Most of the arena system functionality is now well understood and fairly transparent. In general, if you're running the same team, making a new arena team won't do anything. Your hidden rating will still be the same, and your team rating will quickly move towards reflecting that.

Essentially, although you started a new team at 1500, your hidden rating carried over from your former team (and indeed, any 2v2 you've done this entire season). You're getting matched up against teams with ratings around 1400 (or whatever your hidden rating is), so when you win it doesn't move you up much. But losing against these terrible teams will hit your team rating hard until you get down to the same level as your opponents.

Once your hidden rating and your team rating are approximately equal, you should see your team rating increase and decrease in a predictable fashion. The exception to this is if not many people are queuing at the time and the system is forced to match you up with someone not in your rating range.

This latter event happened to my 5v5 team when we got to 1680. All of a sudden we were forced to play against the #2 team in the Battlegroup, who beat us 7 times in a row. They gained 7 points for the series and we lost 7.

As for the first point, not really. Right now, even though you have a 1500 team, you're still getting matched up against 1400 teams because that's what your past 2v2 record has said you are. And when you lose to a 1400 team as a 1500 team, you will lose more points than you would have won if you were to win.

You'll stop seeing the -24/+7 results once your team rating matches your hidden rating, which is determined as I previously explained. If you were 1400 on your prior team, you won't start seeing those +12/-12 kind of results until you get back to 1400 (or rather, 1440 or whatever your hidden rating will be with your increased winning percentage). Until then, it'll keep trying to put your team rating where it properly belongs.


As for the second point, please read the rest of the thread where it is mentioned multiple times that gear does not factor into rating calculation.

My impression of the system is it requires 100-200 games to be played before you even get anywhere in the system. What I am finding is since the system was put into place, more quality teams and pvpers are seen throughout the entire bracket.

My problem with the system, which is many, is the fact that it was put into place in the middle of the season, like every other season prior, getting to 1800-1900 in 20 games was easy, it wasn't until about the 1900s before you started seeing any real competition. Factor in people reaching this rating along with a new system, what you got is people getting 2200+ who really do not belong past 2000. My server which is a PVE server has about as many good pvpers on it as fingers on my hand. What I see is several teams (about 20 I guess might be more) up in the 2000+, 90% of these pvpers are not too good either, but its the same bunch who could not break 1900 in the previous system over the course of 4 seasons.

In S1-S4 you could go 20-0 and be at 1850 with no problem, but now it seems as soon you start out, you are facing about half the teams you would of normally saw at 1900 prior to the change. I know this due to style of play, pillar humping, and gear, I even ran into a Flawless Victor mage in the 1500s.

What does not make a whole lot of sense with the system is why have a team rating? Why does the hidden rating start out at 1300 if team rating starts out at 1500? But it gets far more complicated then that also, I looked over the armory since they made changes to it to view match history and all, what I find is the system tends to pair you up with teams anywhere from 50-100 team rating points higher then you. Which has me asking the question, how does teams win and gain 5 pts, lose then lose 20 if the match pairing is like it is?

One of the biggest jokes for pvpers I see going on in the blizz pvp forums is people telling each other, they are bad, they should not to lose to baddies, its the biggest bunch of crap I ever heard, but its the blizz forums, but at the same times, these people saying this, is the same people who probably do not even belong where they are atm anyway. I honestly cannot wait till S6 for a few simple reasons.

#1 I want to see anyone who got 1900+ before the changes actually climb to 1900 in S6 ( I truly believe 2/3 of the crowd will not reach that pinnacle)

#2 The rating system should be more balanced to where everyone starts at 1500 TR, 1300 HR, none of this system changing in the middle of the season that is putting bad players at the top.

Quite frankly I have had more trouble with teams in the 1500-1600s then with teams in the 1700+.

I mean heck if I can by pass all of these double DPS teams that rape my shammy partner, we going to destroy all the DK/Paladins that is up there, we beat that comp all the time easily.

Arena season 6 rating system announced

Matchmaking rating being displayed means it will be possible to understand how much long past / recent results influence it.

As casual arena player, I am really happy with the changes. Matchmaking rating means I shouldn't be opposed to newly reformed glad teams as was the case in S2-S4 (my 2v2 team tried to stay in 1450-1550 when we played, once every 3 weeks). As I guess my pve talented 3v3 team is now worth between 1200 and 1300, starting from 0 means I no longer have any incentive to disband and recreate team each time we play, just to maximize arena points (I never did, but I hate knowing I would have add better gear doing it).

