After playing arena for the last few days of season 2, I believe that there is a problem that Blizzard needs to address. Top players are being paid by players for a variety of arena-related services and boosts. This post is not concerned with the idea that players are paying other top players to play WITH them, but only that they are paying them to play FOR them.
A common pattern that I saw was that three top players would join a team with a single player that was paying them. Two of the three players would queue games with the buyer and boost them until their rating on the team was within 100 points of the gladiator cutoff. To be clear, while I believe this is lame, I do not have a problem with this and if the player is capable of playing the games and getting to the rating then I believe it to be acceptable. However, once the buyer was within 100 points of the cutoff, they would sub this player out for a third top player and boost the team another 100 points such that it was within the cutoff range for gladiator while still keeping the buyer within the required personal rating range.
In my opinion, this really ruins the experience for the majority of players that actually try to push into the gladiator cut-off range. It creates an environment where 1) people that didn’t earn the rewards are getting them and 2) players have to play against top players that are queuing significantly below their actual MMR, which makes losing much more punishing than it should be.
I would like to propose two potential fixes for this problem:
Remove arena teams entirely and use the retail system of an individual player ladder. I believe this is the best solution because it completely removes the issue while also allowing players more freedom to play with whoever they want instead of being restricted to their team. However, I realize this is unlikely because I would expect it would take a lot more effort and doesn’t stay as true to the original TBC system.
Adjust the personal rating requirement such that players must be within 20 points of the team instead of 100. This would mostly fix the issue as players that wanted to be boosted to gladiator would have to be good enough to actually play with the boosters for nearly all of the games. The clear drawback to this is that it punishes legitimate teams that have a roster larger than the bracket size. In my opinion, given that there aren’t a significant number of teams that use a larger roster than the bracket size, it would be worth it to make it harder on them in exchange for cutting down on the boosting. This seems like a good option because it should take nearly zero effort to adjust this number.
In summary, I believe that boosting a player without the buyer needing to play the games should not be allowed and has a detrimental affect on arena, particularly at the end of the season and near the gladiator rating cut-off. I think that the most straight-forward fix would be to drastically reduce the allowed team rating/personal rating gap so that players looking to buy boosts would have to at least be capable of playing the games themselves.
Pvp is dead in this game, 90% of the wow community just buy gold and raid log, arena community is just same small group of people that sell boosts lol.
I’ve always hated the idea of “boosting”. Lots do it for gold but there is probably a sizeable portion who do it for RMT. Even the ones doing it for gold probably buy their gold from Indonesians creating another problem all together.
The ladder already has enough issues and boosters kinda ruin it for everyone else.
Multiple R1 players team hop in order to boost teams, who would normally not be eligible, into gladiator range.
There are TONS of teams in glad range that have 1 person on it with ~90 points under cutoff. https://ironforge.pro/pvp/team/Benediction/2/1230051/ https://ironforge.pro/pvp/team/Benediction/2/1257013/ https://ironforge.pro/pvp/team/Benediction/2/1239011/
All of these players had R1s boost their team into range when they were unable to get it playing themselves. This isn’t even going into the people who are getting piloted.
In a lot of situations, such as popular stream payo, it’s technically 100% within ToS and the game rules. (Assuming no IRL money is passing hands in the background) It does, however, go completely against the spirit of arena and is unsportsmanlike to the extreme. Hell, from what I hear payo even wanted to play it out himself since they had they were close and snutz was like “nah” before bringing chan in to finish the games up. It’s just complete scumbaggery from players who are seen as respectable pillars of the community
I really hope blizzard does a strong look at the ladder and makes explicit rules about this. R1’s team hopping in order to get their friends into range at the last minute (without their friends even playing) steals legit spots from other people. For those who think being 90 points off is OK, I need to expressively say those 90 points can be unbelievably challenging to gain during the final weeks of the season when competition is fierce.
Getting carried is one thing, because at least you’re still playing. Getting boosted into range is a whole other issue that really needs to be addressed. Removing teams would do wonders, but I don’t think that’s in line with TBC unfortunately
This has literally always been a thing, up until when the arena system was changed in retail. It may not be ideal, but the grand majority of teams out there are not being boosted, and you can quite easily dodge the ones who are. Complaining about it wont make you the better player. Just saying.
I have an issue with people paying someone to play their character, but I dont have an issue with someone paying for people to play with them. In this current iteration of TBC, with arena participation being as bad as it is, its no wonder why people are just offering gold for top level players time. Hell, If I gave a damn about arena I probably would do it myself. The fact that some of them are just using the system to their advantage and getting within 100 rating, the players who are just playing “normally” have access to the same system, and often times they also use it to their advantage as well. I don’t necessarily think that this is some big problem, but hey who knows…
Edit: id also like to point out that this happens in practically every modern competitive game to ever exist. The top players just inherently gatekeep the high brackets by selling carries and just conspiring with each other. This makes it a lot harder than it has to be for an average player to climb and actually compete for a top spot. Its the nature of having a system where the titles are a % of the bracket instead of a flat rating.
The point of my post is that rather than the arena community settling for a system that allows this type of boosting where buyers don’t even have to play, blizzard should instead remove something that clearly allows abuse. Just because something existed a certain way back in the day doesn’t mean we should just accept it forever.