• Calantus

I definitely think the way they went about the rating system is flawed even operating from a position that ratings are a good thing. Right now any 1500 player who started the season with 70k/5k points is completely done with arena and BGs until WotLK, and the season is still very young. There's a problem there, and it's that so many people have very little to buy and have been able to upgrade very few slots.

I think a better option would have been to not have any rating requirements at all on the baseline S4 gear, then put in special items with rating requirements. For example you'd have your Brutal Gladiator's Pummeler which everyone could get, then you'd have your Brutal Gladiator's Pummeler+ that you can only purchase with a high enough rating. The extra items can have a few extra stats similar to the seasonal differences as well as yellow text, special glows, different graphics, or you could even make one of them legendary. This way you can reward players for getting higher ratings, but you don't block lower rated players from being able to enjoy and work towards upgrades in most of their slots.

 

Shakes

I'm sure they're using this season as a bit of an experiment for WotLK at this point. It'll probably be a fairly short season assuming WotLK (and the pre-expansion 3.0 patch) comes out reasonably soon.

While on one hand I'm sure the rating requirements were to stop the new badge gear seeming completely useless (nobody likes spending 150 badges for a 134 DPS 2-hander if they can lose their way to a 140 DPS one), the other part was probably to see how it affects participation. If participation is way down (and it seems generally agreed that it's about halved) then that probably will tell them they need to do something like you suggest for WotLK and have a non rated and a rated tier of gear available.

I think the biggest problem they've faced with arena has always been the weapons. They're just too good in PvE to give away (and conversely warglaives are too good in PvP). I'm wondering if they have any plans up their sleaves to make weapons more PvE or PvP focused. The base DPS (and resulting conversion into spellpower) makes this hard to do, but maybe converting some of the DPS into "resilience penetration" (and upping the resilience on other pieces to even it out) could work.

 

TheCutlery

I think a better way to go about it would be to have some kind of sliding scale where the point cost increases the lower your rating is compared to the required rating of the item. If you're rated 1550, your legs cost 1875 points, as normal. If you're rated 1400, they cost 2500 points (or something like that, I dunno just throwing numbers out here for a point of comparison). This solves both problems -- people who are better get better gear faster, and people who suck still have something to work for, it just takes them a lot longer. I'm sure Blizzard has data on the average arena point intake of a player during the course of a season, they can easily work out the numbers that need to be on stuff to ensure that if you actually work for the gear and acquire the rating required for it, that you're sufficiently far ahead of the curve of someone who's afk'd his way for 10 games a week to his gear.

Really the people who have nothing to gain from the arena/bg system now are the ones who were 4/5 S3, with a S2 weapon/Stormherald , and can't break 1550. That's gotta be a pretty tiny portion of the population. The guys running around in BG's in full S2 with an s2 weapon and s3 bg pieces aren't the people who fit this mold. They can obtain gear from the arena, but for whatever reason, they choose not to. I have a hard time believing there are very many people at all who walked into S4 with 4/5 S3, 5k arena points and 75k honor, and be unable to break 1550. That's just not probable.

 

solbergb

Fortunately, for now, the attainable gear is plenty good for the existing endgame. PVP battleground gear without ratings is more than sufficient for most heroic and KZ runs, and badge gear will then fill in the gaps. SSO dailies eventually provide the wealth for the BOE stuff you might need, or to locate a reliable crafter for the epic BOE's.

As my character wraps up the last few pieces of stuff she can get without drops or arena rating, she's geared better than most T5 raiders. Most of her upgrades from PVE are T6 or Sunwell quality at this point, plus regemming everything with purple gems, the rest are things she'll get with badges eventually - but the badge gear is only a mild upgrade from her curent gear (similar to getting some of the rated S4 stuff or the S3 weapon)

At the moment I sometimes feel like a 15 year old with a Ferrari - sometimes my geared-up character is great, sometimes she's a bit too powerful and things spin out of control - her gear has now outstripped my play experience - she went from something like 5000 stamina and 600 spell damage to 9000 stamina and 1000 spell damage/100 haste in about 2 months and the importance of threat management has suddenly become the most important factor of my PVE performance.

