Let’s assume a hypothetical guild. For the sake of this question, this guild is fielding three Arena teams, each composed of guild members. Due to their PvE and recruiting success, these three teams are the among the top ranked in their battlegroup.

One thing to consider in evaluating the following scenarios is that Arena teams are persistant as are their scores. Unlike trading wins in WSG to farm reputation faster, when an Arena team loses, their rating is actually affected as are their total points.

Another thing to consider is precedent: GM/HWL honor grinding teams. They established caps, they shut certain people out and, when someone reached Rank 13, they dropped out of the race to allow other people an easier time to get to the goal. Do the ethics of a server wide team transfer to a guild level?


Question #1: Is it possible that these top-ranked Arena teams fighting each other will cause animosity within the guild? Is it likely? What could be done to prevent it?

On the one hand, competitive Arena teams will likely play a maximum of 10 games with any single individual on that team playing fewer than that in a given week. On the other hand, cliques with directly opposed goals have been known to tear apart guilds before squabbling over the stupidest of things.


Scenario #1: Fast-forward to season 2. Team A of this guild has gotten their Armored Netherdrakes and bought all the epic gear available through the Arena system. They’re still interested in PvPing but don’t see the need to top the charts again, so in a nod to their guildmates they agree to lose whenever they run up against another guild team. Is this ethical? Does this open up the guild to accusations of cheating or win trading?


Scenario #2: In an effort to head off Arena competition from creating animosity within the guild, the guildmaster decides that whenever teams fight each other, they’ll take turns losing, thereby spreading the wins and losses among the guild evenly. Is this ethical?


Scenario #3: In an effort to head off Arena competition, yet maximize the points for various guild teams, the guildmaster decides that whenever guild teams fight each other, Team A will win during the first season, Team B will win during the second season, and Team C will win during the third season. Is this ethical?

This is a bizarre set of questions. What does your guild have to be upset about if they lose to their guildmates? People who cause drama over being beaten by a _better_ team aren't the kind of people you want in your guild in the first place. Personally, I think fighting my own guildmates will be hilarious. In answer to question two -- of course not, beating the previous champions is one of the hurdles you have to jump to become the new leaders. The third question is lame as hell and I know I'd never want to be a part of a guild with such ridiculous rules.

In-guild competition is also likely to encourage people to increase their performance, due to it being more personal. If your members are of a certain mindset, it could even be a plus.

In no way should the guildmaster intervene though. Let the teams figure out for themselves who needs the win more. Throwing matches is completely ethical in my mind, since one team takes a hit relative to the other team's gain.

Quite apart from that, the interest in this thing is going to be absolutely huge. If there's say 50 odd WSGs going at the moment at primetime, that's going to be equivalent to 100 Arenas at least. Even if you're on at the same time as your other team, you're by no means guaranteed to face them in your 10 games a week.

Edit:- Yeah, and what Crossbones said - if I run into another team from my guild, even we're all generally being pretty serious & competitive, I suspect it'll be a pretty amusing game.

I think the team who specs PvP and refuses to spec back PvE for raids beating the PvE specced grp can certainly cause animosity within the guild. This is something of a bigger concern imo, if Blizzard puts back the fun factor in PvP again it will be much harder to persuade people to choose PvE specs and this may be the source of debates and bitterness of the guild's PvE hardcore.

Edit: beaten by one post :P

I don't know if the guild is worried but as the GM I get paid to worry about the guild.

One of the things that most people haven't thought through is the difficulty of finding fights at the Arena-5 level. There are a number of reasons for this:

1. Fielding a persistant group of 5-10 individuals that will last months at a stretch will be difficult at best.
2. The system is designed as an anti-grind. Time invested = reward received only up to 10th game per team per week. Past the 10th game, the correlation disappears so it is my assertion that people will stop.


The key advantage for a guild fielding multiple teams is the fact that they can fight each other. And while their ELO scores won't go anywhere since they'll be fighting each other, they will at least achieve the necessary minimum 10 games. As you can see from this post on World of Raids, an Arena-5 scoring a rating of 1500 (which is what all teams start out as) receives as many Arena points as an Arena-3 with an Elo of approximately 1800 and an Arena-2 with an Elo of 2000.

More than that, I'm going to iterate that advantage one more time. By designating a fixed time each week for your guild teams to fight, I'm going to broadcast to all other servers in my battlegroup "Hey, there's guaranteed to be a critical mass of Arena-5s queued on Sundays between 2pm and 8pm. Bring your team and we'll have some Arena fun."

So, in a worst case scenario, having guild teams fight each other will allow them to achieve the minumum number of Arena-5 fights necessary to score points for that bracket. In the best case scenario, you draw the Arena-5s together at the same time each week s.o you'll be able to have actual competition which will be mostly non-guild in the long run.

So, to answer your question Kinv, to prevent guild teams from fighting each other would take away several very significant opportunities.

As a preamble, I hesistate to answer your question because it requires me to talk about specifics in my guild. This is a concern not because I'm shy about sharing specifics, but I've been previously banned for plugging my guild too much. That being said, I had this thread pre-approved and I've have no doubt I'll be warned if what I say is perceived as less than pertinent to responses.

To your response: Drama isn't the only negative result to avoid. Low morale is another. And, very few people are going to come out and say "Yep, they're the better team! They're great and we just suck!"

