S4 Changes to Rating System and Requirements

the current rating system implementation fuckin sucks. heres my fix:

- personal rating is completely independent of team rating
- teams are matched by the person with the highest personal rating, not by team rating
- team rating exists solely for the purpose of ladder rank
- nothing resets your personal rating to 1500 other than the beginning of a new season.

this not only simplifies the whole system, but eliminates all the problems with arena exploitation we see today

Yup

These new changes will be tough on my team since we play at awful times and usually end up paired with teams 200-400 points above us.

Whatever, I'll still eventually look pretty as the seasons progress...

I had my first matches last week, oddly 7 were against Rogue/Warrior and Druid combos that had several pieces of S3, we had two match against actual newb teams like us. Not sure how they got in the 1400 bracket, but oh well. While both of us expect to get rolled until we get pieces, it is funny to see how bad these guys own us, we played a druid / rogue combo perfectly (Hunter/Shaman) and after draining the druid we just didn't have the dps to put them down. We still have to spend a whole season just to learn how to play instinctively. Hopefully this gives us realistic matchups.

I support these changes. Less shoulders and weaps on people that can barely hold the rating.

Yea the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. Good call.

Yea the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. Good call.

Thats about the idea of it....

Yea the rich get richer and the poor stay poor. Good call.

not really... especially later in the season.

and if they implemented the arena system properly the geared would be at a personal rating relative to their rating requirement gear and not be paired with the lesser rated/geared.

Weapon should've been 2200, not shoulders. For casters and healers it's not such a big deal, but melee getting sunwell equivalent weapons for free is pretty bad.
I think the reasoning is that high rated teams, once they got the new weapons, would have too much of an advantage over lower rated teams that they'd never get to 2200+. Of course, the same could be said for 2050 I guess, but :shrug:.

Also shoulders sort of carry a visible prestige, moreso than weapons. Anyone wearing season 4 shoulders will get respect from the masses.

not really... especially later in the season.

and if they implemented the arena system properly the geared would be at a personal rating relative to their rating requirement gear and not be paired with the lesser rated/geared.

exactly

The *nice* thing about this is that it should prevent team selling, players wont want to give up that rating until they get all the gear; it'll give a better depiction of class balance issues and give newer and casual players more balanced matches and an actual progression path instead of getting matched against 2200 players buiding a team in the 1500 bracket.

I'm sure there will be loophole for the top tier players to exploit.

While I agree with the concept of rewarding top teams this is kind of like giving [IE] spinfusors with 10% more power than any other team in the ladder and expecting the rest of the ladder to accept the imbalance. If they want an mmo to be an 'esport' they need class and gear balance.

wow can never be an esport... the key factor in esport quality games is consistency. this is contradictory to the nature of an mmo which demands frequent change, expansions, etc to keep the game fresh for pve.

only way they could work wow arena into an esport is to create a permenant balanced arena-only ruleset with restricted arena-only gear. by ruleset i mean all the class balance factors such as stat limits, skill balance, drinking policies, etc. this would seperate arena from the rest of wow into its own minigame...

basically an esport game requires near perfect balance (starcraft for example) and wow is nearly impossible to balance.

Closest they'll come to an esport is the tournament. Only arena gear allowed.

Sure it's more focused and in that regard easier to balance but altogether still a huge amount of work. It's no surprise you have to pay to play that part too.

A quick and dirty way of fixing the arena disparities is to have a Personal Best Rating.

Let's say you're a S3 geared player and you want the S4 2200 rating stuff. As soon as you hit 2200, that's your PBR. No matter how poorly you do, your PBR will always be at least 2200.

When calculating who you play and how much change there is for a win/loss, it's done using your PBR.

However, your Current Personal Rating can be changed, and the points you get for that week are based on the CPR.

Team pairings are based on the highest PBR on the team. That means you can't whore yourself out to lesser teams, nor can you lose a ton of matches to get your personal rating low enough that you don't screw up a team you just joined.

As for win trading...once your PBR gets set to some incredibly high number, you're not paired with low PBR teams, so other than being "against the spirit" of the game you don't affect anyone.

Less shoulders and weaps on people that can barely hold the rating.

That I agree with but I hate the change overall. God forbid you want to play on more than one team or use more than the minimum required amount of people. We have 2 paladins on our 5s team. There have been weeks where one played 10 games and then we played another 10-20 as a team with the other and his PR wasn't "in range". Should he be boned for points because of that? I personally don't think so.

I've never broken 1600 arena rating...guess I'm royally screwed this year.

This is the problem with this system.

I dont like the point selling (ruining everything) and i want to see the gear kinda mean something. However, this system means the top TEAMS (not even the best players per se) will pull away from new players.

More to the point... this is as much about newer, inexperienced players having a viable change to get ahead moreso than "good vs bad" players.