At least by doing this experiment before Wrath, there is a chance that they'll learn before they institute a system in future that degenerates into a cycle that excludes newbies from the endgame. It is not entirely clear that the current system would have ended that way without an expansion but maybe. You can't make the jump to Sunwell with what's currently avaialble and if the T6 farm raiding became as rare as T5 is on my server, there might have been a gap eventually where the newbies couldn't find a raid group even after gearing to the best of their abilities on PVP+badge gear. Right now I could join a guild that was raiding at my level (my current guild is past that, but their alts do a lot of the heroic and 10 man instance runs which are all I'll really have time for before Wrath, so I'm pretty content with how the twilight of Burning Crusade treated newbies)

 

ROJO

My complaint about the current system is the rating on weapons. I would be interested to know if I am the only one who feels this way, but let me explain.

1800 for s3 weapons. If my serious arena character had been around before they implemented the whole PR thing, I might have had a break down of my moral fiber and bought s3 weapons. Because honestly, now that we're in season 4, no one item seems to make as big of a difference as weapons in terms of your ability to take down another person. When we are struggling through the 1700s (ok, we aren't the best alright?) to get our s3 weapons, and we're constantly slugging it out with other rogues and warriors who all have full s3, and we're losing by really thin margins, we can point to that if we had higher dps weapons, we would win. When one item can be so important to your ability to succeed in arena (especially as melee), I think there shouldn't be a rating on it. This might just me being bitter because I don't have them yet, but I dunno.

Before this turns into a QQ about ratings being unfair, I think honestly the s4 gear ratings should be higher. Like every 100 rating or so from 1500 on up, with maybe shoulders at 2k. 2.2k is too high in my opinion, but it is also too easy to accumulate 4/5 s4.

My fix for the whole thing would be what others have suggested. Make everyone in arena wear full current season gear. Then it is about skill, not gear. Ratings earn you the right to wear the gear outside arena and in PvE. This removes the steep gear curve arena currently has and allows everyone to compete on an equal level.

 

Monkens

Totally agree with what you've posted Rojo, That's a fantastic idea.

Maybe give people a screen that lets them gem+enchant the way they want ofc then just get right down to buisness and fight.
This solves the problem of Top PvE'ers using some very good pve gear, Namely Rogues and Paladins as they would be forced to use the current season gear, and would also make arena a much more competetive game.

 

Evalara

I'd agree the "5k arena points and 75k honor" part is improbable, but there are plenty of people in my guild and on my server with 4/5 S3 who can't break 1550. It certainly describes the team I used to do crappy 5's on, which was half alts anyway. We topped 1600 exactly once, when we got some help from a well-geared and experienced warrior/druid combo. Without them we topped 1550 probably once.

At any rate we haven't played in months since there's no point. It's not worth even an hour a week to upgrade the few pieces we can access. That's only partially due to the rating requirement, I'd say the the fact that the increase in stats is so marginal as to be totally unimportant to the casual PvPer gets half the blame. It would be one thing if arena was fun and the gear was a side benefit, as it stands it's the other way around: unless you REALLY like PvP you do it for the gear and any fun is purely accidental.

 

Broncojohnny

This is the point I made in this thread 3 months ago. From what I gather overall participation is down about 50% because of this effect. I have played exactly ten games this season with a 2v2 partner who needed points, besides that I can't really say that I am interested. I even changed my spec to frost just to try to like it and I'm still not really all that interested in arena because the time vs. reward just isn't there.

