panny

Boosting a player is fine, since that player has to actually perform well to get there. It's win-trading that allows people with horrid specs/gear/skill to get shoulders.

 

rehtonAesoohC

I'm assuming you're talking about Warsong here... It's my experience that Warsong can turn into hour long grindfests that just end up boring you to tears. I'm sure it's great fun for a better geared team to faceroll other players in the middle, as you mentioned, but in my experience, you'd be better off "PUGging" Warsong, or sticking to one of the other 3. The other 3 battlegrounds at least have guaranteed win/loss conditions set up, and won't go on indefinitely.

 

• frmorrison

There are two new 227 haste weapons for Season 4, there is a Mace and Dagger version.

What I really like is the developers finally made a weapon that is best for PvP and it will make a big difference in your PvP encounters, but not so great for PvE.

 

tommtomm

The two most common forms of points buying that I run into are:

1) A 2000 rated team sells the team to some scrubs and then quit the team and start a new one. The problem here is that to get the next team up to a selling point, they plow through a bunch of lower geared and skilled teams who should never have had to have those losses on their record.

2) A 2000 rated team adds two well paying scrubs to the roster. The good players play 7 games, basically winning them all vs. low geared players, and then the two scrubs play 3 games. The two scrubs get their points since they played 30% of the games, and they get points based on a 7-3 W/L record.

In neither of these scenarios does the buyer have to perform well.

Boosting a player is not fine. People should earn what they have. I'm not talking out the side of my mouth here either. If you armory me, you will see I'm on some really suck teams and my PR is sub 1500. I play with a descent resto druid who just got his resilience up to 300 this week, and a 61/0/0 mage who has 50 res and a + healing gem in his chest slot. We are sub 1500 for an easy to see reason. The reality is though, that I have 30k gold too. If I wanted a higher PR and all S3 gear, I'd have it in no time. Instead, I'm having fun loosing with some guildies, while I constantly bitch at them to work on their specs and gear. I will never buy points; it’s just not honorable in a competitive environment.

Saying boosting is alright, but win trading isn’t clearly identifies a player as someone with a high PR who is ticked about cheating, and therefore their rank vs. the cheater, but is willing to cheat the system when it suits them just to make some gold. Do what everyone else does, look up the How to Make Gold thread and earn that too.

 

McTurok

Neither of those two ( 1 or 2 ) are viable options come next patch are they? Isn't that was we all are talking about here?

And the way I read is post when talking about "player boosting" was (4 and 1 - 5's) or (2 and 1 - 3's) where they were basically leveling a player to get them the rating.

Personally, that method doesn't bother me because the quality pvp'ers will figure out who the weak link is make the proper adjustments.

 

panny

I have no idea why you're lecturing me since I don't sell points. Neither of the two methods you outlined is boosting.

 

gummy2

If your group was a premade than it is a fair fight. Their group was melee heavy, try cc'ing. If they outgear you than sure they might have more kills on the scoreboard, but the objective of WSG is to return the flag.

 

Bula

Boosting to me would be playing with your lesser geared and/or skilled friends and trying to help them achieve a rating because you are a nice person.

The scenarios you are outlining are simply outright selling of rating and points which are two really different things.

I can't see how you can hate on someone for trying to help a friend accomplish something. Do you have such hatred for people who run guildies through SM?

 

Blackburn

Unfortunately boosting will also be the only form of point selling in S4 due to recent PR changes. So Blizzard really should do something about that too, even if it meant that I will not be able to help out my friends anymore as a result of it (that's what my 2v2 and 3v3 has been all season... helping out guildies).

And it's not really viable to compare arena team boosting to power lvling of lowbies through instances. To use your example, running friends through SM doesn't prevent anyone else from running SM at the same difficulty as everyone else. Boosting your friend's teams means beating on weaker players in lower brackets hence ruining their gameplay experience and making their competition at that rating lvl harder than it realistically should be.

 

Bula

You can't really say you are beating on weaker players in lower brackets considering your team itself has a weak player and you are in the low bracket. Just because you choose to help them get their goal doesn't necessarily mean you are ruining anyone else's gameplay. For starters, once your friend accomplishes their goal of a weapon, or whatever, if they continue to play with you and raise rating they are holding their own and you are no longer "boosting" them, they are simply just good. If you are still playing and not raising rating because they aren't that good, then you are not going anywhere, and in fact are helping other players by keeping points in the system. Overall, more players in the system makes the system better, no matter the reason that they are there.

 

Blackburn

If two 2k quality players are helping out their 1500 quality friend, they should be facing teams 1800-1900 rating from the start. They introduced this thing where teams will get matched up with lower rated teams if their average personal rating is lower than the team rating (which is actually stupid imo... since it makes it easier to boost teams at a slower but more secure pace by leaving and joing the team over and over again), so it should work the other way too. A player should get marked with their personal best, like a hidden parameter of their potential, so when they leave or join any team that number should be used for their matching. This way boosting your friends, or more problematically point buyers every week, will force you to play at a lvl of difficulty higher than the team's rating.

