the-crowd-chose-you
Latest
Patch 5.4.7 PTR: 5 minute Dampening reverted to 10 minutes for 3v3 and 5v5
Community Manager Lore has delivered some news to the official forums that has made me rather cheerful. Lore After some additional discussion, we've decided to make this change only apply in the 2v2 bracket. Dampening will remain at 10 minutes in 3v3 and 5v5 arenas. source I've been posting a lot about this potential change, since Senior PvP Designer Brian Holinka tweeted about it a while back when changes went in by accident after BlizzCon. And while I am still not a fan of the change, I can agree with it way more in 2v2 than in 3v3 or 5v5. Why is that? Well, in 2v2, especially in healer-DPS versus healer-DPS, matches can go on longer, and even result in draws far more often than in the other sizes. Simply, a healer is not designed to be easily killable by a single DPS. As a result, it's harder work to take them down in 2v2. I won't pretend that I like the Dampening system, but it's better at 5 minutes in 2v2 for (hopefully) just one season. What we don't know yet is just how far it will go.
Four reasons why PvP Dampening shouldn't start at 5 minutes
This is something I discussed, in vague and mysterious exchanges, with Senior PvP Designer Brian Holinka on Twitter. While he certainly didn't confirm that Dampening would be moved to starting at 5 minutes, like it was at the BlizzCon tournament, he certainly implied that that was something the devs were considering. For the uninitiated, Dampening is a debuff currently applied to all arena players after 10 minutes of a match that reduces their healing and absorbs by 1% every 10 seconds. @Topikal @holinka As mentioned in my article on it, I'm concerned about Dampening potentially moving to 5 mins with S15. Do not want. - Olivia Grace (@oliviadgrace) January 9, 2014 @Topikal @oliviadgrace I was addressing the claim that I was live testing WoD PvP changes with my statement. You may be sad still Olivia. - Holinka (@holinka) January 9, 2014 Now, first and foremost, I have to make it very clear that on a purely personal level unrelated to game design, I dislike this debuff immensely. I dislike the change in power, I dislike knowing that as a PvP healer, no matter how carefully and efficiently I play, my effectiveness will decrease and decrease as the match continues. It's a horrible feeling, and I think Brian Holinka was right, way back in May 2012, when he said the devs "didn't really like the idea of your power changing over time" in response to a tweet asking for an ever-increasing Battle Fatigue. And yet, here we are.
The Crowd Chose You: Upcoming changes
We told you a change was coming, and as Blizzard Community Manager Lore posted late last night, Blizzard has an idea in the works to replace The Crowd Chose You, the controversial arena match-ending buff. It seems from his post that it isn't quite ready to go at this point, but nonetheless, they have a plan. Lore With Patch 5.4, we added a mechanic called "The Crowd Chose You" to Arena gameplay. This mechanic was added to suit two primary goals: keep the game from dragging on too long, and make sure matches always end with one team declared the winner. However, we wanted something that wouldn't make players feel they needed to change how they played the game. Unfortunately, the implementation of The Crowd Chose You that went live with Patch 5.4 is not filling that last requirement. So, we're going to take a different approach. In an upcoming hotfix, we'll be removing The Crowd Chose You entirely, and replacing it with a new mechanic called Dampening. If a match should last for 10 minutes, all players in the Arena will begin to receive a stacking debuff that reduces healing done by 1% every 10 seconds. This will continue until one team is eventually able to claim the victory. In the extremely unlikely event that neither team has won after 20 minutes, the match will end in a draw. We feel that this mechanic will have a much smaller impact on playstyle, team composition, and decision making than The Crowd Chose You, and thus result in more fun and exciting matches. We're currently testing the hotfix internally, and will provide an update when it goes live. source
The Crowd Chose You: A change is coming
Last week, I had a lengthy discussion with myself about The Crowd Chose You, the arena match-ending buff. I'm not going to go back through all the detail I covered in that article, or all the theories I had for how they could improve this problematic system. Nor am I going to go into the detail on how I thought that the very worst thing the Blizzard PvP team could do right now was to make further changes to arena tie-breaks in the game, to go further down the rabbit hole. Nonetheless, the post Community Manager Lore made today is completely non-specific about what's actually happening. All he says is as follows: Lore We're not really happy with how The Crowd Chose You is working out at the moment. We're exploring a few options for exactly what we'd like to do, but we will be changing it. source I am going to remain cautiously optimistic that they will not make a bad call, and stack the buff up with some other mechanic. I'm also hoping they don't go down the route of stacking debuffs, as I discussed at length in the previous article. From Lore's follow-up post, it doesn't look like they will be testing anything on the PTR, so live servers will become test servers for whatever they decide to do. I'd be happy if they just reverted it to what it was before, and went back to the drawing board rather than messing around with the season any more than they have already. We'll see what comes to pass.
The Crowd Chose You: ruining arena for everyone?
Season 14 has got off to a rather inauspicious start. We've had some big problems with conquest points, caps, weapons, vendors and more, which means that some players have rampaged through the ratings with full Grievous gear, which, of course, isn't scaled down to the same level as everything else. Blizzard is working on fixing the issue, but they've made no comment about resetting rating for the worst offenders. There are some bright sides, though, as the new downscaling system means that Conquest gear is categorically the best for PvP in all but the most extreme of cases. What's more, cross-realm arenas remove a restriction that previously stood in players' way. However, the much-celebrated fix to the RBG element of the conquest cap hasn't worked, and some people really miss having teams. But the biggest change, the one that is causing the most complaints, is the controversial match-ender, The Crowd Chose You. Why is it causing complaints? Well, where should I start...
Patch 5.4 PTR: The new Arena Tie-Break system
WoW Insider reported last week on a pretty crazy debuff that a player had found on the patch 5.4 PTR, The Crowd Chose You!!!. At the time, we were very sure to clarify that, as Brian Holinka mentioned on Twitter, this was not a tie-breaker in itself, rather it was, and is, a match-ender. It is the mechanic by which a match is ended once a tie-break system has decided who should emerge victorious. Rather like boxing, where not every fight can end with a knockout, and the judges use specific criteria to judge the winner, the tie-break system is in place to ascertain who should be awarded a victory, and give them this buff to put that victory in place. As I discussed in a Blood Sport a while back, the important element here was always the mechanic within the game that decided who would get the buff. For clarity, the current mechanic is very simple: if you are unable to kill the entire of the other team before the timer runs out, you will draw, and both sides will lose rating. The arena system currently favors a knockout, and refuses to recognize any other type of win, to continue our boxing analogy. But this is all set to change in patch 5.4, so let's take a look at the patch note excerpt that clarifies the new system.