As to question #2 (I assume you're responding to Scenario #1), you're obligating the previous winning team with maintaining their status as the top Arena team on their server. As an inherent part of the situation, I noted that they decided that they decided they themselves don't see the need to stay at the top.

The virtue of scenarios #2 and #3 come from a guild-as-a-whole perspective. If you assume that a) the guild's unity is greater than the success of any individual Arena team and that b) the Arena teams actively competing against each other creates animosity between guild members (see Question #1), then Scenarios #2 and #3 become plausible in so far that it eliminates that competition.

This is my conclusion as well. As opposed to trading wins in WSG, Arena teams are persistant and wins and losses are accurately captured in each teams enduring Elo score.

I see PvE guilds putting their Tank, key DPSers and main healers into an Arena team, then instructing all other guild teams to lose to them if they ever get into a fight with them. I think the guild teams will see this as acceptable because when they come out of their individual Arena teams into their PvE group, a) they'll be able to progress further and faster because key individuals - as many as 10 if each person plays four games and a few people play five - are well-geared and b) the guild as a whole will have fewer people to compete for loot with since those key individuals will already have Arena gear in certain slots.


I think letting the teams figure it out for themselves is a bad way to do it. Unless you have a very agreeable guild - agreeable to the point where they'll accept loot council agreeable - people may get into unwinnable arguments. Unwinnable because they're arguing what's favorable to the team instead of what's favorable to the guild.

At least with the GM, the GM is the authority of the guild and, hopefully, is trusted to act in the best interest of the guild.

It's certainly up for debate. And it's a new idea that warrants some thought on my part.

To give an opinion on the questions you asked. Avoiding same guild teams playing each other seems easy. Just have Team 2 wait until Team 1 has a game up before they queue.

On the ethics questions. What you seem to be asking is Is it ok to fix arena games to give my guild an advantage. Fixing a competition of any sort to provide an advantage to your guild or certain members of it is flat out unethical. While the stakes are much different there is no difference in the ethical issues between fixing an arena match and fixing a college football game. Thus all 3 Scenario are unethical.

Can you imagine the drama when you put you best healers and Tanks in a single team have all other team lose to then and then have them buy dps items with the points. The rest of your guild think hey we threw games to these guys and the GM sold it to us as good for our PvE progress but they aren't wearing a single peice of Arena gear while healing/tanking in our raids. Instead they wear their PvE armor more sutied to their PvE roll.

Conversely imagine if it's the other way around. The poor healer in the number one team who feels obligatated not only to spend DKP mostly on Healing upgrades but also spend any arena points solely on PvE healing upgrades. He got to think to himself great I got this chance to get the off spec gear I want but this guild system has denied me even that.

Igni, from what I understand your goal with your guild is to dominate the Arena metagame on your battlegroup, and support that dominance through guild policy, PvE raiding, and any other methods you can. As you were quick to point out on the WoW forums, even the structured Arena system is heavily influenced by the fact that we are playing a persistent, Diku-style MMO, and so you want to maximize your gains from the other facets of WoW to help you win in the Arenas. That said, I think you have more to gain from letting the system run its natural course -- having your guild teams compete with each other normally if they do get matched up -- than if you try to game it by laying down rules as the guild master. If you try to manipulate the system by dictating throwing matches, it might not be exactly unethical -- but you do rely solely on your judgment as guild leader. I wouldn't rely on my judgment for something like that. From my perspective, the natural pressure exerted by ranked intra-guild matches outweighs the potential detriments.

There are, however, some potential problems with ranked intra-guild Arena matches, and the initial solution lies with recruitment, in a sense. The best type of player is the one who can play against another team, even in a ranked match, and do the following:

1) Harbor no ill will for losing and not gloat over winning. That is, no drama involved, no matter what a match outcome might be.
2) Be able to acknowledge their team's strengths and weaknesses, even as relates to a "friendly" team.
3) Be able to improve their actualy play skills and be willing to fix the weaknesses that they or their teammates identify.

If you don't have those kind of people, my solution (coming at this from a perspective as raid leader) is to just replace them, probably via recruitment. The problem with this is, like you said, that Arena teams are a persistent entity, very unlike a battleground raid group or a PvE raid group. You'd ideally like an Arena team to stay together for an entire season or more, depending on group chemistry and the avaiable time commitments of the members. (Even though 10 matches a week isn't much, a dedicated gladiator in Igni's kind of guild is going to be spending a lot more time practicing, raiding for gear upgrades, and so forth.) Assuming for the moment that all the players in G&M are pretty evenly skilled, then I think the first thing to do is work on team composition and balance in advance, such that you have three teams that are as close to an even keel of skill and class balance as possible.

If I was to play an AB match with a Virakar team against another Virakar team, I'd have no problem acknowleding their victory with grace if they were to win, and I suspect the same would be true of most of our guild's active PvPers. The real problem you might be looking at is if you end up with a true A team and B team, where the "A" team consistently thrashes the "B" team. That would indeed be bad for morale, and the only way to avoid it (without gaming the system, which I think would be detrimental to the guild as a whole) is to make sure your teams are as evenly balanced as possible, even against one another. This is hard to do though, without the level 70 spells and talent builds, not to mention the itemization of level 70 gear. Also annoying is the inability to do "exhibition" matches in the Arena where you can select which team to play. The only solution for balancing teams' skill levels is to play them against one another, and your options right now are limited to Dire Maul and the Gurubashi Arena. Good luck, I guess.