Breaking Combat in PvP and Battlegrounds

Players have been reporting an issue with being able to escape combat *very* quickly on both PvP servers and Battlegrounds, and then being able to join a Battlegrounds match while seemingly still in PvP combat (on Nagafen). After some discussion and diagnosis in this thread, Rothgar posted the backstory on the issue and presented a change that will be made to address the issue:

Prior to battlegrounds the only way you got out of combat was for your hate to degrade over time. So the more hate you built with someone, the longer you’d stay in combat.

When battleground development began, a new method was added to remove you from combat if you got far enough away from your attacker and hadn’t had any aggressive action with them in a period of time. (4 seconds) The aggressive action goes both ways, you attacking them or them attacking you.

This new check was enabled for all PvP, not just battlegrounds. We’re going to increase this timer from 4 to 10 seconds and see how that goes.

The old rule is still in effect. If your hate degrades to almost nothing, you’ll be removed from combat. But in addition, if you run 20 meters away and neither of you have attacked each other in 10 seconds, you’ll also be removed.

And in response to detractors, Rothgar provided this insight:

working on a project with millions of lines of code that has been touched by lots of different developers can be a real challenge.

Some of the systems are VERY complex and changing any little thing can have huge ripples. It’s pretty amazing how many things our QA department catches. I know sometimes it doesn’t seem like it when a few things make it out to live servers, but you’d really have to be on the inside to see what it’s like.

In this case we didn’t really break existing code, we just added a new mechanic to pvp combat and the initial values that were set were probably too drastic.

Regardless, it’s being fixed. In fact, I’m going to change the timer right now on the live servers so you can see how it goes tonight and give me your feedback.

and amid further angst:

We’re asking for feedback and you’re giving it to us. We don’t want to change the PvP ruleset for the worse, we want to make it better.

If everyone in PvP truly believes its perfect as it is, fine, we can stop trying to make it better. If this change to getting out of combat provides no benefit to open world PvP, lets get rid of it!

I still believe that having a similar ruleset between PvP and BG is the best way to go. It provides an easier learning curve going between them and if someone gets into Battlegrounds and decides they want to make a character on a PvP server, they shouldn’t have to relearn the ruleset.