Mercenary Feature Coming to World of Warcraft

[Conrad Zimmerman]

Mercenary Feature Coming to World of Warcraft

Fight for the enemy and skip the line.

Blizzard will be introducing a new way to help ease the pain of sitting in a long queue for World of Warcraft PvP action. A future update will include a new "Mercenary" feature, which allows players to temporarily join the opposing faction for a battle.

As explained in a post on Battle.net, players who experience lengthy waits to enter Ashran or unrated Battlegrounds will observe enemy agents within their base. Interacting with them will allow the player to disguise themselves as a member of the opposing faction and fight as one of them for the session.

The character's race is automatically switched to one appropriate to their temporary faction. Players will still earn the same rewards as if they had played a regular round of PvP (excluding any faction-specific achievements) but won't have to wait as long to get their combat fix.

With wait times to enter Ashran and acquire its glorious level 100 loot often exceeding an hour, the new feature should be a welcome one. It's uncertain when the option to be a mercenary will be added to the the game, but Blizzard has stated that testing will begin on public test servers soon.

Source: Battle.net [http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/19818013/in-development-pvp-mercenary-mode-7-15-2015]

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[SlumlordThanatos]

This won't help at all.

Ashran and the big 60v60 battlegrounds just aren't any fun and require far more people than, say, a 10v10 Warsong Gultch match. Being able to fight for the Alliance won't change that, just like Call to Arms for the Dungeon Finder (giving bonuses to tanks and healers) didn't help DPS queue times.

Honestly, just writing off large-scale battlegrounds as a failed experiment would be a better solution.

EDIT: I forgot about Alterac Valley. That one can stay, but BGs like Isle of Conquest were never particularly good.

 

[webkilla]

I recall the good old day when WoW PVP mainly revolved around Alterac Valley... good times

Back when holding the line, and a four hour slog through mountains of corpses was soup de jour.


Damn that was fun. And now you can get to attack your own faction, disguised as the enemy? Hilarious! Awesome! This should have been a feature ten years ago

 

[Cowabungaa]

And another blow was dealt to WoW's sense of community. A damn shame. Welp, Warlords of Draenor wasn't gripping me anyway, this is even more a reason to not resubscribe.

I'm very disappointed that I'm going to be transformed into the other faction and am not just going to be a Night Elf wearing an Orc mask.

That is indeed a shame.

 

[Kenjitsuka]

"A future update will include a new "Mercenary" feature, which allows players to temporarily join the opposing faction for a battle."

I've been playing Rift these past few weeks... and the one time I queued for PVP I actually fought on the opposing faction's team, and had a buff called "Mercenary Mode". So... original!

Then again, Rift based all it's basics on WoW, so we can call that even.

 

[Lightknight]

One hour? How is this even still a thing if it takes an hour to get a game going. That's stupid.

 

[Aeshi]

Wait, I thought there was a strict "no communication with the other faction" rule? How's that gonna work with this?

 

[Slizergiy]

Human is SPY!

 

[Nailzzz]

"A future update will include a new "Mercenary" feature, which allows players to temporarily join the opposing faction for a battle."

I've been playing Rift these past few weeks... and the one time I queued for PVP I actually fought on the opposing faction's team, and had a buff called "Mercenary Mode". So... original!

Then again, Rift based all it's basics on WoW, so we can call that even.

Rift was a game whose developers felt so strongly about stealing from others, that they went to court over the name of their game with a small tabletop game publisher. The kicker is that Rift wasn't even the original name. It was originally Heroes of Telera. Trion wasted time and money in court just so they could steal the name.

 

[Loop Stricken]

One hour? How is this even still a thing if it takes an hour to get a game going. That's stupid.

People join a server playing as the more successful faction hoping to coast along for easy wins, leading to a faction imbalance on that server, leading to long waiting times.

Hence this addition.

 

[Denamic]

One hour? How is this even still a thing if it takes an hour to get a game going. That's stupid.

Some battlegroups have severely imbalanced faction ratios. When you're outnumbered 5 to 1, getting together 60 people on both sides may be really hard, if not impossible depending on the time of day, and hence the wait. Being able to fight for the enemy faction should even out the potential PvP population and therefore shorten the wait significantly.

 

[infohippie]

This won't help at all.

Ashran and the big 60v60 battlegrounds just aren't any fun and require far more people than, say, a 10v10 Warsong Gultch match. Being able to fight for the Alliance won't change that, just like Call to Arms for the Dungeon Finder (giving bonuses to tanks and healers) didn't help DPS queue times.

Honestly, just writing off large-scale battlegrounds as a failed experiment would be a better solution.

EDIT: I forgot about Alterac Valley. That one can stay, but BGs like Isle of Conquest were never particularly good.

Or how about not trying to make battlegrounds so structured and balanced, but simply make them easily accessible from outside, turn PvP on inside them, and walk away? Let large scale battlegrounds be little areas of open world PvP rather than an artificial 60 vs 60 arena. So at any time there might be as few as five players from a single faction or as many as a hundred. And until you go in, take a look, and thereby open yourself to the risk, YOU DON'T KNOW.

 

[BoogieManFL]

But I don't want to fight for those filthy Alliance pansies. At least it seems like it's optional.

 

[The Great JT]

Mercenaries are what the players already are anyway, so why not.

 

[LordLundar]

Or how about not trying to make battlegrounds so structured and balanced, but simply make them easily accessible from outside, turn PvP on inside them, and walk away? Let large scale battlegrounds be little areas of open world PvP rather than an artificial 60 vs 60 arena. So at any time there might be as few as five players from a single faction or as many as a hundred. And until you go in, take a look, and thereby open yourself to the risk, YOU DON'T KNOW.

You described Wintergrasp in a nutshell. The imbalance was worse and strategy boiled down to "have fewer numbers and steamroll the opponents" thanks to the messed up buffing system they used.

Back to the topic at hand. It's funny that they're just now starting to implement a feature that's been suggested for YEARS and apparently is only being done when the game seems to be suffering from subscription hemorrhage.

 

[Bat Vader]

I was hoping it would allow players who wanted to to become mercenaries and do quests for both sides. I think that would be cool.

 

[magter3001]

Doesn't fix the main problem though with Racials in PvP. Human Racials are OP, so much so that everyone plays them now. Hence why Alliance queues are so long.

 

[Nathan Josephs]

great now put it in dungeon finder. have you ever tried to do the old burning crusade heroics with that? impossible.