W3C Season 14 - Kar the Everburning Updates
Ladder Update
Random Hero 1v1 Ladder has been replaced with All the Randoms 1v1
All the randoms includes random races, random heroes and random mercenaries.
An end of season tournament will be played for All the Randoms 1v1 after the conclusion of Season 14.
Legion TD 4v4 no longer allows Arranged Teams of smaller than 4 players.
Rankings reset
There will be no MMR reset in any melee mode.
As in our previous seasons, we generally don’t intend to reset MMR so that we can keep matchmaking quality high.
There will be a 50% MMR Reset in Legion TD 1v1.
There will be a 50% MMR Reset in Legion TD 4v4 RT.
There will be a 100% MMR Reset for Legion TD 4v4 Arranged Teams.
Rankings and RP will be fully reset in all modes so the leaderboards should still look fresh after the reset since the activity is rewarded more at the start of each season!
Season end tournament
The W3Champions Finals - Our well loved friends, Back2Warcraft are bringing Season 13 to a close with a tournament organized by them and crowdfunded by the community.
It concludes a 12-week-long ladder season, giving a chance to the top 16 players to fight for the top spot. It will be played on the W3Champions FLO servers as always.
Season 12 finals saw Labyrinth take on the Champion Happy in a best of 5 but couldn’t beat the Emperor who still reigns as the W3Champion. Happy has won 3 back to back titles in the W3C Finals. Will this be the season someone takes him down or will his reign continue?
After listening to your feedback, we made some changes for the W3Champions Season Finals!
Previously, the Ranks 5-16 were placed in a Play-In stage at Weekend 1 to determine the Top 8 for Weekend 2. You also held reservations against the Double Elimination System.
Therefore we decided to change the format to a full 16 Player Single Elimination, which will be played as Best-of-Five (Grand Final: Bo7).
It is now mandatory for players to provide their own webcam and be available for Winner Interviews.
Current Schedule:
January 28: 2x Round of 16 + 1x Round of 8
January 29: 2x Round of 16 + 1x Round of 8
February 03: 2x Round of 16 + 1x Round of 8
February 04: 2x Round of 16 + 1x Round of 8
February 05: Semifinals, Game for 3rd + Grand Final
Matcherino: https://matcherino.com/t/w3cs13finals
All the Randoms 1v1 S14 Tournament
We are happy to announce that we will be also hosting a season's end finals for the all the randoms-ladder at the conclusion of Season 14 (Top 8 will qualify).
Support the prizepool here: https://matcherino.com/tournaments/87496
New UI theme - Ragnaros the Everburning
The leader of the Dark Iron Clan, the mad Sorcerer-Thane Thaurissan, sought to claim all of Khaz Modan for himself. When realizing that supremacy over the dwarves could no longer be achieved by his own force of arms and sensing imminent defeat, Thaurissan and his most powerful allies, The Seven, delved into forbidden lore and summoned the great Elemental Lord of Fire, Ragnaros, from his imprisonment in The Firelands.
Horribly underestimating the power of the Firelord, Thaurissan, the Seven and many Dark Iron dwarves were immediately killed in the immolation of the volcanic eruption that followed Ragnaros' apocalyptic rebirth into the mortal plane. The volcano known as Blackrock Mountain shattered the Redridge Mountains and tore them asunder, forming the great black peak of Blackrock Spire. Ragnaros took control of the depths of Blackrock Mountain and ruled it for more than 200 years. The remaining Dark Iron dwarves formed their new capital Shadowforge City in Blackrock Mountain and were enslaved under the control of Ragnaros and his lieutenants.
Marking one year since the death of Mykhaylo "HoT" Novopashyn, this season's theme is in his honor.
New Launcher
The launcher has been updated to version 1.2.2.
The app is now resizable. If you ever had problems with launcher elements not fitting well because of a smaller screen or the news text looking small and hard to read on a giant display, this change aims to improve that and make the UI elements fit better.
Other changes include:
Launcher position and size is remembered on app startup
UI touchups
Flo updates to prepare for patch 1.35
The Blizzard login window is now borderless
Map pool changes
1v1
Added Melting Valley v2
After the successful reworks of classic maps such as EI, SV and TM that we've introduced with our past seasons, with season 14 it's finally time to bring back another old friend: Melting Valley. Special thanks to Zucth and SaveOrcas for putting this up together. The remarkable differences with its legacy version are the following:
Creep camps around the map are now symmetric: this means players will no longer have different nearby creeps based on their starting location.
Goblin laboratories have been moved towards the middle and are now equipped with proper anti-air and a lockdown (ensnare): we found that previously it was too easy to abuse these camps, either by disrupting the nearby enemy expansion by pulling the creeps, or simply by wiping everything with air units.
Rebalanced item drops: the map was infamous for its abundance of permanent items, while now we believe a good compromise should have been reached.
Eversong updated to v1.1
Murloc creep camps moved closer to player starting locations and now drop an additional level 2 tome.
