Season of Mastery Beta Updates -- October 27

The Season of Mastery Beta is back online following maintenance and includes the following updates.

Week 4 of open Beta (October 27)

• Many groups of Guard NPCs that were removed from Alterac Valley in patch 1.11 have been restored for Season of Mastery.
• The denizens of Blackrock Depths have grown more leery of criminal activity and will now attempt to stash their most valuable items away if they suspect that a thief is in their midst.
• Many adjustments have been made to the raid encounters in Molten Core and Onyxia’s Lair.
• The PvP honor system has been adjusted to accelerate the rate at which players rank up.
  • Developers’ notes: Each week, the Honor system keeps track of players’ PvP participation, and at the end of the week, player-characters with at least 15 honorable kills are sorted by PvP participation. Once sorted, the system decides how many points to award that week, and the sorting is independent of the character’s current PvP rank. The system then awards a calculated number of expected points, and the calculation uses the character’s current PvP ranking points. This can be simplified to: (this_week’s_expected_points - current_ranking_points) * rate_factor. The result is then added to the character’s current_ranking_points, so each week, every player-character approaches their deserved rank. In Classic Era, the rate_factor (i.e. the percentage of the previous week’s expected points that will be awarded) is 20%. In Season of Mastery, we are increasing that rate to 40% to match the faster pace of content.

Please join us starting tomorrow at 2:00 p.m. PDT (5:00 p.m. EDT) for another round of raid testing. Molten Core and Onyxia’s Lair will be open for 24 hours.

Thank you!