SF: Newcomer in-dept feedback

[soro]

hi, im new on SF since 2 weeks and so to introduce myself within my first paragraph on this forum well i basically started wow 8 years ago on tbc, i reached 2.2 as awar/rdruid (AvA tbc), 1.85 as spellret/sp (AT tbc), and then on AT wotlk i reached 2.6 3v3 as awar, 2.5 3v3 as pwar, and 2.2 3v3 as rpal
the above might seem like im bragging to some; i see it as i myself feel more welcomed to listen to someone when i have at least a small idea of what that person’s about you know, so thats the reasoning

i would like to state that eventho i disagree with what i have been reading on this forum about you henry having took away farmed&paid items from players of SF in the past without having figured out an equivalent enough compensation beforehand, as i understand, regardless of that i myself believe it was a mistake to do so but in any case it wasnt an intentionally evil decision, and either way that is just me personally but that being said i am as a newcomer on a 100 players realm choosing to write this down because i simply see how much potential there is on SF when looking at all the features, and even more so when witnessing what presently seems to me as a very passionate and active server owner, which is why the currently low population doesnt worry me

i dont want to seem too fancy or something but id like to mention that someone who doesnt know what he wants can only expect to be disappointed; i myself am strongly against “change”, i am only for *improvement
in order to be constructive within the following 6 numerated sections, i solely mention what i consider negative about of the realm and follow each thing i dislike with a thought-through solution recommendation
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#1 currency simplicity
honor points/arena points/badges of justice/donation tokens/legendary artifacts/wg marks/ab marks/eots marks/av marks; having multiple currencies doesnt achieve anything apart from being demotivating, i recommend to fuse all of it into a single one simply being Gold as i think it is the wow currency that feels the most satisfying when acquired along with being an instinctive reward if that makes sense

another way to increase activity using the currency would be to not only provide it upon arena match win (rather than flush after # days), but to include skirmishes, and even duels a bit, some examples;
- duel win: +1g
- skirmish win: +30g
- 2v2 win: +50g
- solo 3v3 win: +100g
- team 3v3 win: +200g
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#2 itemization reach
i believe that removing rating requirements from items would be beneficial as well, as from a global point of view giving bad players weaker characters than better players has more downsides than upsides motivation-wise; on the other hand item transmogs & race transmogs could be a good alternative for the purpose of differentiating higher rated players from lower rated players (*along with having players start with an already created and undeletable solo 3v3 team)

note: from my point of view the same kind of item reach equality should be implemented regarding a few trinkets which i heard are currently only available from pve; attempting to force players into spending time doing something they do not enjoy only tends to push them away

still related to the item rating requirements removal, i think having a two season difference between the starting and ending gear is demotivating, yet rather than providing vengeful i recommend to give all offsets&jewellery of the realm freely, still with the s2 set but now with the s3 weapons, and to remove the rest of the vengeful gear from the realm (as well as the merciless weapons)
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#3 self-explanatory arena titles
another method about again such type of motivation increase, is to provide players with self-explanatory arena rating achievement titles of the 3 ranked brackets (team 3v3, solo 3v3, 2v2), requiring a minimum of 1600 rating and adding +100 for each further title replacing the previous one, some examples:
"1900 Team 3v3 Bkdbbre"
"1600 Solo 3v3 Roillinx"
"1800 2v2 Boingglal"
"1900 Team 3v3 Khookd"
"2200 2v2 Hegheg"
differentiating higher rated players from lower rated players with the use of transmogs, eventho still appealing, would not be necessary with such an appropriate arena promoting title system in place
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#4 arena motivation
one way i believe huge to raise motivation would be to reduce players' ratings by only 25% when a season ends (instead of the blizzlike 100% reduction); this would help preventing players from feeling that their progress is being deleted every couple of months, along with helping keeping the ladders balanced rating-wise

note: finding arena teammates being already as hard as it is with all the requirements needed for players to get going together, i do not believe it is realistic to expect them to have a good time at it when intentionally giving them an extra huge concern to worry about; faction differences, from my point of view race changing should be free no questions asked (*currently if a newcomer wishes to overcome that issue he actually has to create each of his class characters twice in order to have access to teammates of both factions, a demotivating thought to say the least!)
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#5 a reliable access to appealing world pvp
one more currently lacking efficient way to significantly increase realm activity is providing to players easy access to an area reliably having a high gameplay uptime, as i believe this to literally be vital for such type of server; with line of sight being key for that purpose along with appropriate zone size i suggest FFA in wetlands' menethil harbor castle

