Perhaps it's "random", but endurance-oriented Druid/X pairings are extremely common in higher-rated 2's, and those matchups happen quite often. It's not as if endurance team vs. endurance team would be an uncommon pairing at high, or even merely "good" 2's ratings.

And yes, I echo the sentiment of whoever pointed out that having to do 3 consecutive hunter/druid mirrors(or similar matchups) is just painful. One hour+ match is enough. But three?

An arena "Server" would be great if implemented right. This "Server" should have no world, but consist of:

• A menu for creating characters, speccing and equipping gear (from a small but varied gear list)
• An interface for speaking with your arena team-mates
• A big button to queue.

The gear on this server would all be the same iLevel, but exist in a variety of setups. Attack Power vs Resilience vs Stamina for example.

The Server should be constantly running various tournaments. What I picture is clicking on 3v3 and seeing that a 16-team single elimination tournament is at 14/16 teams and looking for more. Below that would be round-robin tournaments, smaller/larger tournaments etc.

There could be special rules for different tournament rules. I would love a chance to play in an old-school pre 2.0 level 60 tournament, or something similar.

On initial release a LOT of people would swarm this server for the fun of playing any character/build they wanted. The server gives out no rewards to a players real characters though and it would quickly lighten to the people who are only interested in the 'balanced' e-sport kind of play.

What I'm saying is that forcing people to win twice for their wins would be a HUGE disadvantage for outlast teams.

Yes, outlast team vs burst team is a ~2 minute match -- either the burst team kills someone with their cooldowns before their health drops too low, or they don't and without healing they can't go very long at all.

Burst team vs burst team is again, a quick match. No healing means no prolonged games.

Outlast team vs outlast team however, you're looking at games that have the potential to go on for over an hour.

Do you see the distinction I'm making yet? Double DPS teams always have fast games. Outlast teams only have fast games vs non-outlast teams.

That's how things work at the moment -- fair enough that's the nature of playing an outlast team. The problem is that when you double the number of wins required, potentially tripling the time spent playing, that extra time for the outlast team ends up being several hours, while for the double DPS team it ends up being a couple of minutes. It's not the same as it is now at all.

And yes boiling every possible arena 2s combo down to 2 alternatives is a huge generalisation, but the point is simply that being forced to play multiple games is a lot worse for some than for others.

Are there any outlast teams that typically take longer than 15m per game? I can't tell if "several hours" is hyperbole or a pain I never experienced.

I think it'd be good of them to cap game lengths at ~10-15 minutes somehow. Either add a cooldown to Star's Tears, bring back the tornadoes (just wait till 10 minutes to start them), add random power-ups after 10 minutes, or start adding debuffs after 10 minutes (i.e. stacking debuff that reduces max health by 10%).

funny story, me and resto shammy vs pally war, pally got counterspelled then i died from warrior +hoj, then my shammy friend earthshocked the war killing him. YAY! healer v healer match. a fight lasting about 30 minutes followed at which point both shaman and pally were very bored, so they agreed to Res me / war at the same time, shaman res's me and BOOM! earthshock your res pally xD. one of those times u wish fraps was running

Game Over

anyway back to topic, in 5's ive heard of outlast teams (pally resto druid resto shaman war warlock, something like that) mirror match of these could last forever xD

So you made an agreement and then broke it? All for the sake of one arena game? Interesting decision and I wouldn't be boasting about it here if I were you.

Unless one team is exceptionally bad, a Warlock/Druid mirror will never end until one team runs out of waters. My partner and I generally stay in those games for about 5 minutes to see if the other team is painfully incompetent and we can actually win quickly, but if they have any idea what pillar kiting is we just AFK and wait a few minutes to requeue. It's simply not worth playing matches that go that long - both on how many points it's worth and how much it taxes our sanity.

I've always thought it was completely ridiculous that blizzard will match you against the exact same team until both teams are outside of the points range to be eligible to fight each other. Personally I think it's a bit dumb that I have wait a few minutes to queue if I encounter an opponent with a particularly effective team setup against mine. I personally like varity in my arena matches.

Also it was mentioned that the best of 3 set up would give let you play 3 times as long for the same queue time. I was under the impression that the reason 2 queues are longer is not because they are having problems finding suitable matches but rather because they only allow X number of 2v2 games to be up. If that's the case tripling the time you get to play triples the queue time as well and 2s queues are already more then long enough for my taste.

The same thing works the other way where if you annihilate an opposing team, if you requeue the instant you get out it almost always matches you up with the same team again allowing you to essentially farm them until they're too far out or they wait 10 minutes before requeueing (this is with 5s, but works in all brackets I assume).

