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An interesting thread popped up on the forums regarding Arena representation, noting class disparity and how it might be possible to rate performance based on a player’s class. Balancing all the classes is an ongoing struggle and has been one of Blizzard’s greatest headaches in PvP design. In Season 5, Holy Paladins and Death Knights dominated the Arenas, with Warriors getting the very short end of the stick and having the lowest number of Season 5 Gladiators. The original poster points out Blizzard’s continual, active revision of the Arena ratings system and suggests that the system itself might be flawed. Because the rating system is “blind” to class or even classes in team compositions, for that matter, players using an “OP” class have an advantage. The poster goes on to suggest that rankings be based on the class, rather than overall Arena population. This means that the percentile used to determine end-of-season rewards will be applied on a per class basis, thereby granting all classes conceptually equal representation. Ghostcrawler gives the

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Snowyfox of the US Vek’nilash server recently brought up a point on the forums which is near and dear to my heart: 5-mans really feel like they’ve lost their heart. In both Vanilla WoW and Burning Crusade, you could usually count on having the motivation and reward for running a 5 man no matter what your level. In Vanilla WoW, you might do a tribute run for potions and buffs or a Stratholme run for Abomination stitchings for an enchant. In BC, you’d run for badges. In Wrath of the Lich King… not so much. Badges don’t stretch so far since most of the good stuff requires badges only obtained in raid dungeons, and even the daily quests aren’t even close to as lucrative as just heading up to the Argent Tournament or over to the Sons of Hodir and doing some dailies. Yet 5-mans, in many ways, are the heart of the game. They’re where you cut your teeth on group mechanics and really learning your class. While there are many PuG horror stories, they can also be a place to meet new friends and prospective guild members. They’re a nice way to get together and do

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The Colosseum takes us inside the world of the Gladiator (Brutal, Vengeful, Merciless, and otherwise), to interview some of the top Arena fighters in the battlegroups. Our goal is to bring a better understanding of the strategy, makeup, and work that goes into dueling it out for fame, fortune, and Netherdrakes. Caylie is the Priest in a Priest/Warlock or Priest/Rogue team, “Esport Ballers.” Currently sitting at 12th place for their battlegroup, the team has traditionally done well in previous seasons. The player prefers to go by Cayley, due to his character names back in previous seasons. Despite having other options, he says he prefers the Warlock/Priest team for the sake of a challenge. Check out what else Caylie had to say behind the cut. WoW Insider: I guess my first question might be obvious. Which class do you play? Cayley: Priest, but sometimes a Paladin. Wow Insider: What role do you play as a Priest? What made you choose this class? Cayley: The name of my character is Caylie, but I’m more known under Cayley from when I played on Tichondrius during Season 2 and Season 3. I

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Playing the role of Adam Zibbert tonight will be the Michael Sacco. There will be a brief intermission between acts. Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider’s daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Zibbert will be your host today. You know the drill! LET’S GET US SOME QUESTIONS ANSWERED. Bearkub asked… My main is a lvl 80 paladin (holy/prot), gold is not an issue, and I have everything I could want off the Wintergrasp PVP vendor/npc. My alt is a level 70 hunter (hilarity ensues). Is it worth it to spend 200 stonekeeper’s shards to buy the +10% XP bonus shoulders? Or would those shards be better spent on something I can sell for gold (the non-bound pvp meta-gems, for example)? Is there something to spend the shards on that I’m unaware of? I imagine they’re worth it on a lvl 58 DK alt, but I’m not sure what the “cost/benefit” cut-off is. Heirloom items are pretty great, in my experience, especially the shoulders. With 3.1, they also grant 10% extra quest experience on top of mob XP, which

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Two Bosses Enter … but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW Insider’s series of fantasy death matches. This season’s bosses come from the five-man instances of Wrath of the Lich King. It’s an Utgarde mashup in this week’s Two Bosses Enter deathmatch, as Dalronn the Controller and Skarvald the Constructor from Utgarde Keep meet up with Skadi the Ruthless in Utgarde Pinnacle. That’s right: this week’s battle will take place on Skadi’s territory in Utgarde Pinnacle. Now before you throw your hands up exclaiming how much of a whip Skadi can be – we’re going to balance this fight. This all scales. Assume that the foes share similar levels, health pools and a comparative overall damage output. We’ll also assume that there are not so many Frost Vrykul assisting Skadi that his opponents find themselves overwhelmed early in the battle. Let’s assume that Dalronn and Skarvald make it about three-quarters of the way through the gauntlet before the first of them gets killed. (It goes without saying that we won’t allow Dalronn and Skarvald to run

