Era News: SoM Gone, PvP Changes, Hardcore Launch

Time for a short post to mention a few things happening in and around era that don't really affect me much personally, but that I'd still like to make note of here as they are milestones of a sort.

Season of Mastery Gone

The temporary Season of Mastery officially ended in February, but while the servers were locked at that point, they still showed up in game as accessible and people could go and grab their old characters to make use of the free transfer option to move them to the regular Classic era servers. Blizzard said that this option would be available "for at least three months" but then didn't specify any further.

Until last week that is, when they suddenly gave short notice that the realms were about to disappear for good in a few days. If you had characters on those servers and didn't bother to save them until now, they're gone for good now, sorry.

Based on my experience with the shutdown of the Classic era cloning service before Wrath of the Lich King, I anticipate a constant trickle of people posting on the forums and on Discords from now on to complain that Blizzard deleted their characters "without notice", or to assert that surely nothing was really deleted and Blizzard just needs to stop hiding their characters already.

PvP Changes Going Live on August 23

Back in June I mentioned that the Classic devs had decided to overhaul the PvP system on era. These changes were eventually explained on the forums in full and tested on the PTR. They ended up changing more than I expected, but all the feedback I've heard from PvPers in my circles has been positive even so.

In a nutshell, Blizzard is getting rid of both the competitive aspect of the old system as well as rank decay. The former means that your progress is no longer measured against other players, but gaining rank is simply a static honour grind with fixed values. This gets rid of a lot of nonsense that people were doing in order to game the old system. From what I've heard, the new fixed honour requirements for each rank are lower and easier to attain if you were previously on a busy PvP server, but if you were on a chill PvE server where there wasn't that much competition, you might have to work a bit harder to get to max rank than you did before. This is kind of along the lines of what I expected.

What took me completely by surprise was the removal of rank decay. There will still be weekly honour decay, but you won't be able to go down in rank anymore unless you get dishonourable kills. This means that going up in rank still requires consistent play for at least a couple of weeks, but you can basically "take a break" between working on ranks without decay pushing you back to the very bottom of the ladder. This obviously takes away a lot of the "no-lifeing" requirements of the old PvP system and makes it much more accessible to a wider audience. I just wonder whether that'll mean that we'll eventually find ourselves surrounded by Grand Marshals and High Warlords everywhere.

Oh yeah, and like it says in the headline, a few days ago Blizzard announced that this change is meant to go live on August 23.

Hardcore Realms Coming on August 24

That very same news post also contained the announcement that the official hardcore realms are meant to launch a day later, on August 24. Honestly, I'm kind of looking forward to this one now, even if I'm not planning to play hardcore myself, simply because I expect it to be a big community event involving lots of drama. That should be fun to watch.