Do something to fix arena points SOON

WoW Classic Cataclysm Classic Discussion
1

As we all know, arena teams back in TBC started at 1500, and rating changes were zero-sum, meaning that if one team lost a game for 10 points, the winning team would gain 10 points. The result of this system was a meta where many people would play their 10 games per week, and then disband and reform the team is the rating got so low that their point gains were impacted. Because of this meta, points were constantly being fed into the system by reforming teams, and everyone had a minimum number of arena points they could expect at the end of the week, otherwise they’d just reform.

The retail rating system that was forced on us in TBC Classic works very differently. Teams start at 0 rating, and can get up to 1200 before they can start losing points and have to really compete. The result of this is a meta where there’s a high barrier of entry (since you have to play 10-20 games before you even reach what’s effectively the new starting rating), and has a significantly lower starting rating, which greatly affects the majority of teams. Gladiators are still very high rated, casual arena players just in it to lose 10 games a week are still very low rated, but everyone in between is getting screwed.

To put this into perspective, the cutoff for the Challenger title is currently just a hair over 1400. What that means is that the top 35th percentile are currently 100 points below the original TBC starting rating. I’ll repeat that for emphasis: the top THIRTY-FIVE PERCENT of teams are currently ONE HUNDRED POINTS below the original STARTING rating. This is an enormous problem, because it means everyone between the 50th and 90-95th percentiles is getting hundreds of points per week fewer than they should be. Let’s look at that 35th percentile again: currently, at 1400 rating, they’re getting about 250 points in 2s and under 300 points in 3s. At the original TBC cutoff of around 1650-1700, they would be earning 400-460 points in 2s and 470-530 points in 3s.

And all of this is doubly a problem because we’re looking at what’s probably going to be the shortest arena season in history. Everyone’s already bored of T4 content and clamoring for phase 2 to be released. If we get another 6 weeks of phase 1, it will mean that the average player will barely be able to buy one single piece of arena gear. And if T5 is released early but season 1 is allowed to continue on, many people will stop queueing arenas entirely as the gear will no longer be relevant. The brackets, which are already incredibly small due to predictably low participation that was obvious when these changes were announced, will shrink even father and we’ll start seeing gladiator titles awarded to teams that don’t even have the rating to buy shoulders.

Something has to be done here. I think the most obvious solution would be to adjust the rating algorithm to better fit the original TBC curve, but if that’s too big of a fix to be rolled out in a timely manner, I would suggest either a blanket increase to points awarded or a reduction in arena point costs.

17 Likes
2

this seems wrong, ive lost points in the 800 to 900 range

1 Like
3

Yeah on my main I’m past the lower points but I have a friend who just plays casually and he says that at 1100 he is actually struggling because he is hitting geared players and he gets next to no points.

The new arena system is trash for tbc. They made it SLIGHTLY better than what they were going to do but for casuals it’s trash

1 Like
4

I agree with the sentiment, but I’ll also point out that there is a lot of artificial inflation in the TBC arena system probably to offset the lack of a 1500 start.

Overall it “feels” ok. I do agree it should have started at 1500 tho because it’s a nice feature for new players to try out the system and not be so far behind on rating if they start over or try new things.

At the end of the day it’s just a casual game, they should never have monkeyed with the way the teams start.

1 Like
5

Back when they posted the changes every serious arena player said it was an aweful change. Starting at 0 also makes it incredibly hard to pick up new teamates.

2 Likes
6

I’m not really sure why they tried to make arenas extra-casual friendly to be honest. The combat in TBC already does a decent job of being easy to learn / difficult to master all on it’s own. The idea that we would remove the gold-sink of players trying to pay to stay @ 1500 for an extra piece of epic gear every few/several weeks seems a little silly.

It’s like, get good and climb, or don’t and pay to recreate your team at a more neutral rating for better points… I feel like that system was a fine trade to begin with.

4 Likes
7

How do you find the current cut off for challenger.

8

Where exactly are you seeing arena cutoffs to prove that challenger is at 1400?

9

The inflation obviously isn’t working, because 80+% of players have lower rating now than they would have had in original TBC. About half of those are very low rated players, and blizzard buffed the arena point rewards for teams under 1500 to help mitigate the effects of the new rating system, but they’ve done nothing to help mid-high rated players. Teams around the 35th percentile are most affected, with their points cut by a third or even half compared to what they would have been with the original rating system.

I can’t post links, but you should be able to find it if you search for “tbc arena title cutoffs,” or you can just calculate them yourselves using any of the arena standings sites.

