We?d like to. We certainly haven't forgotten about the PvP community at all and we do a lot of PvP oriented behind the scenes work right now. While not very much of that effort is channeled into creating new maps at the moment, we would definitely like to increase the variety of Battleground and Arena maps that are available in the future. That's where things get sticky, though. One might think that creating a Battleground is a pretty simple process (they look simple, right?), but it's not.

Part of the reason is that Battlegrounds are like ducks. A duck looks like it effortlessly glides across the water, but their little feet are actually working madly beneath the surface to make it happen. Battlegrounds are the same way. They may look simple -- even static -- to a casual observer, but in reality there's an incredible number of very complicated processes going on behind the scenes. Part of the reason for this is due to a lot of technical hurdles that need to be jumped to make them perform as seamlessly as they do, battle after battle. As a result, it's actually extremely difficult to design Battlegrounds, partially due to the technical limitations that are currently in place.

The other part of the reason is that Battlegrounds (and Arena maps, for that matter) require a higher degree of polish than a PvE map does. If a bit of geometry causes you to hang up, or blocks line of sight in a dungeon or raid, then in the majority of circumstances you can probably just work around it until it's fixed. If the same flaw exists in a bg or arena map, then that imperfection might be exploited for an unfair advantage, which runs contrary to the spirit of fair competition we want in that kind of PvP. We know that a lot of the PvP community is ultimately more interested in having perfectly balanced and bug-free maps to play on, than they necessarily are in having new maps to play on.

The other thing to keep in mind is that, while boss mechanics might differ from raid to raid, broadly speaking all dungeons and raids have the same rule set (that is, they have raid locks and you have to run back to the portal when you wipe and so on). BGs and Arenas tend to have highly individual rule sets. The result is that, in addition to the factors I?ve already mentioned, we also have to craft every BG essentially by hand every time. We?d like to develop a tool to create PvP maps in the same way we have a tool we can use to create bosses or a tool we can use to create items. Such a tool would let us create BGs and other PvP-oriented maps more readily. That's something that we're working toward now, but it's time consuming and exacting work, and still quite a ways off.

Still, ultimately we think all this effort will pay off, and we're confident that you'll feel the same way. In the meantime, there are still plenty of players of the opposing faction to send back to the Spirit Healer, and we hope you can continue to have fun making red dead wherever you find it.

Ugh_Lancelot posted:

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lol...so terrain glitches might interfere with the "spirit of fair competition" yet bots/AFK'ers continue to be a plague on the game. I see what they did there.

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