As far as stop queuing sometimes that is not an option, Some weeks there is only one day you can get the team together, specially since we all don't raid with the same group so our availabilities don't always overlap. The other issue is you don't get better running away from a team you can't beat. The last time we faced the Drama LLama we had changed the fight from them killing us with all 5 of them standing to only 3 of them alive. It was just taking 22-19 points a game to get a solid strategy.

Seems like a great guy. Something to keep in mind the next time you get angry at the Developers. It really does seem like in this game, as opposed to others I have played, they really do care.

I dont think you should punish a team for brining in a new player to help against a team they are having a hard time with. Or for getting a sub in for a week where they may not be able to play much and want to salvage some points.

I think at a certain rating you should be required to play X amount of games to keep the rating. The S3 gear/weapons will have a certain rating req to equip them. Maybe they should have a certain amount of games played at that rating too. So of Joe blow buys a highly rated team, if he has to play 100 games and keep above that rating, he wont be able too because he'll get wiped out be legit 2100+ teams thus not allowing him to use the gear he wanted to farm.

I think it's great that my guildmates (who run the GMST chapters) are making lots of extra gold by marketing their arena skills to masses, but at the same time, this sort of ingenuity ruins the integrity of the entire arena system. There's a lot more to be said about this particular issue, but I'll skip the discussion and move directly to the fix.

(1) Add a new visible statistic to each arena team: "deserters."
(2) At the start of each week, the deserter count is reset to zero.
(3) Whenever a player who has played games with the team this week or last week leaves the arena team, the deserter counter is incremented.
(4) When the deserter count hits

-4 for a 5v5 team
-2 for a 3v3 team
-2 for a 2v2 team,

the deserter count is set to zero, and if the team's rating is above 1500, the team's rating is set to 1500. Games played per player and total games played for the week are set to zero.

(5) Add a warning message whenever a player leaves a team: "Warning: <team name> can suffer only <#> more desertions this week before its games are declared invalid and its status is reset."
(6) Add a warning message whenever the deserter count hits the appropriate number: "Warning: <team name> has exceeded the maximum allowable number of deserters for the week. The team's past victories are forfeit and its status has been reset."

This is a complete solution. There is absolutely no way for a point-selling team to get around this. This will not have any effect on any legitimate team, unless active players comprising more than a third of their roster all leave during the same week - and if a team loses that many members in that short of a time, shouldn't it get a fresh start in any case? I think so.

Anyway - this mechanic is "in flavor" (the concept of deserters makes sense - right?), easy to understand, and invisible to most players. It simultaneously fixes point-selling teams and mitigates the rating inflation that naturally occurs throughout the season. Unless inhouse development tools involve heavy use of punchcards, this could probably be coded and tested by one guy during his lunch break.

Which begs the question . . . why hasn't something like this been implemented yet? Beats the hell out of me.

I can't see any way to prevent *some* abuse without changing the current system.

If a player has to play a certain number of games or a certain percentage of a team's games to get points/drake/etc, then the purchaser can just play as many games as they like at a 1500 rating, then sit while 2/3/5 people power level the team to the top of the brackets.

But how it plays out from here differs based on what people want:

Drake/title:

Strategy: I think the strategy is to just hold the team where it, playing as little as possible after the PL. Here, counting only the last 100 games is the proposed solution by Mr. Kaplan. But a 1500 team can be PL'd to a 2400 rating in 70 or so games (100-30 starter games played by the purchaser), so I don't see this working perfectly. Additionally, 1500-1800 (and beyond) could simply be played with the purchaser on the team, just contributing as best he can.

Proposed Solution: Penalize teams for lying dormant. This can be done in many different ways, such as charging 100 points if the team doesn't play the minimum number of games (which could be less than 10). There is collateral damage with this solution though. Legit teams that just can't get all 5 people on for the final weeks of the season could lose their mounts. In the end there may be no fair way to avoid people buying nether drakes. But really, I'm not sure I see a huge problem here both in terms of competitive impact and number of occurrences.

