From the upcoming Arena team notes:

WoW-Europe.com Forums -> Upcoming battlegrounds and arena changes

So lets say that you're in an arena team with a 1600 rating, and your personal rating is also 1600. Couldn't you then drop your team, and join a crappy 900 rated team, and win with them until they're 1150 rated (not difficult!), and get your personal rating up to 1850?

I'm thinking there are some greened-out Arena teams that are going to make some serious bank in season 3!

EDIT: never mind I can't read.

correct me if i am wrong but i believe personal rating is only 1 check point. you still need a team rating high enough to profit as well.

No, I just re-read the first line. The rating is unique to each character FOR EACH TEAM they belong to.

If it works anything like regular rating which is likely then you at 1500 rating in a 900 rated team will get no personal rating for beating 1000 rated teams.

Every time you switch teams, your personal rating resets to 1500. What you could do however is use alts or whatever to tank your team's rating 200 points or so, then use your main team to bring it back up. It probably wouldn't be worth the trouble, but it would be a low risk way of raising your personal rating, especially if certain brackets are stratified with unfavorable team combinations.

It'd be similar to playing at 8 in the morning, but you could do it any time... would even be easy if instead of alts you just had other worse players on your team and let them play early in a week then bring the rating back up later in the week.

I suppose we still need more information. I mean, is the personal point gain/loss calculated on the other team's rating, or the average of the team's personal ratings?

Waiting for the PTR and keeping my mouth shut I guess.

Will this completly eliminate having someone join for one week only to help out because you're one man short?

You could also have a team set up with 10 players, 5 A-team and 5 B-team. Everyone gets their games for points but the A team and B team never mix. That team would probably linger in the 1600-1700 range, but if the A-team was good and won every match your personal rating would be pretty high.

Good players get less arena points but higher personal rating. Bad players get more arena points.

It could work out.

Yep thats pretty much what I was getting at. This could be exploited late in a season when people have 5k points stored, but want to get the gladiator title, as that appears to be based off of personal rating.

I guess the question surrounding this would be whether teams are matched based on their team rating or the average of their personal ratings? I would assume team ratings, as that'd be the simplest way, but it would leave it open to exploitation.

Only if people are concerned about their personal rating. Many people will either hit 1850/2000 quickly and get their items, or be so far below it they know their personal rating is not important. There's probably only a few on a multi-week quest for personal rating.

The thing is, if a team is already at 2200 and invites someone, they will start at 1500. How will they EVER get high enough in personal rating? Even if you join the second week, chances are you'll be excluded from the Netherdrake. I can't help it, I fear this is hurting legitimate players just as much as teamsellers.

I'm guessing (hoping?) that your personal rating point gains will be based on the difference in rating between your personal rating and the opposing team's rating.


Example:

Your personal rating (PR) is 1500, team rating (TR) is 2200, opponent's team rating (OR) is 2200.

Your team wins, team gains 16 points due to even match-up. PR, however, goes up by 32 (max possible, whatever that is, I think it's still 32) due to the 700 point difference between OR and PR.

While PR will never reach TR if you do not start them from the same time, it does asymptotically approach the TR function, which means that given enough games you will be within 100 rating of the TR, thus making you eligible for Drakes.

This also has the added benefit of requiring more games to catch someone up the further into the season they join, thus presenting another hinderance to possible team selling.


EDIT: Bah, beaten by Sadrizzzz

On the mmo-champion.com 2.3 summary, it says that both your "team and personal rating" must be at the required score to purchase the restricted items. I can't find a blue post to support that though. It seems like that is a very simple change that would eliminate the benefit of trying to raise your personal rating by dropping your team's rating.

Slightly offtopic... but could be found interesting!
The Armory

Rogue on my realm that was apparently trying to get the lowest possible 2v2 to see (via rating) how many teams were in 2v2, to then calculate what rank was needed for Gladiator status. I really want him to make a PvP video of their matches and what it takes to lose to these people...

A video of that probably wouldn't be that interesting. They either just did nothing and let the other guys kill them, or dropped queue as soon as it popped. I tried this a little while back on a 5v5 team, but only got as low as 1400 since the random puggies I picked up bailed after 10 games to get points.

It was sad though looking at some of the teams we faced. We gave away over 20 points to some of those teams when we were in the low 1400s.

There is a thing with personal rating that you cannot join a team more than 100 points outside your personal rating. Thus you just cannot join a 2200 team the second week.

I'd love to see a blue post confirming that any team over 1600 cannot add new members, since your personal rating resets to 1500 when you join a new team. If you have a link to something official confirming what you've said here, please post it.

Incorrect.

Correct.

Myth busted! We can go on with our lives now.

Yeah, it's bad down there. Of the games that I played (We usually just drop queue), there were some real gems. A dual rogue team that ran at us unstealthed and took about 5 minutes to land a hit. I was making laps in Nagrand and they never thought to mount, stealth, blind, or even split up. They just ran at me while keyboard turning and probably clicking sinister strike.

Back on topic though, I'm going to be pissed if the personal rating has anything to do with season 2 gladiator in some hidden way.

Can someone please tell me what the alternative to "keybooard turning" is. I spent a long time on Google, asked some PVPers of repute on my realm, and the like and found they move with the keyboard.

Clearly, this makes one an absolutely horrible comical PVPer. So what is it one uses to move around and turn their category in lieu of WASD?

Holding down the right mouse button to turn.

Back on topic, I always say in these kinds of threads that Blizzard has too much experience with automated matchmaking to do something blatantly stupid. They might be slow and produce buggy content, but they are not stupid. So the odds that they would produce an easily exploitable system are low. There will always be exploits with automated matchmaking systems where you can reform teams and recreate characters at will (more or less), but as long as they catch the 90% case we should be fine.

The alternative is holding your right button on your mouse down to turn. It allows you to turn quicker than the slow rotation of holding down the A or D keys.