First of all, the arena.



This picture was taken with a lvl 13 draenei shaman. As you can see, you can join the practice arena at lvl 13. You cannot join the real one though. Don't know how high you got to be for that one, probably 30-40ish.


And here is a video of a draenei mount beeing ridden.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?do...91033103&hl=en


Might update with more fun stupid facts later.

<3

Join as Group and Join Battle are separate buttons. I thought you weren't able to PUG arena matches?

Well, you are!

Hahahaha, RT and AT. Hot.

Maybe you can just pug the practice arena?, which would be a nice feature for loners/killing time when your team is offline/getting in extra pvp-goodness without risking screwing up your rating or the ratio that your buddies need to get points that week/(if you can group-join practice as well) pvp-ing with people outside your team/auditioning people for your team?

That then raises the question of what you get from the practice arena, aside from just general time pvp'ing, I figure it's likely you get some sort of (small) flat arena point income from playing around in it (perhapse capp'd).

It's probably a bit early to say you can join arenas at 13. For all we know it could be a bug, since it's still alpha and all. Let's hope the practice arenas don't generate arena points and are just there to screw around and hone skills, whereas the actual battles in the upper section of the window is where the points are earned.

I believed that to be the case as well BEEF, cept i have no idea where i got that idea from.

The way they've been blindly ripping off the whole Guild Wars PvP system, you could easilly expect it to have random arenas too. I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly annouce guild halls and guild battles for the incomming months after BC.

You definetly wouldn't get ranks or much arena points from random arenas. But it will prolly give you some honor.

Overall looking good until now. Can we expect WoW for WCG 2007? :p

This isn't blindly ripping off Guild Wars.

If this is anything like guild wars, then GW copied blizzard in the first place. This is exactly (to the T) the same as their War3 Match making. (different game genre, but still exactly the same match making)

I think he means the style of the arenas, not the actual match-making mechanic. From the screenshots of arenas that have been leaked and what's been said, it definitely feels fairly Guildwars-esque. Not that that's a bad thing, Guildwars was fairly fun with a group of friends.

Take a look at http://s102.photobucket.com/albums/m...stormarena.jpg

It's like a GW map with more visual details :P

The whole arena/reward/ranking system is exactly like in GW. As for the matchmaking system I could even argue that the guys at Blizzard who initially designed it already moved to arenasoft to develop GW. But from my experience I'd rather not discuss this issue on forums anymore :P

Not saying it's bad that they're ripping GW off. GW's PvP is light years ahead of WoW. Blizzard have done good in getting the best part of all good MMOs around and putting it all together in one game, they still didn't have much from GW but it looks like they finally noticed that they were losing too many PvPers to GW. And I'm glad they did. It might be a cheap strategy to rip everyone off instead of making anything original, but it has been working wonders and I personally don't care, I just wanna have a good fun game to play in my free time.

The only reason I still play WoW is because of RL friends who are way too carebeary to move to GW with me :P If they do succeed in making WoW PvP almost as good as GW's than I'd abandon GW for sure.

well i could sign up to the Arena, but i didnt join. im pretty sure that i could ahve joined if there where any games up though :s

Sure there are! They're all hidden away in the basement of some vast corporate building, behind a locked door at the end of a long hallway labeled "Risky Business Ventures," right next to the locked door labeled "Tribes Sequel."

Along the way through this hallway are large green doors labeled "Sports Game 2007," "Sports Game 2008," "Battlefield Game 3000," "Unreal Tournament 2007 (Shiny New Engine Version)," and "Unreal Tournament 2008 (So-Shiny-That-Even-The-Trees-Glow Version)."

Or so I keep telling myself.

The 114DPS 2-handers we've seen and what-not cost 3750 or so honor points?

Does anybody know how many honor points you accummulate per match? From what we've been told every arena season = new items, and we have to spend out points to get said items before the season ends.

So how many points do you actually get per fight?

I doubt it's points pr. fight, but points given out pr. week dependant on your teams standing for that week.

Im glad they implement Pug arenas too:) I was afraid they would limit you to certain players you already know, but pug arena is gonna allow for trying out new peeps too.

And ofc it 's gonna allow for more relaxed matches with friends etc, with not-so-optimal setups which is cool!

I don't think anyone was saying it was bad just Guild Wars-esque. As a formerly pretty hardcore GW player I'd agree with that assessment. I don't care. It's not even something to harp on; if it's getting more like Guild Wars as far as the maps, small arena battles, etc good. WoW's battleground PvP has always seemed a little halfassed to me. There are worse people to be taking a cue from.

I don't have a quote, but I think what they said was that when they started a new season would be a good time to introduce new items. I.E. The next season start after patch 2.3 puts raiding 125DPS weapons in will be when they refresh the arena items to include 125 DPS weapons.

Also, I think you can carry point over from season to season.

Think I read the same quote as Emeraude and it didn't sound like a maybe type of thing, it sounded confirmed that there would definitely be new items every season.

I'm not sure if keeping points over from season to season makes any sense? I know it's not a very good direct comparison, but look at War3 or Diablo 2 ladders, they're always reset to 0 in all respects at the end of the season. Retaining your full amount of points seems a little counter to the whole point of having seasons. You could just farm up as many points as you can for a month or two and be set for years for gear. That sort of defeats the purpose of the reset since you don't have to earn all the new gear.

Except that there is a points cap, and the cap is slightly above what the single most expensive item costs. You won't be able to hoard points in this fashion.

Sorry I didn't realize that was the case. That seems alright then eh, I guess it's a bone they're tossing to the casuals.

Random TBC UI Change:

Tradeskill Windows now have a "Have Materials" Filter!