Blizzard and Communication (RE:2200 Weapons)

#1 - Jan. 25, 2011, 7:24 p.m.

I'm a little annoyed with the lack of communication regarding the 2200 weapon change. No, I'm not going to cancel my subscription. In fact, it's not really a big deal and most people are overreacting. However, you create an overreaction with a lack of a "heads up" post. This current post claiming that you have implemented something (2200 conquest items) is also a little degrading, seeing as how it's worded to imply that rewards (not the weapons, but the armor) were actually implemented into the game today, which they were not; most people are aware of the fact that the 2200 armor (well, the different colored armor) has been in the game for a while.

TL;DR?

You will get a negative reaction with your decision to delay 2200 arena weapons.
You will get a negative overreaction with your decision not to communicate with us about it.
But then again, you probably already knew that.

Daxxarri

Community Manager

#4 - Jan. 25, 2011, 8:33 p.m.

01/25/2011 11:24 AMPosted by Gomez

You will get a negative reaction with your decision to delay 2200 arena weapons.
You will get a negative overreaction with your decision not to communicate with us about it.
But then again, you probably already knew that.

Sometimes, you have to make an unpopular decision, and you take a lot of heat for it. I understand that you guys aren't happy, and I'm sorry about that.

With regard to the weapon delay, as with any change which affects your gameplay, we always prefer to provide advance notice whenever possible, but in some situations it isn't an option. Unfortunately, this was one of those cases.

Some of you may recall that there were times in the past when it was common for the Arenas to be flooded by geared raiders actively engaging in arena matches exclusively to acquire weapons for the sake of defeating PvE content. That's not the intended design for arena rewards (that they be part of PvE progression), and that was a situation that we were hoping to avoid now. Raid content is very challenging currently, and as a direct result, there are fewer top tier weapons floating around. What we didn't want was a 'gold rush' on arenas, which would diffuse the competitive space there as well as give PvE focused players an undue advantage for raid content.

Ultimately, what we really want is parity in the availability of top end PvP and PvE weaponry. We want to see top end PvP and PvE items filtering into the player community at roughly the same time. This delay is an effort to achieve that aforementioned parity in this case.