Posted by Juggynaut on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 - 33 Comments
Tags: daily, honor, lake wintergrasp, PvP, quest, stone keeper's shards, weekly, wintergrasp
In an effort to reduce lag by reducing the number of players who are in Wintergrasp at one time, the daily quests in the zone, such as No Mercy for the Merciless, Slay them all!, and Defend the Siege will only be converted into a new weekly quest format in an upcoming patch. Honor and Stone Keeper Shard rewards are said to be increased, though the gold reward doesn’t seem to be affected. MMO-Champion is reporting that certain quests are giving 20 Stone Keeper Shards each, but the current reward is showing 10, so we will have to wait and see how things unfold.
There are a couple of known issues with the new weekly format, specifically the quest showing up as a yellow exclamation point instead of a blue one and the quests not showing up after the reset until the player moves out of line of sight of the NPC who gives it.
I am not sure how much this change is going to affect the numbe of players who go into Wintergrasp during each fight, as most of the people I know go in for Marks of Wintergrasp or so they can go into the Vault of Archavon afterwards, and not necessarily for the quests. , the quests are a nice bonus, and the new format may actually increase the amount of honor and shards that many players get who don’t usually finish the dailies every day, like me. What do you guys think? Is it going to affect you at all, or will you still go into WG every time you get the chance?
Related Posts: Patch 3.1.2 Live, Patch 3.1.2 Breaks Wintergrasp Instead Of Fixing It, Wintergrasp Rewards, He Who Screams Loudest Gets Heard, The Finer Touches of 3.1,
By Zumo on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
thats a pity, i only like WG because of the huge number of people doing it. And its the only pvp thing alliance win on our server
By Alayea on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Changing the dailies to a weekly is NOT the answer. Either players need to do some upgrading, or Blizzard should change some stuff about the landscape, maybe how WG works (they’ve done it before, with very mixed results) to help reduce the strain.
Punishing dedicated PvP players is unfair. (I’m not even among that group and I can still see what Blizzard is doing is wrong.)
By theone on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 12:59 pm
@ Zumo
u like the amount of ppl in WG 0.o? have you tried playing at primetime? takes 35secs to cast a shadowbolt!
By Raknor on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
I agree with Zumo, its only fun because theres a ton of people which gives it a very epic scope. Not to mention, having quests there to do while pvping makes it that much more fun. This weekly thing is gonna kill it, i think.
By Tehowner on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
That is the stupidest idea i have ever head. Weeklies???? I am a big pvper and that is how i farm the bulk of my honor is from wintergrasp dailies. I dont care if its laggy. I hate you billzard.
By Shnoo on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:21 pm
Blizzard… you just killed my last link to TM vs SS type pvp…
By Vag on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
Well that sucks… now it will take even longer for me to obtain a mammoth..
By Deemert on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Well i guess this can be a good thing. I always foorget to do them and i usaly go once or twice a week to WG.
By Zumo on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
@theone, yes lag can be bad every now and again, i’m just blessed with a good PC that can handle it most times.
i just hope it doesnt reduce the number of people hugely…
By LordReinhart on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Weekly for the win! I actually enjoy that, you get all the honor right away one day, which is badass, no need to come in every single day to do dailies..
I’ll still be in wintergrasp everytime its up though, best honor every 3 hours… so I doubt it’ll decrease the lag by “that much” maybe a little for people who don’t farm wintergrasp.
I do think the weekly is better though, cus I personally hate having to do the dailies every day, and doing it once a week for all my honor in one shot is pretty damn good, get shit quicker.. than waiting all week.
I’ll still be in there farming honor though every time its up.
By Sam on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
This is not about framerate, it’s about server overload. No amount of upgrading by players will alleviate it.
You’ll still get the same amount of honor per week from the quests, plus you’ll actually have a better chance at completing some of the more difficult quests like assaulting the towers.
It takes quite a bit of effort and luck to be able to do that one every day, 7 days a week. Now you can do it once and get the same amt of honor you would if you managed to do it 7 times.
