loopinvariant

Well, sure looks like someone got the easy job of repackaging a Blizzard press release into "news" this morning.

The Mage spell Polymorph now works quite differently."

vs.

"Being polymorphed by an NPC no longer causes player characters to heal, a potentially major change." and "If you are sheeped / polymorphed by a mob, you will no longer gain back health (ie: the mass sheep in Aran, which regens your health before he fire blasts the raid). This is a potentially large change."

Looks like the NPC polymorph is the one working differently, not the player spell.

Drysc said: "If the average personal rating of the players queuing for a game is more than 150 points below the team's rating, the team will be queued against an opponent matching or similar to the average personal rating."

Everyone seems to overlook this statement. It says that a team will be downranked when matched against another team based on average personal ratings.

It also says that teams are matched against each other. People with S3/S4 and high ratings, which go hand in hand, will not be placed against the 1500 team of newbies in greens and blues, because the personal ratings won't allow it.

This change doesn't raise the bar for entry, it stratifies the layers based on personal ratings to stop the point buys. Lower rated players and teams are going to play against lower rated players and teams, and even if they end up in a highly rated team they are not going to gain a personal rating any faster.

What this has done is stop the welfare for the flood of players who don't know how to play the game that are walking around in epic gear, but instead feel they are justified in having a reward for accomplishing nothing.

There are games like that already, such as Team Fortress 2.

Pretty soon we'll be able to identify the welfare cases from the real players with skill and ability, and anyone left in season 1 or 2 gear will stand out like a sore thumb.

Newbs shouldn't be crafting, that's why they can't afford a level 40 mount.

Every newb out there heed my advice: pick up two gathering professions and just sell your wares on your first character, don't craft.

It seems that those who don't raid are always quick to misinterpret what is going on with the raiders. I was, and being new to raiding my perspective is changing.

Raiders face large challenges in order to coordinate groups of people to face repeated failure until a fight is mastered. This costs them gold (pots, repairs, etc), time, and generates a lot of frustration. It truly is harder to get the PvE gear than it is to get the PvP gear.

So raiders are complaining that here is an almost equivalent set of gear (Galdiator/Vindicator) that people are getting just for showing up. The two paths are not equivalent in difficulty, yet are equivalent in rewards.

Blizzard made the raid content to be explored and conquered, and the difficulty level is fine. But they have provided an equivalent path that requires very little work to achieve the same in-game status (and dance around it all you want, when people see shinies on a player it equates to status), and they have given people who travel the PvP route a way to walk into high level dungeons almost fully geared, without the work required by the PvE players needed to get there.

There is nothing wrong with either path. Both lead to their form of entertainment and glory. But Blizzard has allowed the PvP path to achieve its level of glory and also cross into the PvE path, without providing the PvE crowd with an equivalently casual way to gear up unless they play a part of the game they are not interested in (PvP).

Taken as a whole, it simply reflects Blizzard's focus on PvP content in the game now, turning the game into the equivalent of a MMO FPS.

If you want to sell me a game, make a good game. I'll look up from WoW when that happens, just as I did with Portal.

If the air is being sucked out of the game market, its the publishers doing the sucking.

I find it hilarious that he claims the formerly innovative developers are now just copying what works. That describes the entire game industry for the last 15 years, and its called shovelware.