I also liked the idea of resilience penetration. I have my own suggestion for three new equip effects on arena weaponry that take a certain amount of the stat budget of said weapons.
Suggestions:
Equip: Increases your normalized weapon damage by x% of your resilience rating.
Equip: Increases your damage and healing by y% of your resilience rating.
Equip: Increases your healing by z% of your resilience rating.
This encourages players to wear resilience (Arena) gear in order to see the maximum gain out of their weapons. This would be subject to the Resilience cap of ~495. The listed weapon dps, damage and healing amounts can be lower on arena weapons because of this equip effect. The more resilience you have, the better your weapons are as a result - but if you try and take said weapon to a raid, wearing PvE armor, you have an inferior (but still passable) weapon to it's PvE counterpart because your resilience is near zero. If you try wearing PvP armor in PvE, your PvP armor is sacrificing stats for the resilience you need to buff your weapon up to PvE levels. So, PvE weapons + PvE armor would be best in a raid.. in theory. PvP weapons + PvP armor would be best in Arena, because that's where Arena weapons would be at their best and PvE weapons (like Stormherald, raid drops, etc) have no similar competing modifier.
It also means the losing team that scrimps and saves and has garbage + season 3 weapon actually has a less effective weapon than the player that has season 1/2 arena gear + season 3 weapon. Saving up all your points and eschewing all in favour of the shiny new weapon will actually hurt in the short term until you pick up the additional resilience to augment the weapon. I guess with a bit of clever math you could arrange it so that the new season's weapon, at zero resilience, is equal to the previous season's weapon paired with decent resilience (which should be equal to the previous raid tier weapon drops).
Last edited by Charsi : 09/07/07 at 11:12 AM.
Reason: slight clarifications
To give everyone further perspective, a rating requirement will only support team selling in my personal opinion. I've seen 2000 rated 5v5s teams sold for 5000g.
Interesting. The 3 person teams on my server sell 600g for a 2100 rating. They are very happy making money doing something they like. The buyer plays 25 to 35 games at the beggining, then the real team generally goes 55-0 to 65-2 (depending on how it all works out), then it's time for the next one.
Those 1300 rating arena teams have higher success rates because they've been fighting other opponents at their level. Raid bosses don't get easier because you wipe on them. You just get better at fighting them. On the other hand, once your arena rating drops far enough, you usually don't fight the same teams as you did at 1500. Your claim is like saying that guilds farming T4 are more deserving of loot than those farming t5 because they have a higher win/loss ratio against those bosses. PvP uses win/loss ratios because you fight different teams in the games most of the time.
And yes, some guilds will let their friends come in for PvE content they can't beat. Some people no doubt allow their friends to PvP with them (at least enough for points and a mount). Blizzard can't avoid that except by preventing you from choosing who to play with.
Except raid bosses do generally get easier over time..... if not directly by blizzard nerfing them then by the simple fact that as your gear improves the boss becomes easier to kill, Arena instead gets easier as you lose and harder as you win. Instead of complaining about Arena weapons being "to good" why don't you guys bring the real issue up to blizzard? Terrible Pve weapon drops.... I bet if say Vashj and Kael both dropped a Regalia like item every week that could be turned in for a variety of weapons (one for each different spec, maybe even have a different regalia drop randomly off any boss before them for Offhands/shields) that you would barely see any Pvers using Pvp weapons much longer.
With 2 Guaranteed weapon drops a week and assuming like 5 of the raid members have Blacksmithing weapons that would be only 10 weeks for the entire raid to have their weapon(lets not forgot the raid will also be getting the non-regalia weapons at the same time so it's actually a shorter amount of time), in comparison it takes 12+ weeks for the "bad" arena teams to get those same weapons.
Well, yes. The real problem is the random number generator. Controlled acquisition always beats random chance. It's more satisfying. For every drop you get lucky on and see on the first kill, there are plenty of drops that you tear your hair out week after week cursing because you've never seen them. "Try a new raid leader!" quoth the masses..
