Infraction for Omgwtfhealme: Profile Infraction

Kaubel · 08/10/07, 6:18 PM

Post: Arena For Profit and Power leveling, a growing trend?
User: Omgwtfhealme
Infraction: Profile Infraction
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

No, actually we do need to know who you really are. Enlighten us or you'll be looking for another place to post.

Original Post:

Originally Posted by Solipse

This isn't Warcraft 3. It's a game that is far more popular than Warcraft 3 ever was, has enormously more developmental resources and is updated far more often. Applying what happened in a WC3 ladder to what is happening in WoW is just as utterly pointless as comparing the arena system to Vietnam.

Second, smurfers are by far the minority. Blizzard caters to the majority. As smurfing teams begin to cause hassles for the average player, Blizzard will start to implement measures against this. The more teams smurfing, the faster a fix will find its way into the live servers.

And yes, smurf teams do cause problems and wreck havoc on ladders. They tie up points into those smurfed teams that should not be tied up there. This skews the win/loss points given out and makes it much harder to advance within a bracket. If 10% of the top 100 ranks points are tied up in smurf teams guess what? It's 10% harder to advance within the top 100. Further, it makes it so that the top teams have a 10% easier job of keeping their lead. Smurf teams promote stagnation at the higher ranks through making advancing difficult. If you honestly think this isn't a bad thing, well, something's not connecting properly.

What is your main's name, please? In your defending of smurfing you're obviously dismissing all concerns with a cursory 'Blizzard doesn't care, just drop it'. I'm guessing that you actively participate in the practice - at least have the guts to give us your name.

This is a discussion, you needn't know all my characters across all the servers I have played on. We're discussing specifically the idea that teams are smurfing for profit. I'm not using the WC3-WoW comparison to illustrate how WoW should model itself off an older premise, I am using the comparison to show that an ELO based system has this flaw inherent in it. There are no easy fixes around this, if any at all.

I'm not saying that Blizzard doesn't care. Even if Blizzard cared, they can't impose restrictions on teams that want to play arena, it's as simple as that. You can't exist on more than 1 team in the same bracket, this is why you won't see the same elite playerbase spamming up the top ranks with different teams. This is how it worked in WC3, but not how it works in WoW. Teams smurfing for profit have these respective teams quickly fall off the ladder, it isn't that they are taking up unncessary space in the top brackets because this can't be maintained. Once a smurf team gets their money and "powerlevels" a certain other team, it lies defunct and off the ladder. A dedicated team playing regularly to raise their score will not be affected by these "profit-only" based teams, since the smurfs play only as much as they can to boost the rating to a respectable level. And even when they reach the higher brackets, the game becomes just as difficult as it always was, they are now competing within their respective bracket. It gives them good practice, hones their skills and at the same time, they profit from it.

It really is no different from the old days when MC/BWL guilds sold raid spots for extra money. Blizzard didn't change the raiding system to prevent this, they tolerated it because as much as some people were irritated that people were getting free epics, it didn't dilute the overall fun of the game. The same is such with arena. With the X-server matchups, the majority of the experience playing is still the same, smurf teams or not.