Guest column by Andrej “Kume_V" Vesel

Yesterday the new patch (3.1.2) hit World of Warcraft. Along with some minor changes which included a nerf to my precious warrior, (Juggernaut critical strike bonus lowered from 100% to 25%).

There was also an alteration to Wintergrasp with all Lake Wintergrasp daily quests being changed to a weekly format, with the honor and Stone Keeper's Shards rewarded for completing these quests have been increased to compensate.

As most of us WoW subscribers know, Wintergrasp (WG) was a source of massive server lag in the “rush hours”, sometimes even causing world server crashes. Having 300 or more players in a WG battle at the same time, not only caused lag in Wintergrasp itself, but sent tremors throughout Northrend.

I am playing on Lightbringer - a highly populated European PVE server - and I can tell you that mining a node for 15 seconds without any result and “world server down” messages were giving me headaches during my daily grind, since I mostly log on at around 18.00 or 19.00, similarly to other casuals.

I can only begin to imagine what kind of problems players on fully populated servers (such as Stormscale) might have had. Yes, a change was necessary.

Luckily for us Blizzard acknowledged that Wintergrasp needed a fix. But sadly they did not invest some of their outrageous profits into upgrading servers, but took the easy way out – change daily quests into weekly and by doing so reduce the number of active participants in the battles for WG control. It’s not that I don’t think this will help out immensely, but there is another factor I am largely concerned about, that will follow this change.

What will happen to Vault of Archavon?

My main concern is this: if there are less people playing WG at the same time, it will also be that much harder to form a PUG to clear VoA.

At least in my experience most raids form following a victory. It’s all good if you can clear it with your guild, but now with Ulduar being the primary destination of PVE-ers the lack of motivation and/or time might bar some willing players from claiming the loot from Archavon and Emalon.

The second is about the ownership of the area. With some servers having a lot more Horde players and others which are heavy on the Alliance side, I am afraid that the predominant faction will keep control over WG for the vast majority of time. Tenacity is a great concept, but when you have too little men to cover all of the battlefield it just won’t cut it.

Before the patch even if one faction was outnumbered they could still amass enough soldiers to be present at all the workshops and tenacity would do the trick. But now things could take a bad turn into Wintergrasp constantly being under control of the dominant faction of the server, thus denying entry to VoA to the outnumbered one.

And lastly even though the Honor and Stone Keeper's Shard awards were increased, you still will not be able to get as much as you would by completing dailies every day. Not to mention the gold income deficit.

For now however we will have to make do with what we get, let us just hope in the future Blizzard takes a more proactive approach towards resolving in-game issues. Killing off one of the very popular aspects of Wrath of the Lich King just does not seem all that appealing to me.

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This was a guest column by SK user Andrej “Kume_V" Vesel