Exodus Suspended, Brewkz Bails on Stormstrike, CompLexity Reforming, Cross-Faction Transfers

Exodus Suspended
It really comes as no surprise that Exodus was caught red-handed today after an investigation by Blizzard and all participating raid members of their Alone in the Darkness kill were suspended for 72 hours and we can safely assume that they will all lose their achievements, titles, and mount gained from it all. Although Blizzard didn't openly speak of these suspensions, the recent Yogg-Saron hotfixes says enough:

Immortal Guardians are now able to target players in the "illusion room" of Yogg-Saron with their summoning ability. This hotfix has been fully deployed to all regions.

We're also in the process of deploying a hotfix for an issue with Immortal Guardians that could cause them to pause their movement before reaching melee range. This fix will also prevent the Immortal Guardian from running away if their target is stunned.

Exodus continually tries to play it off like they're victims in this case and how Ensidia has exploited many encounters before without being actioned, but they shouldn't really be surprised in the least they this was coming.

Although the YouTube video that Exodus rendered of themselves exploiting the encounter is rather amusing...



... I must say they got off pretty easy here when the punishment could have been far worse.





Brewkz Bails on Stormstrike
After holding the rank #1 3v3 spot on BG5 Stormstrike for the first half of this season with Tugget and Gordonbombay, their team has been living in TSG's shadow ever since Zilea transferred to Executus and TSG has been back in the competition. Although it's not overly surprising that Brewkz went to Drama on Korgath server due to old friendships with Drama's new GM, the real surprise comes from the fact that he left Tugget behind on Mal'ganis.

No one really knows nor cares where Gordonbombay went yet, but Tugget and Brewkz were tied at the hip in most people's eyes and a lot of people are wondering why Brewkz would leave to PvE without his other half. Was it because they were sick of being #2 at everything (literally)? After all, we saw what happened to Celex when he got sick of being runner up.

In either case, Brewkz is following in Veex's footsteps with his newly created 3v3 team named as "HI WERE HERE FOR FGLAD" although it doesn't quite have TSG results as you can see. Glad to see that Maimer is still holding it down, though.





CompLexity Reforming
After disappointing losses since... umm... the team was sponsored by CompLexity... ranging from poor results at ESL Germany, MLG Columbus, and most recently US Regionals, team CompLexity has finally taken a step toward restructuring as Happyminty has apparently had real life issues get into the way of his ability to dedicate the same amount of resources and time to the game as he previously could. Although Minty doesn't have the same finesse as Neilyo, same hairstyle as Kalimist, or same collar as Enforcer, he's done extraordinarily well in TBC arena. WotLK arena seemed to outpace him, however, as it showed on several occasions particularly when he attempted to play as shadow dance.

Who will his replacement be? None other than Yog from Team Fnatic. With Hafu's departure from Glick and their poor results at Columbus, and with Kollektiv's inability to leave EG to join up with Yog and Glick, Yog seemed like the perfect free agent for Venruki and Sodah to pick up. Was Minty really the weakest link though or does another team member need to be replaced and thus rebuild the team around the last one? I think it's rather unfortunate that Druids and Mages don't match up well together anymore, as I personally feel Sodah is far better as a druid than as a priest, but Venruki knows best, I suppose.





Cross-Faction Transfers
Cross-faction transfers were announced today and while seemingly exciting at first, I feel that implementing this feature would have a drastically negative effect on the community and gameplay in general. Faction imbalances would be at an all-time high thus negating all of Blizzard's efforts with free realm transfers to certain factions of certain servers to try to bridge the gap of population. Remember Tournament Realm and how every single team was Alliance almost except for a very small number of triple undead RMP's? Well you take that and magnify it x10000 and that's basically what you'll have if this goes live.

Sure, arena isn't everything to base this on, but faction imbalances arn't the only issue at hand here. There are numerous faction-specific items, mounts, achievements, quests, and many other things that would need to be addressed somehow and I don't honestly see it happening in a way that won't drastically alter the game. Additionally, if these types of transfers were allowed, Blizzard would also have to basically open up race-changes for your faction which they've previously stated they had no intention of doing for a variety of balance reasons and technical issues.

If people really wanted to play the other faction, they've honestly probably already rerolled by now. Implementing this feature will simply allow for faction hoppers which will be very detrimental to the community as a whole, as if one-month server transfers wern't bad enough. Maybe that's just my take on it, though.