Airymil

Elysium, you are standing at a great crossroads here where you need to decide if you should let vanilla be vanilla and accept that summer is upon us, or start doing the same mistakes that Blizzard started doing. Some things are quite possible, ie. adding duals spec access by making your own UI addon+servercode. No matter what you do, please continue to make the game segmented like it should be: Queueing up for BGs from anywhere is the world, makes you less prepared for it cause you'll be grinding or questing in the meantime. People loved vanilla because you had to stop whatever you were doing and get both mentally and physically prepared to start a BG. You had some downtime, but it just made it more joyful once you got in. Also please realize that vanilla was flawed by design from the start, but this was also part of it's charm. If there's anything you should do, it's fight those that enter a BG and sits watching a movie or something while tapping the Forward-key every 1 minute or so.

Alright, so let me point out a few flaws right off the bat. What rly messed up the entire community was when Nostalrius suddenly chickened out and asked for all their contents to be deleted. I would have never honored that and would have even tried making all the accounts in the DB available (if at all possible ofc), rather than deleting the unactivated accounts. Futhermore Elysium screwed up badly by splitting up the community across two and eventually three servers. If you hadn't done it this way, there would probably not be a problem with the active communities in both PvE- and the PvP-scene today, and even throughout the summer! Combine all this with the fact that we're trying to stay Blizzlike with all the design flaws and joys it involves, and it's pretty clear you should not try to go even more custom than you've already done. I could possibly support up to two respecs per week costing some kind of PvP-currency or at least less than 50g each, but as we all know this would also be exploited by PvE guilds. Not that I really think this is a bad thing though: The community is stuggling more and more every week to run proper raids, so this could very much save the community too. Adding duals spec is pretty much out of the question, and also probably not at all possible due to the fact that the client would also have to be patched. Premades are Blizzlike, so I'm really sceptical if we should try to rid ourselves of these. Then again it's extremely demotivational to meet a premade when in a normal pug BG. Maybe force any premade to queue as just that: a premade, and not allowing more than 5 to queue in a BG. Then again this could take the joy out of queueing as a larger group of friends, so this needs to be handled extremely delicately. If there's anything other you wanna consider, it's really simple: remove farming mats from any BG or greatly increase their respawn time. This will get rid of a lot of gold-farming too. I've been to many cancerous AVs this weekend and can tell there are so many that simply does not understand how it's won. I don't believe in punishment. I'm entering dangerous territory here, but maybe consider adding a substancial bonus for a quickly completed BG? This can probably only be added in combination with a system that forces premades to queue against other premades. Sadly the exploiting potential is big too, so thread carefully! If you must add any kind of punishment then please add votekick to both 5-mans and BGs. I wished for this so many times back at Nost. Just at the very end of this lost post, please take into consideration that the problem lies in the poor design and harsh tuning of the PvP-system by Blizzard. We're playing Vanilla maybe just because it is flawed as this often makes for a much more credible experience than those that are overly polished. Nostlarius was really onto something by running a 15k limit, because even if the draw distance and lag was pretty bad, we always had the possibility to have fun and challenges every single of those 24 hours in each day. Only weekends were slow at night, and that was about it. PS. For the love of god DO NOT start adjusting stats on the items!

This feel quite similar to what happened to Blizz back in the days and the reason why they eventually stopped listening and talking that much to the community. I guess miserable people just wanna see the happy ones broken too. When it becomes impossible to distinguish the constructive criticism from the trolls and griefers, I find it more than reasonable that they will ignore any criticism. At this point it's sadly also the right way to go. Eventually the most miserable people who needs to feel special, just like Alex, will go away and cry loudly at someone else.

While I must admit I have been rly torn about the entire server for more than a month now, I must say your endurance and dedication impresses me. You simply don't give up under all these circumstances, and that in itself is worthy of merit. Like you've already stated you're gonna stop giving a shit about all the discrediting of the staff, and this is rly the way forward. I just regret that I cannot have two shadow priests in a team or raid anymore as the DoTs get overwritten again. I hope this will be fixed in the future. I hope things work out, cause we rly cannot have all the trolls and Blizzard win. If we wanna have good vanillas server in the future we gotta keep together as a community, not the other way around!

Thanks for letting me know ;P

You're obviously commenting on something different than what I'm discussing: There were not implemented changes, they simply threw in a new (old?) core because of the whole issue with Nost the past two weeks. That's what I'm talking about and it's rendering a raiding spriest MUCH less useful than just two days ago. Additionally it's very non-Blizzlike which is kinda what this server is all about.

You were the one stating that Ely cannot ignore requests, but alright ;)

What's keeping them from using the Nost core other than the request from the deranged leader of the original project? He handed it over, and it's all open source anyways (minus the player DB).

I noticed that up until Monday night the system worked as normal, while sometime during Tuesday it had changed, which really sabotaged my damage output. It was especially bad at MC today where it would seem that my Mind Flays only got 1 tick off before getting canceled by some other non-priest channeling spell. I fear that this is part of the transition from the Nost-core to a much lesser one provided by the Ely team. If this is the case then I implore you to simply ignore the request from Viper! It's obvious that they're compromised in some way or another and are not sharing all their reasons for this change of heart.

Did you recently change how debuff slots are handled? SW:P won't stack on mobs anymore and simply gets overwritten if other casts it. Mind Flay also seems like it gets canceled by any other type of channelig spell. Anyone else notice similar issues?