Programming "Effort" of the STV Event

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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Lately I have been doing the STV event more frequently. Not because I´m enjoying it (d´oh), but because I need to farm rep for Arathi (lumber). I can do around 1000 coins as a rogue, but I really really don´t enjoy it and I think most people who do this also don´t do the event because it is fun.

There are a lot of things I could complain about. E.g. that this event is totally unsuited for a rogue with low armor/hp and no AOE. While a priest has a 30 s cool down AOE fear that actually kills me (because I´m feared into other groups of players) if I don´t have my 5 min cool down insignia up or mages just blasting arcane explosion in these masses of players, gaining hundreds of coins…

No, what I would like to rant about today is the programming effort that has been put into this. Does anybody know how many developers are working on SOD? I would imagine that Blizzard with 4700 employees might have like at least 20 programmers working on this. But it actually feels more like there are two programmers who have to implement the changes.

Just one aspect: You resurrect during the STV event and get the debuff “drained of blood” that protects you from getting killed again for 15 seconds or so. Instead of making you invisible and just untouchable, you can still get hit by AOE effects (hunter ice traps, flares). You actually get slowed for a very short period of time. You actually get feared by priests for a very short time. Instead of thinking of something that would make you actually untouchable during this time, I can literally see the programmer going like “oh crap, this happens. Erm, I add a line of code, so each time the player gets affected by a spell, it is immediately canceled. Yes, that should work. Time for a coffee…”

The effect is, that I am in combat, I rez, walk to a new location, cross an ice trap / stand to close to a priest and get feared, I am in combat, debuff expires, I get visible and immediately attacked without being able to stealth. Good job!

Now this is not too much of an inconvenience for me, but it makes me wonder how much time the developers get to make the new content. I mean two months between each phase and not that many new things implemented… and those that are have a lot of bugs from the start. If you tell me there´s two programmers working on the changes and one of them works in part time, I would say they did a pretty good job. I would be shocked to hear that actually more than 2 people are programming that total mess.

3 Likes
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The STV event needs massive rework.

Just done the one at 6pm and it was the worst mess I’ve seen in this game.

Not to mention the lag making everything absolutely unplayable.

I love PVP, I love World PVP even more, but that thing is a joke.

1 Like
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Next bug: I walk close to the altar, so when I die I can resurrect and hand in the blood. I die. My corpse suddenly moves to a different location. I go there and press “respawn”, nothing happens. Have to walk back to the ghost healer, resurrect and repeat this s show…

Sometimes I wonder how much of the game I play for fun and how much I torture myself just to get the loot.

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Also the respawn is flawed in my opinion. How often all members of my group are spread between 2 or more cils for dying a few letters appart.

It should not send you to the closest spirit , but each spirit should be allocated to one area. For exemple you die in the south east beach , you have the same spirit for the entire area. Because it is too easy to just get send to Arena spirit and your group to southern cave spirit.

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The event can only be played on off times.

You wanna play mid day a tuesday to get an acceptable experience.

Afternoon/evening of saturdays/sundays are the worst, its unplayable with 11 sec input lag and everyone flying around the screen.

Casters are so heavily favored its unreal.

6

It´s called “hysteresis” and usually every programmer should know about it:

Assign each ghost healer a certain area. If a player dies in that area, she/he is sent to that ghost healer. Now to prevent the situation, when your teammates are sent to a different ghost healer (because they stand a few meters away from you and enter the zone of another ghost healer), there is a simple fix: A player has to step at least (e.g.) 15 meters into the zone of another ghost healer to be sent to that ghost healer. So every zone is overlapping with the adjacent zones and you need to go deeper into a zone to be allocated to that ghost healer. Of course, there are situations when you will still be split apart, but that should fix 80 % of the occurrences.

A really elegant solution would be to check where your last and closest team member died and went to the ghost healer. Then favor that ghost healer and send the other players of the group to these healers as well.

It is clearly observable that none of these easy fixed were applied.

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Worst PVP event. Lack of creativity. Everyone banging each other for 30 minutes, for 4 months. It’s so lame. How hard is it to come up with something more interesting? For example, a battlefield in Arathi with 5 bases to capture like the eye of the storm, and each base grants a unique bonus like +5% damage, +5% healing or why not +10% mount speed.

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I would have loved a halaa style event with an open world objective.

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In general I think most wow players don’t do something for fun no matter the grind no matter how annoying or boring they do it anyway

Which is fine I guess but in an event that requires a 5 man grp you constantly get these grps that try to go for 2k coins cuz they did that once but each member did it in a diff way and they expect the same result every time

  • Less chaos
  • No 5 man bomb ressing
  • No sitting stationary 24/7