 

• Amera

The fundamental problem is really that by this point in the game, PvP has gone from the "casual player's outlet" to another serious activity that requires preparation, practice, and a time commitment up front to learn. I think even most casual PvPers in season 1 and probably season 2 still thought of arena mostly as a sidegame where they could have fun with their friends and eventually get gear. By this point, the average skill level of players who have taken the time and effort to get better/re-roll has gone up dramatically, and you now have rating requirements to even use a significant portion of the gear. These two factors have made arena more "serious," which is excellent for players who are really interested in competing (especially those few good enough to compete for cash in tournaments), but let's face it - the majority of WoW players aren't interested in "serious" competition. They want to log in, have some fun (usually with friends) and get some progression. Instead, now they log in with their team and get curbstomped in the 1500s because even those players now know how to play a RPM well enough to destroy suboptimal teams. Then they go on the forums and get told they are terrible players because they can't get to 2k rating in one night. This has to be pretty disenfranchising.

I think this is why Blizzard really needs to revamp the Battlegrounds and put a lot of thought into Lake Wintergrasp. Open and objective-based PvP is what most players really want - the type where they can log in, hop into the action with our without a pre-arranged group, and have fun battling it out. The same things that annoy the hell out of serious arena players are what casual PvPers really find amusing. Being outnumbered, mostly disorganized masses, fighting for specific objectives rather than killing, and so on. This is really the appeal that Warhammer is going to have to a lot of players like this.

Fight Club Spectator
Sky of <Transcended>
Selaste of <Serious Casual>

 

solbergb

Raises hand as one of those players....

Arena PVP is too freaking serious and from a roleplay perspective is utterly pointless in the WOW world, it's just a gladitorial sideshow. It's a team game in the sense of a basketball game, except your players don't get a penalty
for screwing up, they don't get to play again till the match is over.

So your roleplayers, they'll get more out of taking objectives in AB or AV. It feels more like a "battle" and you get feedback on success or failure that doesn't totally break immersion in the game. (WSG and EOTS lack any real ingame justification for the gamestyle, and are rather predictably, disliked by roleplayers that I know anyway)

The kind of folks who in real world would do a pickup game of basketball or soccer would go do something like WG or EOTS, where messing up means a penalty, but you still get to play, and the objectives support good team play while still allowing an individual to be a star or a goof-off.

The good arena players are more like people who join organized sports teams (and who are good enough to be allowed to play on them).

I don't think I'm going out on a limb to say that there are a heck of a lot more WOW players in the roleplayer or "fun pickup game" camp than in the "I want to do a regional sports team online" camp. While I started battleground PVP as a way to get gear for PVE play, I came back after I got that gear, because they're kinda fun, even when your team sucks. I'm finding that it's harder to keep that attitude in Arena PVP. Even though our teams have more or less "found our level" way in the lower rankings, we seem to have walkovers or "get stomped" as the main options, with only a rare fun game where it is close. And even the fun games are marred by the fact that those who die don't get to participate until the game is over, meaning unless you get no deaths, even a win is kind of boring for some of your team.

There is also, of course, a sizable community that doesn't see PVP as fun at all, either as a roleplay alternative or as a pure game. Those guys inflate the numbers because gear is available, and they are a very sizable faction. The defection of this faction from Arena this season is pretty significant, as they provided the scrubs that allowed the good players to achieve their ratings. 1400 is the new 1600 - I don't know any season 3 players who have come even close to their S3 ratings in S4, and while my sample size is small, I have not seen anything on the forums to counter this impression.

 

Vitae

The PR system is just horribly flawed. There are something like 10 2v2 teams who qualify for every 3v3 and 5v5 team combined in my battlegroup. Don't like 2s? Hope you don't like shoulders either, unless you're in the top 3 rankings for 3v3 (and even first place doesn't cut it in 5s).

They really need to have reduced requirements for 3s and 5s. 2200 in 2s, 2150 in 3s, 2100 in 5s or some such, with something similar for weapons. The fact that, months into the season, the FIRST PLACE 5v5 team cannot buy their shoulders is just silly.

 

Daym

I don't think there's something inherent to arena games that alienates casual players. But there are a lot of mechanics that alienate casual players.

