Of Arena and Fair Play

Jipakazoid · 02/18/08, 8:23 AM

The creation of this topic serves several purposes - to share information, to discuss consequences and suggest fixes.

1. After joining the queue, it is possible, with the help of say Deadly Boss Mods to see the unique number of the arena, you are being invited. It requires no special hacking or smart addons, it's information freely given. DBM for example shows "Nagrand Arena 59 (2v2)".

2. If you decide to ignore that invitation, and not join the arena, you are not going to loose any points. I don't know how recent of a change this is, I remember it being the other way around in season1, but that's how it is now.

1+2 = Queuing with a friend in separate arena teams, allows you to wait out until you both get invited to the same arena (given it's unique number), enter it, and steadily transfer points from one team to another.

After a dedicated night, you can have the desired rating required for the s3 weapon, shoulders or 1st standing in the battlegroup.

We are in season 3 of arena, and still it is possible to buy/sell arena points (join high rated team, loose 3 games) as well as get any required personal rating with the method described above (I am not even talking of the infamous play at 4am).

I simply can't understand what reason could blizzard have to publicly display arena unique id or changing how they treat ignoring given arena.

The end of season2 was already sad enough with gladiator titles sold (5k gold in my battlegroup) and merciless gladiator given to those who were the most dedicated to transfusing points from one 2k+ team to another, the situation now seems even worse.

Except the obvious - stop showing arena id, penalize not joining arena battle, what other changes do you think would be required to insure fair play in the arena?

LodeRunner · 02/18/08, 10:32 AM

After reading and re-reading this I still don't know what we're supposed to discuss.

bobobo · 02/18/08, 10:37 AM

1+2 so basically you have two teams continually q at the same time and go in if it's the same arena number

cool

Zyla · 02/18/08, 10:43 AM

Out of all of the posts that make no sense, this is another one.

Loob · 02/18/08, 10:56 AM

Perhaps this post that I made on the EU pvp forums will enlighten those as to what this issue really is. I made a long and relatively detailed post there so forgive me if I only post the direct link here, but it addresses the same issue as the OP is referring to. It is actually a very important issue for people on my small battlegroup and I would appreciate some feedback from those who can suggest reasonable solutions to this frustrating problem.

WoW-Europe.com Forums -> Empty Arenas and exploiting on BG Ruin

Loshiis · 02/18/08, 11:08 AM

As far as I know, once the queue has come up for a team and you're enabled to see which arena you can join, you lose points if you leave the queue. That in itself makes this issue null and void.

Nurru · 02/18/08, 11:09 AM

In seasons 1 and 2 you lost points for not joining an arena once the queue came up. Unless something significant changed in season 3 this thread is moot and worthless.

diospadre · 02/18/08, 11:20 AM

It has changed as the OP stated. You can't lose points anymore if nobody on your team accepts the Enter Arena prompt.

Loob · 02/18/08, 11:52 AM

Originally Posted by Loshiis

As far as I know, once the queue has come up for a team and you're enabled to see which arena you can join, you lose points if you leave the queue. That in itself makes this issue null and void.

If you actually leave the queue manually, you possibly do lose points - I have never tried this. However, I have tested simply not entering and waiting for the prompt to go away (60 secs). If you do this, you dont lose any points at all, and this seems to be the method that people are using to win-trade.

I appreciate for many of you this is a non-issue. I cant imagine that this is a problem on a large battlegroup due to the very small chances of being paired with your win-trading friends. However, on my battlegroup (4 low population realms), this is a horrible problem and frequently results in 4-6 empty arenas in a row which is a waste of time and very frustrating. Especially considering those who are causing this problem are acting with impunity and simply dont get penalised for this at all - so they just keep doing it.

Dosed · 02/18/08, 1:43 PM

I discovered this all when making a Lose(get as low a rating as possible for laughs) team in 2's. This works for each sized arena of course. Points aren't lost (game doesn't count) until any one member enters the arena. If both arena teams enter and use 'leave battle' to leave the arena before the doors open the game will not be logged.

I never thought about using this to feed a team by getting a friends team into same game number. What i did find could be very useful, or lame depending on how you look at it, is choosing which arena's you would like to play.