By Pauldy on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
It’s dumb because the dailys are not why people are in WG to begin with, they are there to gain or maintain control of vault. To control or get control for the elemental farming. They are there for controlling or maintaining control for shards in instances. I go so I can smash alliance face, and normally I don’t even pick the quests up. I don’t know of a single person that goes, hey WG is up I have to go do my dailys.
By Nance on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
“You’ll still get the same amount of honor per week from the quests…”
Actually, according to MMO-Champion, the rewards for the weeklies are not just 7x the rewards for the dailies. It’s significantly less.
http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/images/news/2009/may/newwintergraspquests.jpg
By LordReinhart on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 2:37 pm
The honor is the same though Nance.
By deSadist on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
This horrible decision and the affront to humanity that are the argent tournament quests is making start to wonder if Blizzard has any designers working on the game any more.
I think they’ve all left to go work on the “new” MMO, and left WoW to the interns.
By Nomzz on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Its not just the WG fight that makes it lag. WG and the rest of Northrend are on the same server. In normal BG’s like AV and SotA, they are on different servers. Have you lagged worse in a BG than in any other part of the world? I certainly havent.
Also, if you have the idea that it totally levels the playing field, (ie 40 Alliance vs 40 Horde) it doesnt have to. Have separate raids from separate servers, but in the same BG.
By chillidog on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
killing people who are lagging is the best part!!!!
dont take that from me!!!
By Pegraath on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 6:48 pm
It is the WG fight that makes it lag. I’ve been in WG fights at the weekend where we had 2 and a half raids full (100 players) and the Horde had similar. Towards the end of the battle the majority of those players are in the courtyard protecting their Siege Engines and the doors. It becomes unplayable. Instant cast spells don’t go off instantly, and any spell that has a cast time cannot be cast because you have to move before it leaves your fingertips.
Whilst the combat it spread between walls, the workshops and the towers it is all fine. The concentration of players in one spot makes it lag (maybe because they’re all casting spells rather than just moving from one spot to another).
By Rilandune on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 7:34 pm
I am with most of the posters so far in that I feel this is a poor decision.
There are a number of other ways lag could be reduced, though I won’t venture advice as I am in no way a programmer or designer - but suffice it to say I think this is a hurtful blow to the mechanics and gameplay of Wintergrasp.
It will be a shame to see this go through. Hopefully enough of an outcry can be mustered to make the change something more appropriate.
~Ril
By Bonedancer on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 2:26 am
@LordReinhart: Quests gives aorund 1200 (easy to do math :)) honor. Thats 1200 x 7 = 8400. But it will give 3723 Honor, so not same amount.
By cocopuff on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 6:19 am
his might exualy work i am not a very big pvper and to be honest i dont even like to pvp i havent done WG since the noble garden and holly crap was the lag bad i couldent even control a siege engine i am going to gate one sacond then i freeze and when i unfroze i was dead not taht this help with the lag if anything more alliance will be attracted but atleast i only have to go though that once a week if you wanto decrease the amount of players maybe you should put a limit on how many players can come in that would help the tanacity problem to how many times i have entered WG and i read “can i get an invite” and my responce allways is” get the hell out if here” i oftened tryed to explain your are making the tanacity and lag worse but they dont listen maybe if you put a limit on how many raids can enter WG they would after the battle is over as amany can enter as they want frankly i think the tanacity problem is way worse then the lag problem even if i could move and land a few bls a player with a high anough charged tanacity can easily kill me and that isnt just becuase i lack pvp skills
By Leonitis on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 6:49 am
it doesnt bother me as i only tend to do WG once a week but full time pvpers will be greatly effected by this
By Holydos on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 7:41 am
@Bonedancer:
But there is 3 quests that give 3723 Honor so times that by 3 and you get: 11,169 Honor.
By Rikaku on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 9:20 am
I’m with Zumo:
I like the high number of people in WG. And yes, I do play prime-time for my server, I’ve never had lagging problems in WG (aside from the occasional new-patch day which always makes our server wonky fora bit). Maybe it’s not just the sheer number of players causing your lag? I dunno. All I know is that many people I raid up with in WG never complain of lag and we’ve had huge encounters for 7 straight minutes just in the courtyard before the door; so it’s not an “everyone” issue.