note: i believe understanding henry that you plan on implementing yet an additional new alliance vs horde pvp zone; if the reasoning is as ive heard solely due to a battleground scoreboard glitch that comes with the presently usable cross-faction code you have access to, then i highly recommend to go ahead and apply cross-faction regardless, as the lack of it is tremendously detrimental imho (then again i mightve been misinformed on your reasoning behind this)
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#6 newcomer ig introduction experience
i wouldve prefer for bags to be already equipped as well as “consumables” which wouldve actually simply been items having cooldowns not requiring to ever be repurchased, i wouldve prefer having multiple stationary non-flashy similar-looking npcs all having a primary self-descriptive name along with <Smolderforge> as secondary name, and for the chat to not have more than 4sc cooldown in between similar messages as i have been finding 20sc to be irritating when accidentally sending a message in the wrong chat

i wouldve also prefer for no-right-click-option npcs as well as added environment objects to not be in there as they unfortunately accentuate the messy impression to me, and for npcs either having a similar purpose or selling the same supplies to be fused together, and also for the mall area plus “battlemasters” and dueling area to all 3 be fused together as well

the mall is not professionally cleanly presented solely judging from my own standards that is, but rather messy and so resulting in being demotivating for me; apart from perhaps addressing what i wrote in the above paragraph, i recommend to start by providing in players’ bags a ~2.5sc cast time mall teleporting stone as well as one for the duel zone and one for the FFA zone, all three requiring to be 4 seconds out of combat for usage
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with even only 3 out of the above 6 sections being dealt with, i am confident that SF would be set up to start naturally steadily growing in population on its own just from word of mouth
once such process has started, there is no more rush, and so working on improving the realm with additional suggestion discussions becomes more and more enjoyable and achievable

i acknowledge that regardless of everything this whole piece still strictly stands as my own opinions; do not hesitate people to share whether you agree with these approaches or how exactly you would prefer to modify any of them, even if its about a single sentence of the topic, the more interaction the better!

[Henhouse]

This is a ton to respond to so I will try my best touching on many of your points. Many of your suggestions are either not possible due to technical limitations and have been thought of before, or were simply not worth doing due to numerous reasons as I may list below.


1. Firstly, you're confusing numerous "currencies" as if they all have the same effect, and they do not. Smolderforge is centered around Badges of Justice as the primary currency, with honor being a subset of that. You're able to convert badges into honor for this purpose. The reasoning is due to how we can price vendors, which I will mention again numerous times in points below. "Extended cost" as it is officially called is pre-defined by Blizzard. It is very important this is understood. Anything that is not gold on a vendor is completely pre-set and cannot be changed. We have to work around that system, and if we could, believe me, we would have done things differently. We use Badges and Honor primarily because they are the most diverse of the options to use, and achieve different purposes very well with the variety of things we are selling by vendors.

On your other note about using gold -- this is a suggestion we have heard before and seriously considered; however, it is not likely to perform well at all, and would not greatly benefit us in any way. Gold is insanely volatile, and easy to be abused. Unless we removed gold from every quest and NPC in the game, there's no guarantee anywhere we haven't found some exploitable issue with gold farming abuse. In addition to that, handing out gold by duels would be the quickest way for any player to get suspended/banned from Smolderforge. Who would be able to resist the temptation to spam /duel /forfeit a hundred times over when perhaps no GM is looking so they can buy that new set piece, etc., etc. That would fail horribly, put an insane amount of work on the staff to be policing abuse, and would have little to no benefit to the community. Smolderforge doesn't focus on leveling -- we do not focus on grinding rare stuff to be bartered. There's little no reason to barter anything on Smolderforge except transmog gear. Therefore, what benefit would gold really have on an instant 70 community? The risks are high, and I simply see no real pay off. Money is corruptive, messy, and causes a plethora of problems. With honor and badges being soulbound and non-tradable we're able to keep a healthy state of things per character and rarely see this trying to be abused in a detrimental way.

