Requiring a certain lifetime rating to be able to wear certain pieces has a problem that is reminiscent of the 2.0 honor system - server specific advantages. Extremely active battlegroups will make it easier to obtain a high rating, since their ELO system isn't as plagued by constant rematches against the same teams as less populated battlegroups. The more active teams, the quicker and more efficient the "true" rating will be found, and the higher the rating of the top team.

You need to be in a team, and gain points every week, for 3 weeks to be considered part of the team eligible to buy items that require 1800 rating.

If scrutinized deep enough, I'm sure flaws will pop up with a change like this, especially dependent on the numbers; is 3 weeks or 1800 rating enough/too much etc...

Honestly I don't think the Arena weapons will be a big problem 6 weeks from now.
The raiding population will soon start killing bosses with comparable weapon drops, and we just need to be patient for that. So what if there are 8 teams in your battlegroup that have the option to get better weapons than you in 2 weeks?

Doomwalker's caster dagger has more PvE damage potential than the Gladiator's Spellblade.

I'm predicting weapon drops from the Vashj/Kael'thas instances are going to be roughly the same ilvl of Arena weapons, with more damage allocated instead of stamina/resilience.

Now that I understand how it works, I am really a big fan of this system. Me personally, I am a protection warrior and its highly unlikely that I would be getting non tanking items from raids. I don't play that much outside of raids and I loathe the thought of grinding Honor Hold and Aldor exalted for the epic weapons there.

I have actually considered making another warrior so I simply can enjoy myself when not tanking. Instead I am going to go into rated matches when I have time, and just have fun and not worry winning or losing. I will eventually end up with two arena fist weapons and I'm OK with that. It will be quicker than waiting for all rogues, DPS warriors and hunters to get their one handers via raiding.

As several people have argued throughout this thread, the problematic part of the system is one-handed weapons, and pretty much only one-handed weapons. This problem stems from the following observations:

a) Arena one-handers are priced very cheaply for the relative player improvement they provide, as compared to arena armor, etc.
b) Everyone earns points, even people who AFK games
c) There is no reason to fill the other slots before buying the one-handers if you are anyone but a hunter, druid, or two-hand user
d) They provide more bang than any BoE weapons (notably the craftable weapons), Prince/Nightbane drops, and Gruul drops, but will be accessable to AFK arena players before more than a handful of top guilds will be clearing equivalent raid content (Serpentshrine and TK25). (I'm estimating this rate based on current guild progression, but in 8 weeks time I still don't expect TK to be cleared by that many guilds, if anyone, and I don't think that is an unreasonable expectation).

The top raiders might be able to eclipse these rewards by the time they are available, but I'm sure that many raiders will consider going for these rewards anyway, if only to pad themselves against bad drop rates. However, casuals and slower guilds could definitely be effected by this design. For players who expect KZ and heroics to be challenging endgame content for a few months, the arena one-handers look very attractive. As Gurg has pointed out elsewhere, the new raid content is absolutely more exclusive than it used to be, and I would speculate that the bulk of the playerbase will not be through KZ for some time. Giving them a relatively easy way to circumvent the weapons drops in KZ and the heroics risks undermining that content. Blacksmiths, particularly casual smiths, could suffer more accutely, because their BoE epics will be undervalued.

The situation is not as dire as I suggest above, but I certainly feel like the perceive concerns are legitimate. Here are some proposed solutions:

1) Change the PvP weapons so that their base damage (or the spell damage they get from sacrificed base damage) is modified depending on the target. Make them ilvl 100 and add a modifier (call it "Bloodletting" or something), which increases their base damage (or spell damage from base damage) by 20% against PvP targets. This would make them competitive with Serpentshrine/TK25 drops for PvP, but equivalent to early KZ drops for PvE. Smithed weapons would still be viable to the PvE populace. You could argue that it would be unfair for PvE weapons to work well in PvP and not the inverse, but PvE weapons would still be lacking on resilience and stamina, and this change would fit with the intention to make arena progression less about gear and more about status/rating.

2) Increase the cost of arena one-handers by 50% and 2-handers by 50%, but decrease the cost of armor to compensate. This shifts the focus of arena progression more toward the armor, which is generally suboptimal for PvE (with the exception of certain offspecs like feral druids), while still preserving the overall gear progression timeline. This is the easiest solution.

