Essence of Wintergrasp is NOT bugged, but needs changing anyway, on Oceanic Servers

WoW Classic WoW Classic Bug Report
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TLDR: The Essence of Wintergrasp buff is not bugged on Oceanic servers but it might as well be. Either way, something needs to be fixed.

Allow me to explain. I made this post in my guild discord after observing what the buff did during wintergrasp windows in Dalaran on horde and alliance. I too initially though the buff was bugged.

This is how it works: It’s 9am and wintergrasp queue opens. People can queue anytime in the next 30 mins. New games are made as soon as a game fills up and there are enough players on both sides to open a new game (This is critical to the problem). For example, 120 alliance and 240 horde queue: it makes 1 game. Another alliance queues, it makes a 2nd game with 1 Ally vs 120 horde. If another 120 horde queue and another ally queues, I am fairly certain (but don’t know for sure) it makes a 3rd game with 1 ally vs 120 horde, rather than putting that alliance in the 2nd game to make 2 ally vs 120 horde with another 120 horde stuck in the queue.

Moving on: the first game ends and alliance wins so we get the buff. As blizzard describes in their post, and as you can observe happening in game (And despite all logic cause this is really stupid) this buff will remain until a new wintergrasp game is made. Not the next 3 hour lockout beginning at 12pm. All it takes is a new wintergrasp game starting within the current 30 minute period. This is observable in dalaran. Wait around during the 30 minute period and you will see both alliance and horde gaining and losing the essence of wintergrasp buff during that period.

So, a new game has started and whoever had the buff has lost it now. This new game determines who gets it. The reason this is an issue on oceanic, and less so on US servers, is that we have a much smaller pool of player to draw from. This means that the final games running during the 30 minute period are likely to be along the lines of 20 ally vs 120 horde and essentially unwinnable for us. How does this differ on US servers? They have way more people so there might be 6 or 7 WG games still going at the end of the lockout and only ONE of them needs to win for alliance to get the buff.

In other words, its not the final game that determines who gets the buff. Both factions should be able to get it because the buff only clears from games starting. The games that are still running after the queue period has ended are what determines which faction gets the buff because no games can start after them to clear it again. Anyway, it doesn’t seem to be bugged, it’s just stupid and contrary to the logical way that you would expect this to be implemented. It’s been 15 minutes and we still have the buff and the queue time has ended so its not going anywhere till 12pm.

Okay, lots of text… Let’s look at the original post by blizz:
" In Wrath of the Lich King Classic, this works in a fairly simple way, if anyone on your faction participates in and wins a Battle for Wintergrasp, your entire faction is granted the Essence of Wintergrasp and the buff will last until the next time the battle is initiated."

So “the buff will last until the next time the battle is initiated.” One would think that this would mean the next wintergrasp lockout two and a half hours from the previous one. But it seems to actually mean the next wintergrasp game within the 30 minute queue lockout period. This is incredibly dumb and unintuitive no matter which faction you’re on. Why? Because if you queue at the start and get into an epic and evenly matched 120v120 game, your win is going to get wiped as soon as the next game begins after yours ends. Your effort is for nothing.

So, Essence of Wintergrasp is not bugged. It’s behaving exactly as blizzard have implemented it which is an incredibly stupid and unintuitive manner which doesn’t take into account faction imbalance and region populations. It is also less likely to be fixed than if it was really a bug.

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Except you’re wrong

Not sure why people feel the need to post blatant disinformation on the forums, is it some cringe attempt to troll?

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Explain why I’m wrong.

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so why only oceanic servers?

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The way you people will cope to defend Blizzard is astonishing.

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Ok so if you read the post I’m clearly not defending blizzard. If anything, this is an even greater condemnation of them than if it were bugged because this implementation is even stupider than the bug is.

Anyway, to answer the productive question, which is answered in my wall of text but it’s a wall of text so idc.

It’s only apparant on Oceanic because there is a much smaller player population. This means that towards the end of a lockout period there is typically only 1 or 2 WG games going and alliance might be split between them resulting in two basically unwinnable games.

In contrast, US servers have a ton of people across them all so they might have upwards of 5 games still running after the queue lockout. It is far more likely, in that case, that at least one of those games is winnable for Alliance/Horde. This is why on US Wintergrasp seems to be phased apparently with both sides controlling it simultaneously across different phases? I don’t know I’m not on US but this would explain that.

Edit: On Yojamba the queues are currently still open. A new game started and cleared the buff off alliance who had previously won (horde did not have the buff). There are now 3 yojamba alliance in the battle for wintergrasp. I don’t know what it’s like on Arugal or Remulos but this is likely to be an unwinnable game. Basically, it’s behaving exactly as I described and as Blizzard stated it will in their post. That is to say, very stupidly and without consideration of faction imbalance or region populations.

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There tends to be a huge disparity in numbers between Alliance and Horde for Oceanic realms. Both Yojamba and Arugal out way the Alliance across all 3 realms (including Remulos the PvE server). This means that when the games are popping in Oceanic region, they’re popping in heavy favour of the Horde. The first few games of Wintergrasp are fairly balanced, but due to the sheer number of Horde players, Alliance can never compete or keep up for all the games over the full 30 minute queue period. When Alliance were able to queue multiple times, we were able to win and keep control of Wintergrasp until they locked people out of queueing multiple times.