It would be nice if Blizzard redid raid bosses so they dropped raid points and raid boss kills awarded raid rating. Then of course you could visit the raid vendor and buy raid gear (that had a raid rating requirement) with your saved up Raid Points. But I doubt it :-/
It's odd, I think they brought this up at blizzcon and I recall they said they chose 3 tokens because it's more random. I don't know why a single all-classes token is so undesirable. It's less random, which is exactly what makes Arena gear so darn enticing sometimes - you can guarantee that when you have X points, you get Y item. Imagine if the Arena vendor's available stock varied from week to week, or sometimes the guy decides you are made of fail and refused to sell to you unless you showed up flasked. :P
Well, yes. The real problem is the random number generator. Controlled acquisition always beats random chance. It's more satisfying. For every drop you get lucky on and see on the first kill, there are plenty of drops that you tear your hair out week after week cursing because you've never seen them. "Try a new raid leader!" quoth the masses..
It would be nice if Blizzard redid raid bosses so they dropped raid points and raid boss kills awarded raid rating. Then of course you could visit the raid vendor and buy raid gear (that had a raid rating requirement) with your saved up Raid Points. But I doubt it :-/
It's odd, I think they brought this up at blizzcon and I recall they said they chose 3 tokens because it's more random. I don't know why a single all-classes token is so undesirable. It's less random, which is exactly what makes Arena gear so darn enticing sometimes - you can guarantee that when you have X points, you get Y item. Imagine if the Arena vendor's available stock varied from week to week, or sometimes the guy decides you are made of fail and refused to sell to you unless you showed up flasked. :P
Yea, I really don't get the whole "random = Fun" policy that blizzard seems to love either..... if it was my choice I'd have tokens for at least every slot in Pve w/ other random items thrown in on the left over slots(or even points like you suggested), you would still have the "OMG LOOK WHAT DROPPED" feel for the non-token drops, but you'd also be guaranteed to eventually get your entire set of gear eventually instead of going months w/out a certain drop, or months with only 1 drop (I remember rotting tokens in Naxx when half the raid still needed their set piece of that slot simply because the same token always dropped every week).
By comparison, you'd be hard pressed to find many players at the skill level of a 1300 rated team in SSK / TK.
Rubbish. Neither interest in nor skill at PvP is connected to success in PvE in any meaningful way. The Goon Squad is 5/6 SSC and 2/4 TK, and we have countless members, including myself, that suck hosewater in arenas.
PvPers with huge egos just need to drop the "deserve" argument. I didn't suffer through 9 weeks of soul-crushing arena matches to get a weapon so I could feel good about myself. I did it because Merciless Gladiator's Spellblade is so much better for raiding than Fang of the Leviathan it's not even funny. You're never going to see me idling in Shattrath with my Spellblade, because it has no crit so I don't farm with it. You're never going to see me in an arena match with it either because a) I don't play matches now that I have it and b) I'm rated hundreds of points lower than you. The only pain you suffer on account of my having this weapon is a distant, abstract discomfort with the idea that a guy who sucks at PvP as bad as I do has an arena weapon. I, on the other hand, get a weapon that's leaps and bounds better for raiding than anything available from raiding, which makes me more effective, thus helping everyone else in the raid kill bosses and collect loot. Benefits > Costs.
PvPers with huge egos just need to drop the "deserve" argument. I didn't suffer through 9 weeks of soul-crushing arena matches to get a weapon so I could feel good about myself. I did it because Merciless Gladiator's Spellblade is so much better for raiding than Fang of the Leviathan it's not even funny. You're never going to see me idling in Shattrath with my Spellblade, because it has no crit so I don't farm with it. You're never going to see me in an arena match with it either because a) I don't play matches now that I have it and b) I'm rated hundreds of points lower than you. The only pain you suffer on account of my having this weapon is a distant, abstract discomfort with the idea that a guy who sucks at PvP as bad as I do has an arena weapon. I, on the other hand, get a weapon that's leaps and bounds better for raiding than anything available from raiding, which makes me more effective, thus helping everyone else in the raid kill bosses and collect loot. Benefits > Costs.
