I know that the ladder phase of the tournament ends on 15 April and that the top teams progress to the qualifirers. My question is during the time of these qualifiers, can the teams that didint make it still do arena for arena points? Do the teams goin to qualifiers still gain/lose rating? Or is that only for the ladder part of the tournament?

But my main concerns is what happens after 15 April if you dont make qualifiers? Can you still arena for arena points? Or do you have to wait for the next season to start?

To my understanding, the system will remain completely unchanged and the qualified teams will have their characters copied on some different servers.

So even if a team qualified they will still play in the arena system like always although any gear improvements will not go into their ladder games.

Will the new season begin at 15 april? Will it introduce new rewards?
Any info on these rewards?

Reason is that im currently playing 10 games a week on a 2on2 and will have enough points for 1hand weapon in a week. So im curious if i should spend the points and get an 88dps dagger now, or wait for season2 and maybe instead be able to buy a 95dps dagger...

Why would they get new rewards now?
Arena, Another
Top Raiding, Another

Arena gear is already on par with the very best of current PvE which very very few have the ability to have a shot at, even if they did buff loot in SSL/TK25 its still so rare that it shouldn't justify new arena weapons yet.

Because they did say that they were eventually gonna upgrade arena rewards. In my humble opionion(and yours) its probably not time to upgrade arena gear when comparing to PVE counterparts. But blizz could still choose whatever they wanted and i merely wondered if anyone had any information on blizzards decision.

The reason why i asked in the first place was this quote(which i read some time ago and forgot about the second half...):
Players: Are there different rewards for the second season?
Blizzard: This hasn’t been decided yet, we will let you know in due time if there are any changes for the second season.

And assuming there would be fuzzyfuzzy if they released such information, i guess i would already have heard about it. So we can prolly conclude that "due time" has passed and there wont be any upgrades.

However that brings forth another question. Im not certain of how much pvp gear the #1 rank teams are able to get in a season, but lets say they get ~all the pvp gear, wouldnt that mean that there were no gear for them the entire second season? Wouldnt that hurt the lust for playing as theyd gain nothing exept hoarding points for season3 or some gems?

I'm hoping the arena rewards don't get updated yet. It'd set a precedent of seasonal upgrades, which will just encourage point hording, which isn't much fun for anyone. I'm on a 5v5 team that hovers between 1600-1700 points, so that's between 500-600 points per week. At best, that's 14 weeks to get all five gladiator pieces. I don't think upgraded loot should happen any more often than that - getting gear is fun, and feeling screwed because I should have saved my points the entire first season isn't.

From what I understand, Arena rewards will receive new item choices each time there's a game update that introduces new raid content(that's harder than what's currently available). So, there's a chance more stuff will be added in 2.1, since that's when Black Temple is coming and all. At the current rate, it'll probably be some time in April before 2.1 hits anyway - maybe even May.

I would imagine there would be a few additional items for Season 2. No upgrades, per se, but extra bits to fill in the gaps, like a healing weapon and spell damage sword/mace for paladins who can't use daggers.

I would hope that 2.1 hits before May. There's a lot of people hedging their raiding bets on if, when, and by how much raid gear gets buffed.

I would personally also prefer not to have to wait that long for the cleave and engineering changes.

I presume since the ladder will be locked on April 15, you won't be to queue for rating games at all (it'll be like the month after release of TBC).

I haven't seen any information to contradict this, but I'd be surprised if the ladder was active in the post season... although, for the sake of earning arena points, it'd be nice if it were.

ouch, that means the arena season does not end on April 15th. Did they ever actually say arenas were 3 months way back when (I thought I remember something about this). If so, that would mean May 15th or so would be the end of season 1. The whole netherdrake thing is going to be bizzare, since the top teams will be very focused on the sandbox realm, will they start losing ranking on the live realms? It would be quite strange if the #1-5 teams in the competition ended up not being #1-5 on live.

Well, they can still play the minimum of 10 games per week and continue playing on the whatever server they provided for the playoffs, thus they can maintain their rating and rank pretty easily. However, if you didn't gear up before the start of the playoffs, and given that there's a character copy going to happen... you're pretty screwed.

The ranking is all about rating. So those teams that are on the top, even if they won't play anymore (which I doubt) can still be first at the end of the season if no other team got a higher rating. The minimum of 10 games / week is for getting arena points...

Sigh. Three month seasons was already tiresome, now it's more? As if staying top5 for the netherdrake another two weeks wasn't boring enough.

Where are you getting longer than 3 months from? April 15 is 2 months after the season started iirc.

I have this feeling they are swarmed enough with issues that some of this may end up on the backburner (re: the Vashj thread)

The raiding game isn't progressed enough to warrant new rewards. Even SSC weapon drops are on par with gladiator gear and we see how far we've progressed since the start of the season. (responding to exog)

Doh, my bad. I guess all the people talking about april 15th (including the blue post) threw me off :/

Summary:
1. May 15th or later ends the season.
2. No plans for gaps between seasons.

Quotes:
http://blue.cardplace.com/newcache/f...62.htm?posts=3

Thank you for sharing that post Alcaras.

because the arena covers as few as 5 slots right now for some classes. They don't need to upgrade what's there, but they could introduce boots, bracers and some god damn healing equip.
I'm at the point tomorrow where I can only purchase minor upgrades. Should I, should I not? I wish Blizzard would tell us more.

Are you already capped at 5k AP with your entire set purchased or why the long face?
I have a hard time feeling pity for your situation