But lets break it down, say if there is 5 games in the first 25 minutes of the window, there might only be 480 Alliance players to play vs 600 Horde, which might be great for the first 5 games, but because Horde has hit its max limit of players there looks to be another game open up in the last 5 minutes and allows another flood of 120 players into it (removing the previous won buff from Alliance). This will most likely fill up with horde due to the sheer number of Horde queuing verse Alliance. This should give you and indication of how the games quickly get lost later into the queue window. As mentioned by Anahaid, it wipes the buff from all players for each game that is started. If Alliance wins 1 game early, it’s wiped when the next game starts during the 30 min window. Due to the lower player pool, Alliance are never able to keep the buff as the later games tend to be Horde dominated.

The only theoretical way to win the Wintergrasp buff looks like it would only be for ALL Alliance to sit and wait till the very last minute to queue and then forcibly win the very last game. This could cause further issues where it may skew the buff for Alliance to always have it or it maintains being Horde as they follow what the Alliance are doing.

TL:DR, Due to Horde having more numbers Alliance can’t control Wintergrasp and don’t have access to Vault of Archavon plus all the other benefits. Please fix this Blizzard.

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Perfect explanation. That is exactly what’s going on and also the only tangible solution outside of a change to the system from blizzard. Which, sadly, seems unlikely since it isn’t bugged. It’s working exactly as they intend it to.

At any rate, the original point of my post was to draw attention to the fact that the problem is entirely predictable and can be worked around as Mistynight described. Unfortunately this requires a massive effort on alliance’s part. If only a few people try it, they’ll just queue into games that are minutes or seconds away from ending (I’ve tried it). You would need a couple hundred at least to fill active games and forcibly start a new one near the end of the queue.

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I would LOVE to get a blizzard employee clarifying this. The real frustation at the moment comes from thinking that the way it’s currently working is broken, blizzard needs to fix it, and every day they don’t is another day we can’t buy our BiS pvp gear or do VoA.

If they came out and said it’s working as intended, there would atleast be no expectation of change. I would HOPE that they’d still do something, but hope is different to expectation.

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Good explanations that seem to fit. I’ve ended games and then watched the buff flick on and off over the next few minutes as games presumably end, only to always finish with no buff.

Blizzard still haven’t fixed the prepatch event still being live on OCE servers, and they gave zero response to the hundreds of posts asking for an OCE fresh server.

I feel like they barely think about us here at all so I’ll be surprised if this gets fixed/changed any time soon unfortunately.

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So, further information that points to this implementation encouraging faction imbalance. I have confirmed my suspicions that new games open to cater to horde waiting in the queue, rather than trying to fill and even out existing games.

The proof: On Yojamba this morning 5 of us queued into a fresh wintergrasp. A /who of wintergrasp revealed that we were the only alliance on the server in the battle (This was in the final 10 minutes of the lockout). 5 minutes later, another /who showed 8 alliance in wintergrasp but the battle we were in only had 5 of us still.

So rather than making even wintergrasp games, the system is splitting the smaller faction across multiple, unwinnable games to allow more of the larger faction in. Great for participation, terrible if you want to ever have a chance at winning.

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Can you edit thread titles?

I just wonder if a Blizz employee is gonna see the title of this thread and say “Oh, not broken? What a relief!”, and move on lol.

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Bump so more people are aware of this issue and its potential for player implemented solutions.

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Please fix this, its making buy items and doing VOA impossible

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Bump again, people still aren’t aware of this and think it’s a bug. Please see the opening post.

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So the only way to win is for everyone to queue the last minute?

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The only reliable way that we’ve been able to find so far. And it doesn’t have to be everyone, just enough that we can fill any existing games and force open a new one with enough alliance in it to win. This would take at least 120 people queuing at once.

It can be manipulated a bit further in our favour too. If you wait to queue until you see the buff clearing from players in Dalaran, horde or alliance, you would have a better chance of landing in a fresh game. This is because the buff only clears when a new game opens, so waiting to queue till then gives you a better chance to get that one rather than existing ones.

This is why I’m pushing the “Not a bug” angle so hard. We can overcome this problem, we just need a ton of players aware of it and willing to do it. And we’ve already managed to do it a couple of times on Yojamba, it’d be even easier with more people involved.

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Makes sense. I don’t think it’s working as intended though, unless they’ve lied in their statement. Anyone on your realm wins, you get the buff versus the last instanced game that wins gets the buff. That’s horribly misleading if it’s working as intended.

Now a new thing has happened, the NPCs at the flight path are gone. So you can’t hand in quests without WG lol.

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I don’t disagree with that. I think their original statement is hideously insufficient and, as we can see, very open to interpretation. However, I do still believe my interpretation is correct.

Anyway, at the moment I am treating this as not a bug but we definitely need a post from blizzard to clarify things. Unfortunately, based on how quick they were to fix the other “queue as much as you want” bug, that implies they’re at least keeping an eye on WG related problems but have chosen not to look at this one. Or something like that…

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The only way for OCE ali to get vendor and the access to VOA is to win the very last minutes games (e.g. every ali shall queue WG in the last 5 minutes)