Soul-crushing? Anyway, this argument would also justify awarding ilvl 136 weapons for, say, farming reputation or tokens from some random world mobs for dozens of hours. Would that be good design, just because "Benefits > Costs" as you put it? Yes, people who get great S2 weapons like their weapons, that's not a surprise. But personal anecdotes aren't really a rational argument either.
People really need to try to be less self-centered in their thinking.
People really need to try to be less self-centered in their thinking.
Are we just trying to be funny now?
-------------
The problem with all the cost vs. benefit arguments (which, incidentally, is a much better phrasing than the nonsensical "risk vs. reward" description) is that you can't draw the conclusion that hours spent, no matter how, have to translate uniformly into gear upgrades.
There's also the issue of generally uniform progress in real time (i.e. the reason that weekly raid lockouts exist). So while I support the idea that people can get gear equivalent or superior to raid gear by doing other things, it has to fit with the overall pacing of the game's progression.
In raids, more hours get you faster progress, and hence better gear (as opposed to simply more gear), but it's rather limited and the returns diminish quickly. A system of rewarding PvP time spent has to work in roughly the same way. Spending many soul-crushing hours every week should be able to get you slightly better gear, at best, compared to people spending significantly fewer hours. Just like wiping for hours at a raid boss for a realistically tiny material benefit.
There's an overall progress curve to the game. Staying level with it should require moderate hours spents, and staying ahead of it should require very large amounts of time, effort, and skill, regardless of how exactly you go about it.
Charsi: Thats the exact same type of system I suggested earlier. I agree its the only fair way to make arena weapons not work well in PVE. However, this does not solve the issue of having PVE items be the best PVP gear for certain slots (anything you cant buy in the arena).
One way this could be fixed is by having some sort of arena faction system that rewards you for playing more arena games and having certain rating requirements (eg. a trinket that requires 200 arena games and 2000 rating to buy). In addition to solving the PVE to PVP problem, this encourages more arena games. Having incentives to play more than 10 games a week would be good for the health of the arena system.
It would be nice if Blizzard redid raid bosses so they dropped raid points and raid boss kills awarded raid rating. Then of course you could visit the raid vendor and buy raid gear (that had a raid rating requirement) with your saved up Raid Points. But I doubt it :-/
This is exactly what essentially every guild does. In actual practice, I don't see how the play experience depends on whether your loot is determined by Blizzard's rules or by my (or your GM's) rules.
No, I'm quite serious. Most people's arguments are really just variations on "I like Arena weapons because mine saved me DKP" or "Arena weapons should only go to people with 1900+ rating because my rating is 1901."
The problem with all the cost vs. benefit arguments (which, incidentally, is a much better phrasing than the nonsensical "risk vs. reward" description) is that you can't draw the conclusion that hours spent, no matter how, have to translate uniformly into gear upgrades.
There's also the issue of generally uniform progress in real time (i.e. the reason that weekly raid lockouts exist). So while I support the idea that people can get gear equivalent or superior to raid gear by doing other things, it has to fit with the overall pacing of the game's progression.
In raids, more hours get you faster progress, and hence better gear (as opposed to simply more gear), but it's rather limited and the returns diminish quickly. A system of rewarding PvP time spent has to work in roughly the same way. Spending many soul-crushing hours every week should be able to get you slightly better gear, at best, compared to people spending significantly fewer hours. Just like wiping for hours at a raid boss for a realistically tiny material benefit.
Except the quote "Benefits > Costs" was being used to invoke social benefits and social costs. 9 weeks of losing a lot probably took, what, 15-20 hours tops? In that sense, a "cost" of 20 hours for an ilvl 136 weapon "benefit" is a great deal. But that's not how the poster phrased it -- the poster suggested that the "costs" were people's discomfort or diminished sense of self-worth as a result of their fellow players having these prized weapons. Not quite the same analysis.
Well, yes. The real problem is the random number generator. Controlled acquisition always beats random chance. It's more satisfying. For every drop you get lucky on and see on the first kill, there are plenty of drops that you tear your hair out week after week cursing because you've never seen them. "Try a new raid leader!" quoth the masses..