It's hard to find teams that work.

Put another way, there are average players on 2000+ teams and great players stuck on shitty teams (who would otherwise thrive, improve and perhaps dominate if combined with the right team).

I admit... this is a hard balance to manage. I support these changes for now, but it gives me concern about the future. I just want to see less team selling and more ACTION.

That I agree with but I hate the change overall. God forbid you want to play on more than one team or use more than the minimum required amount of people. We have 2 paladins on our 5s team. There have been weeks where one played 10 games and then we played another 10-20 as a team with the other and his PR wasn't "in range". Should he be boned for points because of that? I personally don't think so.

We've all been playing long enough to know this would happen. People exploit parts of the system for their own benefit and when they try to workaround the exploit it ends up shafting everyone. It was like that as well with mob kill XP and grouping. Before (long time ago...) you could have earned reasonable XP running around questing with a friend around the same level and had some fun. But then when it was found people were using that to powerlevel each other, they tried to kill the exploit by completely tanking mob kill XP if you're in a group at all even at equal levels. So the end-result was if you wanted to level at a reasonable speed you pretty much had to solo everything not elite/dungeon. And doing it alone is pretty boring, adding to the burn-out factor of people who are leveling their 3rd, 4th, etc. toon.

If AoC or WAR doesn't suck, I fully expect the devs there to do the same after people attempt to exploit the system.

wow is nearly impossible to balance.
It's only nearly impossible to balance because of the backlash that would occur if the DEV team actually made the drastic changes needed to balance the game.

Standardizing everything, as you mentioned, is the only true way to balance arenas. Even just standardizing CC would be a huge boost for balance in arenas.

Or just fucking take cyclone out of the game and rid the world of all the whiny cunt druids. Honestly, when is the last time anyone has seen a druid without 2k shoulders?

I've never broken 1600 arena rating...guess I'm royally screwed this year.

are you serious

are you that fucking terrible, if you can't get to 1850 for your weapon just give up

It's only nearly impossible to balance because of the backlash that would occur if the DEV team actually made the drastic changes needed to balance the game.

Nail on the head.

are you serious

are you that fucking terrible, if you can't get to 1850 for your weapon just give up

You fail to realize that in some battlegroups, everything from 1500 to possibly 1700 is dominated by point sellers. They have all the S3/Vind gear, the best enchants, and the EZ-mode team setups because that's what they do. They're strictly in the business of making/selling high-rating teams, so they know how to dominate/crush everyone in the lower brackets so they can continue on with their business.

You also have to factor into account the only real way to get around this is to play at peak hours, which is not something everyone can do. And even then you still need a bit of luck to get away from point-seller teams. If your team is stuck playing their games at off-peak hours then guess what? You're probably facing point-selling teams, and thanks to the lack of players at those times, the system will inevitably pair you with them.

Nail on the head.



You fail to realize that in some battlegroups, everything from 1500 to possibly 1700 is dominated by point sellers. They have all the S3/Vind gear, the best enchants, and the EZ-mode team setups because that's what they do. They're strictly in the business of making/selling high-rating teams, so they know how to dominate/crush everyone in the lower brackets so they can continue on with their business.

You also have to factor into account the only real way to get around this is to play at peak hours, which is not something everyone can do. And even then you still need a bit of luck to get away from point-seller teams. If your team is stuck playing their games at off-peak hours then guess what? You're probably facing point-selling teams, and thanks to the lack of players at those times, the system will inevitably pair you with them.
If you can't get above 1600, you're garbage.

Even if I believe the arena system is retarded and that they could do a lot to balance the game more, and that world PvP should be more prominent, there's no way in hell you can justify getting below a 1600 rating unless you flat out suck. Even a shitty combo can get 1600 if you know what you're doing even remotely.

Hell, I'd even say 1850 is really not a hard rating to achieve...you would at least probably need a somewhat intelligent combo true, but still...you don't start fighting real teams until 2k.

And the point selling shit doesn't matter. Full season 3 doesn't mean a damn thing unless you're wearing blues and 8k health, in which case that's your own damn fault for not grinding some honor before starting to arena. Before I had a lot of gear (last season and early this season shortly after reactivating my account), I'd run into those kind of teams on 2v2 a lot, and we'd beat them with my fucking gorehowl and my shaman in kara gear and blues.

Yeah it's annoying when you are trying to help your priest friend who just hit 70 and wants to start saving arena points for next season and at 1600 you run into a full s3 warrior who 2 shots him, but I don't think it's as much of a brick wall as you are saying it is...I've gone pretty far with some crappy ass geared people against some of these point sellers...it doesn't justify 1600.

Now if you play 10 games a week in PvE gear and don't really give a shit or attempt to improve...i guess I can see a sub 1600 rating being feasible, but that's even a stretch imo.

you fight s3 teams from 1500 up, at least in my group