EX: You get blades edge but your team is particularly weak on that map. Have your entire team leave the queue before entering and the only thing your team loses is the queue time it waited.

I don't support, condone, or agree with any of this.

Being able to leave queue without penalty if one of your members disconnects is great. Sadly though this allows players the ability to feed wins / choose which arena.

• Mex · 02/18/08, 4:45 PM

Yeah you definitely don't lose any points if nobody on your team enters the arena. I thought that this was a great idea (despite occasionally getting an empty, 0 point arena after an 8 minute queue), because it has saved me and my partner several losses. I never actually thought about how it could be used for win trading.

Shrug, it's against the ToS, I wouldn't be surprised at all if right now Blizzard is stockpiling a huge list of teams doing this and readying themselves for a mass-banning, similar to what they did with AFKers in BGs. I imagine it would be quite easy to track.

Experiment · 02/18/08, 5:19 PM

I honestly hadn't even thought about using this feature in this way until this thread pointed out you could. As tempting as it is to get my Shamans rating to 1850 this way for the one handers, it's very obvious this is against the ToS in some shape.

If the reason behind this post is to find some sort of solve for this action, then I doubt you will get to far. Other then banning the abuse of this feature, not much can justify removing the 'My friend D/C'd, I won't enter without him' idea that spawned this change in the first place. I'm sure in theory if it's possible to do a blanket hide of the Arena instance ID, I just don't know how easy it would be for Blizzard to impliment it.

Just because the idea seems easy, doesn't mean the programming is. At least when you consider the fact that you're modifing something that is already built. Does anyone else see this abused? I'd never heard of it until now.

Herrera · 02/19/08, 5:38 AM

It's a good thing they made a change to not losing any points if nobody in the team enters arena, so you can prevent disconnects. Personally, I could use this to my team's advantage as said eariler, to not join Blade's Edge Arena, since we have disadvantage playing on that map. If this is against ToS I'm not so sure. If Blizzard wants people not to leave the que and always join the given arena, they can just autojoin everyone whenever the que comes out. I'm unsure why they have the instance info still available, though. Without it, this "exploit" is not possible.

Loob · 02/19/08, 8:01 AM

Originally Posted by Herrera

Without it, this "exploit" is not possible.

Again, this is not necessarily true. I was unaware that addons were used for this exploit until I read this post. Prior to that, I simply assumed that the exploiters were sitting on ventrillo (or some other comm system), and if they received the arena prompt at exactly the same time, they would enter the arena. If the prompts were not synchronised, they simply do not enter. Obviously this is a less 'foolproof' method of ensuring you meet your friends than actually knowing the arena number, but on a small battlegroup such as mine, this method would work.

Last night I encountered 7 empty arenas in a row, and out of 15 times queued, we only got 4/5 actual games. Dont tell me its a 'good thing' that people can do this and completely waste my time. Prior to this change it was certainly very annoying to lose a game because of a disconnect, but that was not nearly as much of a problem as the rampant exploitation taking place at the moment. I actually think there is a huge amount of ignorance over this issue. On my thread on the EU pvp forum, there have been several replies from people who have encountered empty arenas but simply didnt know why it was happening. They were shocked to find out the reason behind it from my post.

Loob · 02/19/08, 8:06 AM

Originally Posted by Jipakazoid

Except the obvious - stop showing arena id, penalize not joining arena battle, what other changes do you think would be required to insure fair play in the arena?

I would suggest that including a 'report' button into empty arena closing screens may well be a way of eliminating this problem completely. If I get an empty arena I should have the option of reporting or flagging the team that didnt join that arena. Im sure Blizzard could then easily implement a system where a team with a certain amount of reports/flags is automatically sent to a GM for immediate invesigation. If that team is seen to be exploiting (and I cant imagine this would be hard to determine, given a bit of close attention), then appropriate punishment could be administered to the players involved.

I am not a programmer so I have no idea of the technical difficulty of implementing something like that, but it would quickly have the desired effect, and elminate this problem very swiftly. It would also mean that genuine disconnects are not penalised through lost arena points, and those who experience a disconnect occasionally, like we all do from time to time, would not unnecessarily suffer.