In the “first step is admitting that you have a problem” category, Blizzard has finally announced that there are issues with /teamquit. Although now that personal ratings are involved, it has become a more sticky situation:

“An issue has been identified that is sometimes causing players to be removed from the wrong Arena Team when attempting to leave a different team (being removed from the 5v5 team when trying to leave the 2v2 team, for example).

As a direct result of this some players are inadvertently losing some of their personal rating.

We expect this issue to be resolved in an upcoming patch, but we regret to inform you that our support teams will be unable to reimburse any lost ratings during this time.” -Tharfor

BG9 5v5 Invitational Tournament
On the heels of their EU Cyclone Tournament, SK Gaming is now behind the newly announced Battlegroup 9 5v5 Invitational Tournament. Top teams such as CLC and Shuttlecocks have already committed.

This will be an 8 team double-elimination tournament, best of five games format. Seeds will be given out according to rank and rating of the current arena season and past accomplishments. Sign-ups begin today (Jan 31) and will end February 5th, brackets and teams will be announced by February 6th.

Although some may be miffed at the “BG9″, “8 team”, and “invitational” qualifiers to this tournament, it’s a good start. At the very least, we will get to see some high quality 5v5 matches. And hopefully this will just be a sign of things to come as tournaments should be open to more entrants/teams when tournament servers are finally available from Blizzard.

More details on the tournament here.

Tags: PvP · News

As we continue to wait for new info about concerning 2.4 and class changes (it’s been a month, but who’s counting?), Nethaera has this to say:

“I think people would get tired of hearing “not today” and start asking “when?” Then I’d have to answer with “soon” and it would just go on from there.

Things are in the works, the cogs are moving, and we’ll get there” -Nethaera

Honor Gear and Season 4
Regarding arena gear purchasable with honor… when asked what will happen with Season 4, Drysc confirms that the S2 set will me moved to the honor vendor and the S1 set will be bumped off. Sniff, I’m gonna miss seeing those S1 shoulders around — especially when they were insanely huge on orcs.
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Tags: PvP · News

The big news around the PvP water cooler this morning is from an interview posted over on SK Gaming over the weekend. David “Shawn” K, head admin for World of Warcraft at the ESL, revealed that they will be hosting online tournaments on an event realm provided by Blizzard. As he explains:

“WoW does not have any kind of custom game option that you usually know from eSport-games and players are spread among dozens of servers. The only way to make sure that only those teams play against each other that you want to is to get them on a special server – an even realm. Those are regular servers but only visible to special accounts. Those accounts have all eight classes at level 70 and every character has thousands of gold and bags packed with all possible PvP-items to chose from. When the players are done with setting up both teams queue up at the same time, join the same arena and there is no risk of interfering.” -David “Shawn” K

It’s good to see a league like ESL supporting WoW and it’s also good to see Blizzard accommodating with online servers. Over here in the US, we’ve been promised this before with the Gameriot tournament (whatever happened to that anyways?), but hopefully ESL delivers and opens the door for more online competitive play.

Full article here.

Tags: PvP · News

Regarding the stealth bug mentioned yesterday:

“A hotfix for this issue was applied last night. It may not take effect until individual realms are restarted.” -Hortus

Nice to see the issue being addressed with a hotfix. As for the Cheat Death bug, Hortus goes into a little more detail:

“I’m sorry perhaps I should have explained the situation better…

When two spells land with exact timing activating cheat death the spells can receive 99% reduction instead of 90%. In the past when this happened the spells were not affected by Cheat Death at all.

This only affects the spells triggering cheat death and not subsequent spells and only happens under very specific circumstances which can not be purposely exploited. It does not give rogues “4 seconds of invulnerability” as some people have said.” -Hortus

Now in the “next to be hotfixed” department: casting while moving. Apparently with the use of ‘Shoot Wand’, you can trick the mechanics to allow you to cast any spell while strafing. Here’s a video of this killer bug in action. As with all game breakers, file this under full-disclosure-til-it-gets-fixed.

Tags: PvP · News

Couple of rogue bugs finally got some blue acknowledgment today. First, is the annoying stealth bug that people have been spamming the Bug Report forums about:

“I’d like to inform everyone that the issue with Stealth and Vanish breaking 5 seconds after sapping or breaking stealth has been identified and a fix is being worked on.” -Hortus

Second, is a not-so-annoying (if you’re a rogue) cheat death bug:

“I’ve looked into this issue. In order to assure that that a worse bug (which caused cheat death to not work at all) did not occur under specific timing circumstances Cheat Death will sometimes reduce damage by 99% instead of 90%.

Although technically this is a bug, it is not one that we can currently fix.” -Hortus

Tags: PvP · News