In seasons one and two, the playing field was so much more leveled. It was early on, DPS itemization points hadn't dramatically out-scaled resilience values, everyone had equal access to all gear, and the meta-game was young so it was anyone's game for trying new comps.

Season 3 especially was excruciatingly long, meaning that exceptional to top-notch players had weapons and shoulders in the first 2-8 weeks, and spent the remaining 25-31 weeks selling points or, more commonly, re-rolling for fun: trying new comps, playing with different friends on a weekly or even monthly basis. This means that all inept to good players had an increased learning curve if they didn't have weapons or shoulders early on. The learning curve grew exponentially the worse of a player you were. Excellent to top-notch players, with full gear, pervaded 1500-1850 and, to a lesser extent, 1850-2000. Gradually, very good, if not excellent players, reached the 2k mark and also re-rolled throughout the season. The longer you went without breaking into the 1950+ bracket (out of the remarkably competitive weapon grinding bracket), the more you faced teams that not only had the gear, but had spent time in higher brackets where the level of play, frankly, was higher. So sub 1850 players faced a lot of re-roll teams that not only had the gear, but had gained much more experience in higher brackets.

The problem isn't that the top-notched players got rewards they didn't deserve. I think it's right for the system to reward them for being phenomenal players. The problem is that a gap started to grow and grow and grow: As a decent to good player, you either rolled teams who played 10 games a week at 1500 for points but didn't bother to work at being competitive, or got rolled by re-roll teams that had the gear and know-how that you didn't achieve between 1500 and 1850. Players could and did learn a lot, obviously, between 1500-1850, but I think the more substantial learning takes place in the higher brackets, where gimmick teams are weeded out and you spend more time learning the intricacies of fewer make-ups. When you spend your games either rolling face or getting face-rolled, there's no good middle ground to learn how to play.

It's similar in s4, with some changes. Blizzard addressed point-sellers and q-dodgers. But the gear and skill gap carried over from s3, with a notable number of players having weapons but not shoulders or neither. Additionally, the I-level leap from s3 to s4 is higher than it was from s2 to s3. The sooner you get your s4 items, the sooner you are advantaged. And I've seen some teams in all brackets between 1600 and 1800 who are already rocking full s4. I'm not sure if this is more or less relevant, since the bottom end of the scale has dropped out of arenas because of new rating requirements. Especially in 5s where there seem to be far fewer teams this season.

Anyway, my point is: arena play-style/objectives aren't unappealing to casual players. It can be fun for anyone. But the way rating requirements and re-roll-ability has panned out, casual or anything short of good players are definitely estranged.

I'm pretty happy myself. I'm less frustrated in s4 now than I was in s3 with this gear/skill gap, mainly because of fewer point-selling teams. Also because, by this point, I'm getting better and better at the know-how. I just basically need a wow-only vacation get-away where I can do nothing but work on arenas for a couple months. That would be good. Eh?

edit: better paragraph spacing to mitigate omg painful blocks of text.

 

ktimekiller

One problem that I am facing and probably many people are facing is, due to that there are much higher rating requirements, lot of casuals do not want to play, and the lower bracket is filled with overly geared previous s3 1800s stuck in the 1600ish rating. One of the major mistakes I personally think they made was not lowering last season's rating requirement equally in scale of the jump up of the new s4. s3 went down 50 and s4 went up 200 points? what?

I think it should have been more like 100 points down for s3, and 100 points up for s4, equally. I think this gives more incentives for other players to play, and make the s4 items more reasonable.

 

TheCutlery

I'm pretty much in the same boat. I'm happy where I am, I'm getting a competitive challenge, and if i gotta step it up a little bit to earn the next piece, I can do that. Not being steamrolled by rerolls every other game is a huge difference. I haven't had a game in S4 yet, across several teams and alts teams, that I see as the same as what I saw in S3 -- duelists or better running with a scrub, or just plowing teams wholesale in order to sell points. It was rampant as hell, and breaking the system.