So in the example that I gave, two 2k and one 1500 player would have an average rating of 1833, and those are the kind of teams they should be facing right from the start. If the 1500 player is not good enough to compete at that lvl, then quite frankly he doesn't deserve that gear, that's the whole point of rating requirements.

 

Bula

The point is if that team makes it to 2050 then they by definition have earned it. If their poorly geared friend is holding them back from reaching 2050 then the team is unsuccessful and are doing nothing but feeding points to better teams. If the team in your scenario can only reach 1700 rating and they pound teams below it but can't make it any higher then that is that teams maximum potential and faulting them for not being able to get higher even though their gear is good is asinine.

So the team has to defeat 3-4 "1500" rated teams to get to their maximum potential rating on the way. Seriously is that the end of the world?

 

Blackburn

It would be more like 10-20 wins to go from 1500 to 1700. And yes it's a huge deal when every point seller is doing it every week, several times a week, for several different teams. See where I'm getting at now? The problem is not the once per season occurance that you seem to be referring to, the problem is the people that abuse the system by boosting various teams over and over again every week, screwing over all those who are trying to do it the legit way.

If the team is indeed capable of reaching 2050 even with a player that just started at 1500, then they won't have trouble reaching it even if they start off facing teams in the 1800-1900s right off the bat, and they will avoid the bashing off all the lower rating teams as well. So it's a win/win scenario. You get to play with your friends, they get the gear if they're good enough (and actually get there faster if you can keep beating higher rated teams), and people way below your rating don't get screwed in the process. On the other hand, point sellers have a lot harder time boosting scrub players to whatever rating they're paying for, certainly something many of us would be more than happy to see.

Sometimes I really wonder what kind of people Blizzard is hiring when they can't come up with such simple solutions to problems that have been plaguing the game for months/years.

 

Bula

Except the system is being changed. Why are you arguing about things that were only possible in the old system reoccurring in a new system where the rules have been changed? In the new system if you power level teams multiple times you are doing so because you are sadistic, there is almost no benefit to it. Blizzard will never be able to curtail this type of thing because it is on the players to be honest, and a lot of people simply aren't. What's the point in saving someone's "all time high" personal rating on a team when they could easily just take off their gear and lose 20 matches and tank the team instead of quitting and re-joining? How is Blizzard going to stop that? They do item level checking on gear? OK, now you queue without gear on and get even easier teams. The only way this ever stops for real is if people stop being idiots. Blizzard is doing the best they can in a tough situation imo. Granted they created the situation for themselves but at this point that's not really what it's about. It's about fixing what we've got, not lamenting the past.

 

Blackburn

You better read the patch notes again, the problem is not solved. The only scenario they've fixed is lvling up a team without any point buyers on it, then selling it off to someone who only cared about arena pts and not PR, and then going off to lvl up another team. The personal rating boosting that team sellers have been doing all seaon hasn't changed at all. There are dozens of thousands of people incapable of achieving desired personal ratings on their own, and team sellers that have been taking them along on their teams and boosting their personal ratings for gold. It's been happening all season, and it will continue happening in S4. If you really don't see a problem with it you're either being ignorant or just not very creative.

And if this is Blizzard's best then they're doing a piss poor job at it since I just gave one perfectly viable solution, that took me a whole of 5 minutes to think up, that would perfectly balance out team boosting. And whoever said the personal best I was referring to had to be tied to gear? Use your imagination. All player data is nothing more than an entry in some database. Adding an extra field for personal best that gets updated any time you surpass it would perfectly suffice for behind the scenes matching algorithm regardless of what gear you're wearing or what team you're playing on.

 

Bula

If people are selling personal rating by sharing account information and having people play their toons there is a entirely separate set of consequences for that which should be enforced.

Edit: I'm dumb.

Edit2: Another reason why that simply wont work would be due to the fact that classes have several specs, some classes even have more then one viable arena spec (gasp). Personal example, I play a resto druid that can achieve 2000 rating in 2v2, no big accomplishment there. However, as feral spec I'm terrible and so is my gear. If I want to try a 2v2 team as feral spec am I supposed to play against 2000 rated competition because that is my "personal best"? That makes no sense to me.

 

Warmike

After skimming through most of this thread, it amazes me that there is such strict comparison between PVP and PVE accomplishments.

Getting PVP gear takes more time than many people seem to believe. But in any case, the rating system does not change how fast the players get gear. 1800+ rated teams still get the gear as fast as they always did. This rating change, however, only serves to keep players who chose certain classes a year ago from getting new PVP gear. It's not only about skill in arena. In raiding, just about all classes can succeed, In arena, that is not so true. Hunters and other classes lose by default, regardless of spec. If they are going to tie ratings into gear, they need to make the setting balanced for all. Resto druid and MS warrior 2v2 vs holy pally and MM hunter? If both teams have similar gear and are equally skilled...is the end result pretty much pre-determined by class choice? I tend to think so. You need to either be extremely skilled or have a team that carries you to succeed with certain classes. In raids, you are not usually at a disadvantage because of a class choice you made a year ago.