3) Place a progression restriction on arena purchases, ie, you must by x before y. This is another relatively easy solution, but it removes some of the player's choice in how to spend their points, which is definitely a negative. A better version of this would be that weapon purchases require both a point cost and a point threshhold, ie, this weapon costs x, but you must have acquired at least y total points in the arena to be able to buy it. Here again the player loses some choice, but not a huge amount. A simple starting point would be for the threshhold for buying weapons to be the cost of two-handers. That way players would be able to buy either a two-hander/ranged or MH+OH after earning the same amount, instead of the one-handed player getting their MH early.

Ed. Only one of the three changes I proposed actually addresses the balance between PvP and PvE loot, and that is the first proposal. The other two suggestions are merely delay techniques. They provide a way to push back the timetable for PvP weapon acquisition. They do not change the fact that a PvE raider would have to bust his ass for weeks farming consumables, paying repair bills, and wiping with 24+ other people for hours while a casual PvPer could sit down in the arena for an hour a week until June and get an equivalent reward. Now the raider would fill his other slots, too, but the PvP player would still be investing less time.

But isn't that part of the problem itself? Wasn't the basic premise here supposed to be that the best PvPers can get loot equivalent to the best raiders, instead of there being a huge gulf between the two as there was in pre-TBC WoW? I don't object to that premise. But I'm not sure that things are working as they should be if, a month from now, only the handful of very best raiding guilds in the world (and I'm not talking about the best guild on a given server, but rather the top 0.1% worldwide, like Nihilum, D&T, Impervious, etc.), have access to weapons that slightly exceed what is available to essentially anyone in the top half of the arena ladder, and eventually to anyone in the arena ladder. (The very best 5v5 teams should actually be able to buy 1h weapons in 4 days, in fact.)

From the limited item comparisons I've done, the gladiator weapons seem to be about equivalent to Prince Malch loot (correct me if I'm wrong) and that fight is far from out of reach of the majority of the raiding population within the next 2 months or so.

Huge thread, lots of stuff to comment on.. but since i'm strapped for time, i'll just grab the one thing that people seem to have missed.

The fairness of getting less points / rating for 2 and 3 man arena games.

It's simple really. The rating system causes teams to be spread out on a bell curve, over time, people at the bottom of the pool will form new teams, causing a gradual rise in the mean rating. So far, everyone is happy. The trick is this, the outer extremes, e.g. the highest and lowest ranking possible is a function of the curve (how much you gain / lose when fighting a lower ranking opponent) and how many teams are participating.

As some people have already noticed, they can reach much higher ratings in the 2 man arena game. Logically there will be more 2 and 3 man teams, which in turn implies that the average rating of the skilled pvp'er will be much higher. Couple this with the fact that 2vs2 is far more skewed towards certain classes, and you can see the problem forming.

That is why you get less points / rating (but still might get the most) from 2 and 3 man teams).

If you look at the rating->points system in general, you will see that the aim is to give most people an average amount of points, but still reward the top teams, though not disproportionally so. The current system with taking only the best score from all 3 arenas gives a tighter distribution of points, reducing the gap between skilled and average teams. Experience has taught us, that someone will push the system to the extreme. If you had additive points from Arenas, the highly skilled people would be getting their gear slower (due to a need for a greater safety margin) and everyone else would be getting their gear much slower.

The system as it stand now, is pretty much best raid gear available = best arena gear available. Thats what they stated the system would be about when they implemented it.

But how do you balance that, if you give the best arena gear to the best 1% of pvper the gear gap between the elite pvper and the others pvper will grow too large too fast. As is the gear gap will only get larger where the best will get pvp gear faster then the rest of the pack.

For a healthy PVP competition you have to give access to about the same gear to everyone. While in PVE it doesnt matter at all, a raid group could have lvl 150 epic while another raid group could have lvl 115 blues depending on where there progression is.

The current raid gear = arena gear, combined with the arena gear available to everyone doesnt seem right.