It bothers me alot though, this change. I love WG and I do it all the time I can, and I like collecting the shards for my alts, it sucks now that I get 1/3 of what I can get in a week now, once a week.
By Kalgorn on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 11:49 am
Im not too crazy about PvP, so i can’t honestly say i know what the goal of WG is. I’ve done it once just to see what the whole craze for it was and had…. an okay time. Nothing too painful. But it wasn’t that great either. Nothing about it made me get excited and exclaime ‘Im so coming back here !”
The upside to it for me was i didn’t get ganked 1000000000000000 times in a row like i normally do when im dumb enough to step into a BG of try and quest in IC while flagged.
I’ve never acctually did those dailys. I”ve gotten plenty of Shards from the Heroics and Raids. Never knew what they were for so i accumulated a massive amount of them without even stepping into WG.
I’ve seen the quests whenever waiting for a VoA raid but i’ve never picked them up. Usually i just wait for WG to be taken by the horde then go with my guild to VoA.
So, this has no effect on me. Sorry for those of you that do WG frequently.
If i knew how to PvP correctly i might enjoy it a bit more than i do. But i just get so impatient with getting ganked again and again.
I do gotta say though, it was scary how many people were in that WG. I made the mistake of falling out of that temple thing when i was exploring around it. At first i thought i fell into a red sea or something. Then i realized that they were all alliance players. There were just so many of them that their names in red had blended together to make the ground look entirely red from the arial view i got on my way down from the fall.
Needless to say, i died instantly. Not from fall damage. But a whole volley of spells, arrows and bullets that flew at me.
By Blight on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 12:01 pm
Like Sam says it’s about the server getting worked over by the people in WG.
I’ve had lag in Icecrown trying to attack some mobs and I’d lag there just because of what was going on in WG. However, this only seems to happen mostly on weekends during prime time.
Every time I’ve had that kind of lag, it’s when WG is going on. Most of the people in the Northrend zone I’m in at the time, like Icecrown or Storm Peaks notice it, and General chat usually fills with stuff like “ZOMG, LAG” and “It’s Wintergrasp”. Also, I’ve been in Stormwind while guildies were in Northrend and complaining about the lag, and Stormwind is working just fine.
As far as the Weekly dailies go on this, seems okay to me, since I means I far less attached to the game if I want to work on those rewards. Once a week obligation instead of once a day? Yes please.
It’s the only thing I liked about Arena’s… one hour a week for epics. Course, like the daily quests, you can just grind for it every playing hour you get and get rewarded that much sooner (that is in 1 week of pure grinding instead of months of 1 hour a week.)
By Maverick on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 12:24 pm
@Math
The dailies currently give 1241 honour per quest per day (at 80). Assuming you do 3 of them, that’s 3723 honour per day. If you did them 7 days straight, that’s 26,061 honour.
Assuming each of the new weekly quests give you 3723 honour, that works out to 3 days of dailies, for 3 quests. If you currently do WG less than 3 times a week, you’ll be making more honor in one day. If you did WG more than 3 times, you’ll be making less.
What’s really the sad thing about this is that the only reason they have to do this is because WG is so successful. And instead of working on truly “fixing” WG, they’re going to “solve the lag issues” by making it LESS desirable to play (for many).
By Blight on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 12:41 pm
@Zumo and Rikaku - I’m really hoping Blizzard implements a new 30-40 player per faction BG. The last I checked, AV was a slow queue and when you did get in, one side was horribly outnumbered. I figure a new 40 vs 40 BG would help gain an influx of players who are interested in the new BG as it seems now the currently anemic 15 vs 15 SotA BG seems to be the most popular, but I find it too small to get much fun out of it.
If I had any say I’d create a new 40 vs 40 (or bigger if Blizz thinks it can get away with it) BG that implements two new factions that allow rep rewards like the PvE factions currently do.
The interesting twist would be that Alliance and Horde can chose to join the same faction. Kinda something like DHETA vs Nessingwary factions, where it makes sense that Alliance or Horde might work together (like they did at the Wrath Gate.) Actually, a third faction thrown in there would probably be the most preferable, then this could help eliminate faction imbalances that we see in BG’s now. Then leave it in a persistent map (or maybe one that’s reset at the end of each day) and have control points that each of the 3 factions could try to take. Something like 9-15 control points on the map, whatever makes sense for the amount of players in the BG at the time.
