RSS Arena Update, Official forums issue, Blue posts

Arena System Update <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from: Zarhym (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/11/14578687862-arena-system-update.html" target="_blank" style="color: white;">Source</a>)</div><div class="blizzquote">Earlier this week the Arenas were temporarily disabled while we investigated rating calculation discrepancies. After thorough research, we have identified and created a solution to the issue, and we will be bringing the Arenas back online following off hours maintenance with the fix in place. Please be aware that because the rating issues were extensive, we have decided to reset Arena team and personal ratings to last week’s status. In addition, items and achievements which were gained illegitimately with incorrect ratings will be removed, and the spent arena points refunded. We thank you for your patience while we worked through these issues related to the Arenas. </div></div></div>Kalgan also made additional posts about the arena rating system. <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from: Kalgan (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/11/14498233633-aj-repost-2.html" target="_blank" style="color: white;">Source</a>)</div><div class="blizzquote">- The team/personal ratings and the hidden ratings are related to each other. Your team/personal ratings essentially drift toward your hidden rating, so if you deliberately lower your hidden rating and remake a team, your team/personal ratings simply won't get up to high ratings until your hidden rating does. His exploit as proposed simply doesn't work because his assumptions about the relationship between the visible and hidden rating are incorrect. - Yes, a group of good players could still deliberately stomp nubs by intentionally losing lots of games to lower their hidden rating. A rating system won't stop that, but it still solves most cases of high rated players beating up on lower rated players. First, many of the cases where high rated players were being matched against low rated players wasn't because the high rated players were deliberately trying to stomp people, it was often accidental as high rated players had normal/natural reasons to change teams on occasion (helping friends, trying out new players, new comps, new strategies, etc). Second, it takes far more effort to deliberately deflate your rating down to low levels than it did to simply create a new team. - Something that many of you have mentioned is that the rating adjustments are now not always "zero sum". However, a rating system doesn't need to be zero sum in order to prevent inflation. The new system uses a bayesian prior distribution in order to prevent inflation, which in simpler terms means there's math that enforces that players won't have ratings outside of some range (when working without bugs, of course). For the population size we have for arenas, this means we should see ratings range from around 600 to 2400 (again, assuming no bugs). - There were two bugs with the system that we're in the process of fixing before we reactivate arenas (should be soon) that were causing serious problems (and distorting everyone's perspective on the system). One was in the functionality that seeded everyone's hidden rating based on their pre-3.0.8 patch performance, causing players to "drift" toward wildly inaccurate ratings, the other being in the way that personal ratings were adjusted. Effects of rating changes in the middle of the season I think you say that with the assumption that if it had been the start of the season, the bugs wouldn't have been there (not a good assumption in this case imo). The new system (when working) doesn't significantly change how hard it is to get the gear or who you have to beat to get the title/mount/etc (that's still entirely relative). It also tends to be mid/late in the season when the problems with the old system were the most exposed (with highly rated players starting new teams, helping friends, etc). "Hidden" rating It is not like personal rating. The hidden rating uses a different approach to determining player ratings. It's more complex, but it tends to figure out a player's skill level far more quickly/accurately than an Elo system does. However, changing player's actual team/personal ratings extremely rapidly isn't exactly what we want. So, we're using an approach where we use the hidden rating (internally we refer to it as the GDF rating since it uses gaussian density filtering) for matchmaking since it creates better matchups than Elo and we use it as an anchor to figure out where the team/personal ratings should be moving toward. Rollback Yes, I'm implying that we hope to roll back team/personal ratings back to what they were right before 3.0.8 went live. </div></div></div> Gold selling ads on official forums There was a ... small issue with the advertising on official forums today. For a few hours the forums displayed gold selling ads, of course this was an error on Blizzard side and they have been removed quickly. Selling/buying gold is still forbidden and isn't a good idea. <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from: Bornakk (<a href="http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14498293678&pageNo=1&sid=1#2" target="_blank" style="color: white;">Source</a>)</div><div class="blizzquote">Recently, there was a temporary error with our forum advertisements that caused a gold-selling ad to be displayed. At this time, we have resolved this error. Our stance, which is fully explained in the statement below, remains firmly against the buying or selling of gold, and we may take action against accounts that are involved in these activities. <a href="http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/antigold.html" target="_blank">http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/basics/antigold.html</a></div></div></div><div align="center"><a href="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2009/january/goldsellersforums.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2009/january/goldsellersforums_small.jpg" alt="" border="0" /></a></div> Blue posts <div class="blizzquotewrap"><div class="blizzquoteinner"><div class="blizzquoteheader">Quote from Blizzard staff</div><div class="blizzquote">Burst damage in PvP We think PvP is too bursty. What we haven't announced is what we are going to do about it. Risks of making ill-conceived changes include just shutting out classes or specs without a lot of CC potential, or perhaps having long stalemate-ish fights where nobody ever dies. But that doesn't mean we won't do anything. We are also still discussing whether this is a problem only with certain classes (rogue, mage, paladin, DK and possibly Feral get mentioned the most) or whether damage is just too high in general. Resilience will still make a difference. When you talk to players sitting at say 500 resilience they can notice a difference and by 800 or 900 they feel like they can stay alive (caveat: this is a very generalized statement and obviously isn't going to apply to every player or every situation). Resilience on pets I understand that players want, and think it is good design for, their pets to have resilience. That might still be something we do. Our concern has always been that players need to be able gang up and kill pets when they really set their mind to it. It can be very frustrating to hack your way through the hunter or warlock pet, finally dispatch it, then still have to deal with the master (who, to be honest, have ways for bringing their pets back sometimes). I understand the situation I described isn't at all happening now, but with enough resilience there is a risk of very tanky pets. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/14496620664-lol-significant-pet-hp-buffs.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Queue mechanics This is basically correct. There is a hard cap for maximum allowable players on a realm. The queue begins once the capacity has been exceeded. The estimated wait time is based on the number of people who have recently logged out of the realm, and subsequent players who have been allowed to login. You'll notice the number will sometimes fluctuate drastically before stabilizing again. This is usually due to a number of people logging out at once, quickly allowing more people on, or a lack of people logging off for a few minutes, causing the wait time to inflate. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/14498464055-how-do-queues-work.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) [EU] ACcount-Wide Death Knight Creation We believe this is not an issue at this time. Please note that a realm needs to be at least 90 days old before you can create a Death Knight there or you need a character on that realm of level 55 or higher. Character creation in general also needs to be enabled. If you are unable to create a Death Knight on a realm where you are certain that it should be possible to, then please be sure to contact a Game Master in-game. And please be aware that "Chamber of Aspects" is currently not 90 days old. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/1/7700830638-accountwide-death-knight-creation-update.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) <img src="http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/icons/24x24/paladin.jpg" alt="" border="0" /> Paladin (<a href="http://www.mmo-champion.com/index.php?page=610" target="_blank">Skills List</a> / <a href="http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?paladin" target="_blank">Talent + Glyph Calc.</a>) Glyph of Light nerfed in a hotfix This glyph is vastly overpowered. We are hotfixing the range from 20 yards down to 8 yards. In its current form it has basically become "proc a Circle of Healing" in the same patch that we nerfed Circle of Healing. (<a href="http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/14497013516-glyph-of-holy-light-hotfix.html" target="_blank">Source</a>) Glyph of Light - Explanations Whether it was smart or not, the fact was that it was showing up as a gigantic component of paladin healing to the extent that it was having the impact of adding a whole additional spell to your rotation. That is far beyond the power that we want a glyph to have. Glyphs should be bonuses, about on par with p...</div></div></div>

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