The current system would work, if arena gear would cost more points and teams with 1900 would gain like 10 times more arena pts then the 1500 team and the 1500 team would gain 10 times more pts then the 1100 team. Because according to the ELO is a team with a rating 400 pts higher will win 90 % of the games against a team that has 400 less pts.

But then again that wouldnt work because, because the pack would get killed by the elite teams every game without any chance of competing with the gap just getting higher and higher.

Conclusion, the best arena gear shouldnt be equal to the best raid gear. WOW is a PVE game at its core with PVP elements. WOW wasnt designed like a core PVP game like Guildwars. Its just silly what they are trying to do. The designers have to make a choice either WOW is about progression or about PVP fairness.

Time shouldn't be the deciding factor in whether or not skilled players can outgear unskilled players.

The rating system was presumably designed to reward skill over mediocrity. The problem is that mediocrity plus time will ultimately achieve the same reward as skill.

Would it not have been obvious to put a minimum rating requirement on the epics, and if this meant bad players wouldn't queue because they knew they could never get the rating for the items then blizzard should have implimented different tier's of pvp items so everyone had atleast something to work for.

But giving all players access to the best rewards with out the skill requirement is just defeating the purpose of having a rating system in the first place.

No offense for quoting you Sazbot, but yours is just the last post to state the same thing that I've seen many times on this thread. I really think a lot of people are just abandoning logic when arguing some of their points. All you see is that bad players get "free epics" and ignore how little they will actually receive.

A team that AFKs out, or loses every game will get enough points to get one epic every 12 weeks...that's 4 Epics a year. A good team will get three (12 a year), an incredible team with get four or five (let's say in the middle, so 18 or so a year). So the rating system has tremendous value, how could you say other wise? You can't compare the person who is getting one Epic every 3 months to someone who gets every gear piece, weapon and gem in the same time period, you just can't.

Also, we don't know how T2 Arena rewards will work, perhaps they will involved upgrading the T1 gear, like Thunder -> Deep Thunder works now? Then what, these /AFKers upgrade their one weapon (that took the 12 weeks to get in the first place) after another 12 weeks? So now we're talking 24 weeks to get one weapon, and the rest of their gear is still random blues? We are talking about the incredible lazy people who are just AFKing out of games, or losing on purpose here, I can't see them going and farming other epics.

I think what people tend to forget is that Human nature will stop much of the exploiting in this situation, yes some people will do it (more on that in a second), in the player base we have the following:

1) Competitive people who want to be good at the arenas, they won't be the people exploiting the system
2) People who want to play with their friends in the Arenas, they won't be the people exploiting
3) "Greedy people" who want more than one epic every 12 weeks, they won't be exploiting.
4) People who think /afking out of games is just plain stupid and at least have some personal pride. Again, these people won't be exploiting.

Someone else stated that lot's of people are going to be "cheating" because it's the path of least resistance to free epics, I can't disagree more. Some will, but most won't. The Welfare system doesn't prevent people from wanting to work and be successful just because it "guarentees" a moderate income, neither does this system.

I read this site because I think it is so much better than the WoW forums, but there are some people in this thread who are smacking of elitism (I can't believe a 1500 scrub can get a good weapon every 12 weeks!), or just down right delierium (everyone will just AFK games, then quit, re-sign up every season because everyone is lazy).

Please think about what the average player would do, and realise that mass exploitation isn't going to happen. Also, as I said before, if the 1% of the players on your server do this, does it really matter? Having the Gladiator Weapon with Blues and Greens doesn't make them a threat to you.

Because it takes absolutely NO EFFORT what so ever to get a great weapon that will easily eclipse anything else that I am going to be able to get within that timespan despite being a member of one of the furthest progressed guilds on my server.

I think a lot of people are missing the point of some of the arguments in this thread. I for one am not upset that someone might get stuff that's as good as mine by losing in the arena - rather, I view it as a failure of the design that those players will simply lose until they have a weapon, and then have no legitimate path by which to upgrade it.

