NDA is most asuradly NOT revoked. I was rather taken aback by the level of detail in that article when I saw it as well, and I really hope they did in fact get permission to share the details that they been the past few days. Their comments regarding Stress Testers getting beta invites also seems like it would be a violation of NDA terms...

If they are simply disregarding NDAs then as a whole their site lacks credibility and is a detriment to the industry. If they got special permission, they really need to put a disclaimer at the top to avoid confusion and not encourage others to violate their NDA agreements.

~Cyndre
 

I don't think I could say it any better than Cyndre; this is a huge oversight.

Not exactly the best way to start off your website, eh?
 

The stress testers getting invited to beta was displayed on PotBS own home page, so it can't be against NDA to mention that.

Population imbalance can be pretty detrimental to any PvP, but it depends on the context. The population problem on WoW doesn't really affect the battle grouds does it? In each battle it comes down to organization and ability/gear.
 

"The population problem on WoW doesn't really affect the battle grouds does it?"

Queue times? There's also a problem with the world PvP regions. I've yet to see Haala remaining under Horde control for more than 30 minutes on my server. It's practically another alliance town.
 

I guess me having spelled 'grounds' wrong, was confusing enough to think I was talking about world PvP. Thus having completely proven my point about context. I know...reading is hard.

How differently can I say that the battle grounds are not affected by the population problem such that you will read it and understand. In the context of battle grounds, an instanced competition, the victor is not determined by the size of his faction (the length of time in queue doesn't provide either side an advantage in the battle now does it).

So, it depends on what the PvP is like in PotBS. Population may not matter.
 

Why so hostile? My very first sentence answered how faction imbalance affects battlegrounds, while the other sentences brought up a different point unrelated to battlegrounds. I'll elaborate on the first point: Alliance suffers from faction imbalance, because they have to wait longer to get into a battleground. You may or may not agree, but I hope at least now you understand what I said.

I'd like to add that luckily, I'm a Horde player, but I have RL friends who play Alliance and who don't PvP for that reason alone.
 

I agree with BugHunter; it all depends on how the PvP is set up.

I agree the Battlegrounds queue times can be ridiculous, but it doesn't actually affect the outcome of battles. On the other hand, you have games like Meridian 59, which I played religiously for 8 years, and which had faction-based combat that was completely disproportionate, not instanced, and totally open. That did not work well at all.

I think this is one of the many reasons why PvP-centric MMOs are so rare. There are a lot of contradictions between the conventions of the genre like factions with no way to autobalance them and level/gear-based combat that make it extraordinarily difficult to have fair and fun PvP. I really hope someone comes up with some solutions someday.

And re: Massively and NDAs; we have been communicating with Flying Lab Software and have permission to run certain preview features, which includes the crafting post. It's all legit, we promise! And as BugHunter said, the stress testers getting beta invites thing was publicly announced on the front page of Flying Lab Software's website. That announcement was my source (which I linked to) for that post.

http://www.burningsea.com/page/news/article&article_id=10475
 

Massively isn't the only site that has been publishing guides and previews for PotBS. There is no NDA breaking going-on by us or other larger sites. Maybe all writers should leave a note that the post is exempt from the NDA, but that could look egotistical, etc. I may bring this up with the team. I'd probably include it in my own posts anyway to avoid confusion.

If you want to write in-depth PotBS beta content, you may want to get in touch with pr and simply ask, that's exactly what we did. BTW, any MMOG NDA broken by a Massively writer is heavily frowned upon and would be dealt with accordingly by management / leads; which for the record, I am neither.
 

Hello!

Troy 'Aether' Hewitt here, Director of Community Relations for Flying Lab Software and Pirates of the Burning Sea. I wanted to pop in and assure everyone that we are in fact working with our friends at Massively, the information they've published on their site was approved by our offices well before it was published.

The concern is certainly appreciated, and many thanks are due the folks at Massively for writing such a great article.

Best,
Troy
 

I forget which blog I read it in, but it went into detail as to how different Queue times for each side can affect BG results, and it made perfect sense.

Say you have 40 Horde players and 80 Alliance players queued up for a 40-man BG.
That means every Horde player gets in compared to half the Alliance.
A 20-minute match ensues and as soon as it's over every player on both sides joins the queue again.
Every single Horde player jumps straight into the new game, while the Alliance players are all rotated out. 20 minutes later the cycle repeats.
Let's run that scenario for two hours and six games, shall we?

In those two hours every Horde player has accrued 6 BGs worth of Honor, while each Alliance player has only accrued 3 BGs worth.

Let's cut the Alliance some slack and pretend they won 2/3 of their games. That's 7 Honor Marks per Alliance player (2 wins, 1 loss), versus 10 Marks per Horde player (2 wins, 4 losses).

So at the end of the evening, even winning just 1/3 of their games, the Horde in our example still have more Honor and more Honor Marks than their Alliance opponents, because they played more games, because they had shorter queue times.

What does this mean? It means the Horde get to spend their Honor & Marks faster, meaning they upgrade their gear faster, meaning they become more powerful than their opponents so they end up winning more games, so their opponents earn even less Honor & Marks, and I'm sure you can see where this is going.

If one side always has shorter queues it will affect the outcome of the battles in the long run.
 

Heh - if you were wondering if you were news, Tobold, as a previous post asked, I think the people posting comments here (and thus reading your blog) might answer that question.
 

On the queue topic, as long as the population isn't distributed fairly even between the faction that is the kind of problems you will face in any MMO. If more people would play the less popular factions then it would be much better.

I must say though that players must have some advantage of choosing the lesser played faction. Otherwise there wouldn't be any point in switching sides and even out the population balance.

Also, playing the larger faction is a major advantage in non-instanced PvP. Just look at Halaa, it's basically an alliance town.
 

Halaa and other world pvp areas do tend to be controlled by the Alliance, which makes it more of a problem for Alliance players than Horde.
I remember trying to do the world pvp in Eastern Plaguelands before BC came out, but the towers were always Alliance controlled - I never had a chance to capture them.

Time they had a battleground that would let Alliance fight against Alliance; maybe a Caverns of Time instance where you fought for or against Admiral Proudmore.