Blizzard US Tournament Finals Update 2, Gameriot Decision, Good or Bad Idea: You Decide, New Racial Changes

So I'm not sure exactly what was going on with the Blizzard American Finals stream as not only did the vast majority of the WoW community not know it was even happening or available to view, but those who did manage to find it were met with unstable streaming, or no stream at all. Regardless, I do have a couple of updates as to the current standings of teams in the tournament. I don't understand why Blizzard handles their tournaments with such poor professionalism and a complete lack of care for overall quality - I mean seriously, it takes a completely unrelated website to update the standings for them as they are apparently too incapable of updating their site themselves.

Anyway, courtesy of Gotfrag.com, you can find the current, updated standings, here.

Lower Bracket:

Team EG (WLD)

Selective Queuers (RLD)

Upper Bracket:

Fnatic: (WLD)

Magical Muffin Factory (WLD)

As was to be expected, this tournament is the official tournament of WLDs. It's unfortunate that even the best RMP teams just can't compete when there are so many WLD teams to fight against.

As for who will win, I feel it's going to be a final match of Team EG versus Fnataic. Will Hafu win her second tournament pushing her beyond  the other competing "most successful female gamers" in the world?

As for the European finals, once again, Gotfrag has provided the information as to who made it through today.

Lower Bracket Finals:

Nihilum Plasma

Triple Threat

Upper Bracket Finals:

x6tence

Winner of Lower Bracket

WoW Riot Deleting all Blogs but Those WoW Related

[General gaming content is fine, it doesn't have to be just about WoW.] -
Kyle P. edit

There has been a lot of controversy surrounding the recent decision of the Gameriot staff to disallow the continuation of political, or even non-wow based content in the WoW Riot section of the website. This decision is undoubtedly a double edged sword. Yes, it should clean up the WoW Riot section tremendously, allowing a much greater focus on specific WoW content, but at the same time, it will remove a lot of other great content that a lot of the current community enjoys reading. In time, I'm sure there will be a dedicated area for such content, but as for now, I think one of the underlying goals is to remove the nonsensical troll-based crap that no one ever wants to read, and any fake, misleading title-based content.

When there are too many posts that simply bribe or trick users into clicking based on the mis-leading titles, this decision was bound to happen - and subsequently, users will report this based on their annoyance with whomever are responsible for creating these blogs in the first place.

While Vir is guilty of the above himself, generally speaking, I find his content, Roma's and others to be quality reads 90% of the time. Both of them are more than capable of writing quality WoW-related material, but it's hard to say if removing their political discussions will affect anything - and if it does, will it be a positive or negative? So, while browsing the WoW/SC/Diablo content of this site, do you appreciate the political/other discussions as well?



Are the monthly contests responsible for how out of hand the website has gotten? With so many bastardly, tricky ways to pull in traffic (Ie the misleading titles that generate hits from google) the contest itself, with a cash reward, could be to blame for some of ridiculous blogs that came up. Betterthanyou is a perfect example of this - you might remember him spamming the front page with Blogs so that he could have the highest potential of generating unique hits.

However, these techniques were much more effective in the past. Now, it actually requires articles that provoke discussion or debate, and controversy will always be the highest traffic generator there is. Those who have not been able to produce this, and have tried to rely solely on Digg/search engine hits, have already been weeded out themselves.

So in the end, this change is most likely purely for organizational purposes. But I'm curious as to how the general community feels about this change. You never know, your opinions could actually change something here. Again though, in time, I have no doubt in the fact that there will be an official place for off-topic or other political/other based subjects.  I think what's being done is a good idea, as long as there is an off-topic/other area for our political etc. writers/readers in the near future.



Racial Changes

Blizzard has announced they will be changing racials in an upcoming patch, and some of the changes are a breath of fresh air for certain races.

Trolls - Racial Passive "The Voodoo Shuffle": Reduces the duration of all movement impairing effects by 15%. Trolls be flippin' out mon!

After years of ****ty racials, Trolls finally get something half-way decent. If this stacks with other reductions to movement impairing abilities it will be quite amazing. For once, you might actually hear someone mutter "I'm rerolling Troll".

Human - Perception: changed to a passive, now grants one character level of passive stealth detection

Huge nerf to Humans. No more charging out and perception bombing the other team to break any stealthers early.

- Racial "The Fall of Humanity": Feign death which may trick enemies into ignoring you. Any threat is restored versus enemies still in combat upon cancellation of this effect. 5min cooldown

This will be quite good in arena as long as it drops you from combat temporarily and allows you to drink. Think FD > Drink. Blizzard needs to implement it as such since they nerfed perception, but it could prove to be broken.

Blood Elf - Mana Tap: ability removed (partially integrated into Arcane Torrent) - Arcane Torrent: restores 15 energy, 15 runic power, or 6% of mana to the Blood Elf (along with the current 2s silence effect)

Much, much more useful. A quick 15 energy to Rogues could be a lifesaver if you happen to be 10 energy short of a kick, gouge etc. However, you'll have to be careful not to use it to openly for the restoring effects as then you won't have it if you need it for a silence.  Still a good change though.

A couple of races still need some work, but at least Blizzard is trying to make stun resist etc more seamless through all effects in an attempt to lower the amount of RNG.