As you play in the BG and help capture control points or participate in killing enemy players (healing counts!) you gain rep towards your faction of choice, and once you hit the various rep levels, PvP rewards get unlocked for you.
So you could get some basic blue PvP gear, 5 man equivalent stuff at Friendly, Honored unlocks weapons and a full set of PvP 5 man equivalent blues, Revered gets you some 10 man equivalent gear, and Exalted unlocks most of last seasons Arena gear, or whatever Blizzard thinks is fair for the work involved.
The perhaps one faction unlocks a certain group of Epic items (weapons, trinkets, rings, neck) another faction unlocks another set (head, shoulders, chest, legs) and the third faction unlocks the rest (back, wrist, feet, gloves). You can then only earn faction with one at a time, and there’s a quest to change factions, similar to how the Oracles and Frenzyheart deal works. So, in order to get fully geared, you’d need to work on all 3 factions.
Well, it sounds compelling to me at least.
By phil on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 1:47 pm
It Will keep people who enjoy PVPing happy(ish) and the people who just want to get all the mounts not have to play everyday…Its not a bad move by Blizzard, although its not exactly the best thing to do…
By cocopuff on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
i guass it is just the human nature to think of your own needs before others you should think the needs of everyone 40vs40 is so boring first of all and sacond of all look at all the other BGs AV 40vs full of noobs most of the time or out numbered and ends up in losing AB SOTA basicly has the same concept of WG aliance get raped i ahvent done many but in allot of the battles we berly got past the first gate while horde were at our relic room EOTS AB+WSG i wonder how hardis it for the horde to get teh perfect storm achievement and damn the horde like to get 5 caps in AB and alliance apparently like nothing more to give them that either that or they are jsut brain dead retards well maybe they like ganking morre no horde but aliance thier own fraction not literly killing as showing thier mace aaxe sstaff degger 2 handers on handers spears cross bows down our throte but pulling it of to lose when 1900to 1000 its redicilous WG is exualy one my favorites not because they so incredibly awasome in it but because not matter how hard they try the most they can lose by is three points quick battle hey free marks a long battle big honnor and get more time for achievements a middle langh battle some marks and some honnor i caant think of anyway to screw for them to screw up that bad
By cocopuff on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
LOL lost my point anyways i think Blizzard should run wih this idea now i mean its not the best idea but i think its the best they can do allso i like blights idea you may even one to in the same patch just whould make sance i like the mamoth mount i have something over 200 shards if i did the dailys for a week i whould probable get anough money for the mount but i am just not that attracted to pvp mostly becasue like i said alliance sucks in PVP and the lag doesnt help at all call me crazy but i am not to fund of getting steam rolled over by 40 horde players in tonks with tanacity if they were dailys i whould only have to it once a week and then i am done i can do what ever ellse i want a raid level an alt what ever or i can do something out side of wow it may take me 3 times longer but in the long run it comes easier if your one who likes a chalange and exualy like to do pvp maybe blizzard will do something like blight said and then thier all the other BGs and arenas i allways thought it whould be cool for alliance and horde to team
By Kuismar on Friday, May 15th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
SImply put this was to eliminate the PvP gear farming. They found that everyone just went to WG to farm fast honor and marks to get the gear their. Therefore nobody went to the old honor farm BGs like AV and AB.
While I do think they did it to help with lag issues and realm stability. I know most of the people that even went to WG was for the Honor/Gear. Since these types of welfare epics are going to be less viable that alone would eliminate the number of people showing up.
In a recent post they even stated they are decreasing the amount of honor gained from a win and dramatically decreasing the amount from a loss. The honor is also going down for destroying towers and walls.
By Toresh on Wednesday, June 10th, 2009 at 3:54 am
WoW kiddies complain how hard it is to get gear this way.. not difficult to see who have never played mmorpgs where getting gear really IS hard, and here we are talking about years, and many years !
Laughing My Ass Off