Posts with tag arena

If you have an opinion about Ashran, now there's a place for you to take it. Blizzard CM Kaivax posted that there's a new forum dedicated solely to Ashran. It's right here, although it doesn't appear to have a counterpart in Europe yet.

Ashran's been a hot topic as of late for problems with queue times and difficulty in balancing it - with some players having used Ashran to gear up it's not not uncommon to see people discussing one faction utterly dominating the zone now. If you're interested in Ashran and possibly in contributing your voice to the discussion (you may have a good suggestion for fixing the issues, or just a perspective that hasn't been considered yet) then head over to the new official forum for the PvP zone and make your voice heard.

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Brian Holinka, Senior PvP designer for World of Warcraft, tweeted the big news today - the next official rated PvP season for World of Warcraft will be starting this December 2nd. This means that if you intend to take part you have about three weeks to get to level 100 and get started, whether it be arenas or rated BG's you intend to make use of.

The first rated season for Warlords starts Dec 2nd.

- Holinka (@holinka) November 3, 2014

So there you have it. Get your weapons sharpened, polish your staves, stock up on arrows, get your best prayers set. On December 2nd you can start accumulating Conquest Points by horribly destroying your fellow players in pitched combat.

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I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that one of the reasons World of Warcraft hasn't made as big a splash in the world of eSports as games like League of Legends is because, simply put, you can't really watch it as well as other games. Blizzard itself isn't unaware of this. According to Kim Phan, Blizzard's Sr. Manager of eSports, one of the issues they're looking at is the fact that WoW simply wasn't designed to be something people watched the way bigger eSports games are.

"I can definitely say that WoW 3v3 Arena right now is kind of hard to watch, in the form that it is," he told PCGamesN. "And so there are things that we want to evaluate."

"World of Warcraft was obviously created well before eSports blew up to the way it is now. It is taking a game that was out before all of this happened, and then figuring out how to enhance it and support it . . . What makes something an eSport really depends on what people want to see."

It's a sticky problem, to be sure - how do you promote WoW as an eSport when it's kind of hard for anyone to really watch it? I think she's dead on the mark there. Spectator mode's a nice idea, but I think we need to consider how to make stuff like Rated Battlegrounds attractive as a competitive eSport as well - larger teams would make it something relatively few such games do.

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For those of us waiting with bated breath (look it up, that's how it's spelled) for any idea of when Patch 6.0 will be dropping, the answer is soon. Blizzard has done a warning post for the end of the season, and in their own words, it's not far off.

After many grueling bouts in the Arenas and Battlegrounds, the time has nearly come to see who will reign supreme in this action-packed PvP season. Prepare to fight your last battles, and remember-to the victors go the spoils!

Arena and Rated Battleground Season 15 will be coming to an end in a couple of weeks. Once the season wraps, we'll begin an approximately two week process to determine end-of-season reward eligibility.

So, since today was a rolling restart maintenance day, it's fair to speculate that it'll be two weeks into October, most likely October 14th, when Patch 6.0 drops. That falls into line with the usual month between the pre-expansion patch and the actual expansion that we saw in Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria.

Please remember, if you're an Arena/Rated BG player waiting for your end of the season rewards, to not transfer your character to another realm until after the PvP season has ended if you want to remain eligible.

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In the spirit of get it done soon that we see getting more and more prevalent as patch 6.0.2 gets closer, here's some news about PvP Season 15. Namely, it's ending as soon as the patch drops.

This means several things - there will be no Arenas or Rated BG's after the patch, all Conquest Points will be converted to Honor, with excess Honor above 4000 points being converted to gold.

Blizzard - Patch 6.0.2 PTR Patch Notes

• PvP Season 15 comes to an end with the launch of Patch 6.0.2. (Date has not been determined yet.)
  • Conquest Points will be converted into Honor Points, and any Honor above the cap of 4,000 will be converted into in-game currency at a rate of 35 silver per point.
  • Season 15 items will have Conquest costs converted into Honor Points equivalent to their previous Conquest Point cost, with the exception of any items that have a rating requirement.
  • Season 15 items with rating requirements will no longer be available for purchase.
  • Note that Arena and Rated Battleground matches will not be available until PvP Season 16 begins.

source

So there you have it - the upcoming end for Season 15 is as soon as the patch itself (which we still have no date for) and when it comes, the usual conversions will commence. If you're trying to hit a certain rating, you have been warned.

