. It’s already hard to impossible trying to join raid groups as a “foreigner”. If you have the wrong build you are just dreaming. Or you are able to get yourself hooked to this spinning wheel or you are out and staring.

With this last patch they removed all PvP bonuses from PvE loot. I definitely see this as the direction they choosed. It’s impossible to keep up with both systems at once. It’s already hard to keep up with just ONE.

It’s not a news that the elder game is completely different from the 1-60 treadmill. Now they are putting a barrier even between PvP and PvE.

As we expected the battlegrounds are now live to be shown at the upcoming E3. As we expected there are lots of fun problems:

Problem 1- Lack of Horde players leading to infinite waiting queues or deactivating/resetting battlegrounds.

Problem 2- Early reports give the lag at levels above the average Tarren Mill raid:

I’m seeing people just slide around, no walk animation or anything.

Its real fun.

From my direct experience the situation is rather bad. Not only the players slide around like frozen as per the comment above, but there are also many “invisible” players running around (I could see just the shadow) and lots of Unknown Entities hitting you. Especially the NPCs and monsters spawn/despawn right on your face and nearly always you cannot avoid to run on something till when it’s already hitting on you. Even if you are in a quiet zone of the BG you’ll notice the NPCs despawn just as they are a few feets away from you, so you can actually see in just a very narrow “bubble”.

Problem 3- Paladins with speed potions and vulnerability shield on are fun:

haha i saw something really funny when i tried the CTF Battlegrounds, a paladin took our flag, took his shield and a speed potion and we’ve never saw him again.

He did it three times in a row, and won the CTF battleground kinda lonely.

Problem 4- Mine fields and guards give you a 10% durebility hit. 15 minutes in the Battleground and I had my equipment completely broken. Nor enough money to repair it.

I’m already done with testing.

I wish I could have seen what killed me. I just kept dying to invisible “Unknown Entities”.

Problem 5- If you happen to log out while dead on a BG (or crash), you’ll enter a Limbo. You’ll have to walk out till a spirit healer to res and you will be locked out of every PvP instance.

Problem 6- If at some point one of the two factions is near to lose, it can organize to disconnect en masse, forcing the instance to deactivate itself for the lack of players and preventing the winning side to get the reward.

Problem 7- Most of the armor sets have been considerably nerfed of their PvP bonuses in order to directly separate the two systems (PvE raids for PvE armor sets and PvP raids for PvP armor sets). Obviously the players are ranting after having spent months to achieve gear that now lost the use it had.

Doubt 1- No mention of the effect of the old policy on these battlegrounds:

Repeated killing: you only get full CP for killing the same player once per day. The second kill on the same player on the same day gives 75% of the CP, the third 50% and the fourth 25%. Subsequent kills give no CP at all.

This will be particularly fun when paired with this:

Players may now see an “estimated contribution point value” in the combat log for an honorable kill. Note that this value does not take diminishing returns against the same player into account, and is therefore “estimated”.

So the battlegrounds may become just a trick to make players believe they are getting points when, instead, they are getting none (if not from completing the BG). A masterpiece.

Doubt 2- From the patch notes: “Dishonorable kills – gained by killing a trivial Civilian NPC – now has a negative impact on a player’s honor. Enough dishonorable kills will reduce a player’s rank all the way to zero.” Thanks for the notice, but maybe explaining the actual rule? How much is “enough”? What’s the size of the “negative impact”? What type of feedback the game will offer to let peoples know about this without reading the patch notes?

Notice 1- From the main page: “The current plan is for the public test to last several weeks to fully test all aspects of the upcoming Battlegrounds content.”

Notice 2- From the patch notes, a welcome new option: “Added a “Maximize” windowed video option which will maximize the game window and remove the borders for a fullscreen experience which allows popup windows.”

All for now. I had other things on top of my head by they seem gone.

Btw, the official downloader for the patch is here – I’m not sure if I’ll mirror the actual patch here.

Oh, and do not log off when you have the flag…

If you kept looking at the american World of Warcraft site and forum for official news about the upcoming patch with the implementation of the Battlegrounds, you looked in the wrong place. The news appeared today only on the european site:

International Public Test Realms
We’re happy to announce that we are now just a few days away from being able to deploy the first round of public test realms for our international audience. Due to the need to conduct as much testing of our initial Battlegrounds content as we can, the schedule calls for the next major content patch to go live on the US public test realms shortly. We will then roll out the public test realms for Korea and Europe as soon as the hardware setup and configurations are completed.

To conduct a targeted test of specific character classes for the Battlegrounds, we will be providing testers in Europe and Korea with access to a variety of high-level, fully equipped characters to choose from. More information on how players can access the test characters and the public test realms will become available as we get closer to launch. Assuming everything goes smoothly for this round of testing, we plan to deploy public-test-realm content for future patches simultaneously in Europe, Korea, and the US. We’re excited to see players from around the world on the test realms in the days ahead, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts on the new PvP Battlegrounds content!

I don’t know if my reading comprehension is getting worse but I really do not get what is written there.

What are these International Test Servers? If they are going to launch shortly along with the new content patch, why the announce names specifically the US public test realms?

Or maybe it’s just a fancy way to say that they’ll try to open the test servers all at once without delays from a zone to another, without an actual international public test server.

Anyway. This week or the next we should be able to know some more.