Upcoming Ashran Hotfixes

We have a couple hotfixes in the works intended to improve the player experience in Ashran, and wanted to bring them to your attention.

First, we've reduced the maximum number of players per side to 40. We've also increased the number of available Ashran instances, to compensate for having fewer spaces in each Ashran. Since Ashran was changed in Patch 6.2 to automatically place players in a raid group upon entering, we feel that having 40 players on each side makes more sense, instead of splitting players into two separate raid groups. This hotfix went live yesterday.

The second hotfix is intended to limit situations where one faction is unable to win events for extended periods of time, by increasing their damage and healing. Once this hotfix is in effect, a bonus will be granted to the faction that has been losing the most events in a particular Ashran instance. For example, when the Alliance are winning more events, the Horde will have the bonus, and vice versa. The bonus is decreased or increased in increments of 5% for every event that faction wins or loses, up to a possible maximum of 50% increased damage and healing in extreme cases.

In other words, every time your faction loses an event, it will be 5% easier for you to win the next one. If your faction currently has the damage and healing buff, it will go up by another 5%. If the opposing faction has the buff, then it will go down by 5%.

Please note that, due to the nature of this hotfix, there is no visible buff on the player that shows you what benefit you're currently receiving. We may be able to add a visible buff in the future, but that would require a patch, and we didn't want to delay getting this hotfix out. It will go live the next time realms are restarted.

Hello everyone, I'd like to address some of the common points I'm seeing mentioned in this thread.

First, I want to stress that the intent of Ashran is to provide a very different play experience than Arenas or Battlegrounds. The vision is a large PvP space where players are moving throughout the zone, competing for rewards, in a faction themed conflict. As many of you know, there hasn't been enough fighting in Ashran, for a number of reasons and we're looking to change that.

One of the most important factors driving player behavior in Ashran is the reward structure and how efficiency drives group behavior. Specifically, I mean that when the same reward is available in multiple locations at the same time, the two factions avoid each other. It is easier and more efficient to not fight for an event if killing a rare offers the same benefit. Right now, at the launch of 6.2, we are in an atmosphere where the primary concern for most players is earning Honor. Honor can be earned throughout Ashran in a number of ways and as a result, there isn't a lot of competition going on.

The new season will begin soon and inevitably players will turn their attention to earning Conquest. There are only two ways to earn Conquest in Ashran in 6.2. The first is to complete the quests to kill the faction leader and win 4 events. This will put both factions in direct competition with each other over events and the Road of Glory. The second is to kill 200 players of the enemy faction. Obviously, this drives players to kill each other. Our expectation is that if players feel they can compete for these rewards they will.

We're obviously concerned from comments we've seen on these forums and within the game that the Horde feel they cannot compete at events and the central road. When it comes to PvP, players will only participate if they feel they can compete. This is the primary motivation behind the mechanic Lore explained above. When a faction falls behind, it is easy for everyone to go their separate ways and never engage the enemy. This buff should help players win some engagements and hopefully build the confidence (and numbers) needed to compete in the larger battles.

On a related note, I've seen comments that the Horde think they are outnumbered in Ashran, but this just isn't true. We strictly enforce faction balance numbers in Ashran. If there are ten Horde players in Ashran, we will not let an eleventh Alliance player in. We've looked at the data several times and it is clear. The number of Horde and Alliance players in any given Ashran is the same at all times. However, there are a lot more Alliance waiting to get into Ashran. Since we enforce faction balance, the only way to get more Alliance players into Ashran is to get more Horde players into Ashran.

As a small note, I know some people have compared this new buff to Tenacity, but the situation is very different. Tenacity was a buff that scaled based on how lopsided faction balance was in the zone at any given time. Players would have several stacks of Tenacity but they would be terribly outnumbered. We don't allow either faction to be outnumbered in Ashran. This buff is primarily in place to help the faction that's losing recover and hopefully win the next big fight.

Finally, we've have seen the feedback about the desire to see premade raid groups return to Ashran but we don't think this is a good idea. Ultimately, it led to a situation where if you knew to use the premade group finder, you would wait a long time but get into an Ashran where you were guaranteed to win. Unfortunately, if you didn't know about the premade group finder, you would get in immediately but were almost guaranteed to get demolished. We don't think this is a healthy environment for the zone to be in.

We appreciate how passionate everyone has been about the zone. We'll continue to monitor your feedback here and in-game. Thanks for playing and we'll see you on the battlefield!