Sort of OT, but what on earth do they need all this money for? With the consumable changes, you can farm the mats for your nightly consumables in ten minutes, and you can get repair money in about 20 minutes of daily quests.

Once I got my epic mount, I have no need for money. You can't buy things in the AH better than raid loot.

Gold still sells decently. Funnel it through a second account for an easy couple hundred bucks in your pocket at no risk to your main account.

The big problem with the existing system is that the rating of multiple teams can be increased or maintained by a single team-sized group of players. Whenever an established team re-forms, and at the same time maintains access the former team and its rating, the integrity of the system is hurt. When very high-rated players do this flagrantly, for profit, the problem is clear to see. A group of 1800-quality players beating up on a 1500-quality team with their brand-new "fun" reroll team has the same effect, though - if your rating does not reflect your skill level, you're hurting each and every one of your opponents on your way up. The higher the discrepancy, the greater the damage. The bottom line is, anyone whose rating is far from 1500 should be discouraged from re-forming or team-hopping (which amounts to the same thing).

Why should lower-rated players be able to re-form and switch teams at will, while higher-rated players are restricted from the same activities? Both are disrupting the integrity of the rating system, and a rating reset hurts them to a degree proportional to the damage they're doing to the system.

Honestly I hope they do, the only meaningful way to get change in a quick amount of time to it exploit it till Blizzard realizes that the entire battlegroup is getting griefed and their system is being made a mockery of. I don't support smurf teams, but them rolling over the battlegroup will force blizzard's hand.

I've never heard of people doing this before I read this thread. Maybe this explains why, when we were at 1400 (when we first started), and heck, even now, we get people at 1400-1650 rating that obliterate us within 30 seconds or are wearing full season 2 arena gear plus season 2 weapons.

That would also explain why we've run into some horrible teams that we wondered how in the world they even got to the rating they actually had. That really sucks! My favorite part of Arena is the competition; the adrenaline rush I get from it, and this whole thing just ruins that.


How can you tell when people are doing this? Is there even a way to tell if the smurfers in question aren't naming their teams something obvious?

The armory will reveal the smurfers quickly. Usually the bad players play 6 games first then the smurfers come in and play 14. So at the end of the week you will see a team with a 14-6 record with everyone on the team having a 0-6 record. Scale that out a couple of weeks and it becomes very obvious.

In general, any team where the win percentages diverge too much is suspect. Sometimes teams bring in a new guy after reaching equilibrium so that guy would have 50% wins. But anyone on a highly rated team with a win percentage of significantly below 50% probably does not belong there.

This would be an example of the main team. 2 of the guys on the team have a total of 3 games played, so they were most likely moonlighting somewhere else. One guy has 33% wins, but at 1-2 this means nothing.

If you are looking for a smurfed up team, see The Armory .

I can think of quite a few duos on my server alone that sell 2v2 teams, either they form a charter on their own, run it up to 2000 and sell it, or they join someone else's team and run it up to 2000 for them. It only takes them a few hours to do this and they can get 800ish gold for it fairly easily. I think the problem is only going to get more prevalent, as it is a fantastic way to make gold, and is way more entertaining than any other method of gold farming.

Better example: The Armory

Thank you; I mostly wanted to know so I could check my own battlegroup's ranks and possibly even on my own server, but on the first page of ranks, there were only a couple that met those criteria (which I linked).

Heel, I gotta say, my jaw dropped at that link. That is just insane.

A couple of weeks ago my 3v3 team lost well over 100 points to a smurfing team... first time we got them we lost 23 points to them, then proceeded to get them again several times until we only lost 12 points. They were all ranked gladiator and decked out in pure gladiator gear, and it was very frustrating because there really wasn't anything we could do about it. We have some scheduling conflicts due to the fact that we all raid and not all in the same guild, so we can rarely get together more than once per week. If we stopped queueing up we wouldn't have gotten our 10 games in. This really didn't just affect us, since we had been displaced from our "true rating", it had a ripple effect on other teams that we faced later on.

Basically, the way you can look at it is every time a 2300 rated team reforms and smurfs their way up the ladder again, they steal 1 point from each of the top 800 teams.

Stocking up for the expansion. The richest people today are the people who took up Jewelcrafting and leveled it fast while grinding the factions to get the recipes. Inscription will have the same effect(plus the bonus of making your own skills better than anyone else if they go with the profession specific stuff you see with every other profession these days).

There's also BT gems, expensive enchants every time you replace weapons or gear(Mongoose, Surefooted, etc).

Indeed Wodin.

I've never understood this 'why do you even need money?' thing.

I have my epic flyer and I barely even raid much these days, but I could always do with more gold. I'm on my 4th Mongoose now, surefooted, nethercobra/cleft etc. + gems. Not to mention I'd probably mess around with 1-2 of the Darkmoon cards if I had them. Oh yeah, and I'm not even close to exalted with Scryer yet either - the quests get you to Revered and I'm don't find grinding fun so... it's either that or money.

I'd've also levelled Blacksmithing and got the crafted Mace, if I had 5000g lying around...

Anyway, back on topic, this is obviously insane and there are numerous quick fixes Blizzard could experiment with right now. I'm not sure why they're holding off.

According to the interview transcripts that I saw, inscription will be a secondary profession, and will likely be about as useful for making money as first aid.

Most implementations of the ELO Rating System I've seen give newly-rated players a provisional rating for their first 20 games or so. I think WoW should do the same. There's a difference between a 1750 team losing to a 1500 team that's played 200 games and a 1500 team that's played 0 games, but the current system makes no distinction.

I wouldn't mind this at all. Something that matches teams based on average ranking (perhaps in last 2-3 weeks) within the BG could reduce the 'hits' top teams take when they fight the teams grinding up rating for gold. There's a fair amount of team selling going on in my bg, nothing like losing 25+ rating to a team you normally fight with for 15 points.

Considering the way prior battleground fuckery failed to "force the hand" in any significant way, I think you are being too optimistic here.

As pointed out earlier, you can sell gold - play arena for 20-30 hours a week, make a few hundred dollars, great way to make beer money. I know a few people who make $300+ a week from rotating through a few arena teams, leveling them up, and selling the gold to chinese farmers.

Its ridiculously easy to farm up 5k gold, especially with an alt (just do quests at 70!), so I could see the lure of doing this, especially for the netherdrake mount and title. Do it once every 3-4 months, probably takes a week to farm up the 5k gold, and you pretty much have the best PVP gear for no effort whatsoever.

Can you point us at these transcripts? As far as I know, the "secondary profession" was posted on these very forums, and it later transpired to be simply someone putting forward his own speculations as reality.

I thought I saw it on the WoWinsider liveblog, but I might be getting confused with the thread on these forums discussing it, since usually information on these forums is pretty reliable. In any case, this is kind of off topic.

Edit: just went and read through the blog again, here was the most relevant information I can find:

While not conclusive, it looks like you are right and it won't be a secondary profession.

They should just make it like CAL:CS and make it so you can only change your roster one day per week and after a set point in the season you can no longer change the roster at all.

Be smart, and stop queueing if all you see one after another match is with the "smurf" team.

You will probably lose 3 or 4 games in a roll, but 100 points? Are you guys paying attention at all???