Blizzard recently removed titles from 2s and 5s, meaning the rewards pool has dropped significantly again. Seasons are going to be the shortest they’ve ever been. Player participation in arenas dropped massively across WOTLK. Boosting & cheating for ratings and rewards was rampant, and drives a lot of RMT.
I really love queuing arenas, but feel like there’s this inverse effort → rewards curve as xpacks evolve and more players stop queueing arenas. I get better at the game, but the player base dwindles and the reward pools dries up. It’s got to be insanely frustrating to new players.
A few hundred players will likely get gladiator this season, ~200? Compared to the thousands of spots that existed in retail the first time around. It just feels like a dated system to me, and one that doesn’t scale down well at all.
It’s controversial, but I really think they should open the pool up to 3%+ or make it rating based like in retail. 0.5% was an arbitrary number they picked when the population playing arenas was WAY bigger.