"The Crowd Chose You" Clarification.

There are some very good points being brought up in here, particularly the dispute between the “frequency in which each team gets someone from the other team close to death during the course of one game” Vs “how close to death the enemy was”.

Some solutions could encourage turtling and we have to pay attention to that.
On the other hand, we also don’t want to change players’ behaviour too much because of this, for example, some healers might stop feeling comfortable playing at low health in order to keep the pressure on the other team during certain moments, and paladins/spriests/mages/hunters/rogues won’t wait so long before they bubble/block/deterrence/vanish, etc…

Who should win between a team that nearly kills their opponent 20 times during one single match and a team that leaves their opponent at 1 HP and plays defensively during the rest of the game?
Maybe there could be a mix between both variables with some weight applied to each of them.

We’ll make sure to share the potential issues you brought up with the devs, there are many solutions available to break ties and it’s possible that we end up seeing some iteration on this.

Just going to jump in here to add some new information for you all:

What we are wanting in every match if for there to be a clear victor in all battles. In our current "draw" system, everyone loses and in those matches you can quite often leave with a sour taste in your mouth.

The big thing that we want to do is avoid modifying player behavior. This is the reason that we believe that a debuff with a ramp-up time is not the best solution for this case; it may lead to a situation were players simply turtle the entire game until the debuff builds up enough effect over time. We will also be keeping an eye out for this new system making such a change to player behavior as well; we hope that you will try testing it out on the PTR to see if there is any way that you can abuse it and report it to us.

We also understand that there are some potential issues that could pop up with this new system (such as Mages wanting to Ice Block earlier, Cheat Death becoming less useful and others), and we will continue to discuss those in great detail. While we may not be able to resolve every single issue before 5.4 releases, we are confident that the new tiebreaker feature will be a significant improvement over the current system.

27/06/2013 13:05Posted by Sha

Let's also not forget Guardian Spirit which basically means a player can 'die', 0% HP, but result in 50% HP. Holy priest are and should be viable!

These are the kinds of spells that we're referring to when we mentioned Cheat Death. We will be looking into and discussing these particular abilities and spells in great detail and we greatly appreciate your feedback on the matter.

Do understand thought that we know that there are some issues with this system, but we will be looking to iron as many of them out throughout the PTR cycle as is possible. We are confident that this system will be better than the current "draw = loss for both teams" system and we will endeavor to create a system that ensures the rightful winner of every match gets the buff.