Things like legendary artifacts and donation tokens aren't really applicable to this either. They are simply items we are able to use with the extended cost system to make NPCs so players can see items in-game, preview them in the dressing room without having to leave the game, go on our website to use some menu to buy stuff there. We took advantage of the Mark of Illidari and Glowcap item extended cost entries to achieve an easier-to-use experience for users. It's not really a "currency" that we're complicating the game with -- they achieve different functions. The legendary artifacts exist solely to facilitating you being able to buy the item once you've finished farming it.

I feel like I have more points here, but I will move onto the next point.


2. Removing rating requirements is not possible per my extended cost mentioning earlier. Only some exist without rating requirements and if I recall correctly, they're all quite low amounts. Maybe not, but everything would have to be priced almost the exact same way. We just re-priced S4 into an amount we really find healthy for players who've not played arena before to jump right into and actually be able to earn a decent amount of S4 without having to achieve very high rating, while keeping the special items like weapons and shoulders reserved to those who've climbed high enough.

I agree that it makes little sense for weaker players to have worse gear, but that's how any game like this is, and how Blizzard designed it. Players want their pay off to mean something, and WoW thrives on making your character "better". That's why anyone does anything -- keeps playing the next expansion to become 'stronger'. Replacing that with just transmog doesn't seem to be motivating in the same way. Sure, maybe everyone should be the exact same in terms of item level/gear level, but... then you're saying people can only have fun based on the PvP experience alone and there's no fun to be had in actually earning anything, working towards something, etc. and that is simply not true.

A two-season difference is not as crazy as you're comparing it to with perhaps WotLK. TBC was significantly more skill based, and I mean significantly. We've many a time seen S2 rogues completely outplaying top teams in full S4. Is it likely? Not really, but it's definitely doable. WotLK was incredibly dependent on gear in comparison to TBC. Yes, it makes a difference, but the difference is just much lower. S3 simply entices people to enjoy and play BGs to make that "next step". Honor is earned through arena, too, though not as much. If you hate BGs, and do arena you can go straight into earning S4 without even needing rating requirements on some of the items.


3. This is simply not possible. Just like extended-cost, titles are not something that can be modified. We did play around with a system where we could have pseudo titles, but it would basically modify your name so that everyone would see you as, say, "Henhouse the Admin" and every chat, target, etc. would be [General][Henhouse the Admin] says: hello. This has a serious potential to break addons, and simply cause very odd things to happen. (Imagine having to type all that out in a /inv). We decided the system was too weird, hack-ish, and wasn't worth trying to implement.

Having a title that says "2200 2v2 Namehere" looks horrendous... Surely the exclusive arena title, mount and tabard clearly achieve this in a better fashion than that?


4. MMR does not exist in TBC. Perhaps you're confusing that from WotLK but it was not at all a mechanic in TBC. There is team and personal rating, and absolutely nothing that binds your character to it once you leave a team. I personally think a full wipe each season is fine, and while ideally it would be nice for it to remain balanced, there's simply not enough people queuing for that to matter at all. High rated teams are constantly going to be forced to face low level teams because of lack of similar skill people queuing. So even if we did have an MMR system like this, it would have no effect as the system will start games regardless of rating if there is not enough people in queue. It would be ideal, of course, but MMR doesn't exist in TBC, and there's not big enough of an arena community for it to actually mean anything. If that were to change, that would be great to look into better balancing it. But even still, before when we used to have a 2.5 minute wait on finding a team within 200 rating difference of you before starting a game outside of that threshold -- many arena players hated it. They preferred facing anyone than no one and waiting around every game to pass that 2.5 minute wait.


5. Everyone has an ideal location they'd "like" to see the PvP zone at, and I'm sure many would work just fine. The fact is Hyjal was an INSANELY POPULAR and successful world PvP area for many, many years around 2008-2011 or so. It was phenomenal -- why did that die? Loads of reasons, a lot of those are because we made graveyard farming not possible anymore which took away the "fun". Also, people actually often hate World PvP. Everyone romanticizes it now from vanilla days, but when people actual do it, they quickly realize how unfair and imbalanced it is, and are quick to grow disinterested unless it's abusive (eg: graveyard farming with massive groups). Hyjal has died due to this simply being less appealing. Sure, we're still going to make a new area with newer changes... but I don't think by putting it in a new location we're to see it be any more successful than the switch to Azshara Crater in 2012 was. It too, was incredibly successful until we removed HK gain from it, and made the graveyards random (we added HKs back later).


