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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.
