The randomization of the start time makes it very difficult for those of us with real life time constraints able to reliably participate in the Battle for Nazjatar. I used to be able to plan to play over lunch or during a break at home – can’t do it now.
Edit: this change seems to mess with the PvE side too – so one cannot plan at all for this event no matter how you play the game.
Edit 2: It’s now just broken. Late at night no one wants to wait for 30 minutes+ in the hope the PvP event will occur. We had all of two of us this evening taking on the commanders, and to add insult to injury it phased out on us while we were trying to recruit more players to take the commanders on
Edit 3: At least one can work around it by joining a raid party via lfg as the spawn times seem random server to server. But that’s what I thought this change was made to discourage.
9 Likes
Totally agree. I’ve participated in only 1 thus far today when normally I’d have been involved in several by this time of the day on a Tuesday.
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I noticed the Developer’s note says:
“As players have learned the timing of the event over the course of Rise of Azshara, increasingly the perceived optimal way to participate is to camp the control points in advance of the start time. By adding some variance (which still averages out to a 3-hour interval), we hope to make the Battle for Nazjatar more dynamic without reducing the overall frequency of the event.”
However, I never saw people camping control points (flag areas) in advance of the start time, because it was known to the players that doing that could bug the event and cause it to not start.
Does blizzard not even understand or play their own game?
I think they did do it to hamper the ability to play Battle for Naz.
Another possibility is the ‘developers’ who decided on this change couldn’t have cared less about thinking it through, gave the order to code it in, then went out for mid-morning lattes.
7 Likes
Current hot fix is far better. I’ve had more even battles and more pvp fun hoping from flag to flag trying to secure them.
I don’t see any difference … jumping from group to group in LFG before finding one where your faction is winning .
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Agreed. People dont camp flags anymore, they nerfed because servers cant hold too many players on the same shard, adding a random timer will make the wpvp communities way more harder.
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its another alliance nerf horde dominated until the group ruin came along some horde QQ and boom
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This should be reverted, it’s a horrible nerf to people who schedule things like the OP said. Camping the zone for hours hoping for a battle just to have to find a group that can win (or fail and lose after hours) is really sad. It’s not like we’re spending 2 hours to down a mythic boss and getting phat lewt, we’re getting 10 pearls and 50 conq, oh noes! (if you win)
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Finished two battles right now, it took 1 hour and i got luck with a ruin group. 3 days ago with that time i was able to do two bfn, check for cavendark, farm a little bit for the bee mount and do wq if i need to.
About the battle nothing much changed, the shard was unplayable for the horde and the same happened to alliance on others shards, but less players are doing bfn now, so i dont think we will experience servers crashing again.
ps:if you dont have the bfn mount yet… oh boy, it just got waaaaaay harder to get.
I can confirm now, the 3 hour mark still a thing plus the random timer.
Given that groups were forming teams of raids (many raids) in a single shard and crashing the shard its not surprising Blizz did something and this is a sneaky way of keeping those raids groups from forming like they were.
I feel like that, and not the whole “pre-camping flag locations”, was the real reason behind the change.
Sort of a “this is why we can’t have nice things” change.
The system is trash even with the fix. The problem is shard shopping, not faction imbalance. Case in point, I went to Naz on Alli toon to look for some WPVP action. Not 1 horde on the shard. I go into a bg, when I come out I am killed before I get out of the load screen. 40 Horde sitting in Mezz waiting for some fool like me to zone in. Same shard that had 0 horde 15 minutes earlier. I get killed before I zone in and get a battle for naz debuff before I can res. Trash system is trash-- all they did was put lipstick on the pig.
Interesting. Only one of my toons has been able to play a BfN today/tonight, since my main play hours are not during general prime time. And when I am on, I’m not usually hanging around in Naz. I occasionally check group finder while I play but like I mentioned, only got in one battle.
JMO, they could ‘fix’ things by providing a “Battle for Naz has commenced” in-game announcement to all players in Kul Tiras, Zandalar, and Naz.
Or maybe someone brilliant will make an addon that can alert folks to battles… 
That’s their excuse at least, because the real problem came from sharding and they don’t like acknowledging when it causes problems by its very nature. The real problem was that since the events all went off at once, everyone knew when to hop into LFG for a massive shard dump – whether that meant Alliance joining a Ruin raid, or Horde jumping out of the PVE event into the battle that the PVE event was meant to be a substitute for and causing them to flood everything else.
Randomizing the start time feels like the easy way out. The only real solution is to just lock down the shard until the event concludes.
When I was running them tuesday it seemed liked they were popping anywhere between 3-20 mins over their old start time for me. Has it snowballed and pushed the start time further off course?
The only difference I’m seeings it that I’m participating in far fewer of the events. Awesome! Thanks Blizz. thumbs up
2 Likes
Between ??-45 minutes so far. Never saw a battle starts after 45 minutes, lets hope that is the max.
Ok cool, was hoping that it would stay around the same with maybe a little under an hour variance. Let’s me know when to start keeping an eye out.
I actually had one that popped at 55 after the hour. It has really been all over the board for me and makes it hard to actually do them.
Me too, i think it is 1-60 minutes after the hour mark.