6. This paragraph somewhat struck a cord with me, so I will try my best to not come off as annoyed, but honestly, many people on SF and I mean MANY have complimented us on the fact we do not use the cookie cutter styled malls that look like a 12 year old downloaded a WoW repack and has any clue about design, or gameplay experience. Perhaps you prefer that, and that's simply your preference whether that's by being exposed to that so many times, or you simply like that, but I loathe it for many reasons. It's lazy, it's ugly, it's not at all visually appealing, there's absolutely NO clarity to it, and takes ages to walk around the mall finding stuff until you've memorized it all. Take the mall redesign -- that was what we focused on. Clarity. Stand in the spawn location and look out. Without clicking on any NPCs you can TELL where the mounts are, the gear vendors are, the trainer is, the hunter/warlock trainer is, the gem/enchant NPCs is. All of it. Without knowing English, or running up clicking on any NPCs we designed that mall to be understood. So telling us that our month's work doesn't look "professional" is somewhat of an insult to tell us that cookie cutter copying and pasting is more mature and elegant than a well-designed feel. Of course, it's preference, but a LOT of thought went into that, and I ultimately believe it's better for new players. The consolidation of NPCs into our multi-vendor system was also tremendously beneficial to make things simply easier to navigate.

Subnames of <Smolderforge> are just unnecessary -- they should know what server they're on.

Your ideas on consumables are very interesting, but would likely confuse the player base at first. We could try it maybe.

The areas of the mall being merged is a terrible, terrible idea from a technical perspective. Take MrGamemasterReviews review of us from 2011 when nearly 400 players were on in that mall. Do you see how his PC can barely handle the framerate? Yeah... not every player has a high-quality rig despite this game being 8 years old. Many players have poor internet connections or poor computers still, which also may be why they're playing an 8 year old game. Also, from a server perspective this is insanely bad. When Nostalrius went down in April, our population peaked at 750 and we forced a queue. Why? Because having that many people in the mall began massively causing issues with server performance. No, it's not because we had 750 and that was too many people -- it was because it was too many people in one area. Imagine you have 700 people standing still. 1 person moves -- 700 signals are sent out to inform that movement. 1 from the player to the server, and 699 to the players standing still. Now imagine everyone is running around, casting spells, doing stuff, etc. (700*700... and you get the idea). That bottlenecks the server, and is why you see servers trying to spread players out. TBC cores are really, really bad for handling this stuff too, and considering we were not prepared for it, it poorly affected us. Many years ago we used to spread players out a LOT. That's why professions used to be on Quel'Danas and in Shattrath, and we had the city locations to queue at. We almost made new malls, but didn't. Spreading players out was just good to keep the load balance healthy. Merging everything into one area is bad for this reason, for players PC performance reasons, and also because that is too much traffic you wouldn't see anything. Keeping BGs separated from the mall is nice for new players too so they can actually SEE stuff.



So as you see, many of your ideas are not at all bad -- they just either aren't technically possible, or aren't feasible to some of the reasons I have tried to explain. Some of these could potentially take a long time to switch to, or implement causing mass confusion, a LOT of work, and.... what gain? Potentially it could be negative and all that time is wasted. You have to pick your battles in some areas since we only have a finite amount of time, and running a server is a tremendous amount of work. Since I primarily have always run everything by me, overseeing all aspects of the server is already a lot of work in itself. It is difficult to put time into many tasks at the same time. We just prioritize what we feel is needed and possible for us to do at the given time. I hope this makes sense... and hopefully someone reads it besides OP.

[soro]

i appreciate the attention, ill start off and respond that in contrary to your opening accusation well you are in fact the one who wrote about the multiple currencies of the realm serving one identical purpose, i didnt man, as it obviously isnt so, i dont see the point of your “1.” paragraph!
the in game money amount gains i wrote were solely examples, the suggestion itself is impossible to abuse since it is configurable; for example having to spam “/duel +/forfeit” 250 times in a row to equal the result of winning one single skirmish is obviously not worrisome
i believe perhaps understanding that youre saying tweaking out gold amounts looted from all mobs of the game feels like it would be a mountain of work a little too uncomfortable to get into for the SF staff members regardless of the potential benefits, which would be totally understandable