Points/gear:

Strategy: I think the strategy is to get PL'd to a very high level and then put in 3 games a week during peak times when you know you won't lose 30 points in a game, then queue leave for the next 7 games.

Proposed solution: Have the team have to actually *play* a full 10 games a week to get points, which should cost about 150 points a week, and likely more. Seems like an easy fix, am I misunderstanding something?

Basic math: You purchase a 2200 team -- You'd have a week at 2200, then 2050, 1900, 1750. Say you could have sustained 1500 on your own. 1202+1070+894+692+432 - (376*5) = 2410 net points "earned" from purchasing a team, which isn't a game breaking amount in my opinion.

Under the current system you'd earn about 4800 points net in the first 5 weeks of purchase, and about 6000 over the lifetime of the investment.

There are some potentially debilitating problems with individual ratings. Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple:


*With no ability to leave losses behind, people will lose the freedom to join a team just for some fun games early in the week. Given the emphasis WoW's developers put on the fun factor, this is damning.
*Players who play bench, subbing in versus highly unfavorable matchups (to make them only moderately unfavorable), get screwed royally under an individual system.
*Teams might sub in a low ranked (but pretty good) player to drag their collective rating down, allowing them to win more games against lower competition. An 1800 team could powerlevel one of their players to be the top ranked person in the world, simply by having 4 people drop to 1300, then sub the lucky devil in for games until they start to be challenging again, only to sub him out for another loss streak.

heel: Cool idea, and it totally makes sense, but you could still sell 3/2/1 spot(s) on the team every week, right? Why not have it be a longer term, like 10 member changes per season?

The reason why such a deserter concept is probably not going to be implemented is purely because you are outlining an arbitrary counter under the assumption that whoever leaves an arena team, it is purely because they want to take part in some point-inflating/smurfing team. There are many reasons why people leave and join teams, it is enough that their individual % of played games gets reset and they have to start over again. Such a system would only work to the detriment of arena moreso than abolishing smurfing teams.

I personally don't see any point in rallying against smurfing teams. This concept is not new to a ladder-based game system. It was present in Warcraft 3, one of the reasons why a lot of people never jumped on that bandwagon. There were so many smurfing teams on the ladder that the average person just didn't feel like playing. However, whereas the average person may have not felt like playing, this didn't alienate a lot of the playerbase that did play the game. There were other venues to explore, custom games, and random team battles, etc. My friend and I didn't mind playing teams that "smurfed" simply because in a match between two teams, the better team will win. It is pointless to agonize over what grounds the better team won. If you want to progress in a system where the better team will win, you must learn to beat them. There really is no difference between some team that decides to smurf the ladder for fun, or teams smurfing for profit. You can't tell the difference, the only thing that irritates people is that these teams are broadcasting their "rates" and as such are widely-known. But who is to say that you, team A, can't play the arena if your intention is perceived to be ill-conceived? Blizzard is not going to wet their feet with that kind of arbitration. So it makes no sense for them to setup a system that automatically does it for them.

Selling spots on a single team - like, say, having five great players and five buyers on the roster - is fine. The buyers need to all play 30%, after all, so the rating that such a team would receive would be appropriately reflective of the contributions of its members. The most important thing here is that that group of five great players are tied to that team, and only that team. They can't all leave and power another new team up to a very high rating, stealing points from legitimately-rated teams on the way up, without the first team being reset. There will only ever be one team with a rating which reflects their ability, and that's what counts. What they do with the remaining slots on this team is their business.

*This severely punishes the more casual player, who may team hop a lot during the early part of the week for fun. It's very common for two friends to have a casual 3v3 team, subbing in the third whenever someone else is available.

*This creates some admittedly limited griefing potential. Add some people to your team for one game and they gain the ability to set you back to 1500.

Yes it was present in WC3. Yes people complained. And Blizzard did quite a few things to curb it. Which begs the question why they did not see this coming.

A fully automated system will probably never be completely abuse-proof. But to say that the current is the absolute best a company that has the resources the hire to the 10 smartest people in the world to fix it can do better be an exaggeration, for all our sakes.