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With the recent events at ESL regarding ring of valor coming up every game, I thought it appropriate to address the arena that everyone who’s anyone hates, ring of valor.  I thought that it was funny listening to the commentators say ‘if it was Nagrand, nobody would be complaining’ and it’s true; I think everyone remembers the time when blizzard disabled Ring of Valor to address certain bugs, everyone was celebrating. Well guess what: they missed a whole bunch of stuff that they could have fixed at the same time. These sorts of bugs and flaws in a map that is used for competitive matches are not acceptable and if you think of any other esport, maps are edited and tweaked all the time to fix small bugs or exploits.

#1 – General bugs with pillars

  • Completely bugged for all pets (if you set your pet to attack before the platform is fully raised it bugs out and wont move for some time)
  • Can’t put portals on pillars or the starting platform.
  • Fear pathing bugged on pillars (you cant run off it or onto it while feared)
  • Blink bug (you cant blink off a pillar, it also bugs on fire sometimes aswell)

#2 – General Strategy

I don’t know about anyone else but I’ve found that our strategies change vastly on ring of valor to a much more zergy style of play, simply because the map does not allow for more advanced strategies involving line of sight. As soon as you try it the pillar inevitably goes down and you get smashed up by two melee who most likely have ears growing out of their backs and no eyes whatsoever. I believe a  ‘ring of valor – reduces your change to outplay the opponent by 50%’ debuff should be added to represent the way this map plays.

#3 – Improvements

In my opinion the following changes need to be implemented in order to bring ring of valor up to par with the other maps:

  • The starting platforms need to be removed and entrances should be added behind the smaller pillars.
  • The smaller pillars need to be increased in size slightly to stop people meleeing through them but also be small enough so that pillar kiting is not possible here.
  • These Pillars should still go up and down, and start up as they are now, but go down after about 15 seconds before they continue on their usual cycle. This eliminates teams camping and forces them to make quick tactics when they see the other team, which I think is what blizzard originally intended when they came up with the design for Ring of Valor.
  • The Larger pillars at each end should remain up for the entire game since right the strategic possibilities of this map are being severely restricted by the lack of constant pillars.
  • Since the drink change it is virtually impossible to get drinks off on this map due to the pillars being virtually nonexistent and the fact that you can keep people in combat even while they are on top of them (surely defeating half the point of the pillar).

If Blizzard do not plan on making the arena maps play consistently, then I suggest that they implement a map selection system similar to that in Warcraft 3 where you have the option of picking one or two preferential maps and one map that you do not wish to play on.

Will Of The Forsaken

Since the Wotf change I have played a few hundred games and have come to the conclusion that it has hit some classes more than others. It has become virtually obsolete in 90% of games for priests and rogues since the games dont last long enough for you to use it effectively.

  • Mages and Death Knights are pretty much unaffected since dks can wotf -> lichborne -> trinket and mages have block.
  • Warriors have berserker rage though undead is no longer the best race for them.
  • Warlocks have pet dispel so they are slightly less affected.
  • Priests are hit fairly hard; however it’s also a buff since they have psychic scream.
  • Rogues are the most affected; if they wotf a fear then they can’t trinket and are open to being bursted.

I think a more in-line shared cooldown would be 20-30 seconds.

Water

Water is virtually unusable in most 3v3 games now. I propose that the drink delay is reduced to 2-3 seconds in 3v3 since this opens up a variety of other strategy options for a lot of teams. Water was originally nerfed due to 2v2, however the game’s balance is primarily focused around 3v3 so there is no need for the ‘waiting 6-8 seconds to get out of combat, then 5 second drink’ delay. This is equivalent to ccing yourself for 10 or more seconds only to get stopped after 1 tick or have to stop halfway through because some warrior thought it’d be cool to hit your rogue to 40% in evasion.

And now Yiska’s Germanese thoughts on ESL!

Summary of ESL Edmonton by Yiska

Disaster. I chose this word to start this off and I think I do rightfully so. A new day and a new ridiculous problem. Let’s recap real quick. On Friday they had problems with the observer UI. When Shawn (the ESL WoW Headadmin) contacted Blizzard, they told him that there would be no way the could fix it that day and quite possibly not on Saturday as well. When MLG shoutcaster Jarred “Vhell” Coulston heard about the issue, he logged in on the MLG TR and came up with a work around in (now get this) a full 5 minutes.

At this point I already had a hard time getting my palm of my face considering the tournament was destined to not be as amazing as only 7 teams attended (6 of them being professional + one local team) and the players were forced yet again to play on a completely unexplored new patch.
If this was all that had gone wrong, I could’ve probably passed it off as “Oh well, that’s unfortunate” not knowing of what was soon to come. SK.US new line up with Glick, Realz and Kollektiv suprised everyone with their new strategy as they played Deep demo Warlock against Check6 and managed to beat them 3-1 in the group phase. When Friday was over, we knew the participants for both the North American finals and the participants for the Global Finals would be Check6, Fnatic, SK.US and Evil Geniuses.

On Saturday I was surprised by the incredibly badly chosen system as I realized that the final stage of the tournament will not be played as double elimination. Really? In that case I can’t really blame EG wanting to lose in Group stage against Fnatic so they wouldn’t have to play against Check6 or can I? I think if you want to win a tournament you should be up to win against the strongest teams at the tournament (or you will get a free ride like TSG did to 25000$ USD at Blizzcon, heh).

We’re not done yet, far from. After enduring all these problems shoutcaster Saravok commited a fatal mistake. They streamed him opening the txt-file with the data for the observer account. Of course nerd kids had to hack the account and even delete the character. Fortunately one good guy was quick enough and changed the password and send the new one to 2good. Thumbs up! I know for a fact that the stream has quite a delay and therefore I really don’t understand how normal viewers could’ve been faster than the guys in the ESL TV office.

Finally we were able to see one full series of EG against Check6 which they lost as they expected themselves. I felt Pookz blocked too early in a couple of matches and they could’ve done better. Anyway, the other match between SK.US and Fnatic went 4-1 in favour of Fnatic leaving them without a chance to win the tournament. The games were done for Saturday and we saw… a grand total of one series in two days. At this time I was really actively thinking what could possibly go wrong despite what already happened. At this point I have to admit, I think I jinxed it.

As the matches occured on Sunday a new problem was presented to the officials. For an extended period of time only one map would pop up and if that wasn’t worse enough it was only Ring of Valor. The matches for 3rd place had to be delayed as well as the finals.
While they weren’t able to fix the problem at least the map that constantly popped up changed and so Fnatic lost to EG.

In the final matches, it all looked like the veterans of SK.US would take it home as they had to match points but the map RNG wasn’t in their favour yet again and only Blades Edge popped up which is a really huge disadvantage. Check6 ended up winning the final match vs SK.US 4-3.

If you want to hear more about the tournament from a perspective of a player check out Glick’s blog on Gameriot. There are a couple of more ridiculous circumstances they had to cope with.

It is important to note that despite mistake with the account data, ESL is not to blame for this misery. Tournament server problems really only can be fixed by Blizzard and they weren’t able to fix the problems in time. It’s ridiculous and amusing at the same time that Vhell could fix something in 5 minutes what and entire office couldn’t.

Also the Headadmin Shawn as well as 2good did an amazing job at getting the best out of the situation they possibly can and it was still enjoyable for me to watch the stream. It would’ve been better with Matt though for sure, heh. I personally phoned Shawn on his cellphone when I heard that Vhell found a work around and as soon as I told him that we got a solution I could hear that he started running.
The bunch at ESL are definitely dedicated to their job and we can only hope that Blizzard steps up and does an equally good job. My 2cent.