im not sure about your “2.” paragraph are you saying that you cannot remove the rating requirements from items completely but that you can lower them?
if thats the case then you could still lower all of it as much as you can manage in order to essentially help serve the same purpose, but again i mightve wrongly got what you attempted to explain there
i dont know how to reply to the paragraph right below the “2.” one, as i dont see your point in there, and with your choice of ending sentence it seems as you are apparently putting your own words in my mouth in order to downplay an imaginary statement i didnt say @_@

about the 2 season difference thing, “crazy” is not the word i used what i wrote was “demotivating”, and your following blind yet huge accusation that i am subjectively comparing SF to wotlk isnt constructive either! even if you attempt to put emphasis on my mmr mention
you accuse me of doing something youre the one doing, you are the one comparing tbc to wotlk you wrote a paragraph about it^^

i understand that your team currently isnt in position to provide self-explanatory arena titles, and well along with my suggestion to stop deleting players' ratings being refused thats unfortunate to hear for me, i truly believe both of these ideas to be motivating for players but alright i gotcha
about the key points regarding providing reliable access to appealing world pvp well its simply to give a free for all small zone with a lot of line of sight, obviously there are a lot of options in the game; menethil harbor isnt my “ideal” one as you wrote, its just one that meets these requirements you know
apart from that, eventho i dont see how its related i do believe what you said regarding hyjal’s past success, yet my personal take on hyjal’s current inactive state is that its mostly due to the lack of population

regarding the mall well as you wrote, aesthetics, all about preferences, im just gonna say that it can be easy when youre proud of something to subconsciously give more value to positivity than there actually is, not saying thats whats up tho
im talking about this because on my hand ive shown that mall to a few contacts and theyve had a similar opinion as me, mostly about finding it irritating not being able to see npcs’ descriptions from reading their nameplates
obviously you still have access to the npcs’ descriptions but you get the point, either way literally all of that is subjective as you wrote so w/e, and im glad to hear that you might consider making consumables simple items with a cd =)

about the everything the server offers being in one area thing, i thought it was obvious that players would not be literally physically forced to stay in that area, and just because a server’s mall is not split in 2 and doesnt prevent players from dueling that doesnt mean it results in a bunch of issues imo
either way if a realm cannot have up to 50 players in a decently wide area without crashing or something well im just gonna say thats a bit depressing to me, but i doubt thats the case for SF

to end this post, i still recommend the following to increase player motivation;
- give all offsets&jewellery for free (including ashtongue trinkets)
- provide currency upon arena match win (rather than a flush after # days)
- provide currency from winning skirmishes
- provide a free for all small zone with a lot of line of sight
- promote arena teaming by making race changing free
- promote solo 3v3 by having characters start with a team already created

[Oldsalt]

Hi there, I think Henhouse answered your suggestions pretty well but I will try to complete it by answering your last post.

i appreciate the attention, ill start off and respond that in contrary to your opening accusation well you are in fact the one who wrote about the multiple currencies of the realm serving one identical purpose, i didnt man, as it obviously isnt so, i dont see the point of your “1.” paragraph!
the in game money amount gains i wrote were solely examples, the suggestion itself is impossible to abuse as it is configurable; for example having to spam “/duel +/forfeit” 250 times in a row to equal the result of winning one single skirmish is obviously not worrisome
i believe perhaps understanding that youre saying tweaking out gold amounts looted from all mobs of the game feels like it would be a mountain of work a little too uncomfortable to get into for the SF staff members regardless of the potential benefits, which would be totally understandable

Henhouse simply wanted to inform you of the non-flexibility of WoW extended costs, as you started to mention the various currencies you noticed here.
However as stated by Hen, Smolderforge is primarily centered around Badges of Justice with Honor Points as a subset.

You can obtain Badges of Justice by different ways:
- PvP daily quests (Call to Arms quests from the Horde Warbringer or the Alliance Brigadier General)
- Repeatable quests from Battlemasters (10 Battleground Marks for 4 Badges of Justice)
- PvE daily quests (Heroics and our custom 10-man raid Scarlet Citadel)
- Cooking/Fishing daily quests from Nat Pagle at the profession area
- All the daily quests in Hyjal, Azshara Crater and Quel'danas.
Donation tokens are acquirable by a donation (https://www.smolderforge.com/site/donate) and allow you to buy rare or non-accessible items. Thus, players are able to use the in-game Model Viewer which is interesting knowing that these items are for Transmogrification purpose (and not for their stats).
Legendary Artifacts are made of 150 Weapon Fragments which are obtainable from the PvP, PvE and Cooking/Fishing daily quests. It is one of the two ways to get a Legendary Weapon Model, the second being Arena Points with a 2k Arena Personal/Team Rating.

