Sirs & Madames:

I don't know why I started off like that, but I think it had something to do with wanting to keep things to a civil discourse.

I play on a fairly high-rated 3v3 arena team in the Vengeance battlegroup, and my team's name is Humililol. Last week we hit our highest rated ranking yet, scoring 2272 in terms of ranking points.

As the season winds down and the rush beings amongst teams to try and get a top spot for a netherdrake, yesterday night I played against some former guildmates of mine powering another team to a high spot, to get more netherdrakes for guildmates.

Taking a step back, what they're doing is perfectly within the rules (of lack thereof) regarding arena teams, yet it seems tremendously and abhorrently unsportsmanlike to do so.

Basically, you have a team whose true rating is perhaps 2350+ or so, join another team, get it to a high point, then give it away to guildmates who can then enjoy a netherdrake.

Has there been any discussion on such tactics, Blizzard hopefully going to do something about rampant team-powering, etc. etc. for the next season?

It's tremendously discouraging and saps me of what little desire I have to compete in such a broken system when it is so easily manipulatible by those at the top.

Too bad it doesn't work.

I would say that anything that involves getting an arena title and armored netherdrake to someone who didn't earn it is quite unsportsmanlike - especially when you consider that it will be knocking off someone who DID earn it. But there is no system in place to stop it, so for the time it is going to happen whether we like it or not.

Consider this scenario - you are on a 2v2 team rated around 2k-2100, and your friends are on a 3v3 team rated 2500 in another bracket. You get your friends to leave their 2v2 team and come power level your team a few hundred points to the top 0.5%, whatever that may be. Chances are you and your partner will still have the majority of the games played through the season, but you won't have earned those last few hundred points that got you the netherdrake in your mail and the gladiator title displayed above your head.

I'd like to see a teamswitching cooldown for season 2 added.

It would work still because the 2 super good pvpers join there friends long time team, which might be say 1700 rating, and the 2 who own the team have played say 100 games over the season, It's not going to take the 2 uber guys over 400 games to rank them up.

20% of games - say you play 80 matches and get a team up to 2300ish - that means that the people you'd have to power would have to play 16 games only - easily doable at the start of the formation of a team - leaving 64 games for a powering team to use to climb to the top.

A bit low in my opinion.

Just like win trading, it's unsportsmanlike and just plain wrong no matter how you look at it, but Blizzard does not care and has shown absolutely no signs of them doing anything about it in the future.

I think you missed the part where they were already getting netherdrakes from their 3v3 team.

This still means they will only have one qualifying team in a certain bracket. Sure, they could keep their 3v3 rating and thus the power levelers would get their netherdrake, yet it also means that the power levelers only have one team in the 2v2 bracket still. Whether this team is going to reward their guildmates/friends, or themselves is inconsequential, had they remained on the team and not gave it to their friends, they would still have bumped your team out of the top win %.

If your team deserves the netherdrake reward you will remain in the top %, if not, then you won't.

If you leave a team your played count is reset when you rejoin.

The team will have 200 games played or whatever, you will have zero.

There isn't anything illegal either, its why you are allowed to be on multiple teams.

What you are saying is we have in the 3v3 bracket initially as a team is:
Uber PvPer 1
Uber PvPer 2
Uber PvPer 3

Then there are the 2v2 teams being talked about, containing:
"Powerleveled team:"
Mediocre PvPer 1
Mediocre PvPer 2
Uber PvPer 1
Uber PvPer 2

And your 2v2 team, which I'm assuming only has 2 people on it:
Semi-Uber PvPer 1
Semi-Uber PvPer 2
<empty slot>
<empty slot>

Notice you could still add 2 people to your team if you wanted too. Regardless, Uber PvPer 1 & 2 are simply playing on multiple teams, like MANY people do. They don't have to hop teams to "power level" them because they can simply have their extra guildies in the extra team slots.

You're telling me there is a team on a given server capable of continually knocking the existing top teams all down in rating so they aren't at the top?

Or is this just theory craft and exaggeration?

