Either way, if this is the final answer, then i am ok with it.
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By the way, dark chocolate is delicious. How dare you.
Edit: Mind the language please.
Nah they are all sh*t.
Like many others have said, big mistake.
What’s next? No seals for playing in the Arena
I suspect player disappointment would be much lower if this had ever been communicated, or even hinted at, the past few years. The “yeah, we always said it works this way, we were just describing buggy behavior we couldn’t reveal to be buggy behavior” surprise move feels really cheap, especially since it seems to have become quite popular recently.
Are there any other “bugs” pending to get “fixed”? Like events really supposed to cost real money instead of gems, glory shop packs really supposed to be restricted to VIP 10 and above, armor bonuses really only supposed to work for quests you can only do once?
Weirdly enough, some talents of the last played class still bleed through into Arena runs, like 10% extra XP, so technically the new system still knows about the class.
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I’m not happy with it, neither are the low-level players who find Arena a more rewarding experience than getting their face ground off in PvP.
You mean like it appearing on the known issue list? 
This is a fine point and I agree with it. One of the more interesting tradeoffs we’ve had in recent history was when it was decided that Explore wouldn’t give ingots. I thought it was clever to make us pick between traitstones and ingots.
But I think what’s going on happens too much:
Something releases with some quirks the devs don’t want. But they’re too busy moving on to the next big thing to deal with those quirks, so they just leave them. Later, when they’re doing something else, it becomes convenient to “fix” the thing that they didn’t like. Then, players are unhappy.
That we got class XP at all in Arena was apparently “a bug”. But it wasn’t listed as a known issue or something that the devs were planning on ever addressing. It happened, there was no comment, we got XP everywhere else, so it made sense. This went on for months, with no comment from the devs. If it was a bug, they had plenty of chance to say “enjoy this while you can” or open discussion on it. They didn’t.
Then, when they worked on the class change (which we wanted!), they got their chance. Since Arena depended on the old class-related stuff, it must’ve been pretty easy to tell Arena “there is no class”, which neatly removed the class XP. This was the moment they revealed to us that getting class XP in Arena was a bug.
I get that they don’t really have a policy that they have to remove something nice to give us something nice, outside of some very obvious economic balance decisions.
But it is splitting semantic hairs to say, “We didn’t take anything away, you weren’t supposed to have this.” Nothing changes that from a player’s viewpoint, an arena run used to be worth 16 XP and now it’s worth 0. It’s valid for a player to say “this was taken away” whether it was a bug or not.
I get the larger discussion, that maybe the devs don’t want you to be able to farm trophies and Champion XP at the same time. I think that’s a good game design discussion. The problem is they let us do that for what, 6 months, without ever putting on the table that it was a thing that could suddenly change.
But now I’m left where my favorite game mode only delivers rewards that incidentally matter to me. I don’t care about Trophies other than I know it’s important to the guild statistics wiener contest. Gold/Souls don’t really matter. I was really happy to have a low-bullshit mode I could get decent Champion XP from without disrupting my contributions to my guilds. Now I have to wade through round after round of repetitive PvP choices to get the same thing. It’s a net loss, I don’t care whether the old way was “a bug” or not.
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Going by the 3.5 patch notes, it would have taken a really exceptional leap of faith to believe gaining champion XP within the Arena might not be intended:
That’s the part that really irks me. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love the way we are no longer locked into playing one class only for an extended period of time. But please, devs, PLEASE learn to communicate with your community. You knew exactly that removing champion XP from Arena wouldn’t be hailed as a Good Thing. Impacts braced: none.
This would have gone down so much better if somebody had had the courage to speak up a month ago. Saying something like “look, we’d like to remove the class change fee, unfortunately the redesign requires us to cut champion XP from Arena, please discuss”. As it stands, this feels like yet another “bummer, they caught on quickly again, whose turn is it this time to get out from under the table and claim it was a bug all along?” situation. So much opportunity wasted, a man could weep.
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I think people like you who don’t care about the trophies will find the trade off of being able to set explore/dungeon/PvP/task team classes to ones you want to level while still being able to do raid/invasion/GW with stronger classes and not having the class held hostage by whatever the weekly event dictates will see it’s more conducive to leveling all classes.
On the other hand the trophy-mongers still aren’t going to be happy because they’ve had the best of both worlds (fastest trophy production + leveling “crappy” classes without having to deal with their inefficiencies) taken away.
Personally I could care less because I don’t do arena very often. There are more than enough other things to do to fill my GoW time that allow me to max out my classes as necessary.
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Nothing you’re saying is wrong or silly. But here’s the point where we differ:
This is why I care a lot: I play(ed) a lot of Arena.
I like all the aspects of the new class system except this. Overall, I’m spending fewer matches in every mode “wasting” XP. Every mode except Arena. Which is the one I liked playing the most.
It will go away eventually because in theory one day I’ll have every class maxed thus I won’t care about champion XP anymore. That’s… a long way off. I don’t want Arena to be “a waste” for that long.
Again, nothing you’re saying is invalid. I don’t want to go back to the way the class system was. I initially said I thought this was a fair trade. Now I don’t think so.
1 Like