One of the trends I'm noticing in our battlegroup is that of reform teams.

Namely, we see people that we recognize as members of 2300+ teams slumming in teams in the 1700-1800ish area. We've noticed these people -always- do it early in the week. It never, ever occurs on fri/sat/sun/mon.

While I'm not entirely sure why they've been doing it, I suspect that they are having people on a team play 10 games early on tuesday, win or lose. Then they have some people from one of the 2300 teams and play 10 games to boost the rating. They can do this on 2-3 different teams and then drop and go back to playing on their original 2300+ teams for the rest of the week.

Their own ratings do not suffer from it while they are boosting the scores of their guildmates/friends/whatever.

Is this a fair tactic? Is it something that should be allowed?

Who's to say what's "fair"? I think it's kinda dirty, and I wouldn't partake in a team that did that (and I've got the shit arena rating to prove it). But people have tried to exploit every single aspect of the game so far, so this doesn't surprise me in the least.

The druid on our 5v5 team is currently playing on two squads. We just started using him this week, and he doesn't have a problem with playing games with us (the higher rated team) and then switching to his original team after that and staying there for the rest of the week.

IMO, it is worth it for the flexibility. And as for the 2300+ mercenaries, are they doing this to help friends gear up for pve? Because I don't really understand the point of having a high Arena rating if you didn't earn it. That's like playing for an NFL team but never seeing the field. No fame, no glory, not feeling the thrill of victory, what's the point?

I think it's very cheap but I know a lot of people who do it.

Nothing more fun than beating the top team on your server and getting 2pts instead of 27pts when you find out they are on a new team even though it's the exact same roster.

A real Lose-Lose situation. Playing top competition when you have everything to lose, and almost nothing to gain.

Would even be a good (dirty) tactic to build up 2-3 spare lower rated teams and play them against the teams ahead of you just to knock them down.

Actually, come to think of it, you may be seeing these people on "practice" teams. If my rating was 2400+ I wouldn't want to blow it due to having a bad day. It would be nice to go play real teams on a "junk" team for a while then jump back to your "real" team for some serious matches.

I think it's a bunch of crap, personally. Add an option for non-rated team-only matches for people who want to get in some practice, and either implement a "1 switch per week" policy, or start tying personal rankings to players rather than to teams so that if you lose on an alternate team, your personal ranking takes a hit, and when you go back to your primary team, the team ranking takes a hit to account for it.

Changing teams to help a friend probably doesn't matter too much, but this has a lot of abuse potential.

Imagine you're the #1 team. At this point, you're earning shit for points for every match you win, but lose a lot any time you lose.

So rather than playing on your #1 team, you make a new team, earn it some rating so it can actually fight the #2-5 teams, and then you just play matches hoping to match up against them (you could even check if they're online and pvp'ing if really needed). If you lose, they gain like 1-2 points, same amount they'd gain from anyone else, nothing happens to your real team. If you win, they lose 25-30+ points, and you just gave your main team a solid lead over them.

Not sure how likely this is to occur, but it seems like situations like that could be very messy.

SOmewhat related to Morthis' point, what's to stop people reaching their #1 ranking and then basically stopping once they gain a reasonable lead? A friend of mine is in a bracket where his 2v2 is #1 by a comfortable margin. This team doesn't seem to play any games at all anymore, since he gets satisfactory arena points from his 5v5, and if his 2v2 stays up there he probably has a good/great shot at a netherdrake.

To be fair, he's mostly not playing since his parter has some RL stuff to take care of, but there doesn't seem to be any penalty for just sitting on a ranking - once your competition has taken a few large losses and dropped behind, there's no way for them to catch up other than playing a lot of games, since your team is the only one that could give them a large point boost - and you're not playing.

I think that's kind of BS, though. So, alright, you're the #1 team ... but you don't want to play any games because you might lose. What kind of crap logic is that?

Yes, I understand you only get a few points for a win and you lose quite a bit at #1 ... but that's the way it should be. The top rated teams should be the ones that win the fair majority of the games.

As a reverse to this:

Is it fair when my team loses at 1900 to a 1700 rated team with 3 2300+ rated players in it and end up losing 20+ points?

Theres not really any motivation to try hard at this point, if you're at a 2,000+ rating you'll likely have most of your set and/or a weapon, and since we have at least a month left you'll have plenty of time to save up and carry over 5,000 points to the next seaon.

Once we're actually told it's going to be ending it'll hopefully pick up, but trying hard at this point is just a waste of time.

Very good logic? If you're #1 the more games you play just gives you a higher chance of screwing up and losing points requiring you to spend more time to make them back, regardless if you play 10 games or 100 games in a week the rewards wont change since you're still getting a Netherdrake, and you'll likely have every piece from Arenas that you actually need so the extra 50-100 Arena points wont change much.

As a 1,900 team you probably have people who still want some pieces at least so the points actually matter to you.

So that somehow makes it OK for said teams to leech out another bunch of points from midranked teams?

If you're going to play games, they need to be played on your primary team or they need to not be played at all. It's idiotic that 2 games vs a team ranked 200 points below us can wipe out nearly an entire night's worth of work just because those guys are too afraid to risk precious ranking against teams that have a chance to beat them.