WoW Classic gets Battlegrounds and Key Rings Today

Today’s WoW Classic US downtime sees the deployment of World of Warcraft Classic version 1.13.3. (EU realms won’t get this until 1am tomorrow if I read things right… but that will still be today here.)

Classic is as classic does

This update brings with it a few changes, the biggest being the introduction of battlegrounds to WoW Classic.

After the introduction of world PvP and the honor system with phase two of the WoW Classic plan caused… issues… like the expected non-stop gankfests made more sinister by increased populations relative to vanilla and the usual faction imbalances on servers (there might be an all Horde server now)… and also how honor is even calculated… led Blizzard to introduce battlegrounds early, before they got around to the full phase three release.

So, as of today we now have the Warsong Gulch and Alterac Valley battlegrounds available, one of the first vanilla things you could queue up for… not counting the queue to get onto the server.

Warsong Gulch is the 10 vs 10 player capture the flag game that allow players level 10 and higher to join in.  It is divided into level brackets (10 to 19, 20 to 29, etc) along with the level 60 bracket.  Last week a level 19 hunter twink in planning paid me 5g to take him through the quest in Duskwood that has the special quiver as a reward, all while he was in ghost form because he was afraid the xp would level him up.  So expect a lot of that.

Alterac Valley is the 40 vs 40 epic zone struggle that allows players level 51 and up vie for control of the zone.  I’ve done Alterac dozens of times and I am still not sure how the whole thing even works.  I just follow the mass and kill the things.

Whether or not these two will take any pressure off the gank fever on the PvP servers remains to be seen.  I suspect life will remain miserable for many.

Also on the list of things WoW Classic is getting today is elemental invasions.  In the zones Un’goro Crater, Azshara, Winterspring, and Silithus elemental invaders will be showing up.  I am sure this is in furtherance of some event, but I honestly don’t recall what at the moment and the patch notes don’t say.

In addition we are also getting the key ring today.  This is a special 12 slot inventory space that lets you store the keys to various things so that they don’t take up your otherwise limited and often critical inventory space.  I have at least three characters that will get an extra inventory spot because the key to the side door of Gnomeregan will go there.  Worth it to me.

Oddly I remember both the key ring being added and later being removed from the game.  If you want to know more about it, WoW Head has a guide.  Just remember it doesn’t show up in the UI until you actually have a key to store in it.

Finally, there appear to be a few changes to the LUA interface to keep addons from doing more than they should, a way to access paid character transfers has been added though such transfers are not yet available, the executable has been renamed, and some bug fixes have come along for the ride.

I have seen some people saying that with all of this we now have phase three in place, but that is not so.  Phase three won’t be fully deployed until Blizzard opens up the Blackwing Lair raid and adds Darkmoon Faire to WoW Classic.  We won’t see those until “early” 2020.  That will bring us up to the July 2005 level of vanilla content.

Somebody did a nice post about the phases of WoW Classic if you are interested in what else is coming.

Now back to my nice comfortable PvE-RP server where open world PvP issues aren’t really a thing.

The December Update Brings Gambling and Structure Changes to EVE Online

The December update for EVE Online has gone live after an extended downtime and brings with it an array of changes for New Eden.

Called the “Free Market” release, the headline item for the update is the HyperNet Relay gambling interface that will allow player to pay CCP to allow them to run raffles in the game.

The New Face of Gambling in New Eden

I covered this return to gambling in New Eden in a previous post.  CCP received a lot of feedback on this feature, responded to none of it, and shipped it as announced.  We shall see how it plays out.

There is also a new wallet UI being added with the update.

The New Wallet UI

My enthusiasm for this is fairly small as well.  As usual, being used to one awkward UI makes the next one seem difficult.  I suppose they are trying to get rid of yet another rows and columns grid that helps keep the “spreadsheets in space” theme alive, but I still think they need to fill that senior UX designer position sooner rather than later.

There are also some changes to the player trading interface that is supposed to make what is being traded more obvious by, for example, displaying the type of ship being traded rather than the name the other player has given the item, closing a loophole for some scams.

Also coming with today’s update is another of the Team Talos projects, Kicking over Castles.

Team Talos strikes again

This project has its own dev blog, but in short it is an attempt to address some of the ways that people have been using the mechanics of Upwell Structures to the detriment of the game.  The changes are:

• Defenders can no longer choose a day of the week for exiting the hull reinforcement cycle. Structures will exit reinforcement at the next available hour of the defenders choosing (+/- 3 hours) after the following durations:
  • Wormhole space: 1.5 days
  • Low and Null security space: 2.5 days
  • High security space: 4.5 days
• Updated vulnerability windows now takes 30 days to take effect (instead of 7).
• In a solar system where the Activity Defense Multiplier is above 4.0 and where an Infrastructure Hub is held by an alliance, pilots that are NOT members of that alliance will be unable to deploy medium Upwell structures (Astrahus, Athanor and Raitaru).
• The random jitter range on reinforcement exit times is increased from +/- 2 hours to +/- 3 hours.

These changes will give attackers a chance to get a timer that isn’t both mid-week and 180 degrees off their own on time zone as well as keeping down the ability for hostiles to drop staging structures in your home system.

But the biggest change coming as part of this, to my mind at least, is related to Faction Warfare, where the ability to ignore the NPC stations by bringing your own structures has been somewhat game breaking.

New FW Tethering Rules

Basically, if you’re in FW space held by the other faction, you can no longer happily tether up and feel safe on any old structure you come across.

While that falls short of simply not allowing Upwell structures in FW space, which probably should have been the default mode back when they were introduced, it at least makes attackers in FW a little less safe.

Also, the time limit is up on Ansiblex Jump Gate and Tenebrex Cyno Jammer structures that are anchored within 500km of a structure.  Any that have not been moved out of that range will now be offline until they are moved.

Finally, in another blow to fans of Player Owned Starbases, blueprints for many POS modules have been converted to be blueprints for Upwell structure modules.  They are not gone yet, but there isn’t much left of the once mighty POS.

There are also the usual array of minor fixes and adjustments.  These are covered in the patch notes for the December update.  The release has been reported as successfully deployed, so all the changes are there waiting for people to log in.