WoW works on a largely aspirational model - you see the good stuff that you don't have and you want it, and you play and keep playing to get it. If you can just get the pinnacle of the things you want - a weapon on par or better than anything else in the game - by losing 10 times a week in the arena - that devalues all other roads of progression. Look at wow 2.0 and the PVP rewards - how much harder was it to get a group for a 5 man dungeon once people realized they could get gear many times better simply by grinding away in battlegrounds? Who got an arcanite reaper crafted once Ice Barbed Spear was introduced into the game, even, let alone once you could get a GM weapon by AFKing in AV? By making weapons - which are really at the top of the "OMG I WANT THAT" list for most players - so easy to get, it devalues all of the other avenues of the game those players might take otherwise.

It's not about "bad players don't deserve epics". It's about preserving the value of content like crafted weapons and rep rewards, which will very quickly be made obsolete by arena weapons at the current prices.

I believe what's being described here is the disparity between effort required, not the fact that casuals or less skilled "should" or "shouldn't" have good weapons. While earning points legitimately by playing games is not an exploit, I do believe it is the RAIDERS, not the joe casuals, who will be making their mandatory 10 games a week on any team they can find just to rake in points and buffer their dkp. Think about it. Join an average team with an average rating, get a high dps weapon, save your dkp for epic raid armor of pwnage. Anyone who DOESN'T do that is passing up free loot, and that can be considered a problem.

This is mostly just a concern for classes that rely heavily on weapon damage, since the dps on these weapons make them incredibly for pve despite having resilience/stam or whatever pvp oriented stats on them.

There was a good post several pages back:

I think a lot of you are seriously missing the point. As far as I can tell, the objective of the arena system is to be an area of the game where everyone can play, enjoy themselves, and be moving toward the reward of their choice at a reasonable pace.

Think about it:

1) Each team (at theoretical equilibrium) wins about half their games. No more getting 5-0 farmed in Arathi Basin.

2) Every person is moving towards the same rewards. Think about which motivates someone more: "I can get the same sword as anyone else, if I keep going!" or "Because I'm less than 1800 rating, I will never have that sword, no matter what I do."

3) It doesn't require a lot of administrative overhead - you can take a few friends and play however many or few matches as you like.

I think a lot of the proposed "fixes" in this thread actually fundamentally break the point of the arena system.

Consider the following scenario:

A player has recently hit level 70 and has now finished just about all the level 70 5-person instances. They've cleaned out their quest log. But this player is of very mediocre skill: they don't stand a chance at doing heroics. No raid really wants to take them, and in fact they don't want to go through all the rigamarole of scheduling raids, preparing, etc. ("I get enough regimentation at work; I just want to relax at night", they say.) What can they do?

This is where the arena system comes in! They can play games at their leisure, and even when they go down to a 1300 rating, they still feel like they're making good progress towards a carrot worth chasing. They don't feel second-class the way non-raiders did pre-TBC: their achievable wish list has the same stuff on it that anyone else does, and they know they will achieve it in some near-horizon time.

With a lot of the proposed "fixes", this is no longer true: that mediocre player either isn't making progress towards their item in a near-horizon time, or they can't even move towards it at all. You're pushing them right back into that second-class status.

What is the mediocre player supposed to do, then? The only options left are start a new character, or just quit WoW. For what it's worth, when you cancelled your account in pre-TBC WoW, one of the reasons you could choose for your departure was "nothing left to do but raids" - the arena is trying to keep those people around.

Right, this is what I've been trying to emphasize. I think I said like four pages ago, that I'm approaching it from a game design vantage point, rather than self-interested envy. There's no envy involved -- I'm going to be getting my Gladiator's stuff just like everyone else.

I think a lot of people have lost sight of the timeframes involved here. The expansion has been out for less than a month and a half. Does anyone seriously think we're going to see another expansion before Christmas 2008 at the very earliest? How much more content is going to be added to TBC, and at what rate? Pre-TBC, non-raiders who did the GM/HWL grind when it was introduced found themselves with zero upgrades from, say, July 2005 through January 2007. That's a long time. Even raiders pretty much had to wait until spring 2006 and beyond for AQ40 loot and eventually Naxx, to surpass those epics.

People seem to be operating under the assumption that in a couple of months, all sorts of wonderful new progression options are going to materialize out of thin air. Last I saw, 2.1.0 is going to feature the Black Temple as a tier 6 raid zone, and won't really change the current picture much, seeing as even the very best guilds are only now starting to get their feet wet (no pun intended) in the tier 5 zones.

