WOW, Season 4. Arena or GTFO

[TheCutlery]

WoW Forums -> Season 4 Requirements and Arena Changes

While Season 3 is still going strong, we wanted to announce ahead of time the rating requirements that will be present for arena items once Season 4 begins. We also wanted to give everyone a heads up to some changes that will be in an upcoming patch, altering how points are gained and players are matched in the arena system. The patch with these changes is scheduled to release before the start of Season 4.

First though, the rating requirement changes:

When Season 4 begins, Season 3 items will be reduced in personal and team arena rating requirement to:

Shoulders: 1950

Weapon: 1800


The new Season 4 items will have the below personal and team arena rating requirements:

Shoulders: 2200

Weapon: 2050

Head: 1700

Chest: 1600

Legs: 1550

Gloves: none

Off-hand: none


In addition, some of the Season 4 quality items that will be purchasable with honor will also carry a personal and team arena rating requirement:

Boots: 1700

Ring: 1650

Bracers: 1575

Belt: none

Necklace: none

Trinket: none


The Season 2 items, which will move to the honor system when Season 4 begins, will continue to have no rating requirement.

The changes to the rating requirements for these items reflect the nature of the items, their power, and the relative difficulty that should be had when attempting to obtain them. These items are comparable to those found in the newest 25 person raid zone, Sunwell Plateau, and should therefore also feel very challenging to obtain.


To help ensure that the challenge in obtaining these items stays true to those achieving these ratings, we'll also be implementing new rules with an upcoming patch to curb practices that undermine the core concepts of the arena system.

These rules are as follows:

"If a character’s personal rating is more than 150 points below the team rating, they will earn points based on their personal rating instead of the team rating."

This means that a player cannot join a highly rated team and begin earning points based purely on the pre-established rating of the team before they joined it. They'll need to compete, improve, and gain a personal rating worthy of the points they would receive.


"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."

This means that players cannot join a highly rated team and immediately face highly rated opponents, easily and quickly bringing their personal rating up. Instead they'll need to again compete, improve, and earn their rating.


We're excited to see these changes implemented, which will continue to emphasize the strong competitive nature of the arenas, and the challenge in obtaining the highest end rewards available for PvP

Discuss.

[Chanur]

I think its a silly change on the ratings requirements, I dont mind the normal arena items, but Arena ratings for honor purchasable gear, is just a big what the fuck.

[Lejina Bloodbath]

Yeah seriously. Need arena rating to spend honor? What's next, need marks to spend arena points?

Also, with so many items being tied to rating, I can see a lot of scrub teams saying fuck it, not bringing points in the system and thus making it harder to get high rating. I can picture most of those at 1500 and lower buying their gloves and off hand on day 1 then not bothering to play season 4 since they can't buy anything else anyway.

[CabbitCabbit]

Arena is indeed serious business

[Vardisk]

Two biggest unaddressed problems by these changes:

1) Being able to reset your personal rating at will.

2) Personal Rating selling teams. (which are a far far bigger problem than point selling teams ever were)

Really if they just made your personal rating permanent, and not reset to 1500 every time you dropped a team, that'd go a long way towards getting rid of PR selling teams as well. (With the new matching changes)

[Kodylan]

The arena rating required for the honor items is indeed dumb as hell. They should just make them purchasable with arena points if they're going to do that.

[The Ancient]

I agree with what you say, but it looks like those convoluted rules they added make it much more difficult to sell personal rating. It looks like they made it so you'll have to play many more games with a team to get a desirable personal rating.

Regarding Arena points on honor gear. Who the fuck cares? What else do you need honor gear for? 1700 is a fucking joke to get to.

[TheCutlery]

Originally Posted by Vardisk

Two biggest unaddressed problems by these changes:

1) Being able to reset your personal rating at will.

2) Personal Rating selling teams. (which are a far far bigger problem than point selling teams ever were)

Really if they just made your personal rating permanent, and not reset to 1500 every time you dropped a team, that'd go a long way towards getting rid of PR selling teams as well. (With the new matching changes)

This is my feeling as well. Shit like this guy The World of Warcraft Armory shouldn't ever happen. You mean to tell me this guy competes seriously at 2k rating wearing fucking greens? You're full of shit. And this isn't the gear he logs out in, I saw him in AV which is what got me started looking. No fucking way you will ever convince me that the most gear dependant class in the game can hit 2k personal rating on his own accord wearing anything less than the best shit possible.

Other random musings. I see why they want a rating requirement...it's already getting quite ridiculous with anyone who's anyone in the game running around in essentially T6 gear right now. They're basically handing out BT quality loot to anyone who can muster an hour a week to PvP. That's kinda fucked up. It definitely should be limited, and that's why they're throwing the rating requirements on the BG shit as well.

That being said, this is either going to be the most fantabulous thing for arena ever, or the biggest disaster, completely destroying the entire idea. Either more people are going to realize that they need to actually try to get geared up, increasing competition, making better matches for all, or anyone who can't muster 1550 is just going to stop playing, meaning that if you were 1500 before, you're 1300 now, and then you quit, and then all those fucking jackasses who spout shit about how 2k rating is so easy to get are going to be at 1800 and literally unable to move upwards at all. This will basically destroy any and all competition on smaller/less competitive battlegroups. So I hope for their sake, it works out like they hope it will. If that's the case, you're gonna need a lot more than gloves and an offhand for me to keep logging on my 1450 alts and feeding the queue.