The frustrating part is that people were saying this kinda stuff months ago, and just got summarily told to fuck off by just about every forum on the internet. "Learn to play. 2k rating is so easy a caveman can do it. Shut up and go back to keyboard turning in AV, scrub." People who apparantly are incapable of doing simple math about the arena curve decided that everyone who didn't get 2k in the first week was a useless piece of trash not worth talking to, and of course that had an influence on the way the system broke down.

If you start telling people that they're not good enough to play, and then rating requirements are instated on pieces of gear, what do you think is gonna happen? They're not gonna bother with your system, and the only people who are going to suffer for it are the people namecalling on boards because they're 2200 and you're not. The problem of people in 3's and 5's not being able to get shoulders is DIRECTLY related to that. Less teams playing = Less teams above the rating cutoff in the curve. It's so simple and everyone ignored it, choosing to wave their e-peen around instead.

The whole problem basically came about because they decided to put required ratings on items before they fixed the point selling. When the have's had their gear, all they did was continually farm the have-nots, and then sell said teams to the same have-nots for their points so they can buy gear that they otherwise would be able to work towards without these teams curbstomping them every day of every week. If they had made it so that gladiator teams had no reason ever to be fighting at 1500's FIRST, and people had been able to segregate out amongst the ratings like they should, less people would have had a problem with putting required ratings on items. When only something retarded like 5% of all arena players are over 1900 because of the amount of point selling teams being leveled up, what did you think was going to happen? Johnny 1500 who should be 1700 isn't gonna waste his time, because he feels he has no chance of ever getting anything. And I can't blame him, to be honest. I said many times that people who are at 2k+ rating have no idea what it was like during S3 at 1500, and got blown off and called a scrub. Well, now it turns out that for whatever reason, all the scrubs quit playing your game and now it's a lot harder to get the ratings you were accustomed to.

Next time, lets focus on trying to make the system better for everyone, instead of alienating a giant chunk of the playerbase and causing ripples that go all the way up to the top. I'm much happier with the arena system now. I'm getting better matches, and I can deal with the progression. The #1 ranked 5's team who still can't buy shoulders isn't nearly as happy about these changes, I'm sure. I have a vested interest in seeing the top of the game happy as well -- if I get hurt at work and i'm out for a few months, the top could be me.

 

Tsohg

I am Johnny 1500. My friend and I play a bad comp (BM Hunter, AP-Pyro Mage- we have had no luck with a control based team). We aren't fantastic players, and we currently play at about a 1600-1650 level. In season 2, we got to 1820. Our experience in S4 is that the 1600s "feel" a lot like the 1750s did back in S2. Meanwhile, the S3 weapon prices (the only meaningful upgrade I am really working towards) have only dropped 50 points? This is subjective, but it certainly seems harder to attain an 1800 rating in S4 than it was to hit 1850 in S3. I can't even imagine the pain of a blue geared hunter, mage, shaman trying to play in the Arena these days- there's a cliff-like learning curve for non-optimal 2v2 setups around 1550 onwards. <Edit> maybe the cliff is actually at 1450 or below and new teams are entering the ladder in free-fall.

My (selfish) hope is that Blizzard will try to keep people interested in the Arena by slowly lowering ratings for some S4 and S3 pieces as time goes on, or change to a dynamic ratio-based system (like they use for awarding ranks) instead of a static PR system before WotLK. Or.. maybe I can find a druid partner and play 30 minute drain matches.

 

Roldrethus

I think an earlier poster had it exactly correct, the skill cap for arenas has risen drastically in the recent seasons. I constantly see people complaining about arenas being hard or their class being terrible and then find out they play 10 matches a week and stop.

Just to give some perspective, I achieved 2.2k a couple of weeks ago in 3-4 days worth of queuing. Sure I'm playing a strong class and I partnered with a good player playing a strong class, which helps at the top, but it's certainly not all that matters. On average I probably arena close to two hours a day. Every day. And I win a lot. Arena takes far more effort than people tend to give it credit for.

