Bitter Rivals Day One - PvMe?

Patch days are sort of like waiting for Christmas and then getting told, at the last minute, that all the gifts will arrive on the 28th.  I spent the afternoon reading a book and watching the server status in vain -- happily, I clocked a couple hours of playtime later that night.

Patch 1.2 is upon us, for realsies!  We charge into the Bitter Rivals live event and soak up the legion of changes that the patch hath brought.  NVidia users, don't forget to go grab the new drivers as well!

General impressions of the first day to follow:

New Party & Warbands Interface - It's nice, got a hefty feel to it, but is it less intuitive than the open grouping button?  I kind of think so.  And like many other games with LFG interfaces, it's an uphill battle for this to become the accepted norm over general chat and blind invites.

Model Changes - The first thing I noticed when I logged in is that my trusty dragon rifle had turned into this monster hand cannon with scope that you can see in the picture to the right there.  SWEET.  And is that a little WAR apple on my belt?  Oh, it just might be...

Performance - I guess we're not free and clear of patch day performance woes.  The game froze up on me twice in Twisting Tower, complete reboot kind of freeze.  Yikes!  And the framerate in RvR was as bad or worse, so I finally looked at my new beefy video card, sighed deeply, and lowered everything to "fastest framerate" -- which still stutters, but is more playable.

Twisting Tower - Framerate issues aside, fairly big thumbs up for this scenario so far.  It's fast, visually dynamic, and once I or anyone I know can figure out how we actually capture points and win the fight, it might go on to greatness (maybe you know, but it's not very obvious, and the instructions on the loading screen are very vague).  I still go "whee!" as I shoot through the air at the beginning, and it's fun to have the option to start at the top and fight down, or at the bottom and fight up.  Order and Destruction were each winning about the same amount of times.

New Map Features - One of my biggest small gripes was that you could never see your warband -- or sometimes your party -- on the map, and now that seems to be a problem of the past.  Awesome!

Map Pieces - I got the third of three parts in my second scenario.  Now I really want to get the first two... anyone know what happens when you assemble the whole thing?

Bitter Rivals - Mythic's rolling out this live event's one week schedule day by day, it appears.  I did both of today's requirements in one scenario, and shot a third of the way through my influence bar.  Unless future requirements are going to be steeper, I think this'll be a very easy event to max out.  Good thing, because other than getting the Slayer a week early, I don't really care for the rewards.

PvMe - It got weird, really weird in scenario fights.  You know how you fight in RvR and get this steady stream of piddly renown?  Like 1 renown here, 2 there, 1 here.  Meaningless, really.  Well, tonight I kept seeing messages like "You get 1 renown for killing Syp", over and over again.  And I wasn't dead (yet).  I felt fine!  I felt happy!  So what's up with that?  Is this a new PvMe feature that Mythic's trying to sneak in under the radar?