The 3-2-2 troll camps now drop a level 1 permanent item (e.g. Cloak of Shadows) instead of a level 1 tome.
Red camps now have a level 4 Bloodfiend (cleaving attack) instead of a level 3 Fel Beast.
Goblin Laboratory creep camps now drop an additional level 2 tome.
The 6-3-3-3 camps nearby taverns no longer drop the level 1 tome.
Removed Rusty Creek
This map unfortunately didn’t enjoy the favour of the playerbase, and many may argue that this is part of the inexorable destiny affecting all of the big macro maps. Nonetheless, Rusty Creek leaves us a lot of memories and the achievement of being included into the map pool of an S-tier tournament.
4v4
Added Cherryville
This map was one of the first to be rotated out of our 4vs4 map pool and we’re therefore glad to bring it back. After Battleground with the previous few seasons, this makes our objective clear to leave no map behind, and spice things up every new season both with new additions and maps that belong to our history.
Added Mount Hyjal
This is a brand new map by Zucth. Here teammates are close but afar, due to high grounds dominating the area. Players are well protected by natural defenses but it will be their duty to expand into the map and claim the exposed gold mines.
Added Winter Township
This is one of the few high-level maps that were still left behind from the latest 4vs4 mapping contest that provided us with many great additions throughout the time. The map layout is somewhat reminiscent to Northmarsh Ruin, but at the same time it might require some more focus towards the center of the map rather than at the corners.
Chimney Isles updated to v1.3
Now the red camp at the top is slightly stronger (a Revenant with Chain Lightning was added) and drops a level 6 charged item (e.g. Doom Guard summon).
Indigo Keeper updated to v1.2
Fixed a bug that was allowing polar bears to run away from players by swimming on the water.
Removed Battleground
This map was recently given a second chance, but unfortunately it just isn’t so much of a fan favourite. Yet we believe it still served its purpose, as it’s one of the few maps to force unique one-base gameplay and a lot of action from the get-go in order to conquer the crucial red camps.
Removed Nerubian Passage
Nerubian Passage is one of those maps that has been with us for the longest time. Looking at the not-so-bright playrates from the past season and after talking to its author, we’ve decided to give this map a hiatus to hopefully bring it back for the next season with a refreshed look.
Removed Deadlock LV
Just like the previous map, Deadlock LV has also happened to be with us ever since season 1. Therefore, as part of a healthy rotation of maps, we want temporarily part ways to give some other maps the spotlight.
2v2 and FFA
No changes to the map pool of these game modes for the current season.
A shoutout to the map makers
A lot of the work you see on the maps that are tirelessly updated every season is thanks to the MMC (Melee Mapping Central) community. You might see names like Mafe, Kaer, rhythmt, Tenshi, Zucth, SaveOrcas, Lovestruck, and more mentioned often but they are all a group of volunteers who love the game as much as we do and have spent a lot of cycles building these maps to be up-to-date for us to play and watch games on. Previously they worked with Blizzard to provide community maps for the BNET ladder. Updating existing maps (like LR, EI, SV, and TM) and improving them is also a significant effort that we want to show them gratitude for. You can always say hello, post suggestions, or join in, on their Discord server:
Regarding Joinbugs
The last few weeks we’ve seen a marked increase in joinbugs on the platform, especially on specific servers and in 4v4, we’d like to give a little context on this.
Firstly, there are really two types of joinbugs:
Where players can’t “join the game” - this will look familiar to anyone stuck on the loading screen for a long period.
A player drops from the game immediately on creation.
Both of these are caused by bugs in Reforged, and unfortunately there’s not much we can do about it. We suspect that this could be a contributing reason to why Blizzard’s own ladder has had many ranking issues and incorrectly attributed game results.
We also know that since this is a bug in the Reforged client, typically restarting the game gets you back to a healthy game state, those of you who have experienced joinbugs might recall seeing a note that informs you “Reforged is in a bad state”, this was added by Abeninski who was able to detect one of these conditions that caused joinbugs in the past. Unfortunately we have no info on the new bugs, despite a lot of work from Fluxxu to check.
Another note is that poor network connection can cause joinbugs, and some part of that is on our server network, so we will continue to try and improve the routes available to players with our pseudo-VPN setup that we’ve created. We are also expecting that servers that cross the Chinese Firewall will have more errors, this is an unfortunate reality of the infrastructure, but we’ll keep trying to keep the network as healthy as possible.
In more positive news, Ellalink undersea cable seems to be in use by many ISPs now, so we’re investigating a route from Brazil to Portugal that could be 80ms or lower!
Build W3Champions together!
W3Champions is looking for .NET, TypeScript, and jQuery developers
While we appreciate PR submissions, we are mainly interested in developers that are willing to commit time and take ownership of their projects. We have few formal hierarchies and our approach is very free for all. We are always open for a talk if you want to inquire more about how you can help!