[Clericnon2boxed]

I am considering just banking 5k arena and 75k honor and see what I can get for that at level 80 in 9 months or whenever the expansion is supposed to be released.

Think they gonna reset points at some point or will they put level 80 stuff on yet another form of point / token system ?

[Xurlitil]

This is the best change ever. Mainly because I'm going to be making a fuckload of gold selling team/pr rating.

Also idiots don't deserve purples. Yeah.

[Mist]

Originally Posted by The Ancient

I agree with what you say, but it looks like those convoluted rules they added make it much more difficult to sell personal rating. It looks like they made it so you'll have to play many more games with a team to get a desirable personal rating.

Regarding Arena points on honor gear. Who the fuck cares? What else do you need honor gear for? 1700 is a fucking joke to get to.

It's a fucking joke to get to now. However, it still represents the top 10% of the current ladder. When the other 90% of the ladder stops queueing up, it's going to be a lot harder to get to 1700.

[Vardisk]

Originally Posted by The Ancient

I agree with what you say, but it looks like those convoluted rules they added make it much more difficult to sell personal rating. It looks like they made it so you'll have to play many more games with a team to get a desirable personal rating.

No, they do absolutely nothing to stop PR selling teams. Teams sell PR by making a brand new 1500 team with either 2 or 4 people in full S3 gear, who know how to play their shit well enough to get 2200 or 2400+ rating, and then play games with some random scrub as their 3rd or 5th player. And because they have 2/4 amazing players they are easily able to roll scrubs up to 1850 so the newb on their team can get that spiffy S3 weapon.

If Personal Ratings were permanent, when they rerolled that new team they'd still have 2200+ personal rating, and immediately start off against 1900ish rated teams, and wouldn't be able to win with that one scrub on their team.

[The Ancient]

Originally Posted by Mist

It's a fucking joke to get to now. However, it still represents the top 10% of the current ladder. When the other 90% of the ladder stops queueing up, it's going to be a lot harder to get to 1700.

So you don't get to wear the very best PvP boots in the game without proving a modicum of worth. How terrible.

No, they do absolutely nothing to stop PR selling teams.

Ah. Forgot how that worked. Yeah, I've no clue why they make ratings reset, it's fucking stupid. What's so bad about computing an average rating and facing your opponents based on that. They killed team play in Warcraft 3 with a stupid team system as well.

[TheCutlery]

Originally Posted by The Ancient

Ah. Forgot how that worked. Yeah, I've no clue why they make ratings reset, it's fucking stupid. What's so bad about computing an average rating and facing your opponents based on that. They killed team play in Warcraft 3 with a stupid team system as well.

Yeah, they need to stop resetting ratings at a whim. There's no purpose at all that it serves besides fucking over the 1500 bracket.

Want a new team name? Here ya go, start over at the rating you were at.

Want to try a new composition? Great, you and your 2100 buddies all get to start at 2100, because you're fucking 2100 players. What's that? Need scrubs to practice on? It's called Skirmish, fucking use it.

Want to PL your 1500 friend with 4 of your 2100 buddies? Great, you start at 1980 to work his rating up. Can't win at 1980? Guess your buddy isn't fucking quite ready for the big time, now is he?

There is NOTHING wrong with any of the above scenarios happening as a result of keeping your PR permanent. Either add it to the list up there, or don't bother doing any of them, because it won't fix shit.

Also, it's gonna be funny when the number 1 team on a BG can't buy shoulders because their BG isn't competitive enough to support a 2200 rating in that bracket.

[Vardisk]

Originally Posted by Mist

It's a fucking joke to get to now. However, it still represents the top 10% of the current ladder. When the other 90% of the ladder stops queueing up, it's going to be a lot harder to get to 1700.

The whole point of these changes are to get the top 1% of players out of the 1500 and 1600 brackets, that way players who are SUPPOSED to be in those brackets (but aren't because they get rofflestomped by 2200+ rated players) can actually get into them.

I mean for fucks sake, when I pvp on my paladin alt in 3s brackets we were in the 1800 rated bracket for the first half of the season. But for the past 2 months, 80% of the teams we play against are 2200+ rated teams that rerolled and can easily own us, so we lose 8 out of 10 games and drop own into the 1700s bracket, where we easily dominate the normal teams we fight, but still come up against 80% point sellers, lose all those games and drop down into the 1600 bracket. For whatever reason we get much luckier in coming up against normal teams in that bracket and just completely annihilate all of them, but wtf are we supposed to do when 80% of our fucking games are 2200+ rated games that we have zero chance against and just lose game after game to week after week?

That's ALL the Emberstorm battlegroup is, normal players have just completely stopped even playing arenas because if you're 1450-1850 rating you will have a net loss of rating every single week because 80% of games are against point sellers.

Get rid of the point sellers ruining the entire 1450-1850 range, and the people that are supposed to be in that range will slowly trickle back in.