It would be nice if Blizzard redid raid bosses so they dropped raid points and raid boss kills awarded raid rating. Then of course you could visit the raid vendor and buy raid gear (that had a raid rating requirement) with your saved up Raid Points. But I doubt it :-/
It's odd, I think they brought this up at blizzcon and I recall they said they chose 3 tokens because it's more random. I don't know why a single all-classes token is so undesirable. It's less random, which is exactly what makes Arena gear so darn enticing sometimes - you can guarantee that when you have X points, you get Y item. Imagine if the Arena vendor's available stock varied from week to week, or sometimes the guy decides you are made of fail and refused to sell to you unless you showed up flasked. :P
I find this an interesting proposition. It would do away with a few 'archaic' looting rules that we have inherited, ie. DKP, at the cost of balancing the speed at which raids would gear up; as well as a clutter of tabs to deal with the said ratings/points (the higher tier bosses give more rating to allow us to buy the gear at tiered prices perhaps?). To avoid hoarders somehow buying tiers above their means, instead of raid ratings, perhaps attunements/quests could be tied in to enable the purchase of said gear. Bosses can then have smaller loot tables to drop 'unique' flavour items, which would then be more 'desireable' to own (like rare mounts or artefacts).
Anyway, this argument would also justify awarding ilvl 136 weapons for, say, farming reputation or tokens from some random world mobs for dozens of hours.
This cuts both ways. Once the ratings crystalize, the experience of the 1901 team that plays 10 games a week has basically the same experience as the 1600 team that plays 10 games a week. They are both just killing player-controlled mobs to meet the minimum quota. Assuming the rating system works as it should, their win/loss rate is probably similar.
Currently, the 1901 team is rewarded for being better by acquiring gear at close to twice the rate of the 1600 team. If there is a cutoff at 1900, however, the 1901 team is futher advantaged because the 1600 team will never have arena weapons.
This is exactly what essentially every guild does. In actual practice, I don't see how the play experience depends on whether your loot is determined by Blizzard's rules or by my (or your GM's) rules.
In one situation a vendor sells all loot, and you gain point to buy items.
In the other situation a boss drops x number of items from a table with y items in it, of which you may never see item 'phat caster weapon' ever drop, because of randomness no matter how much DKP you get (or equivalent).
A big part of the issue is the massive amount of sheer randomness that goes into boss drops. Naj'entus has 14 items on his loot table. To be able to see one item, that means on average it's 7 kills. To be able to get the caster dagger, if you're 4th in line that's a hell of a long time to wait. It could be kill 4 that you get it on, or you could never see it drop in the first place. There's still a multitude of items that we haven't seen in BT despite having cleared it 8+ times. This is partly due to randomness, partly due to the amount of offspec items that "need" to be crammed onto the bosses to make sure people don't feel left out (and even then there's plenty of whine on a lot of forums about things such as the last feral weapon being off the second boss in Hyjal which isn't very well itemised, for example).
This cuts both ways. Once the ratings crystalize, the experience of the 1901 team that plays 10 games a week has basically the same experience as the 1600 team that plays 10 games a week. They are both just killing player-controlled mobs to meet the minimum quota. Assuming the rating system works as it should, their win/loss rate is probably similar.
Currently, the 1901 team is rewarded for being better by acquiring gear at close to twice the rate of the 1600 team. If there is a cutoff at 1900, however, the 1901 team is futher advantaged because the 1600 team will never have arena weapons.
Huh, the post to which you responded wasn't really anything anything along those lines, but rather just pointing out that "well my weapon is an awesome upgrade" doesn't justify the means of obtaining it from a game design perspective. Imagine any stupid, arduous, tedious task (farming 20000 linen, getting 250 rare bop drops from annoying mobs, whatever you want) and someone (many someones) will perform it if the reward is good enough. That doesn't justify it as good design.
