[WoRBot]

Design Intent of /castrandom Macros

Quote from: Bornakk (Source)

We allow players to use macros for convenience, especially when automating tasks that they do often. Where macros cross the line is when they are making the decision instead of the player. In the old-days, there were addons that would essentially target a player with a debuff and cure it. That crossed the line for us – the mod was playing the game instead of the player.

In the /castrandom case, players were sometimes using these macros to cast the ability that wasn’t on cooldown without having to recognize this fact or hit the right button. Players using this system had an unfair advantage against players that weren’t. Instead of having to cope with the complexity built into the class, players could just spam one key and have the game “do the right thing.”

We recognize that in some cases, certain classes are probably over complex or else the default WoW UI doesn’t provide the information you need in a form where you can quickly notice that say an ability has proc’d or another is on cooldown. In these cases, we would like to fix the class or UI problem, not require all of our players to use macros to get around the limitation. You can help us identify those situations where you feel overly-dependent on a /castrandom macro so we can start to address those problems.

We also recognize that players sometimes used /castrandom for options that were truly random and with no gameplay consequence, such as picking a random polymorph animal, companion or mount. In these situations, we want to give you specific commands you can use to get the desired functionality. We have no problem with you rolling the dice in this manner.

3k Arena Rating Cap Removed

Quote from: Kalgan (Source)

In the case of a tie, all tied teams are awarded. However, the rating cap was removed in patch 3.2, so the 3k cap shouldn't be an issue for the end of the season.

12/08 Realm Tag Changes

Quote from: Slorkuz (Source)

We have recently made changes to the ‘Recommended’ realm tag. The tag will now read as ‘New Players’ and will indicate the realm chosen when a player chooses to be assigned to a realm of a certain type. Currently, one realm of each type has this tag on at any given time. The ‘Recommended’ tag will no longer be in use.

The ‘New Players’ tag is designed to encourage players new to the game to create their characters on the ‘New Players’ realm and thus meet other new players like themselves. This change is to encourage a flourish of activity and interaction in the lower end zones of the world, helping to create an enhanced and engaging levelling experience for our newcomers.

Blue Posts

Player versus Player

Facing the same Arena team consecutive times (Source)

There is currently a 2-minute queue time addition to play against a team you just played against (so, 2 minutes plus normal queue time to be matched against them). This time value was 5 minutes when 3.2 was first released, but was lowered to 2 minutes in a hotfix last Friday.

The purpose of the time addition is to make it less likely that an average team doing arena games for a night isn't likely to run across the same team in many of their games for the session. We'll continue to tune the system to make sure that it doesn't feel like too much of a nuisance when there simply aren't other teams within a reasonable rating range to play against.

Bracket balance (Source)

It's not, in our mind, an issue on which bracket is the most balanced. It comes down to which bracket is the most balance-able.

The 2s bracket has two flaws built into its design. One is that it tends to select for those classes who have a lot of different options and utility built into one class. Since your team is just one other guy, and he or she is often going to be focused or CC'd, you can't rely so much on your teammate's abilities. You have to rely on your own abilities. What players kept asking for, and the direction we realized we were taking, was just to give more and more abilities to more and more classes so that everyone had everything. We don't think that's good for class design long term. Arena is intended to be about teamwork not self-sufficiency.

The second problem is the relative balance of power of healing. If a healer can keep themselves and one other person alive in 2s, then they probably can't keep three people alive in 3s. That tends to squeeze healers out of 3s. On the other hand, if a healer can keep a three-player team alive, then they can probably keep a two-player team alive trivially.

We didn't remove the 2s bracket from the game. If you like it, it's still there for you. But we wanted to be able to focus more of our balance effort on the 3s bracket and wanted more of the high-end potential gladiators to focus their balance feedback and effort on that bracket as well.

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Think about it this way. We offer 10 and 25-player raids in the hopes that players who like smaller groups or larger groups can both find something that suits them. We could take that to extremes and also offer a 15-player raid or still offer 40-player raids too. But the more of these options we add, the more effort it takes to balance them all and the bigger chance that something will break at one of the extremes.

We think 3s and 5s will ultimately offer a better play experience. But we have supported 2s for a few years now and some players have grown to enjoy them, so we thought it was overly harsh to just cut them from the game.

Battleground Experience (Source)

This is something we're watching very closely and right now we'd be inclined to agree that there are some battlegrounds where we may need to boost the amount of experience awarded. However, that isn't to say that all battlegrounds are less than they should be. Still, we are looking at adjusting the experience sometime in the near future.

Mage

Buffing Arcane spec (Source)

I said we wanted to buff Arcane but wanted to do so without adding back some of the fast burst damage that we have worked hard to reduce in PvP. We agree that it's worth changing things that can be really frustrating to play against even if it doesn't reward the other guy with high representation or ratings.

Priest

Glyph of Mind Flay (Source)

I'm almost positive that the way it works is the glyph leaves a 10% snare on Mind Flay today on live (the glyph didn't change in 3.2). The reason is because we thought it might cause a lot of bugs related to whether a target was officially snared or not. A 10% snare isn't particularly useful but it is noticeable.

What we're talking about is changing the glyph to not affect the default snare at all. The glyph would just boost range.

Warlock

Improving Demonology (Source)

This feels like one of those "I'm going to take things out of context to try and add fire to my own agenda" deals. Apologies if that's not what's going on.

The context was how do you find 3 distinct niches for a dps class such that each of the trees has its moment to feel special and shine yet over the course of a raid tier, all 3 feel like they do about the same dps. That's a really challenging goal.

It wasn't a "buff Demo" discussion as much as what the roles should be for pure dps talent trees, unless you fall back on the classic "PvP, PvE and the spec nobody takes."

If we buffed Demonology, and we buffed it too much (even if it was only on some fights) then what you'd probably see is most raiding warlocks shift to Demo. This is exactly what happened when we made Survival better than Beastmaster. What does that really accomplish other than giving players whiplash and perhaps giving those players who really just love a certain spec a little bit of time in the sun?

[lora]

probably wont stop vets from playing on those servers though