Blizzcon, Day 2: PvP

“Let’s talk about kicking ass,” World of Warcraft lead Tom Chilton said, by way of welcoming Blizzcon attendees to Saturday’s PvP panel.

Major changes are coming to Alterac Valley, Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan said, accompanied by a Power Point slide labeling it “Alterac Valley 6.0.”

“We need to make people want to win Alterac Valley,” Kaplan said. “Believe it or not, but the Horde can win in AV. Now we have to make them want to.”

Among the coming changes:

• NPC issues, including solo-pulling Vandar Stormpike and general weirdness with the Horde warmasters will be addressed.
• Characters will not respawn in either tunnel unless all other graveyards are gone.
• AFK characters can be clicked on via the zone map. Once enough players have done this, a timer debuff will appear, while the character still gets honor for just being in the zone. Once it’s counted down to zero, it’s replaced with a debuff that halts all honor gain until they begin fighting again.
• The majority of the honor gains will be shifted from the beginning of the match to the end.
• Groups will again be able to queue up for the zone.
• The destructible buildings and siege weapons coming in Wrath of the Lich King PvP may also be added to Alterac Valley.

The Eye of the Storm battleground was originally going to be an Outland update of Arathi Basin, with a mobile flag that would orbit the playing field. But it was under development at the same time as Netherstorm, and the team liked those graphics so much, they decided to go with them, instead.

In future, to allow Blizzard to add more battlegrounds without fatally thinning out the available number of players, players will likely pick the size of a battleground match they want to play, but not which battleground. So a group may pick a 15-person match and be placed in a random battleground.

Learning from how world PvP worked in The Burning Crusade, Blizzard has set up the world PvP zone in Northrend, Lake Wintergrasp, to affect all of Northrend when it changes sides.

Third season arena competitors will need a better final rating to earn weapons. At the same time, the first season arena gear will be added to the regular honor system, to let newer PvP players catch up.

In an unrelated Q&A response, it was revealed the LFG system will be getting overhauled in the new expansion.

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