Regarding your point, well no, someone who is winning 50% of their games and hovering at 1950 is facing much more challenging opposition than someone winning 50% of their games at 1600. Saying that the two are doing the same thing by "killing player-controlled mobs" is like saying that someone who spends 2 hours in Gruul's/Mag's is doing the "same thing" as someone who spends 2 hours in BT.
Interesting. The 3 person teams on my server sell 600g for a 2100 rating. They are very happy making money doing something they like. The buyer plays 25 to 35 games at the beggining, then the real team generally goes 55-0 to 65-2 (depending on how it all works out), then it's time for the next one.
Really great, so again it doesn't even take losing some weeks, but rather doing daily quests to get the weapons. Perhabs doing it radical. Anyone gets weapons and gear at the begin of the season and at the end there is a special reward based on the rank. As it seems its actually zero skill involved if you have time for the dailys and are on server with the right mercenaries.
Such guys really make me angry.
Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde
Huh, the post to which you responded wasn't really anything anything along those lines, but rather just pointing out that "well my weapon is an awesome upgrade" doesn't justify the means of obtaining it from a game design perspective. Imagine any stupid, arduous, tedious task (farming 20000 linen, getting 250 rare bop drops from annoying mobs, whatever you want) and someone (many someones) will perform it if the reward is good enough. That doesn't justify it as good design.
Regarding your point, well no, someone who is winning 50% of their games and hovering at 1950 is facing much more challenging opposition than someone winning 50% of their games at 1600. Saying that the two are doing the same thing by "killing player-controlled mobs" is like saying that someone who spends 2 hours in Gruul's/Mag's is doing the "same thing" as someone who spends 2 hours in BT.
Sure the opposition is more challenging -- for that reason they are rewarded by acquiring gear at nearly twice the rate of the 1600 team. I wasn't suggesting that they are doing identical tasks. I'm suggesting that the outlay of effort and success rates were similar. They put in the same amount of time per week and win the same number of games. The salient difference is opponent skill, and that is rewarded by a significantly higher point-acquisition rate.
The major objection that I have to a point-requirement that is anything more than trivial is that it constitutes double-dipping by the pvp elite to the disadvantage of people trying to get better.
As to your broader point, if weapons are really out of whack with the rest of the gear as your broader point suggests, why not take them off of the point system entirely? Make them an elite ladder-type reward for being in the Top 5 on your battlegroup, add another category of weapons that the rest of the arena folks can spend points on. The lower tier weapons could be tweaked so they don't blow the doors off of pve content. This would solve the double-dipping problem (or at least contain it at the highest level), would mitigate the pvp/pve crossover problem, and would add more gradations of rewards at the highest end to incentivize season-long play
What I generally want more of is rewarding excellence. I have no problem whatsoever with someone on a 2375-rated 5v5 team having access to an item or an enchant or some other upgrade that is better, even for PvE, than anything I have. They deserve it. They're much better than I am, work harder at it, and have a group of similarly dedicated and skilled teammates. I wouldn't feel envious, but rather just motivated to improve my PvP game. The problem is not with PvE/PvP crossover, in my view, but with the inconsistency with which it is implemented.
There's a big difference between competitive and non-competitive play though. Raiding is non-competitive play. When you kill Illidan, it doesn't mean that nobody else can kill Illidan, or that other people have to face a tougher Illidan than you. In PvP, it is competitive. The better your team's gear gets, the harder your opponents have to work to overcome you. If you are already in a superior position (got the gear first), then it makes their attempts to get it much more difficult than yours.
Do you think it is an overall good idea that a small population of players can actively keep everyone else out because they are that much better geared?
This is why PvE and PvP are hardly analogous... PvE competition is pretty much only for world bosses and bragging rights, and even competing for the pull isn't something that gear can inherently help. In PvP, better gear directly translates to tougher competition, and a well-geared team can literally stop other teams from advancing, while getting better at doing it.
Originally Posted by Praetorian
Except the quote "Benefits > Costs" was being used to invoke social benefits and social costs. 9 weeks of losing a lot probably took, what, 15-20 hours tops? In that sense, a "cost" of 20 hours for an ilvl 136 weapon "benefit" is a great deal. But that's not how the poster phrased it -- the poster suggested that the "costs" were people's discomfort or diminished sense of self-worth as a result of their fellow players having these prized weapons. Not quite the same analysis.