Whine post incoming.

I think before trying to increase interest or e-sport acceptance of WoW, Blizzard needs to get back the interest arena has had even 3 months ago. Right now it is slipping, and fast.

2v2 has been screwed up for a long time now. Even Blizzard has admitted the poor state of balance. And the "the queues are long due to winter break, no need to add new servers for a temporary spike" argument has run out of validity. 2v2 is flat out unplayable even if you look past the imbalances and the potential for hour long turtlefests. Would anyone (who is on BG9 and has to play during prime time) honestly do 2v2s if the other brackets were as easy to organize, get rating and points in?

My favorite bracket has always been 5v5. That's where I got my title and that's where I got my gear. It has the most depth and requires the widest range of skills. But at least in my BG 5v5 right now is terrible. Nobody plays that bracket seriously. As a result, all the top teams are spending most of their time selling points. One guy on my server bragged how he has 36 point selling slots available every week. Because of that, literally 2/3 of games we played recently were either against point buyers or point sellers. Nothing like getting railroaded by a top 10 team only to then massacre a 3 mage/2 holy pally team. Or then that game against a 3 hunter/ret pally/holy pally team where not a single trap was placed the entire game. Oh and that team was higher rated than us.

One thing I always liked about playing on BG9 was that no matter where you were you always got fair matchups. 16 point games were the norm even up to 2200 (we never got any higher). Now? Last time we played (at 1800) we had 5 games of 5 points or less - out of 14 games we played. And as I said the losses sucked and the wins felt hollow. Because of that our performance has slipped dramatically. We were on the fast track to getting our shoulders, now we are at 1715. We play like crap because it is not fun and nobody really put in any significant effort. We were more motivated during our first week of arena back in S1 were all of us were PvE specced (our warrior was prot) and we went something like 2-20.

So, my question is. Is arena running out of steam? Every serious player has all their gear by now. And with arena seemingly getting very stale, is its run coming to an end?

Two major semi-controversial points in response to that:

1) The best players in any game tend to play a lot, regardless of whether it is PvE or PvP. While arena is supposed to be "casual accessible" (and is), the reality is the best players still play a lot, or at least played a lot at one point. Yet once you learn how to play and work with your team (a significant time investment, but we are in the third season now), there is very little time required. You can play 10 games a week or even 20 games a week and at most you've spent maybe 2-3 hours of the whole week playing. That's one night's worth. The best players who want to play a lot have, basically, nothing to do. Not to say I am a "best player," but I am pretty good and do play a lot, and after I quit raiding in August I basically started point selling because it was something to do. Play 3-4 3v3 teams a week plus your 5v5s, and you'd actually have something to keep you occupied at least a few days a week. I know for a fact many people who were only PvPing did this. But even that gets old, and gold is pretty meaningless at a point.

2) The gap between player skill has never been higher. This is true in PvE and PvP. In raiding, the difference between the guy who completely understands his DPS rotation, all the math behind his execution, and his role in teh grander scheme of the raid is light-years ahead of even a fresh level 70 who might be decent. The difference between a 900 DPS rogue in a guild now killing Illidan versus the 2k DPS rogue who killed him in July is enormous, and well-beyond gear. The same goes for top PvPers. Our team has played well over a thousand 5v5 games at this point, and I think we are all good players, but we still get shit-stomped by the top 5 teams in our battlegroup. And, of course, we shit-stomp the other 90%.

--

Put those two together, and you have a pretty serious problem. On one hand, your "top players" who want to play the competitive aspect of the game have basically nothing to do. Once they have their rating, there is really no incentive to play more than 10 games a week. The GM grind may have been stupid as hell, but it did reward playing - arena doesn't really. This is great for the casual PvPer and whatnot, but I actually think it is bad for the top end. Couple this with the fact that people are bored and have no competition, and they have even less reason to play.

There needs to be a continuing reason to play a lot more than 10 games a week even at the highest level. Right now there is not.


Toss these two together with the fact that arena balance is a joke at the moment (and that they only rebalance once ever 4 months, if that), and its not hard to see that there is a pretty serious problem.

Edit:
I think in theory this is the obvious reason they want people to play more: it's fun to compete. But I think the issue with many teams not finding competition, or getting bored of the same games over and over again, really hurts this. Hell, combine this with the fact that the best players who beat Illidan months ago and are competing in PvP at a high level haven't had any new content in more than half a year and you have a real problem.