Arranged Teams for Arena -or- Let's All Play Together
Making a thread here because people requested it.
It still angers me that I can't play with _all_ my friends in arena, and have to pick and choose between them because I can only put so many on a team charter.
Please make it so we can don't have to exclude some of our friends to play rated arena.
I want to be able to arena with all my friends, and not just some. Team charters frustrate this goal, and make it harder for us to play together.
I'd love to see 'Arranged Teams' for Arenas, borrowing from Warcraft III and battle.net, where each group you play with has its own team ranking, and you get points from your highest arranged team with 10 games that week.
Example:
Arthas, Uther, Sylvanas, Jaina and Thrall want to play 2v2 together.
Since there's 5 of them, under the current system, one of them won't be able to play with the others, unless they make two teams and have people hop between them, nuking their personal rating and making them play a lot more games to catch up pointwise -- a very inelegant solution.
Under an Arranged Team system, people would get points for their highest team.
For example, Week 1 for Arthas
Arthas/Uther, ranked 1600, played 10 games this week
Arthas/Jaina, ranked 1800, played 15 games this week.
Arthas/Thrall, ranked 1900, played 10 games this week.
Arthas/Sylvanas, ranked 1550, played 5 games this week.
Arthas would get his points from Arthas/Thrall in Week 1, since he's played the minimum number of games (10), and it is his highest rated team.
Week 2 for Arthas:
Thrall is on vacation in Nagrand, so Arthas only gets games in with the other three:
Arthas/Uther, ranked 1700, played 10 games this week.
Arthas/Jaina, ranked 1750, played 5 games this week.
Arthas/Sylvanas, ranked 1600, played 10 games this week.
Arthas would get his points from Arthas/Uther this week, since he's played the minimum number of games (10), and it is his highest rating team.
I think it would make it a lot easier to participate in Arena with a wide cross section of
friends, without having to bench or sideline some friends, or engage in clunky team hopping. It worked well in Warcraft III and I think it will work well in WoW.
Arranged Teams for Arena, please, not team charters.
Do you need to retain teams though? What happens if you entirely dispense with weekly arena point dispensations, since Lake Wintergrasp awards arena points as well as honor points, and instead you give people arena points right after a match?
You'd only have personal rating, your personal rating would be averaged with other people's personal ratings to give the team personal rating, and that would be used to calculate rating win/lose. You'd get some fixed number of arena points for playing games, up to a limit per day or week.
I'm pretty sure Wintergrasp only awards arena points for Beta.
However, the point of this thread is to come up with ideas to make it easier to play with more people in arena, without needing to go through the current contortions of team hopping.
Your proposal of arena points right after a match could work, though it'd make it so you'd need to play your games in a particular order; or you wouldn't be able to play with Uther until you had earned points from your games with Jaina. If we could somehow rework it so it wouldn't make it harder to play together, I'd be all for it.
You'd have to reduce the minimum number of games. The current minimum per player is 3 or so.
Also, this is a fair amount of data you are storing. For N players per server/faction, the current system stores a max 3N teams. For N players, the absolute max per server/faction is (N choose 2) + (N choose 3) + (N choose 5). This is vastly more data than the first solution. Now the average amount of data you will be storing is probably much closer to the current system, but it's still a significantly larger amount.
As well, it would probably set back Blizzard's efforts (such as they are) to eliminate Tuesday downtime, as the algorithm for handing out rating for each player gets bumped up to at least O(N) from O(1).
I think this would just lead to a massive increase of rating selling and rerolling because people wouldn't have to leave their main team anymore. Half the games you play at the moment are against rerolls or point sellers (a reason for which I know a fair few people have quit arena). For the average joe trying to get in some fair games constantly playing against a division 1 superstar is demoralizing.
I think the easiest solution would be just to maintain the personal rating regardless of team changes and to base the queing-mechanic on the average personal rating of the players queing. This would remove any problems with team switching.
Hildegard Sprigglespruxx - Wissenschaftlerin am Institut für Pfuschkunde
I think the easiest solution would be just to maintain the personal rating regardless of team changes and to base the queing-mechanic on the average personal rating of the players queing. This would remove any problems with team switching.
I also think this is the best solution, but using highest personal rating might be better.
I think the easiest solution would be just to maintain the personal rating regardless of team changes and to base the queing-mechanic on the average personal rating of the players queing. This would remove any problems with team switching.
This is akin to the "secret rating" Blizzard has mentioned they'll be doing.
That said, I still want to see things done to make it easier to play with friends, and the charter system really restricts that right now.
I think the easiest solution would be just to maintain the personal rating regardless of team changes and to base the queing-mechanic on the average personal rating of the players queing. This would remove any problems with team switching.
Well, one advantage of Arranged Teams is that it allows a competitive player to play with her husband or casual friends without affecting her rating. And letting friends play together is always fun.