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The University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ student newspaper, the Rebel Yell, has an article up about a student there named Michael McCreery, who’s studying how people interact in online games. Unfortunately, most of the article is about the game itself (most of which we already know, obviously), and there’s not much about how he actually did the study: apparently he had people play WoW using only the ingame chat, and surveyed them afterwards about it. How exactly that tells you how to “quantify the social interactions of participants in the game so that future online games can build better environments,” we have no idea, but we’ll leave that to the experts. Basically, McCreery and his team are examining how people use and interact with others in the game to see how we project ourselves and our characters. Eventually, he wants to do something “education or therapeutic” with the information, though that too is left pretty open. Virtual environments like World of Warcraft do definitely engender ties between players — is it possible that those ties can be

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Since the new site went live last night, an awful lot of our comments have been from here in the EU. Hundreds of our lovely readers have been having some problems, namely they can’t find their characters using the on-site search engine. There’s a simple reason for this. Because so many of the shiny new features are in beta, the search function is currently only taking info out of the US Armory, not the EU one. It will happen at some point, hopefully sooner rather than later. Just hang on in there, you have not been forgotten. As Liz said in her earlier post this morning: Please remember, WoW.com Profiles are still in beta — while we already have lots of ideas for the future, we want to hear from you about what we’re doing wrong (or right!) to help us improve it. And before you even start protesting, we’re aware that Profiles currently only work with characters in the US armory. (Though, to readers not on US servers, you can certainly create an account and participate on WoW.com Profiles — you just aren’t able to add characters. We’re starting small with

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Sometimes you’d like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all MMOs, including WoW! Check out this roundup of the latest news from the wider MMO world. First official confirmation that new Blizzard MMO is original IP In a post on the official World of Warcraft forums, Blizzard community manager Zarhym came out and said the new MMO was in fact an original IP, saying, “We have nothing to advertise for the new MMO because it’s a shell of a game thus far. We’ve already stated it’ll be a brand new franchise, which means the lore, art, and game play are being developed entirely from scratch. It’s an overwhelming process, but a process through which we excel. Our track record supports this.” Runes of Magic reaches 1 million registered users Here we are, not even two full months after the release of Frogster’s Runes of Magic, and they’re already announcing that they’ve hit the one million registered user milestone. Not only has this announcement

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DreamHack, the world’s biggest LAN party (according to Guinness), takes place in Sweden twice a year. They’ve just made an announcement of interest to us WoW players: at this year’s summer event (June 13-16, assuming “Juni” means what I think it means), they’ll have their own WoW realm. This is something that not many events have been able to do in the past. They’ll be hosting an Arena tournament at the event, with prizes to be announced in the future. We can expect the realm to feature premades and gear and enchant vendors, like previous tournament realms. They also mention “live showing of raids;” I’m not sure we’ve seen realms with premade PvE play before, so that should be interesting. More information on registration is going to be released “within the next few days;” we’ll keep you posted. Is anyone thinking of competing at DreamHack? Has anyone gone before? [thanks, Raful]  

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I tried to make a “stealth nerf” pun in the headline, but it just wasn’t coming to me. Anyway, Blizzard has decided that items that grant stealth detection were feeling too mandatory in arenas, “forc[ing] players to use lower level equipment even when more powerful items were available to them.” Therefore, they’ve nerfed the lot of them. Ultra-Spectropic Detection Goggles can no longer be used in arenas. Epic engineering goggles will no longer grant stealth detection. Stealth detection on many other items (Catseye Ultra Goggles, Blood Guard’s Dragonhide Gauntlets, Marshal’s Dragonhide Gauntlets, Knight-Lieutenant’s Dragonhide Gloves, General’s Dragonhide Gloves, Bloodvine Lens, Knight-Lieutenant’s Dragonhide Grips, Blood Guard’s Dragonhide Grips, The Night Watchman) has been reduced. This hotfix is already live; tooltips are not updated, yet, but will be in the next patch (patch 3.1.2). What’s your reaction to this? Obviously it’s bad when people feel compelled to wear low-level items because they’re

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