That’s okay, he did a pretty terrible job of explaining what happens and then got annoyed and dismissed the conversation.
So in original TBC, brand new teams started at a rating of 1500. Based on your win rate, or lose rate, your rating would increase/decrease. There were some issues with this, largely with people who were ranked really high, because they had enormously long queues while waiting for players in their rating. The majority of players were in the 1600 range, so doing your ten games a week A) took a really long time, since there weren’t many players in your rating bracket and B) were extremely punishing for losing. Imagine waiting several hours to play a game, just to lose and take a huge rating hit.
So what people did to combat this, were to break up their teams, form new teams, start at 1500 rating, and then win their 10 games with relative ease, take their points and go about their business. It was a decent strategy for getting points. Good players would actually end up getting their points more easily by playing in a 1500 rated team, than a 2200 rated team, since there were so few people to match against.
That was the ELO system. The ELO system is Kindof what is used in chess to determine the ranking of a player and their likelihood of winning a match etc.
The problem with that system was that it’s really designed for single player rating. It doesn’t really take into account the likelihood of a team of three or five winning a match, because the variables are so much more intricate.
So in blizzards attempt to combat this, they created an MMR rating. The MMR rating is an individual rating applied to each member of the team. Regardless of what your teams rating is, your MMR rating is reflective of only YOUR actual success as a PvPer.
This rating was then used to match you with teams of equal skill. So if say you had a 2’s team with a player who had 2200 rating, and another with a 1100 rating, your teams average MMR rating is 1650. That means your team would be matched with other teams who had an MMR rating that averaged around 1650. So in the match you might have a 1100 and a 2200 on one team and two 1650’s on the other.
This sounds all fine and dandy up to this point, but what blizzard did; was they made it so that any time someone starts a new team, the rating of said team begins at zero. That means that your brand new team, with a 1650 MMR rating will match with other teams who have an MMR of 1650. That sounds okay, except your actual team rating is 0.
This means that assuming you win all ten games that week (unlikely since you will be against equally paired opponents) your rating will climb so slowly, because the points are based on your rating, that it’s barely worth the effort, unless you plan to be extremely committed.
Starting at zero basically means that people who planned to very casually play arena, have very little incentive to. That in turn means the people who want to take it seriously have very few people to play against. Furthermore, it makes the climb to those required rating to purchase items so far outside of reach that most people who just wanted a BiS weapon won’t bother.
It basically thinned out the herd so much that it killed arenas.
Unfortunately the zero entrance rating really killed