I understand you wanted to introduce new rewards for Arena and Dueling but there is simply no way we keep 24/7 a close watch on duels. Rewarding a 1v1 victory would inevitably lead to abuses and as sad as it is, many players want to get everything really fast, even if that implies the use hacks or the abuse of bugs.
Moreover, if the Gold remains tradeable, there is a possibility the fraudulently obtained gold has been already sent over another account. It leads to extra work and even the help of Henhouse for every suspicious case.

Badges of Justice already being all-purpose and accessible from so many ways, there is just no reason we implement another currency that would do exactly like the one we mainly use but add new issues and unneeded work.

about the key points regarding providing reliable access to appealing world pvp well its simply to give a free for all small zone with a lot of line of sight, obviously there are a lot of options in the game; menethil harbor isnt my “ideal” one as you wrote, its just one that meets these requirements you know
apart from that, eventho i dont see how its related i do believe what you said regarding hyjal’s past success, yet my personal take on hyjal’s current inactive state is that its mostly due to the lack of population

As far as I know, there is no way to avoid players to group. Even in theory it doesn't seem possible to do so; if being in a certain area was preventing players to group, they would just group from elsewhere and come back to the area. Thus, World PvP always ends up with a group of players who just ruin the fun of a "free for all" and we can't prevent that. Pretty much why we would prefer to have an Alliance vs Horde area, we worked on one (relatively small compared to Azshara Crater or Hyjal) that still needs to be implemented.

about the everything the server offers being in one area thing, i thought it was obvious that players would not be literally physically forced to stay in that area, and just because a server’s mall is not split in 2 and doesnt prevent players from dueling that doesnt mean it results in a bunch of issues imo
either way if a realm cannot have up to 50 players in a decently wide area without crashing or something well im just gonna say thats a bit depressing to me, but i doubt thats the case for SF

It would definitely not be an issue for all the players who want to duel, knowing that we have a phasing system for duelists (they only can see each other).
However, every other player will see these 2 duelists. Just imagine how messy it would be to have to gear yourself with 20 players duelling around you. Moreover, there are hidden game objects to avoid NPCs being hidden by mounts or Taurens, these would simply bother everyone.

SF didn't crash when Nostalrius former players temporarily joined SF (more than 5 hundred every day, not 50). It was simply slowing down the server as well as considerably reducing players' framerate, both due to all the population being in one area.

to end this post, i still recommend the following to increase player motivation;
- give all offsets&jewellery for free (including ashtongue trinkets) 
- provide currency upon arena match win (rather than a flush after # days)
- provide currency from winning skirmishes
- provide a free for all small zone with a lot of line of sight
- promote arena teaming by making race changing free
- promote solo 3v3 by having players start with a team upon character creation

- S3 off-set is free and the S4 offset rating requirements already have been removed. You only need arena points in order to get it.
- So far the Arena Flush System worked well, and was the one used in retail from TBC to Cata. It's a fair system that requires you to do at least 10 matches in order to get points after x days (3 days instead of a week on SF) based on the bracket and your rating.
Removing this system would lead to many issues: You would like players to get arena points upon a victory, what about those who actually play arena but do not win a lot of their matches? Wouldn't they be unable to gear themselves?
How can we restrict players from getting too many arena points?
It implies very custom calculations for arena points and definitely a lot of scripting, it honestly doesn't seem to be worth the time spent developing it when a currency system exists that accomplishes what is needed quite well.
- You already get Honor Points every win in 2v2 and 3v3 (rated or skirmish): 45 for a 2v2 and 135 for a 3v3. It is indeed very small but it is impossible for us to increase that amount without risking abuses from players and thus, account suspensions.
- Answered above
- The server maintains a moderately healthy faction balance nowadays, and that's thanks to the free transfers from Horde to Alliance. If it was made available to everyone, you would see an overpopulation of players who switch to Horde for the better racials for PvP (same reason everyone is Alliance in WotLK). You would have people switching to Horde to PvP, and switching back to Alliance for either looks or to force-start some BG due to too few Alliance queuing, etc. It's not the way the game is intended and we only created the service for those who wanted to truly be a different race or faction but did not want to lose their progress by starting over. Race switching in TBC is done very hackishly... there's no Blizzard-made way in TBC to swap races or factions so the code *can* sometimes cause issues and we also have to reset professions due to just the complexity of it all. In all honesty, if the feature were permanently free, most of the Alliance players will switch to Horde and never switch back to Alliance due to the better racials and heavy PvP preference on this server.
- It was the case when we first implemented 3v3 solo queue but every player was then included on arena flushes, which was actually making the server lag for few seconds due to so much calculation and thousands and thousands of empty, unused teams. Normally, it should be almost instant and without any lag. Therefore, we can't make every player start with a 3v3 solo queue team due to the issue it caused having thousands and thousands of blank teams included into the calculations.

