Match flow in PvP is affected by everything from team formation and arena queuing to the way players actually enter matches. I’m happy to announce that the process players use to enter PvP arenas has been completely revamped to improve match flow!

Rosters

The concept of PvP rosters has been completely removed. Players queueing by themselves will no longer need to create and submit a roster to play, and the days of teams forming parties just to invite them to a PvP roster are over. Instead, players can simply queue with their party or queue alone. This change means that anyone can queue their party for ranked or unranked arenas, which will prompt the other party members to confirm. Since parties stick together through the match flow process, they can easily queue over and over with no need to recreate rosters for every match! To accommodate these changes, the PvP UI has had a major overhaul.

Match Prompts

We’ve heard loud and clear from the community that AFK players are mucking up matches. We’ve taken the most popular suggestions from the community and added them to the match flow, including prematch ready checks and match-start alerts.

When a match has been found, a distinct sound will alert players who have the game minimized or are looking away from their screens. The game will also flash on the task bar if sound is muted. For the players who have walked away from their computers, or for players who simply forgot they were in queue and no longer want to play, the ready check finds and replaces them before the match even starts.

These changes to match flow will help prevent players from going AFK and provide a better overall experience by requiring players to actively accept a match. Players will no longer be automatically pulled into PvP matches when the queue pops. To ensure players are ready to accept, they will now be asked to be in the Heart of the Mists and ready to play when they queue. This also means that when a player sends or accepts an invite to queue up for PvP, they will also be prompted to go to the Heart of the Mists.

Since players will now queue directly from the Heart of the Mists, some core services (e.g., bank, trading post, laurel vendor) have been added there to provide more tools to manage your character between matches as well as help make the Heart of the Mists a more enjoyable social hub for PvP players.

Dishonor

The Dishonor system exists to make players think twice about leaving games or going AFK in a match.

Each instance of undesired behavior will immediately result in a timeout and increase the player’s dishonor stat. During a timeout, both unranked and ranked arena matches are unavailable. Dishonor is now a long-term effect that wears off slowly. The purpose of dishonor is to increase timeout durations. The more players misbehave and the higher dishonor they accumulate, the longer their timeouts become. First-time offenders with no previous dishonor will have short timeouts, but the severity of timeouts ramps up quickly as dishonor lingers on an account.

Leaving matches at any time or declining a match-ready prompt will result in a timeout and an increase of dishonor on an account. Dishonor does not apply in custom arenas.

Map Voting

We’re giving power to the players with a brand-new map selection system! Each time a match starts, all ten players will each get to choose their favorite map from a random subset. Once players finish voting, the final map is picked by a weighted roll. The more a map is chosen, the more likely it is to be picked. For example, if six players choose Battle of Kyhlo and four choose Legacy of the Foefire, there is a 60 percent chance that Kyhlo will be selected and a 40 percent chance that Foefire will be selected. This means players will always have a chance to play on their favorite maps.

All these features and upgrades will lead to an even better PvP gameplay experience.

I look forward to seeing you all in the Mists!

Evan