Also what happens when they are done power leveling a team and the real teams continue to play and raise their rating above the power leveled teams? They can't go back and re-power level all their ten moocher teams because then the moochers wouldn't have 20% games played anymore, and surely the moochers couldn't win when the team was up at ~2400+.

Furthermore, aren't most games won at 2200+ only worth about 4 points? It would seem like an insane amount of effort for any 2 people to power level up that many teams.

If you can show me some armory links or any sort of proof of guys power leveling up 10 teams I'll get ready to remove my foot from my mouth though.

My bad, double post. Please delete if possible.

XI, Anujit and Demontx have powerleveled a team with a 29-21 1500ish rating to #1 rank while playing less than 80% total of these games. And with "a team" I mean roughly half of DnT, over and over.

I'm sure XI will make an appearance in this thread anyways.

Why not, they'll just stick with the last team they PLed.

Tris, this isn't Theorycrafting. XI, Demontx and Anujit are holding multiple ranks in different teams of the #9 3on3 ladder
This is one of the teams:
http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#t...t+Strikes+Back

As various high ranked 3on3 members of different teams have said, they just can't touch them due to considerable item advantages.

http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/#a...Vengeance&ts=3

Keyword: Carpet.

So far it's only 3 teams, but who's to say that it won't be 5 by the end of the week or so?

What about next season?

***

The number one teams are number one for a reason, and there is a problem when number one also occupies multiple other top spots.

I dunno, if this team can continually raise ratings from 1500 to 2300+ over and over right over top of the other top teams, I think either the actual problem lies with the gear they are using, or with a distinct lack of competent teams in that bracket.

Yes, gear is a factor. Right now in the top bracket raid gear is better than most PVP equipment, especially for a paladin a 4 gladiator - rest PVE heal equip is far better than full honor equip and 5 gladiator. Especially because there is no healing honor gear.
Same for newly created T3 weapons. They're 136? Compare that to 123 gladiator weapons. Does that mean the pure PVP raiders didn't earn the netherdrake, because they didn't PVE enough?

Heh im doing the same thing on my server (PL'ing teams so they get mount). I did it cause i needed money to fund the epic flying mount riding skill of the arena mount i should receive in a week or something. As for the sportsmanship part, i guess its just an exploit of yet another example of blizzard's narrow vision BUT no worse than the countless guilds selling PVE epics before or after TBC.

Of course, i would like to see this getting fixed.

How exactly? If you're 2300+ you obviously have the skill and the gear and anything but the very top teams will be trivial so you can sleep through 1500-2k. Once you get into 2k+ there's no garuntee that tops teams are even queue'ing at that period of time and even if they are, you, being a top team, have a very good chance of beating them at potentially a very skewed risk vs. reward. Any of the top teams on any BG can immedietly recreate their team and be back to where they are within a day or two. If Blizz wants to stop people from cluttering the ladder with non-existent teams, or allowing people to sell/give away top spots, then they'd need to add a cooldown to arena switching.

There's an important difference, for every team PLed into netherdrake levels a team that actually deserves being there gets kicked out of the rankings.

Not true, if like 1000 of these teams are created then one of the teams that would have been "replaced" wouldn't since the increased amount of teams also allowed for one more team to get a netherdrake. The system works.

Not really imo, if you gonna go into this type of arguments how about:

For every guy buying a pve epic, many other people's (compared to just 1 team) epics get less shiny and unique (yes many people play wow so they can have shiny epics). And guess what, these people actually deserved these epics since they raided to get them.

For every guy buying a pve epic many other people's chances to join decent guilds get diminished since the guy's gear ugpraded while theirs didnt. And guess what, these guys actually tried to improve their gear by farming every 5man 20 times, and enchanting it with the best gems and enchants, only for some random guy to completely outgear them by payign some hundrer gold he could just have ebayed.

List can go on etc and the attempt on exaggeration is intended.

I do feel for the guy missing his arena mount just because some clueless pver decided an arena mount was so cool looking and he could have one. I could have felt the same way when my casual guild wiped for weeks in a row so i could get my tier x part, only to see a guildless guy named ABCDF bragging about the very same item he just got by paying 500g or something. However i strongly believe it's upon blizzard to fix this stuff and not upon my good will.