Well, there are other problems with the arena, such as the ones Xi mentioned. Problem is that using it as justification for what he's doing is a red herring: "the arena system doesn't work ideally, so I'm just going to exploit the living fuck out of it to the detriment of others."

I don't think it's "fine as is", but I'm not sure if there are many practical measures that can be implemented to improve it. It might be nice to see matching for high-ranked teams be more restrictive so that people can't farm 3-point teams for a high ranking, etc., but there could be downsides to this.

Why would raiding guilds be so inflexible if the time coincided with a scheduled event?

I imagine most raiding guilds would adjust their schedules to avoid the "arena time" if it was standardized. Your guild might even schedule arenas during "arena time". Unless you're in a raiding guild that doesn't recognize the advantage of farming PvP weapons for PvE, it would give you a window that raiding guilds wouldn't touch. Furthermore, this time slot would likely be a "prime" time slot, making your coordination even easier.

Guilds would respond and let players make the arena time (or they're stupid guilds based on weapon quality and player happiness).

True, that still means that the people also have to have time on this particular moment. Which screws casuals over again, which is something Blizzard will avoid after the desaster that honor 1.0 was.
Why exactly should we lose rating because one guy couldn't make it on friday 7pm ?
Too many weak bandaid fixes that are as bad as the disease are being suggested here lately

Why shouldn't teams have a roster of 6 if getting 5 together is that hard? Any particular time does disfavor some people, but it doesn't disfavor the whole class of "casuals", just those who cannot schedule time with the rest of their team during what is usually a peak playing time.

I'm sorry, but I have a problem with any team that wants to proclaim itself as superior yet only plays at 3:00 am due to the constraints of their membership and never competes against the bulk of the teams in the bracket. It's not that I don't believe the rating, it's that I know it hasn't been tested like those of teams playing during prime time.

Yes, this means at the core, that if you can't manage to PvP during prime time, I don't put much stock in your rating. If you're a team who's ranking was powered up or a team who "earned it" (whatever that means), but don't queue up, then please shut up about how great and deserving you are.

The advantage of Blizzard declaring an arena time is that almost every raiding guild would very likely avoid scheduling events during that time. Without a dedicated time, different top PvP teams find their games at different times due to the constraints of their in game guilds.

Note: By prime time, I don't mean that time normally called primetime by TV, but any time a lot of players are on. Any weekday evening suffers coordination issues due to timezones (if a Battlegroup crosses multiple time zones)

From what I can see the system works fine for 99% of the population. It has issues with 0.9% of the population, and 0.1% outright abuse it (numbers obviously made up). Instead of making things miserable for the 99.9% who do not abuse the system, why not simply use the banhammer to deal with the exploiters instead? Reset their arena ratings and points just before the season ends. I am confident that would reduce the number of exploiters dramatically in season 2.

And btw, setting fixed playing times would kill my 5v5 team. Flat out kill it. When you have people from multiple raiding guilds and with different work hours, scheduling is hard enough as it is. Making arenas less accessible would destroy one of the best aspects of it. And I can sure many many teams are in a similar situation. So even if doing that would make the ranking for a tiny number of teams more accurate the collateral damage would be so huge that Blizzard won't touch that idea with a 10 foot pole.

This is not true, you can report teams that uses this method to get high rating and Blizzard is actually doing something about it.

It happened in my former battlegroup and the 5on5 team that went up to 2300 rating with an impressive 43-0 record got deleted cause alot of people reported it.

Report it, the team will get removed and hopefully the people involved gets banned.

True, a decaying system would be bad for the raiders with a very tight schedule and perhaps the casual players. However I believe that at some point or another a player has to make a choice if he wants to focus on pvp or pve. On the other hand it would be harder to turtle in the top spots and to use the system to push friends/customers to get a title and mount. The end result would hopefully be more competative topend pvp.

I don't really trust the GM's to fix something like this with any degree of consistency. Short of an edict from Blizzard telling them to crack down on it, enforcement will likely be extremely hit-and-miss. Though I would definitely endorse reporting these incidents, as that's about the only way to bring it to Blizzard's attention. How they choose to deal with it is their choice, but it will never get addressed unless enough people speak up about it for them to believe that it's a significant issue.

As others have said "just queue up" doesn't fix anything. If the #1 team in the battlegroup(with the highest "true rating") wants to power-level other teams, it's not like queuing up is going to fix anything, since they can attain the highest overall rating anyways. And in the process of queuing up, they may or may not drop a few points to the smurfs in the process.

Other people touched on possible solutions:

-Playing 500 games at 1700 rating doesn't get you a netherdrake. If players aren't playing the 30% required at ratings near the team's final rating, they obviously didn't contribute to its success and didn't earn the mounts.

-Cooldown on team changes(probably somewhere between 1x/week and 1x/month). Hopping from team to team rapidly really does nothing to contribute to the validity of the system, and there's no need for it.

I think the two above changes are the simplest, most effective changes that could be done to address this. Particularly the latter, which should be extremely simple to implement, and while it would not completely eliminate the "powerleveling" scenario, it would scale it back quite a bit.

Turtling in top spots is NOT an issue. There are only 2 teams on netherdrake spots in my pool that have relativly few games played. The rating for netherdrake minimum pushes up over 50 rating here every week

I have played 3 games that use elo rating before WoW: Chess, Magic and Marvel VS. I believe in all 3 games if you are found to have fixed your ranking, you get banned.

In magic, a player called Bob Maher got banned, because someone threw games to him to allow him to qualify for a professional tournament, when he got banned he was as big a name as Xi is in WoW, the ban cost him thousands of dollars, he did it once and was generally regarded as being one of the cleanest players of the game there was.

Whatever argument you use, very few people will see what you did as in the spirit of the game. Whilst I hope you don't get banned, I'm sure some of the people you have deprived netherdrakes do. If you get banned, Blizzard get a whole ton of free pr that they are hard on cheaters.

Any rating system can be broken, its a lot easier to fix it by bannings at the top end than by making it unabusable.

How is Bob as big as XI when Bob can't even qualify for a tournament? If he is as famous as XI, he probably should be pretty good. Then he could qualify by himself

Not banned, but the reason makes even less sense

That is where the quote is from. It simply doesn't make sense and without more information I don't see how his situation is comparable to XI. If anyone "should" be banned, it's the people that were catapulted to Netherdrake spots.

Actually it would be arguable that Xi and his team are the ones causing the situation, not the ones being catapulted to netherdrake spots.

If it wasn't for Xi and co's actions, those individuals wouldn't be catapulted to netherdrake slots.

This is just stupid. The fact is you shouldn't have to schedual life around wow. What about people who are in odd time zones? Do they get burned? What if your guild can only manage raids at a certain time? They can't hold up the raid for 3-5 people who do arenas. Not all raid guilds have a large arena population on my server. What about if you wanted to go to a play or a movie one night? Or if something came up? Flexibility in time is absolutelly neccessary. This is a game. If you are actually playing in a tournament for something big and important...yeah sure make it an event. For arena matches...I would probably cancel my subscription.

Bob became famous after the ratings fraud as the Magics rules team call it, he was current player of the year when he was banned, the banning happened a long time after the infraction took place.

So his fraud went by undetected for years?