wow The World of Warcraft 2016 Road to BlizzCon

[Zadina 923]

Blizzard has released an overview of the rules for this year's World of Warcraft Arena World Championship. These rules have caused mostly negative responses from the community.

 

Before we begin to discuss the issues presented by this year's rules, we will firstly cite them below:

 

Blizzard Entertainment

The 2016 World of Warcraft Arena World Championship will soon be getting underway! With the recent announcement that the Legion expansion will launch starting on August 30, we wanted to provide more details to help European and North American teams who are looking to compete in this year’s Arena World Championship prepare for battle.

To kick things off, three qualifier cups will be held in both regions to decide the teams advancing to the Regional Championships. These cups will be played in the Warlords of Draenor expansion. After these qualifier cups are complete, we will transition to Legion for the American and European Regional Championships, as well as the World Championships at BlizzCon 2016.

 

Overview of Rules

As this year’s Road to BlizzCon spans two expansions, we are also making some changes to the rules for 2016.

• As previously announced, teams may once again have a 4-player roster.
• Once a team has qualified for their Regionals, the team may make one roster swap of one player.
  • Only one roster swap is allowed, and it must be completed before the 6 p.m. PT on September 14, 2016.
  • The roster swap is available to teams with either 3 or 4 players.
  • A 3-player team may use their roster swap to add a fourth person to their roster.
• If a player on a 4-player team is unable to attend an in-person tournament, that team may continue as a 3-player team.
  • If the team still has their roster swap available, they may use it to add a new fourth player (up until the roster swap deadline).
  • If the team has already used their roster swap, they may not make further additions.
• It is no longer necessary for all members of a 4-player team to have played in a tournament match in order for all 4 players to advance to Regionals.
• There is no Arena rating requirement for entry in 2016.
• The qualifier cups will each have a prize pool.
  • Teams may continue to play in future cups for their region once they have qualified for Regionals.

More details on eligibility, qualifier dates, and complete official rules will be coming soon!

(source)

 

A first issue is that the qualifier cups will be played in the Warlords of Draenor expansion, but the Regionals and the World Championships will be played in the Legion expansion. This somewhat makes sense, given that Legion will be released on August 31, but still it will be quite challenging for all of the contestants to master new classes and compositions in around 2 months.

 

The other two issues are slightly more problematic. For the first time ever, this year it is allowed that teams make one roster swap of one player. The problem that arises from this rule is that players can technically pay a large amount of money to buy a spot in a qualified team. Moreover, teams that have qualified for the Regionals can still participate in the other qualifier cups, thus making wintrading possible.

 

Something else to note is that the prizepool for the 2016 World of Warcraft Arena World Championship has been reduced compared to previous years. It is also the lowest prizepool out of all the World Championships for other Blizzard games that will be held during BlizzCon 2016.

 

Well-known PvPer and member of Method's PvP team Cdew has summarised all these issues in the following video. Even though tensions run high and strong language is used in this video, Cdew's words echo the opinion of the rest of the WoW community on these rules.

 

 

Some time ago, Blainie had an interview with Venruki about PvP in Legion. Venruki had raised another issue that has been plaguing WoW PvP: botting. Venruki also pointed out that there's still interest for WoW PvP, since the World Championship had had good viewership numbers and the recent introduction of GCD TV has been well received.

 

Arguably, there are still a lot of people who are interested in competitive World of Warcraft. Still, do you think WoW PvP is dying? What's your opinion on this year's rules? Do you think Blizzard will amend them?

[Dantalian 20]

2 moths is pretty much enoguht to understand how things will work. Firstly new system will be implemented in prepatch, arour end of july, star of the August. so there will be plenty of time to test new game mechanics. Only problem that I see will be PvP Gear and how the weapons will work there and how to play against Demon hunters, cause they are totally new. i dont believ that having spare man to swap is the negative thing. Yes it brings some issues with coordination and so on, but it is better to have some coordination problems than wont be able to paticipate if something happens to player from the team.

About Prize Money, well since it is possible to buy time with ingame currency, release of HotS and Overwatch, they also will get their Prize pools it is  reasonable that Prize Pool of WoW-PvP was reduced. 

Anyway I look forward to see what will happen to the PvP in 7.0