Recent Actions Against ToU Violations, Blue Posts, HotS - Garrosh Patch, StarCrafts

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Knights of the Frozen Throne Launches This Thursday!

Recent Actions Against ToU Violations
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
We’ve recently taken action against a number of accounts that were actively participating in and/or advertising the sale of in-game raid or dungeon clears in exchange for real-world currency. Such behavior is a clear violation of the World of Warcraft Terms of Use.

Additionally, we’ve issued smaller actions against players who were found to be sharing account details in order to gain a competitive advantage during raid progression. Account sharing of any kind is against the World of Warcraft Terms of Use, and will not be tolerated. While the penalties applied as part of these actions were relatively minor, we intend to apply much harsher penalties for such behavior in the future.

As a reminder, in order to ensure fair play and competitive integrity, we closely monitor these and other activities that violate the Terms of Use. This includes selling in-game services for real money, exchanging accounts or characters, and similar violations done with the intention of gaining a competitive advantage in raid progression (such as the purchase or transfer of geared characters or accounts between owners).

Note that while selling assistance with obtaining items, achievements, PvP rating, or other in-game benefits for real-world currency is against the Terms of Use, selling those things in exchange for in-game gold is perfectly legitimate. Players should not feel as though participating in a “gold run” is going to result in negative action taken against their account.

Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
EU Forums

I'm sorry that your event on Argent Dawn was overlooked. In the future, if you are hosting a very large roleplaying event that is being impacted by sharding (which, given the above changes, shouldn't happen very often anymore) I'd encourage you to bring it to the Community Team's attention by dropping an e-mail to CMTeamEU-WoW@blizzard.com with the details of the event.

In regards to the EU forums being ignored, I can accept that there's room for improvement but at the same time I think we have also come a long way over the past year or so.

In most cases Lore and Kaivax now mirror information onto the EU forum as soon as it gets posted on the NA forums rather than there being a delay of several hours. Yes, sometimes things fall the cracks or get missed and ideally we want to avoid this.

More recently (since Legion), the EU forums have had developers contributing in the Class Development forum and Watcher (Ion) has also posted several times on the EU forums in topics that were of interest to EU players but not necessarily to NA players.

When it comes to feedback, it isn't considered in a vacuum. We compile feedback from all the game regions (both EU and NA as well as ANZ, China etc.), this includes what players are saying on social media, fan sites, other forums, YouTube videos etc. We will drill down deeper if one region is resonating with something far more than others, to understand why that is the case and what (if any) action is appropriate.

There is also a 9 hour time difference between France (where the EU Community team is based) and California (where the developers are based). When we are in the office, the majority of the staff across the ocean are asleep or going to sleep. This means we don't have immediate access to get answers or information, so we send any requests or relevant details via email. More often than not, the feedback being raised by the EU player-base isn't that dissimilar to what is being raised by the NA player-base, so such matters become topics of discussion during office hours in California, this is often why information comes out during that time rather than during EU hours. Though there have been cases where information has been posted first on EU, which has lead to similar complaints from NA players about being ignored.

The information that we receive and post, in most cases, is a direct result of feedback relaying on a global level, not because one forum is preferred more than the other.

At the end of the day, our priority is to get any information we receive out into the community, it's not really a considered a problem whether that happens to be on the NA forum first, the EU forum first, or another platform entirely if it's more appropriate for the audience in question.

Sorry, did you just copy/paste a response from a Dev post on US forums in response to a complaint that Devs never respond to posts on EU forums? Did someone dare you for a laugh?
Yes I did, because it was information we received during the night that we were asked to share globally. Considering part of this thread was about the RP event in Europe that got missed I felt like it was the best place to put that information as it pertained specifically to the sharding topic. That being said, Community Managers aren't Developers. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

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Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Patch 7.3 Elemental Discussion
Catching up a bit on the newest changes people are starting to see on PTR, in particular:

"Static Overload: After using Stormkeeper, your next Chain Lightning causes Elemental Overload to trigger on every target."

Static Overload has been a sticking point throughout Legion (both in our eyes and based on feedback). Too much of the power of Chain Lightning was contained in an uncontrollable and very spiky proc. This is exacerbated by the fact that Chain Lightning is buffed tremendously in short windows by some effects--primarily, Stormkeeper and Lightning Rod.

A fully-controllable redesign of Static Overload should significantly mitigate the randomness in hoping it comes up during the moments it would be most valuable. The version we're trying out on PTR always gives a Static Overload at a high-value moment. We expect that it is overall a net increase to the power of the effect.

Summing up where we are with Elemental after various small changes in this patch:
--Single-target damage is buffed, through a flat buff to all spells other than Chain Lightning, and a larger buff to Earth Shock. We'll continue to monitor overall balance as always.
--Mastery will continue being valuable in higher values, which eases gearing constraints, and also prevents overall scaling from tailing off as it's capped out.
--Burst AoE potential available through Stormkeeper is both higher and more reliable. Increasing Elemental's on-demand AoE burst wasn't a big priority, but it's fine for it to happen in the process of switching to an on-demand design for Static Overload.
--Sustained AoE damage is similar or higher due to a large buff to Earthquake, and the likelihood of Static Overload's total contribution being higher in situations where Stormkeeper is being used.

Well. The first half of this sentence (which to be fair is from my post) couldn't have been any more wrong. As it stands, our average potential per Stormkeeper will drop significantly. The larger the number of SKs you compare, the more painful the comparison becomes.

When comparing what we could expect in 5 Stormkeeper casts: https://gyazo.com/2589d5750139946f30a54692c3de18a8

The bell curve represents the average you'd expect on live, while the red highlight represents what we'll see on the ptr.

When you compare with say 11 Stormkeeper casts, it gets worse: https://gyazo.com/08913ba093027e863b121268bf011424

We might be talking past each other somehow, because as I try to interpret what you're saying, it doesn't sanity-check. Talking about averages--on live you get 0.3 procs per Stormkeeper cast; on PTR you get 1.0. Would need more explanation of which "average" you're saying is going down.

Your first graph, the distribution of proc count on live over 5 Stormkeepers, I'd expect to look more like this (With the "5" column highlighted in red, as you did) (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

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Garrosh has made his way into the Nexus, along with other patch changes!




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