You can't seriously only equate in-game reward with the amount of time it took in-game to earn it.
Perhaps it's 20 hours, but it's spread out over a 2-3 month time period. Yes, raid loot is at the mercy of the random number generator, but you don't either randomly get *something* or *nothing*. You get armor, trinkets, shields, other weapons, etc. etc. in the meantime, that may or may not be useful.
The 20 hours over 2 months may seem tiny compared to one's 20 hours over one week, but it's still two whole months of real time that the arena player will not advance. Given the two months of raid play, chances are extremely good that your character will advance in more ways than simply the weapon, or armor piece, or whatever the arena player will get, provided you run content you are statistically likely to get better gear from (e.g. Elitist Jerks would get almost no benefit from running Karazhan).
It isn't like one can simply put in 20 hours and get an arena weapon. It simply isn't possible. The only way a bad team can get that many points is by paying huge amounts of real time. The real time cost is the high price, not so much the arena points themselves.
I went out for lunch so i'd like to clarify, my suggestion was in good humor. I happen to prefer the Arena way of acquiring items, as flawed as it may be.
Originally Posted by Sillia
Yes, raid loot is at the mercy of the random number generator, but you don't either randomly get *something* or *nothing*. You get armor, trinkets, shields, other weapons, etc. etc. in the meantime, that may or may not be useful.
There is an important psychological factor at play here. When you play Arena and earn points, each week you are coming closer to your goal, whatever it may be.
When you kill a boss and the loot nobody wants drops and is sharded.. not only is a letdown much the same as knowing you can't quite reach the rating to buy item X on tuesday.. there is the double-sting of knowing this week's useless drop doesn't contribute in any way to what you want dropping on the next kill. There is no invisible karma at work when you DE junk.. and some loot is just terribly, terribly itemized (as we all know), destined for sharding on the first drop.
A point system are a progression towards a clearly defined goal. In that respect DKP alleviates the problem somewhat, but there's still the "it'll never drop" gremlin at play.
As has been stated before by others, I believe the desirability of Arena weapons stems mainly from 1. poor itemization on the PvE side, and 2. the frustration of randomness of boss drops. I don't think i'd mind Arena drops being the way they were if there was a way I could earn certain PvE drops. (Not just the points to buy it IF it drops, but the actual item.) Or if as much care was put into stat distribution on PvE as on the PvP gear.
Note: At my current rating I earn about 600 arena points a week. That means I am buying one new Merciless Gladiator piece every 3 weeks, and a 2h weapon every 6. I don't mind that rate of advancement. Raiding has the advantage of offering advancement from the very first time you drop a boss. But the price is straightforward - you have no control over what that advancement is, or if anyone even wants it. Maybe Blizzard would get a clue about itemization if they put everything on a vendor and took a good long look at what never got bought.
I made a suggestion up there about Arena weapons having an equip that modifies their damage by the amount of Resilience worn by the player. Was that simply a terrible idea or something? Fundamentally, I think you want Arena weapons to be overpowered in the Arena, but underpowered anywhere else, to discourage the mixing of PvE and PvP gear, and changing the relative power of weapons based on a stat you predominately see in Arenas and not so much anywhere else seemed to do it.
There is an important psychological factor at play here. When you play Arena and earn points, each week you are coming closer to your goal, whatever it may be.
When you kill a boss and the loot nobody wants drops and is sharded.. not only is a letdown much the same as knowing you can't quite reach the rating to buy item X on tuesday.. there is the double-sting of knowing this week's useless drop doesn't contribute in any way to what you want dropping on the next kill. There is no invisible karma at work when you DE junk.. and some loot is just terribly, terribly itemized (as we all know), destined for sharding on the first drop.