But it certainly hasn't been any harder to achieve a high rating, at least in the small brackets. People forget that 3s and 5s are *always* much slower than 2s, just because of the much smaller number of teams queuing and so forth. Organizing people for anything seems to become exponentially harder based on the number of people involved so it's no real surprise.

And yes, at the beginning of the seasons, the ratings are very compressed given that every player is starting at 1500, but as time goes by it will return to how it was near the end of season 4, with the ratings appropriately spread out between the players. The 1500s will no longer be entirely full of fully geared pvp players and the players who are more casual will be able to progress.


On another note, I recently got my alt druid to level 70 and started PVPing. Sure, it's a druid, so it's great at PVP, but doing arenas with blues is still difficult. But not so difficult that I couldn't slowly improved. I didn't hit 2k on my first week, but I did hit 1550. Then I hit 1600. Each time I slowly got more gear. Now I have two pieces of brutal and I'm over 1850. This isn't an entirely analogous situation, since I make good players partner with me, something that someone very new might not have access to, but I have difficulty believing anyone who truly tried is stuck at the 1500s week after week.

As for class combinations, well, aside from obvious things like prot paladins/warriors, I've seen basically every combination you could think of at ratings like 1800 and beyond. Sure, it's much harder and you're probably going to run into an actual ratings cap based on your comp, but the cap is never 1500.

Anyway, to sum up, if you want high ratings, work at it, stop complaining about ILVL 141 epics taking more than 10 minutes a week.

 

• Amera

That was actually the point I was making. Many players want a casual, pug-style PvP to enjoy, and arena isn't it. You have to work at it, find strategies, find teammates, and so on to succeed in s4 arena, more than ever before. Early arena used to be casual - throw together a team and play as little as 10 games a week. Now that will barely get you enough points for a few pieces of gear in 6 months or so, and you won't be able to buy most items anyway.

I'm not complaining about it personally because I'm not a casual PvPer and enjoy arena, but I think it is in Blizzard's interest to rekindle the casual PvP in this game for the players who really enjoy that type of thing, and who the system ultimately depends on.

Fight Club Spectator
Sky of <Transcended>
Selaste of <Serious Casual>

 

Tsohg

My point was more about how static item ratings requirements and deflated team ratings discourages terribles/casuals/non-FOTMs or whatever you want to call them from playing, thus decreasing participation and reinforcing the cycle. I think that maybe got lost in my anecdote about my own 2v2. I know we aren't going to get to 2k as hunter/mage by playing 10 games a week (we've played more than 10 a week and managed 1600!).

 

Lambourne

I agree with this to a point, I'd add that the Arena playstyle itself just doesn't appeal to many people. Arena is very straightforward, put 4 people in a box, fight. There's a reason raid bosses aren't just Hogger with 3 million HP, there has to be more to make it interesting. Once these people have gotten what they could get from arena (which is indeed less and less) they stop playing. I still see many people in full PVP gear doing battlegrounds though, presumably because they like them more. It's certainly that way for me.

I prefer battlegrounds over arena because they offer (apart from the pug-style accessbility you mentioned) more depth and tactical gameplay (making an educated guess which base to attack, recapping towers, throwing yourself at 3 people trying to cap a flag can still be a "win" eventhough you died, if you delay them long enough for the rez wave to hit).

I'd like to see special arena-only gear though, at this point it's sort of required to do arena if you want to do BGs heavily, or fall behind in gear (much like raiding gear used to be required to do battlegrounds before TBC)

 

Traj

Most of this is a matter of opinion. Yes arena is simple in concept but it is anything but in practice. I find all raiding trivial and boring, sunwell couldn't even hold my interest and you could call it a masterpiece of PvE. Arena, on the other hand, is constantly changing. Every season, all though there aren't enough seasons, the dominant comps change. Even back to back games against the same team can