WOW, Season 4. Arena or GTFO

[Zehn - Vhex]

It's to compensate for the -40% damage range on your weapon when you have SoC activated. And since nobody uses SoC in the first place except to judge it on incoming, a fairly pointless change.

[Xequecal]

It's a shame, too, because it would be an almost perfect fix for the SoC/SoB disparity if it was actually just a straight +40% damage to CS. SoB would still be better against high-armor targets while SotC would be better against low-armor targets.

[Needless]

I guess the only useful thing would be tossing a CS before you through an initial SOC judgement.. thats pretty stupid :\

[Clarity]

- Hazza’rah’s Charm of Healing Haste rating reduced.

I hate you blizzard. This was such a pain in the ass to get and now it is completely worthless.

[Xequecal]

The ZG trinkets had to be nerfed. Triple-Mutilate stunlocks and 0.5sec cast Mana Burns are ridiculous.

[Zest]

Stripping 50% of someone's mana through 400+ resilience in a single fear duration was pretty stupid.

[Mippo]

Rather then raise one person's personal rating we went with the idea of starting fresh on a new team. With the new patch people are queueing based on the lowest personal rating so we have faced a lot of 2k+ teams in the 1500's. When we win, we win 20+ points but when we lose we only lose a few points, 1-4 usually.

The problem is that despite the team ratings calculating accurately, our personal rating is taking a beating by losing to these teams.

We keep raising our team rating but our personal rating, due to these losses against very high ranked teams (2k+) is lagging quite far behind our team rating, despite all of us playing every game on a new team formed today.

[Chaotic]

So, lets say you have a 2k team - you invite your friend who is 1500.

You are then matched based upon your friends PR - 1500 in this case.

When you lose to those 1500 teams based on PR, (or win) are you then accorded points based off the PR calculation or the team calculation?


I can't imagine losing to some 1500 team and losing 45 points.

[Rezz]

I guess the moral of the story is if your friend is 1500 rank, start out at 1500 with him instead of taking humongous risks with your 2k team.

[Chaotic]

does that mean yes you do risk losing 40 points? Also don't want to just abandon my high rated teams. I like to play with alot of diff friends. This patch sucks my balls.

[Lejina Bloodbath]

Originally Posted by Mippo

Rather then raise one person's personal rating we went with the idea of starting fresh on a new team. With the new patch people are queueing based on the lowest personal rating so we have faced a lot of 2k+ teams in the 1500's. When we win, we win 20+ points but when we lose we only lose a few points, 1-4 usually.

The problem is that despite the team ratings calculating accurately, our personal rating is taking a beating by losing to these teams.

We keep raising our team rating but our personal rating, due to these losses against very high ranked teams (2k+) is lagging quite far behind our team rating, despite all of us playing every game on a new team formed today.

Hold on, did you keep your high personal rating when moving to a new 1500 team? (which would explain your high personal rating losing more points than your team rating on a loss against high rated teams)

Or, is the calculations messed for personal rating, ie you dont gain/lose the same points on your personal rating on a win/loss than an equal team rating would?

Btw, in my experience the maximum one can lose/win on a sigle fight has been 30. Are you guys tossing random numbers for the hell of it, or is it now possible to lose/win 40-45 points on a single game?

[Clug]

If the average personal rating of the players queuing for a game is more than 150 points below the team’s rating, the team will be queued against an opponent matching or similar to the average personal rating.

So ya, it's not queuing based on the lowest person's PR.

[Mippo]

Originally Posted by Lejina Bloodbath

Hold on, did you keep your high personal rating when moving to a new 1500 team? (which would explain your high personal rating losing more points than your team rating on a loss against high rated teams)

Or, is the calculations messed for personal rating, ie you dont gain/lose the same points on your personal rating on a win/loss than an equal team rating would?

Btw, in my experience the maximum one can lose/win on a sigle fight has been 30. Are you guys tossing random numbers for the hell of it, or is it now possible to lose/win 40-45 points on a single game?

The highest I've ever seen for a win was 29. We had several wins today in the 23-25 range. This team was a brand new team, I started at 1500 personal, with a team rating of 1500. After playing games, my personal rating is significantly lower then my team rating.

It looks like the personal rating is being calculated differently then the team rating, probably based on the other team's personal rating.

If my team is 1600, and we face a 2000 team because their average personal rating is 1600 we could have a situation where winning would net us 25 points of team rating, but only 15 points of personal rating resulting in a 10 point discrepency between our team and personal rating.

It also seems that we could end up with a 1 point loss, but a 15 point personal rating loss to the same team if we ended up losing the match.

I would assume that the personal rating changes are being calculated based on the comparison of personal ratings between the teams. This was never a problem because you faced teams based on your team rating. If you joined a new team (1500 pr) and won against a high rated team, you would get a big boost to your personal because the personal was well behind your team rating allowing the personal rating to slowly move toward the team rating after playing enough games, which, prior to this patch is what happened. Over time, the personal rating always gravitated toward the team rating.

Now that you can be queued based on your personal rating, it throws the whole system out of whack when the team ratings and personal ratings are significantly different. If you play enough teams that are not being queued where they should be, 2k+ teams facing 1500-1700 teams, regardless of winning or losing you can find yourself in a situation where your personal rating is lagging far behind your team rating.

[Zerai]

Makes you wonder if they even test their own system. Sounds like people are going to be getting all their points from personal rating just based on that terrible system because your team rating will keep getting further away.

[Mippo]

There are 2 big exploits I expect to see in season 4.

1) Teams that want to play games for the week but don't want to risk losing any rating will simply use alts to queue up at 1500 now. Let's say you have a 2300 rated 2v2. You play 3 games on your high rated characters, then you bring in well equipped alts and have them join the team so they each have 1500 personal, then you play 7 games against 1500 rated teams to get your 10 wins for the week. The alts obviously won't get points, but that was not the intent. The intent of doing this is so that you can get your 10 games in without risking your team rating. I don't expect this to be very common, but I do expect this to happen.

2) The big exploit in season 4 is going to be people purposefully lowering their personal rating to get queued against lower teams to raise a buddies personal / team rating to the level needed to purchase an item. Remember what happened when you could purchase items when they only required personal ratings? People could just lose until the team was 1400 and just win every game at 1400 and you would eventually hit 1850 personal with the team rating never going above 1500, just bring in different characters to lose to keep the team rating.

This is now possible to do again, and there is no reason to suspect people won't exploit it again.

Let's say you need 1900 and you can't get past the 1800 3v3 bracket, the highest you could get was say, 1850. Well
you have the other 2 people leave and rejoin the team to reset their personal back to 1500 and now you will queue against teams at 1600. If the team is 1850 you will still get a few points of team / personal rating for each victory against 1600 teams, and you can continue to do this until the team and personal rating is over 1900, never facing a team around that rating to achieve it.

For all the people who couldn't quite get over the hump to purchase an item, this will be the way to do it. I expect this to be the exploit of season 4.