But that's also simultaneously a disadvantage, because it makes rating selling trivial. If the competitive player can play with her friends without hurting her rating, she can also play with Joe Random who paid her a large sum of gold.
Well, one advantage of Arranged Teams is that it allows a competitive player to play with her husband or casual friends without affecting her rating. And letting friends play together is always fun.
But that's also simultaneously a disadvantage, because it makes rating selling trivial. If the competitive player can play with her friends without hurting her rating, she can also play with Joe Random who paid her a large sum of gold.
This won't make point selling going away, but it will let people play together.
I firmly believe we shouldn't penalize people from playing together in an attempt to prevent people from selling points. But that's what the current system does. It does nothing to stop dedicated point sellers but prevents folks from playing with friends.
I think that if you don't want to play competitively in a competitive arena then do skirmishes or queue for battlegrounds as a party. Thats my solution for you within the current patch. Actually I'm fine with your idea - but with a catch. Whatever route Blizzard chooses, as long as it keeps A league players from playing in division D, I don't care who they play with, only against.
As others have said, the obvious solution is to just remove team ratings altogether. The current personal/team rating system is really silly as it punishes you for anything other than slavish devotion to a single team/set of players. There's no reason not to just queue at the average personal rating (which is what is done anyway if your average is more than 150 points from the team rating). All the current rules are just patches trying to cover up the fact that team rating stopped mattering in S3 when they tried to stop point/rating selling by adding personal rating and increasing its importance.
Current system:
(a) Punishes changing teams to play with friends
(b) Punishes inviting said friends onto the same team if they are of different skill levels.
(c) Allows rating tanking exploits since personal rating can be reset
(d) Dilutes the meaning of ratings as the season goes on because new teams can be created (creates more points in the total system).
A personal-rating only (can never be reset per bracket) system:
(a) Allows for pick-up teams and teaming up with friends at a limited risk.
(b) Allows for friends of all skill levels to play and learn together.
(c) Prevents rating tanking by taking points from players based on proportional rating.
(d) Makes the ratings much more interesting numbers that are directly related to the number of people participating in the battle group, not the number of teams created during the course of the season.
The current system of arena discourages casual PvPers. It use to be I could jump from team to team and play around with different freinds, guild mates, and random people to have fun and experiment with different combos. This all changed when PR started to reset. PR rating and many rules were put into place to discourage point selling - I do not understand why PvP point selling is so bad and PvE gear selling is okay (or at least ignored by Blizz).
These two types of selling - PvE gear and PvP gear/points - are basically the same. Person A pays person B an amount of gold, in return person B gaurantees person A something in return (gear usually). I personally think point selling should not be aloud, the "cost" of the current rules hurt and discourage many people. For example, I have always been casual and now that I am engaged I am becoming even more casual. I have over the last season changed the way I play to make me a better player, I keybind most everything, use mods, read strats and blogs to do more "research" about abilities and certain groups to become better. I have improved considerably, but once I get a decent rating I do not want to switch teams. I am afraid to try new partners, and not willing to put in time with new players who have potential because the "cost" to me...my PR gets reset, my ability to get points (short term) is hampered, and I risk upsetting my partner(s).
If I was one of the best PvPers in my battlegroup - then I would play with some of the best. I would get every PvP item quickly, and not have to worry about points or rating (unless I needed a title) until the next season. But I am casual, so getting most to all the items I can is hard, takes many months, and hampers/slows the "farming" of PvP talent on our server. I no longer look for new PvP talent, and neither do many of my freinds (I am on some of the best arena teams on my server - top 80 for the battlegroup in 5's). Blizz has forced my hand, I am content with one team and don't even consider other peoples attempt to arena with me anymore. I feel for all other casual and semi non-casual players who are in the same boat.
Yes, this is exactly the boat I'm in. Due to increased work and a breakdown of my guild's raiding schedule I no longer raid, but still have T5, S3 and badge gear from when we were pushing through Hyjall. There is no incentive for me to PvE currently, but I always enjoyed arena. Since the middle of S3 it's been impossible to do arena casually, which has really hurt creativity. It used to be that I had a set 2s team with a guildy, but a larger group of 1800+ pvpers on the server would pickup 3s or 5s every week. Now the server is a wasteland. I spent 4 hours looking for anyone with 1500+ experience who was willing to join my 1700+ rated 3s team last week. This just felt wrong (although the final combination of shockadin, mage, rogue turned out to be super fun...looking forward to playing next week).
One idea that just popped in my head; should there be some kind of reward for playing more than 10 games per week? The more games a person plays, the faster their rating becomes a more accurate reflection of their skill. The reward could be something as simple as 1 arena point per match played.
I guess my hope for this would be that it would increase arena activity at all ratings, making the system work more smoothly and encouraging less skilled players to play more often, thus feeding some points into the system.
09/26/08, 6:31 PM
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