10

I agree with the OP’s post 100% it should never have been changed, but also I think part of the reason for higher low end ratings in OG TBC was because they start at 1500 and you can constantly re-set.

Again not saying it should not be made original, that’s the way it should be because that’s how it was.

Also I believe you, I don’t need to look it up man.

11

Yeah, other people were asking about the cutoffs and apparently I can’t make two posts in a row.

Obviously Blizzard was made aware of the point reward problem since they increased the rewards for low rated teams, but those changes don’t fix change anything for most people, and there’s huge problems now for a large portion of the player base and no one’s really talking about it

2 Likes
12

I made a post about this a week or so ago, but everyone was too busy QQing about battlegrounds.

TBC classic is geared towards the super hardcore and everyone else who doesn’t play TBC classic as a full time job will get left in the dust if you like to PvP.

Honor gains are stupidly low so even if you had instant queues it would still take months just to get a blue set if you did BGs all day, and arena point gains are stupidly low for 95% of the player base that virtually none of the gear is obtainable.

I play probably 50+ 2s comp games a week and have not budge past 1200 rating. As soon as we start gaining ground we get hard stomped by either comps that just counter my comp well or we are out geared and lose because we just don’t have the output we need from our gear to win. My partner has a full time job and has 1 piece of blue PvP gear (shoulders) and the PvP trinket and that’s it. He doesn’t have time to farm BGs all day, and the only reason I have PvP gear is because I farmed a bunch of BGs in prepatch when blizzard made honor gains way higher than they were supposed to be.

The result of all of this is we fall farther and farther behind gear-wise and get roflstomped in PvP by players who managed to get their hands on some PvP gear, especially the arena gear. In a few more weeks once the top 10% or so have multiple pieces of arena gear, they will be like fighting raid bosses to everyone else because resilience is extremely important to winning in PvP.

3 Likes
13

Couldn’t agree more with this post. These topics don’t get enough attention and arena participation plummets and soon it will be just like retail where even if you’re at the top, it doesn’t matter because no one is queueing anymore.

14

this is why I quit, dont want to do millions of hours of bgs to gear up, also dont want to be stuck at a rating due to no resil that will get me full arena set in over 1 YEAR!!
GREAT DESIGN!!

15

I just dont get it Blizzard.

I´m a Orc now, even playing my hole life as Human, I came to Horde to play with my friends. We dont need to mention how hard is to farm 150k honor with those 1 hour queues. It took me 4 days playing 10hours/day when HvsH was on and I made 15k Honor. It´s impossible for who work/study/have a life to achieve the full pvp gear.

It would be easier to make an arena/bg mode witch erveryone has the same full pvp gear as default and only skills would mather.

Unfortunely those absurds grinds, on tbc and retail, are the main cause to scare new players.

16

Yeah I’m ok with buffing the arena point system to match what it was. I’m also very excited to get my first piece of arena gear this week. The chest is a 53 resil upgrade for me. S1 pieces are so big. Nothing new, the people who sat honor cap at prepatch and abused the mail recovery for tokens will be so far ahead of everyone else by the mid point of s1.

17

I didn’t arena at all back in the day. You can lose points?

That’s for a new team. You can recruit nee teammates to an existing team, if needed.

18

Since gear is part of the achievement of PvP, you’d be removing the huge carrot that’s used to encourage participation.

1 Like
19

Gear has always been a part of the carrot on the stick, however, it was not nearly as difficult to get PvP gear in original TBC. I remember farming out a few pieces of PvP gear on a weekend and marks being the bottle neck to the honor PvP gear. Now, I took a week off from work, I literally PvP’ed BGs all day and farmed out in the world/quested while I waited for BGs to pop managed to get 1 piece of gear in a week.

Arena gear was also much easier to get. You could just make a 5 man team, do 10 games, and get 400-500 arena points maybe more if you won most of your games and played a few more. This whole starting at 0 has basically screwed over the majority of the playerbases change of ever getting arena gear. It is also not in the spirit of what TBC was about and Arena will become stale with very fiew people queue to do them once they see the writing on the wall that they will just never manage to push past 1200 rating and get a measly 250 points for the week. In 6 weeks, they may have enough to buy 1 piece of arena gear! Great system Blizzard!!

1 Like
20

I got 2 pieces of gear last week… Almost a 3rd. It’s pretty much the same as I remember. Honornus best earned by actively participating in battlegrounds. The arena points thing seems like it’ll be fine, but I’m only on week 1 so far.