Seriously, if ratings were wiped from the arena system, at 400 arena points per week (very conservative), it would STILL take 32 weeks to get full S3 gear right now.

Vengeful Breastplate 1875
Vengeful Gauntlets 1125
Vengeful Helm 1875
Vengeful Leggings 1875
Vengeful Shoulders 1500
Weapon 3750
Stat Stick 1000

Does anyone think 8 months is too fast to get that gear for the average player? I've seen people walk out of raids with 2-3 new pieces of gear per night, often those that were not even there when the group was learning the content (Pugged players or what have you). The only difference is that you can kind of estimate how long it will take to get PVP gear, whereas in raids it could take 1 night or many months to get what you want.

I don't think it's fair to require ratings for most PVP gear when that gear can already have a substantial time frame to get in comparison to raid gear (can take a new lv 70 1 week of Kara to get 2-3 new epics for example). To get arena gear you need to get the points each week, sometimes 8-10 weeks for 1 weapon, and there is really no honest way to get around the waiting period (outside of point buying which is also done in raids to an extent). In raids however, a person can get lucky and get that shiny new piece in their first night (unless there's strict DKP requirements).

The current system also let's the better geared teams keep the equally skilled, yet newer entry teams/players from achieving their goals each season. It feels like, if you didn't start with max gear from previous seasons, trying to catch up in the present system is next to impossible.

In closing, before my ratings get brought up. I do arena as a hunter with my feral druid wife. We fight hard each week to maintain 1500-1600. Are we elite PVPers? No. But we only get 300 points a week. Even without ratings on gear, do you know how long it takes us to get a new piece? Should we not be able to get 50% of the S4 gear simply because of our classes/specs? Should I leave my wife and play with a person that made a better class choice? The same would never be called into question in raids. All classes can succeed with equal skill outside PVP.

My only other option is to stop PVPing as there are no rewards for my maxed out pool of honor/points with too low of a rating to use them. That just doesn't seem like a good business model.

 

mofidik

Rating requirements are there exactly so that you need to be a somewhat skilled player to achieve high quality gear, granted you need to find a suitable partner (if your wife respecs resto, that's arguably one of the better 2v2 combs there and then, although it requires lots of skill). I really can't see how you think the system is flawed because you don't get stuff when you're simply not "winning" in the system. And what system doesn't work like this? It works exactly the same as any character advancing system I'm aware of: You get better gear meaning you advance in some way to where you'll meet more technical and stronger oponents. Gear is nice and shiny, but if you don't have to work for it, half the fun is gone because half of the advancement curve is gone. Don't take that away from the masses that actually want to have a serious go at arenas. Have you considered the arena system is entirely just too hardcore for your preference at all?

Also you might want to be careful with your claims of class viability. Every single class is vialbe in every single bracket, if you chose to play the wrong spec that's your problem, but the only thing you could argue is that you can't find a suitable partner or you're a fresh PvPer. Even in the case of gear, it's always nice to point fingers and not blaming your own lack off skill, but there's plenty players still wearing some S1 past 2k.

 

Touf

The raid analogy is pretty flawed. Yeah, you can walk in and get 10 pieces in a night, but you failed to mention the 24 other people that carried you, especially the geared tanks and healers. You can get lifted to a decent rating on a 5v5.

 

• Yes

As a feral druid and a hunter combo with your skill level you are 1500-1600 rated. You should be happy. You're still 'better;' more then half the population that arenas. Compare the amount of gear the average raider gets itemlvl to itemlvl to a 1500 rated arena player!

My other main | My PvP Blog

 

morohtar

Oh come now, as Alliance in many battlegroup (mine for sure), we lose a large (best guess, 75%) majority of BGs...so we have to lose our way to honor and marks. Why would I feel arena is any different? Wow PVP rewards losing, albeit slower than winning (ie, 1 mark per BG instead of 3). You can lose in AV and still get more honor than the winners.

I am not saying it's impossible for any particular class/spec to win, but you also need to be careful with what you feel is "viable". I am saying that raiders can succeed equally as any class or spec. In arena, a prot tank, pally, or feral druid are not going to do very well. A hunter and other classes have to be more skilled to beat lesser skilled players by default. There are some classes that do poorly at every bracket. This is simply not balance or E-sport. It was fine until they started bringing in rating requirements. I didn't mind doing mediocre with my wife in the past because I knew there was a reward coming, even if that carrot was a mile away. Now I have 5k arena and 75k honor, and I may not even be able to spend much of it in S4 (aside from the honor and points I get while in S4). So is it in Blizzard's best interest for me (and the others like me) to just quit since I have no reason to continue?