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?

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Don't get me wrong, but, what if the team that was queing had one of the players disconnected 7 times in a row? Maybe frequent disconnects? I'm just saying that proving this is quite difficult and I'm not talking about meeting the team who you have set to meet, but just not queing cos you don't like the map. Removing the instance information would solve this problem, but I guess it's hard for the client not to know which instance ID the button click would take you?
Also, do you have any information what is the average wait time for 5v5 accross all battlegroups? I know it's instant on most of them, so it isn't a big time waste, for most, and if there are many low pop battlegroups, Blizz can just merge them.
Tell me what's more frustrating finding an empty arena and requing or playing 10 straight matches for 2 points and losing the next two for -26 because of a disconnect.

Well, if someone is having frequent disconnects, is it fair to penalise the opposition by effectively wasting their time, by continually requeuing and leaving the queue? Even if it is only the time spent in the buff zone? 5v5 queues on my battlegroup are quite high, and of course this is a problem in itself, but if people keep leaving the queue, even for legitimate reasons, they are still wasting someone else's time by not actually joining. However, Im of the opinion that penalising the odd disconnect is a more appropriate way to deal with these matters than to leave the door wide open for exploiters to run rampant on low population battlegroups. So, in that sense, I preferred the old method where sure we lose the odd game due to a disconnect, but where I didnt have to spend 30-40% of my game time in a perpetual state of frustration at the lack of opposition due to exploitation.

I agree that map information should be completely unavailable prior to your points being 'on the table', but saying that 'its ok for most' due to low queue times in most battlegroups simply does not help those who do not have that priviledge. For many, transfering to a low queue realm isnt an option if they are stuck on a pve realm, but again that's a side issue.

And a GM investigating exploitation in these situations would see very clearly if a team is actually exploiting. Sure, one could say 'I disconnected every single time, except against this one specific team' but in fairness that isn't going to hold much water is it if we are talking about 50/60 games where they didnt enter and 10 games, all against the same team, where they did? The pattern will be obvious to the impartial observer.

I suppose its about finding the happy medium between building barriers against exploitation and not punishing the innocent. I would be delighted to hear other people's ideas on this.

This should not be punishable for obvious reasons, even you should support it.

I couldn't agree more. Removing the information strikes at the very base of this problem and solves any form of possible exploitation. However hard, this is where the devs should start working on the problem.

I stated in my post already, I am against this and any form of pre-determined matches, even when playing at 4am. This has been punished previously, I know many teams banned for doing this at the start of the season3.

Well, if they can't fix the instance ID hiding then I guess something like the following would be fair enough:

- If a que pops every player is autojoined in the arena instantly (or after a very short time like 3-5 sec).
- If a game starts 4v5 (or 1v2, 2v3) due to disconnect, game ends Draw immediately after gates open.

I just pulled this out of my arse in 2 sec, at first glance, I don't see a straightforward possible way of exploiting. I know instant autojoin can be annoying, but it's not like you're in the middle of a raid boss encounter when queued for arena.

If you're not penalized for DCing after entering, then people will just DC if they get pulled into a different arena then their friend or if the queues don't pop simultaneously.

Teams would simply exploit by having one player unplug his or her internet connection if the opponents were not those desired.

There's basically no way to prevent this kind of exploitation without:
A) re-instating queue dropping penalties, as the free lunch here distorts the system. You should have to ante up your arena points before receiving information about who you are playing, even if that information is simply the timestamp of when your queue popped.

or B) Putting in place measures that obscure the subtle information already conveyed by the arena system.
1) Eliminate the hidden notice of which arena one is about to enter picked up by DBM
2) Make queue pops occur over a random 10-15 second interval, so that teams cannot rely on both receiving a queue at once as evidence that they should enter. Else, people will hang out on vent and only join when they each receive a queue at the same moment.
3) Hide the number of opponents one is facing until the match begins. Else, people will have their farmed team enter first and only tell the others to enter if there are no opponents with a few second left on the match timer.

I'd favor A for simplicity's sake. I'm not exactly who is helped by not taking points if no one enters. If a player suffers a DC before the queue pops, you can leave queue. If she suffers it after the queue pops, one of your team mates has probably already clicked Accept.

There's a pretty simple, fair solution to this in my mind:

Set a certain fraction of games queued for(Say 10%, could be tweaked) where if someone DC's/queue is dropped in fewer than that number of games, the team is not penalized. If the fraction of games dropped goes above this number, the team begins taking large penalties. This would have to be based on a fraction of recent games(as opposed to total games) as well, to prevent a team from running some absurd number of games early on just to pad their total game to give them headroom.

This should address the most flagrant win-trading, or the dodging of certain maps a team doesn't like. Obviously it doesn't totally fix the 4AM win-trading scenario, but it would be a step in the right direction.

10% is an arbitrary number and could be adjusted upwards or downwards, but I think it's a good starting point:

-If a team has a member D/C'ing in >10% of games, they really need to get their ISP checked out anyways. This shouldn't be a problem for most teams with normal ISP's.
-A team trying to dodge a map obviously will have to drop queue in over 10% of games.

Yes, a team has the ability to milk that 10% and hence it's not perfect, but it's not really wise to push close to it, if you're a disconnect or two away from being penalized. It ought to keep the most flagrant abuses down.

Not possible. The Scoreboard would still show 5v5 even if someone DC-d.

I sympathize with those people who lose games because of disconnects but is this really such a big problem that Blizzard should leave open huge exploitable holes in the arena system. If you are disconnecting that much the proper solution involves fixing the disconnect problem, not adapting the queuing system to deal with it. There are solutions to disconnecting issue. There must be because the vast majority of the wow player base does not randomly lose their connection to the server.

Keep in mind that if a player on your team disconnects before the queue pops you can leave queue and no harm is done. So you really only get screwed out of points if someone loses their connection after the queue pops.

I am no expert on computer programming but I doubt very much that Blizzard could in any way tell the difference between an induced disconnect and an uncontrollable disconnect. If that is the case trying to “fix” the system to stop points loss for a disconnect will always be exploitable.