WoW Arena: Ratings get nerfed, but is it the end of the world?

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Recently, the powers that be at Blizzard made some changes to the way Arena Ratings work. In essence, this is the next step in their quest to stop the rampant point selling or team boosting that has been happening since the early days of The Burning Crusade.

In all honesty, I don’t even see what the point is. If there is one thing World of Warcraft has been good for in recent times it’s handing players gear. Just look at how fast all the casually tuned content was cleared in Wrath of the Lich King.

Keep in mind that I quit WoW quite some time ago, but I keep my ear to the streets and there is one thing I am sure of: This game has become way easy. In a game that seems to hand you every piece of equipment on a silver platter these days, why do they even care about Arena points anymore?

The new change basically adds a super secret double probation rating to your World of Warcraft toon. So now you have your original team rating, your personal team rating (what you’ve contributed to that team), and your big-brother-is-watching-secret-personal-rating that follows you from server to server.

If only I could play in the Nagrand Arena, my life would be complete.

The main goal of all of this is to stop boosting and create an all-around more balanced experience for players; I guess I have to applaud Blizzard for that.

I sat down with my old WoW friend Stuck (currently 2300+ rated in 2v2) this week to see how high rated players feel about the changes.

Even though he has gripes, he notes that at first frustrations arise but it evens out quickly.

Stuck said:

If your team rating is below your character’s rating, your team rating will always tend to ‘drift’ toward your hidden rating. If your team is 200 rating below your hidden rating, and you beat a team lower rated than you, chances are you’ll get a very decent amount of rating for winning, just because your team rating must drift towards your hidden rating.

He does note that the major problem with the new system is the randomness with which it was implemented and the fact that it was done mid-season.

Stuck also mentioned:

This system seems to be an improvement over the old one. However, Blizzard made one mistake: they should have waited until the beginning of a new season to implement this. When they implemented this system, it took a while for the hidden ratings to even out [in the non-zero sum system]. This means I was winning a lot of games for 2 rating and losing games for 10-15.

Now that the rating is basically evened out though, the system is a lot less frustrating than the old one. Gaining 7-13 points a win, roughly, and losing only 3-8 on average, it’s not easy for your high rated team to get farmed down just from a counter [group] or an unlucky game here or there. It takes longer to raise a team up, but I see it as a more accurate measure of rating.

I guess that makes the verdict pretty simple, from an old school WoW player that quit over frustrations, I don’t see the point. From an ACTUAL WoW player that is highly involved in the realm of Arena combat, the system works (pretty well actually). My dislike of the system only comes from the fact that PvE gear is a gift, and we all know that’s where your real epeen should be coming from.

All joking aside, props go to Blizzard for actually taking initiative and trying to balance Arena combat. It’ll help the new kids from getting farmed by remade teams, and it will help the highly rated teams from falling miles just because they face a counter team and lose hundreds of points in a night (or just log off and log back on when the bad players are online).