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BlizzCon 2014 is on the horizon, getting steadily closer every day, and thus so is the 2014 World of Warcraft Arena Invitational World Championship. If you're a player on the North American servers--which include North America, Oceania, parts of Southeast Asia, and South America--your chance to qualify for the tournament is coming up in the next few weeks. In order to be eligible for the North American Arena Tournament your 3v3 team must have a minimum rating of 2500 by August 25, 2014. The tournament will be a double-elimination with teams competing in a best of five match format. At the end of the tournament, the top three teams from North America will be invited to BlizzCon to compete against five additional teams from around the world for the championship title.

Think you have what it takes to compete at BlizzCon for a piece of the $250,000 purse? Time to get your teams ready and push for that 2500 rating by August 25th. Good luck to all the competitors!

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WoW Archivist explores the secrets of World of Warcraft's past. What did the game look like years ago? Who is etched into WoW's history? What secrets does the game still hold?

In many ways, The Burning Crusade was the birth of modern WoW. Most of TBC's innovations are still going strong in WoW today and have been ever since their introduction. Looking back, it's striking how many key features of WoW were absent in classic, only unveiled during the game's first expansion.

Even more striking, however, is how many of these innovations Warlords of Draenor seems poised to undo. Just as Garrosh will undo the transformation of Draenor into Outland, Warlords seeks to unravel most of what Blizzard innovated during TBC. The next expansion will take us through a portal into a very different WoW.

Archivist has now covered all the major patches of The Burning Crusade: patch 2.0.1, patch 2.0.3, patch 2.1, patch 2.2, patch 2.3, and patch 2.4. Now it's time to review the expansion as a whole -- and explore how Warlords will make most of TBC's innovations disappear into the nether.

Dawn of the quest hub

The idea seems so obvious it's hard to imagine that classic WoW actually didn't have quest hubs, at least not in the strict sense. WoW was the first MMO to promote the idea of leveling mainly through quests rather than grinding mobs. So Blizzard had no model to look at when they were designing the original quests.

In classic WoW, quests were put into the game wherever the developers thought they made sense, mostly from a lore perspective. Quests didn't necessarily guide you through a zone area by area. Quests were scattered, and their objectives were, too. They weren't breadcrumbs -- they were meant to be discovered. They didn't hold your hand -- they sent you on an adventure, like it or not.

• Trial of the Gladiator is gone, removed. This is due to concerns about the proposed system.
• Skirmishes, un-rated arenas which you can solo-queue for or do with friends in 2v2 and 3v3, are in.
• Skirmishes reward honor and have the chance to award a bag containing gold, more honor, a small amount of conquest points or something else entirely
• A Spectator Invite system has been added, allowing players to put Wargames together and invite spectators. This is specifically aimed at tournament organizers, but could be a boon for streamers or casual observers in parties with players doing wargames.
• Tournament gear is in for Wargames only.

Why should you be excited? Well, Skirmishes for one. These casual games allow players to try out arena by themselves, another solo-queue option that WoW PvP has sorely needed for some time, since Skirmishes were replaced with Wargames when Cataclysm launched. Not to mention earning honor from them! While many PvPers have allowed themselves to dream about Skirmishes' return, I don't think any of us ever dreamed we could earn honor from them!

What's more, the addition of Spectator Invites and Tournament gear makes it far, far easier for would-be tournament organizers to put contests together. We can all hope to see more and more Arena tournaments coming out of the woodwork with these additions!

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PvP Season 14 is currently scheduled to conclude with next week's standard realm maintenance. Good luck! http://t.co/MxsaULpaE1

- World of Warcraft (@Warcraft) February 15, 2014

As Brian Holinka has tweeted in the past, the end of the PvP season has, in recent instances, indicated the release of the coinciding patch. Throughout Mists of Pandaria, this is the pattern that has been followed, so it seems likely that patch 5.4.7 will be no exception. You can check out all our patch 5.4.7 coverage in the meantime.

WoW Insider also put together a short guide to what you should be doing to prepare for the end of the PvP season, so get those wins in for that mount, cap out that honor by killing those rares, and be ready!

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Every other week, WoW Insider brings you Totem talk for the shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and InternetDragons.TV), shows you how.

With the end of season 14 announced, and the imminent arrival of Patch 5.4.7, I thought I would take some time and get involved in some PVP action. I've always had a fondness for PVP, but raiding always took so much of my time in game, that between out of game things and raiding I just didn't have the time to invest into any amount of PVP. That's changed with a new guild, a new raiding schedule and a new work schedule out of game, so when a friend of mine asked if I wanted to start PVPing again, well I jumped at the chance.

While I'm not nearly as well versed in PVP as my fellow shaman of awesomeness Oliva Grace, I still manage to have a lot of fun in both Arenas and Battle Grounds. That said, I've been away from the PVP scene for a while, not setting foot in an arena since the middle of Cataclysm. I thought I would share my experiences and thoughts from this past week.