I don't disagree at all. Blizzard could easily alleviate much of the problem by providing better itemization in many cases, and adjust drop rates. But that's been brought up before. I was directly responding to Gurg's post that there isn't enough "effort" put into obtaining arena weapons. I think the amount of effort needs to be adjusted, but not for the Arena gear... it needs to be fixed for the raid gear. I've already posted what I think a reasonable solution would be... spread the weapons around, so that multiple bosses can drop them in a given instance (e.g. Salamander-type bosses in MC, Opera event in Karazhan have shared loot tables across multiple encounters). Put the 'desirable' stuff on the shared loot table, and you've got much less disappointment.
I know misery loves company, but I'd rather have more people less miserable than more people more miserable.
Do you think it is an overall good idea that a small population of players can actively keep everyone else out because they are that much better geared?
It isn't like one can simply put in 20 hours and get an arena weapon. It simply isn't possible. The only way a bad team can get that many points is by paying huge amounts of real time. The real time cost is the high price, not so much the arena points themselves.
The question here has false stipulations and there are ways to circumvent what you mentioned. First of all, the number of teams that do this across all servers is not going to be very high. On my server personally, there are no teams on either faction that use the system this way. Second of all, "everyone else" is not COMPLETELY stunted by this small population selling their teams, but only delayed as long as "everyone else" knows what to do when they face this scenario. The delay is realistically 30 mins to an hour and a loss of the range of 1-30 points. Allow me to explain, team B ("everyone else") queues up and gets team A ("small population"), results in a loss for team B. Team B has two options: wait 30 mins to an hour (or play another day) or keep queuing with the knowledge that team A is playing. With a queue delay or playing another day, this team will surely be out of your own team's rating range. This is a solution to the problem you present but you worded it as if they actually BLOCK all progress, whereas they only delay it. Blizzard is also seeking their own solution to point selling, but the previously explained solution is a good enough placeholder until Blizzard can figure something out. Now if they play every day, all day and make a new team every single day of the week...then I'll see it as a problem, but I'm sure this is VERY rare.
The same solution can be said about disconnects which are uncontrollable and no possible solution Blizzard can place. If someone on your team disconnects two times or more, you should stop playing until it's fixed. A disconnected teammate carries the same disadvantage as mega-gear vs. no gear: a tiny chance of success but otherwise improbable. It's ultimately the individual or team's responsibility to KNOW when to stop queuing or delay it, that is the solution.
Finally, yes the real time investment for "bad teams" as you so put it is quite high, but I don't understand why you mentioned this? A bad team will not get many points no matter how much they play in the ARENA system because it is a reflection of winning and "skill", not time invested. They can play 2000 games and should end up at relatively the rating which reflects their skill. You're thinking more along the lines of the honor system, which any bad player can sit in with linear gain of honor with regard to time spent.
I am in a raiding guild, and that is my primary focus with my character. Currently we are 3/9 in BT, and 2/5 in Mt. Hyjal. I do however also enjoy PvP, although I am much more casual about it. I just play on a 2v2 team, because I don't enjoy 5v5, and don't have a good 3v3 team class composition worked out yet. On a part time pvp basis, I've put together a pvp gear set with 272 resilience and 10.6k HP, and that's taken me until now to do so, and I've been playing since mid season 1, mostly bouncing around 1700 rating, missing weeks here and there, with various pve geared healers.
I don't go into matches trying to lose for welfare epics, I play to win. It's just not my #1 priority in the game. Right now I'm using [Blade of Infamy] and [Merciless Gladiator's Quickblade] for PvE, and both s2 swords for PvP. Nobody whined and complained in WoW vanilla when someone with rank12-13 armor and rank14 weapons used that gear for PvE, and I don't see a significant difference between then and now. In fact, despite the proliferation of arena weapons in PvE, I think they have even less of an impact in TBC raiding than they did before, simply because of the number of retard checks in every single fight. A retard with season 2 weapons is still going to die to box clicking/shatter/spout/thaladred/etc, and the effect on overall progression is almost negligible. If that weren't the case, we wouldn't see so few guilds raiding post Magtheridon.
Most of what I see coming from the PvP-only camp is just complaining about the lack of status associated with the weapons they use. This is despite status "items" such as rank, title, netherdrake mounts, and tournament invites already in place.
