Blue News for Dec. 17th

Hydraxian Waterlords not rewarding reputation properly
This has been taken under consideration, and in a future patch creatures associated with the Hydraxian Waterlords will give full reputation irrespective of your character’s level. (Source)

Sovereign Twilight Opal
Keep an eye out, they should be available in the future. (Source)

“Vehicle” type mounts issues
This is slated to be changed in an upcoming patch (not 3.0.8 ). All new mounts that currently function like vehicles will be changed to function like other standard mounts. This includes the flying carpet. (Source)

PvP Vehicles
We are talking about making PvP vehicles susceptible to all player damage spells. They would still be immune to roots and other forms of CC, but could be poisoned, cursed, etc. It’s wacky, but the way the classes have been designed it isn’t worth the balance issues just for flavor in this case. (Source)

Extended maintenance
People have a tendency to think the worst no matter how much information they are given. We don’t do extended maintenance without good reason and generally, the reasoning is that we want to make sure that the community continues to have as good an experience in game as possible. That means, making sure new things in the game are there, databases are running smoothly, functions and features of the game are working as intended, etc.

We’ve just released a major addition to the game, and while it can be frustrating to have downtime, there are a lot of moving parts to deal with that we are making sure we have working all together rather than having people find that the aspect of the game they enjoy most is not working for them. (Source)

More items added to the currency tab?
Thanks for your suggestion. We sent a very similar list through to the development team. Currently the currency tab functions somewhat as an invisible bag. Apparently there are technical limitations that prevent adding many of the previous “currency” style items. It is very likely that currency items associated with pre-WotLK content will not be added. Though, we might be considering adding the Darkmoon Faire Prize Tickets, and any new currency items that we might add from now on.

The various scourge stones for the Argent Dawn would be nice too. They really start to stack up from strat/scholo solo runs.
Unfortunately as I already posted, there are no current intentions to add currency-style items from legacy content. (Source)

When will you add Dual-Spec to the game?
Though we haven’t stated the actual patch number this feature will be in, yes it is not in this current patch and I believe we’ll be making a pretty obvious announcement when this exciting feature is incoming. (Source)

Class balancing and parsing game data
Please remember that WoW tends to generate very complicated data sets. What I mean is that it is difficult to predict what a given player’s dps will be. It varies enormously depending on skill, gear and the other classes (and their players) in the group. For example, you might find that below a certain gear level a spec is not competitive, but above a certain gear level they dominate. You might find that class X performs well only when specific buffs are present. I’m not confident the data are always normally distributed. All of those confounding factors can make simple statistical tests suggest trends that are not actually there. The tricky part is not in running the actual test but in deciding which points to throw out. Do you only include players who clearly know their class? Do you only throw out certain gear levels? Do you include groups with different numbers of healer or buffs? Which data you analyze is everything.

None of that is to say you should discount these data. We ask for numbers a lot, so it is awesome when players can deliver them. But you have to be very, very careful to not over-analyze them.

On the actual topic, we chose the new Steady Shot number after a great deal of research. But we also know that sometimes even the best statistical models and predictions routinely fail to represent reality, which is why we provide a PTR in order to collect additional information. Is it possible we nerfed hunter dps too much? Of course. We have some confidence in our numbers, but rarely certainty. Certainty is a conversation ender. That’s not what we are about. (Source)

[EU] Character Recustomization issues
We are aware that some people are experiencing difficulties with paying for the Character Re-Customization service when using the following cards and currencies: Maestro (British Pounds), Solo (British Pounds) and Visa Electron (Russian Rubles).

Our payment partner is handling this with the banks involved. We have not yet received an estimated time for the issue to be corrected, but will update you once we receive news. (Source)

[EU] New Chamber of Aspects PvE Realm
As some have surely noticed already, character creation is enabled on the realm. (Source)