I'm a powergamer by nature. I'm Exalted or close to Exalted with most of my instance reps, I've done pretty much every Heroic, I continue to farm badges to get epics and resist gear, and so forth, and I've done it in a fairly brief amount of time. And it's been a lot of fun, and continues to be. But I'm definitely in the upper percentiles when it comes to the amount of time I've invested into the PvE progression Blizzard has laid out for us. Most people aren't there yet, and these highly-accessible rewards short-circuit that progression. It just seems like they carefully balanced and crafted a really complex progression through quests, instances, heroics, raids, tradeskills, and so forth, and it all worked (see my "Options #1 through #8" post above). And then they just kind of nonchalantly throw these Arena rewards into the mix, and it disrupts the whole thing.

I think it's a mistake in the long run, and Blizzard is hurting the longevity of their own content by doing it.

I wasn't implying that people were going to flat out exploit the arena system to get easy epics. Nor did i mean to imply there wouldn't be a distinct gear difference between good teams and bad ones when it came to the number of arena items they had.

I was merely pointing out that finally blizzard, with TBC it seemed, wanted epic items to be unachievable by time alone, and that a certain skill level's were required for certain epics. But with the arena, in my oppinion they have failed, in that regard.

I certainly see your point, but I think a major objective of TBC was to move away from the model of having One True Path that all players should be moving down.

Some people don't have the skill for heroics. Some people don't like, or don't have the skill for, raids. Some people don't like crafting.

Part of World of Warcraft's strength is its ability to be "all things to all people" - allowing everyone to focus on the part of the game that they personally find appealing. When there's One True Path for progression (as there definitely was in late-period pre-TBC days) it loses this strength.

Being on a professional sports team is a job; World of Warcraft is a computer game that people pay money for and play in their free time.

If you think that "being fun for all the players" should not be a design goal of WoW, then we may have irreconcilable differences in viewpoint.

So where are the greens and blues from the Arena? Where are the low-quality epics? There's a lacking nuance to the itemization in the system. I am not advocating a "One True Path," but rather parallel paths. This isn't that. This is a set of well-crafted parallel paths being paved over by a highway leading straight to the end.

If I'm not skilled enough to run heroics, then I get greens and blues, or I farm easy mobs for gold/mats and buy/craft some decent epics. If I'm not skilled enough to PvP well, I still get the same top-notch epics. Just at a slower rate. But still fast enough that it's a better bang for my buck than anything else out there. Especially if I'm not skilled enough or lack the necessary time/interest to pursue the alternate PvE routes.

/sigh

It takes NO EFFORT but it takes 12 weeks. So they will have one weapon, you will have a plethora of Raiding gear, Rep Gear and possibly crafted gear during that time. Also, nothing is stopping you from playing 3 games a week and getting the same weapon...hell, if your team wins 5 out of 10 games, you'll get it even faster.

I take it back to my welfare example. If someone doesn't work and gets 15K a year on welfare, does that cheapen my 100K a year I make being a software designer? Does it encourage me to quit my job, and just not try because I know there's this 15K out there? Of course not. The "NO EFFORT" people will be in Greens and a smattering of quest Blues, you will be in Epics. You will still destroy them, weapon or not.

Please, depersonalize the debate. This isn't about individual envy, or shouldn't be. The problem isn't that it's unfair to the raiders or whatever -- the problem is that it's poor game design. Also, where did 12 weeks come from? A 1400-1500 rating will get you a weapon in ~5 weeks.

How about we wait until Season 2 and see if they introduce other items into the Arenas...let alone, how a player will upgrade those weapons first before we start worrying about preserving value.

Yes, the current Gladiator weapons are equivalent to the T2 Craftable BoPs (using Deep Thunder as an example). But we have no idea how a player will upgrade his Gladiator Weapon to the next tier of Gladiator Weapons...in fact, we haven't even seen what the next tier will be or when they will be released (unless I missed it).

What I think Blizzard will do is wait to release the next Gladiator gear until people have made their way into the Black Temple (or at least the CoT 25 man), I also have a feeling that Blizzard will make an upgrade path, so people just can't get the top weapon without getting each one on the way, making it a long processes.