While I do think the weapon situation can be improved, the best idea that I've seen in this thread is to put PvP procs on PvP weapons. Stormherald should not be a PvE weapon. There are a million different class specific bonuses that could go on PvP weapons, similar to the equip bonuses on the arena gloves, like "no spell pushback on polymorph" or whatever.
Just remember that Blizzard wants players to experience their content, and I think they like it when people do participate in arenas/BGs/PvE content, regardless of how broken we may think various aspects of the game are. Anything that might potentially reduce overall participation in the game, whether that's as a whole or by segment, I'm fairly sure will be approached with caution by the designers.
Just remember that Blizzard wants players to experience their content, and I think they like it when people do participate in arenas/BGs/PvE content, regardless of how broken we may think various aspects of the game are. Anything that might potentially reduce overall participation in the game, whether that's as a whole or by segment, I'm fairly sure will be approached with caution by the designers.
Except the entire advent of Tailoring and Arena weapons means realistically if you are smart as a caster, there is no reason to raid until T5+. At all. Doesn't that fit your analogy?
When people say "crud I need to fix my weapon situation for pve. Time to pvp!" doesn't this reek of wrongness to you?
And to those of you who think instituting a rating system requirement to obtain the newest weapons keep forgetting that S2 weapons will still be there, and they are MORE than adequate (overpowered really) for your wants. Same with S1 weapons going to the honor vendor - now I can afkbot to get a S1 weapon, great!
The question here has false stipulations and there are ways to circumvent what you mentioned. First of all, the number of teams that do this across all servers is not going to be very high. On my server personally, there are no teams on either faction that use the system this way. Second of all, "everyone else" is not COMPLETELY stunted by this small population selling their teams, but only delayed as long as "everyone else" knows what to do when they face this scenario. The delay is realistically 30 mins to an hour and a loss of the range of 1-30 points. Allow me to explain, team B ("everyone else") queues up and gets team A ("small population"), results in a loss for team B. Team B has two options: wait 30 mins to an hour (or play another day) or keep queuing with the knowledge that team A is playing. With a queue delay or playing another day, this team will surely be out of your own team's rating range. This is a solution to the problem you present but you worded it as if they actually BLOCK all progress, whereas they only delay it. Blizzard is also seeking their own solution to point selling, but the previously explained solution is a good enough placeholder until Blizzard can figure something out. Now if they play every day, all day and make a new team every single day of the week...then I'll see it as a problem, but I'm sure this is VERY rare.
However, the more team As there are, the more team Bs they can delay. If team A really wanted to screw up team Bs, they could get their gear, restart at 1500 and tear their way through the team Bs by blowing through their ratings all the way up, then sell the team for gold.
I never said it was impossible for teams to climb and claw their way up top, but it is much easier for the first teams to get there than later ones. That doesn't really happen in PvE, because it isn't competitive.
Finally, yes the real time investment for "bad teams" as you so put it is quite high, but I don't understand why you mentioned this? A bad team will not get many points no matter how much they play in the ARENA system because it is a reflection of winning and "skill", not time invested. They can play 2000 games and should end up at relatively the rating which reflects their skill. You're thinking more along the lines of the honor system, which any bad player can sit in with linear gain of honor with regard to time spent.
The point that Gurgthock was making was that the investment (the "effort") they put into the game is (in his opinion) insufficient for the reward they are gaining. He views it as 20 hours, and mostly skips over the 2 months of real time that are also part and parcel for it. The two months of real time of saving points are also a heavy cost associated with the reward, and should not be discounted when considering what the 'effort' requirement is.
Really, what it comes down to is this:
Arena = Weekly paycheck, but most things are very expensive for most people.
Raiding = Lots of weekly lottery tickets.
People are tired that the chances of winning the lottery are not higher, and therefore envious of the paychecks.
The point that Gurgthock was making was that the investment (the "effort") they put into the game is (in his opinion) insufficient for the reward they are gaining.
09/07/07, 10:57 AM
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