This is exactly what was brought up by myself and others back when they first implemented rating requirements on gear. It is what you would expect - if you cease to reward people who are below a certain threshold, they stop participating the moment they realize they will not cross the threshold and the next group up becomes the one that is cannibalized for points - until they stop playing and the cycle repeats. Discouraging team reforms, as you say, only exacerabtes this by removing one of the few supports the system had left.

It's the same dynamic that has burned anyone who took a curve-graded honors only course in college. Suddenly you have to work damn hard for a B because there are no more scrubs.

While less from ideal, the situation described is in my opinion a whole lot better than the sillyness we had in S2 and S3 where people could basically lose 10 games a week for 3 or 4 weeks and pick up gear (especially weapons) far beyond anything they could acquire in their raid progression.

In my opinion the whole problem comes down to 1 thing: people are driven by the ability to acquire gear. This is *especially* true for PvP, where there are no e-peen rewards for anyone but the top 1%. The reason why Wintergrasp is so popular is because it awards a lot of honor for little time spend. The reason why the amount of arena teams has dropped by 65% is (among others) because there is no real reward for a lot of effort.

The S6 rating requirements combined with the hidden rating queueing system looks like a middle-ground between the two, as long as it still takes a reasonable amount of time to actually get to 1200-1300 if your actual 'skill' is at that rating. New teams starting at 1000 after the first half of the season makes me think it won't be the case.

My concern at the moment is that any team rated below 1500 is getting points as if they were 1500. With the prices of the items as they are, that means the average 10-losses-a-week team will have all the toys they can acquire with their 1200 rating in 6 or 7 weeks and then will leave the arena's again because there's nothing to gain for them, putting us back at the situation of today.

Another consideration is that with Naxx as it is, people can easily get the best PvE gear available by just joining random pugs in the weekends or being in one of the dozens of new "casual guild we have 2 bank tabs, a tabbard and Naxx on farm" guilds that sprung into existance since WotLK. If Ulduar normal-mode is at the very least out of range for the majority of the guilds that now take 3-4 nights to clear Naxx and Malygos, more people will revert back to arena's to get their epics. If Ulduar normal mode turns out to be the pushover it has been on PTR, I'm afraid arena will slowly bleed to death.

With how bad PvP gear is when used for PvE purposes, nobody will "come back to arena" just to get gear they can't get in Ulduar - because even the S6 gear will most likely not be nearly as good as naxx-25 gear for PvE purposes.

In PvE the more PvE you do the more gear you get and it takes forever to actually have everything. In PvP it only takes a while to get everything if you actually have high enough ratings for it, and if you don't you'll simply never have everything no matter how much you play, at which point people stop playing.

I don't really see the point in having (high) rating requirements on all the gear. It's already going to take a long time to get decked with 1000 points a week, with 200-400 points a week you're probably not going to have everything by the end of the season even if none of it had rating requirements. I only had a good partner for the last ~3 weeks and only missed about 2-3 weeks of getting points for the whole season, and earned in total 6682 arena points this season. This isn't nearly enough to even buy 1/2 of the gear, rating requirements or not. Worse players than me would have an even much harder time to earn enough points to buy everything, so I really don't see the point in not allowing them to use the small amount of arena points they did earn. Rating requirements on very few pieces (say, T2 weapons and 1-2 of the top set pieces) would make sense, but not an absurd "only a couple hundred teams per battlegroup" kind of limitation, considering the massive amount of players in an entire battlegroup. Gear should be something everyone that don't suck should be able to get eventually, with the good players getting it faster/easier. Otherwise, you'd have the bad players have no chance to retaliate even if they actually learn to play, because their gear just isn't good enough to get up there.


As for the actual rating/matching system, it seems to be overall doing its job, however I don't like how long it takes for your personal rating to reach your team rating when you join a new team - playing 10 games while keeping the team at the same rating should be enough to at least get you very close to the team rating, as if you're a 1500 skilled player playing in a 2k rated team, I doubt you'd be capable of keeping the team at 2k after playing 10 games. Also it's still not clear to me how hidden ratings are supposed to work when 2 players of different hidden ratings team up - will the higher one stay high forever as he's supposedly "carrying the team" and thus the other one never reaches the team rating? Do they slowly drift over time to the team's rating regardless of differences? Is it as slow of a drift as the personal rating one?