Rated Battlegrounds in Cataclysm

The biggest news out of Blizzcon for me was the addition of rated battlegrounds in the upcoming Cataclysm expansion. I was pretty much ecstatic. I have long rallied for the arena system of old where by there were no rating requirements, but ratings determined how many points you achieved a week. Those with poor ratings often could not gain more than 200 or points a week, which meant 6 to 8 weeks of arena just to get a pair of pants!

Blizzard got it completely wrong, I'm not afraid to say it. They blame the failure of interest in TBC raiding on the easy access of arena gear. TBC raiding failed because of the massive system shock to guilds, both from the initial cut of numbers from 40 to 25, and then the progression path that involved a 10 man raid. The jump from easy mode Karahzan to SSC/TK definitely didn't help the issue.

Gaining gear through arenas was often called "welfare", but it was damn hard to get at the same time. By their own word, the majority of players were at 1500 rating. The system was a bell curve. If Blizzard felt that players were getting gear too quickly, then all they had to do was raise the cost of pieces of arena gear. Instead they added the horrible rating system, trying to promote raiding by removing access to weapons. The archaic concept of raiding in order to gain upgrades to weapons was pulled straight from someones ass.

Honestly, not much has changed with the inclusion of the rating system. The same players still gain the same approximate amount of upgrades as if there weren't rating requirements at all, they're just limited to gloves and legs instead of getting to choose from the entire 5 peice set. The bigger problem is the removal of accessable weapons to players who don't want to PvE.

Back to the topic though. The rated battlegrounds aren't actually worth... anything. So far there's no conclusion on if players will gain seperate rating for bg's then their arena ratings, but the general consensus looks like it is tied to your arena rating. Many people are throwing around the idea that rated bg's will up your arena rating, and that's how you will gain bonus arena points. I can't believe that that is the system, but knowing Blizzard, these people may be right.

Two huge problems with rated battlegrounds that I can't believe Blizzard is stupid enough to implement. 1) You are only allowed to play around 6 game a week. What? What in the world is the point then? Why only 6 games, the entire point of rated battle grounds was to let players enjoy battle grounds and get back into the PvP progression path that arenas blocked them from. Then there's the even bigger issue. 2) No PuG's. Only full teams of 10, 15, or whatever the number of people play an AV match is, can queue for a rated BG. So close Blizzard, so close yet so stupidly far. All that is needed is the no rating change if you lose concept, coupled with a BG MMR and normal rating system, and you end up in a situation where people can PuG to their hearts content and progress in your game.

Rated battlegrounds at this point in time are nothing more than a gimmick. They aren't meant for the casual player to have a means of end game progression, they aren't meant for BG lovers to have a means of end game progression, it's nothing but hot air to make their expansion look better if you don't do your research. Just reading the info on MMO-Champ about rated BG's will leave you nowhere near the actual idea.

Blizzard, you need to bring back PvP progression for casual players. Does everyone deserve all the best gear? No. Does everyone deserve a chance at that gear? Yes. I still feel that Season 2 arena was the best PvP progression path WoW has ever shown. The old argument that shoulders are seen and worth something is actually really bad these days, with how horrible and small the shoulders look, they just aren't as big as they used to be back in Season 3. Rating should determine how many arena points you gain, the speed at which you can aquire PvP gear. A 1500 rated player should be able to accomplish 2 pieces of season gear through arenas by 80% of the way through the season if they play every day. An 1800 rated player should accomplish 4 pieces by 80%. A 2k+ player should accomplish all 5 pieces by 75%. And that's not even including the weapons. An arena weapon for a 1500 rated player, back in Season 2, would take over 50% of the season to gain enough points.

It looks like I'll be picking WoW back up anyway, and I'll try my best at 3v3 arenas, hopefully my priest will take me back and they'll kick their rogue, but who knows. I can just BG too, and thankfully they're reintroducing a PvP honor weapon this coming season... last I heard anyway. It's always fun wrecking max pvp geared arena players in BG's because they're terrible at anything outside of a box. Just like I'm terrible inside a box.

Empire: Total War

I think the gaming companies have finally developed the perfect way to prevent pirating. Release their games broken and then slowly fix them over the next couple of months with patches, so that every time somebody finishes a complete upload of the game, a new patch comes out and the people trying to create the hacked versions have to either do it all over again, or just fix the hacked part. Granted patches are usually hacked in a timely manner, when a company releases patch after patch after patch almost once a week, well... I can imagine even the most devoted hackers would get tired of redoing the same thing over and over.

The game looks great to play, the reviews talk about how great the game is, and yet I still haven't gone out and bought it. $50 just does not feel worth it to play a game like Empire: Total War. Though honestly I'm surprised they aren't charging $70 or more yet, considering everything else has inflated over the years, while the price of computer games has seemed rather stagnant for the last decade. I want to play it. But I can't think of when I would have time to play it. I don't even raid in WoW right now and my time feels better spent enjoying free forms of entertainment, and thankfully legitimate ones through Hulu.com. What a wonderful site, for now. It will probably run out of entertaining content quickly, since I don't like sitcoms. If only they had the History Channel and not just Nova. Nova is great, but... you go to watch an episode on ants, and it's not actually about ants, it's about this guy who used his study of ants to explain social patterns in society. I mean come on now... teach me more about ants! The last 15 minutes or so of the episode didn't even involve ants at all, it involved monkeys on an island!

WoW Update: I cannot arena at the moment because my arena partner xferred servers and I have not been able to follow yet. So I am stuck, not doing arenas, BG's get worse every week, and raiding has stopped completely. I don't need to spend 16 hours a week raiding, not when finding a guild is rather laborious and often a fruitless pursuit. The last one I was in lost the raid leaders, and then two of the three tanks, and then the 2 guild masters that caused all the drama went AFK again after messing everything up. I don't know why the raid leader didn't just remake the guild, but whatever. So WoW is incredibly boring right now. Ulduar is an impenetrable road block unless you're in a serious guild, 10 man raids don't offer any gear upgrades from what I already have, and PvP is stagnant and hasn't changed for 5 seasons, going on 6. I can't wait to find a new game. Sad to say, I am mostly looking forward to new Blizzard games. Diablo 3 and their currently unannounced MMO.