[soro]

hey salt, no worries man i wasnt expecting a response going through everything from the get go neither you know, and im alright with you taking over
ill admit being surprised and a bit disappointed to read your initial response to your first quote of me in which you remention the claim about a dueling currency being abusable, i disproved potential justification behind such concern within that very same quote!;
“ the suggestion itself is impossible to abuse as it is configurable; for example having to spam “/duel +/forfeit” 250 times in a row to equal the result of winning one single skirmish is obviously not worrisome ”
and well the same also applies about your currency trading concern; configuring it properly to prevent abuse, aka making gold untradable in that specific example


your current concern about players teaming together in a free for all environment is not justified based on my own experience; ive played on a lot of very successful servers throughout the last 8 years and experienced countless hours in FFA zones in which players going through the trouble of attempting to team together without a party was something extremely rare, and far from worrisome (especially if theres a decent amount of line of sight)


regarding the currency upon arena win thing, i believe that you are presently looking at it from the wrong perspective, apart from the fun of doing something itself well an individual becomes motivated once he has a reward in mind, the clearer that relation is the more appealing it is;
winning a reward directly from succeeding in a match is then naturally motivating, it is instinctive and then knowing that there is no limit to the reward the player chases, while on the other hand telling the player that he doesnt get anything after 10 matches significantly directly promotes inactivity


about the factions, assuming we both agree that horde races are overall stronger than the alliance ones on tbc; players knowing that they can no longer freely go horde if they chose alliance actually currently highly promotes horde on SF, communicating to a player that he wont be able to freely change afterward is encouraging him to pick his strongest option (horde)
almost the whole playerbase spending 99% of their time doing something that is not ranked arenas; if it was known by players that they in fact could freely go horde for their rare few casual serious arena matches then a lot more would play alliance, that assurance then making them feel comfortable to play as alliance whenever they are doing anything that is not ranked arenas
i will add that this paragraph was strictly to address your written concerns which i personally think are misplaced; on top of that another impactful downside to the current system is again that it makes it harder for players to find teammates


thank you for informing me about the reasoning behind the lacking starting solo 3v3 teams =) that being said you both didnt reply to the 2nd paragraph of my previous post!;
i understood that SF presently cannot manage to completely remove rating requirements from items, yet isnt it possible to lower them more than what they currently are?


in a way to end this post with a few points, i would first like to say that if SF plans on keeping the same starting gear i then strongly recommend to make the ashtongue trinkets also obtainable from pvp, as attempting to force players into spending time doing something they do not enjoy only tends to push them away
i indeed believe understanding that SF is working on yet an additional faction vs faction zone as you wrote salt, and am aware about the present duel zone being on the SF team’s mind (which i dont think being emotional when stating that it is an unbearable area to spend time in =P), so i will just add that for players to have to manually refresh their cooldowns after every single duel doesnt help!
as a player who doesnt enjoy bgs nor pve, but loves world pvp, arenas and duels; i am lately finding myself logging on this realm almost solely to be reminded by SF that i cannot realistically work on gearing my characters by myself from doing what i love in this game, which is unfortunate to say the least since i understand being far from alone in that exact position
basically, the few conceptual foundations the SF team seems to be used to follow regarding the way this realm is orchestrated in game, well i think it comes with more downsides than upsides; downsides which can easily push away newcomers, my opinion