Please Make Changes to Arena Teams and Personal Rating

WoW Classic Wrath of the Lich King Classic Discussion
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With the way how arena teams, team rating, personal rating, and MMR currently work, it is very difficult to find new partners and to play arena games suitable to your skill level. In fact, it is hard to play arena games in general.

Your regular partners may not always be online to queue with you. If you happen to want to play some arena games, you’ll either have to leave the team and join another or invite someone new. This presents a few problems.

When you leave a team and join another, your personal rating is default set to 1000 (same with inviting someone to your team. Their personal rating starts at 1000). This causes the MMR of the team to drop dramatically (basically to around 1000 MMR no matter what the personal rating of the other player is). This forces you to play many games at low MMR in order to build up the personal rating to be able to play games suitable to your skill level.

This leads to lower-rated players in the ladder being decimated by these higher-rated players grinding up their personal rating. At the same time, it actively discourages people from joining new teams/inviting new members because of how much of a chore it is to increase their personal rating. It took me nearly 15 wins in a row to get back to 1900 MMR after inviting a new team member before we were finally able to increase our team rating from wins.

The second problem is that you are required to play 30% of the games on a team in order to be eligible for arena points at the end of the week. When you join a new team with existing games played, you must first increase your personal rating to within 150 of the team rating and also play enough games to have 30% participation. You may have to stop queuing if playing more games causes another player on the team to drop below 30% participation. Again, this discourages hopping around to different arena teams, and playing arenas in general.

I believe that if these mechanics were changed, there would be many more people willing to queue arenas. Casual players who do not have dedicated teams would be able to easily queue, causing ladder participation to increase. Here are some changes that I propose:

Your personal rating should not be reset when changing/joining new arena teams. This will make it so that teams wouldn’t have to mop the floor with lower-rated players for hours until they finally get to play against similarly-skilled players. It would also be easier to find partners with similar ratings. Currently, the only measure of skill you can ask from a potential partner is their supposed arena experience/current team rating. If the new player happens to be bad, your team rating will quickly tank.

Arena points should be calculated based off your personal rating (the new personal rating I suggested), not team rating. You would still require 10 games played in order to be eligible. This makes it so that if you swap, leave, or are kicked off a team, you would still be eligible for arena points. You wouldn’t be bound to one arena team for the week.

Thank you all for reading. I hope this sparks some discussion and that changes are made. I just want to play arenas.

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i like your intent, but not the proposed changes

i am also fine with people hard sticking to teams, like in good old days, you knew team name + comp + players name, right now theres bunch of 3-4players 2v2 teams

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Thanks for your reply.

I think the novelty of being in an arena team only applies to high rated players who have a name for themselves in the PvP community. Nobody is going to remember your team at 1700 rating.

Arena teams work well if everyone on the team agrees and is able to play at the same time. For casual players without a PvP network, it would be frustrating to find consistent players to queue with.

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PvP guilds and set times up with your partners.

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PvP guilds might make it easier to find partners to queue with, but it doesn’t address the problem of MMR being set to 1000 and having to grind up your personal rating every time you play with a new player.

Sure, you could set up designated queue times with your partners. But it would be great to be able to queue whenever you want.

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Thats how it was. You want MMR with no teams go play retail

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I know that’s how it was. I’m hoping for it to change. Sure, I could just go to retail, but right now I am interested in playing TBC arena. I believe that it could be so much better if changes were made.

Saying I should just go play retail because that’s just how it is, is like saying horde should just go play retail if they don’t want 1 hour queues.

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Horde should go play retail if they complain. I agree with that statement.

Its how TBC was. People want retail things in TBC classic. Its not gonna happen.

Not trying to be rude but what you described is retail.

The teams is what made Arena great in TBC. It was like a raiding guild. I was in a PvP guild and we had set times to play with each other. We created great teamwork and ranked up pretty well. Retail things take away the community aspect and thats what makes TBC great. Adding retail things to the game will kill TBC.

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We already have retail things in TBC classic. Changes have already been made, and still can be made. Retail LFG tab will probably be implemented soon, which will help with every aspect of the game (PvE and PvP).

Yes, what I described is exactly the retail version of arenas. There is a reason that teams were eventually done away with. Perhaps changes can be made while still preserving the integrity of arena teams. Perhaps keep team rating as the number that is used for end-of-season title calculations, or keep the requirement for team rating in order to buy gear.

Again, arena teams are a novelty. You can have a set group of players that agree to play at designated times to queue even if arena teams weren’t a thing.

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What retail things do we have?

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boosting, for one.

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Alright ill give you the boost

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Boost and store mount are the only things I can think of that are the same as retail.

I think everyone can agree that we are already far from no-changes. There are big changes such as paladin seals and druid energy. They were made to improve the quality of gameplay of TBC classic. In fact, there has already been changes with regards to arena. Points were increased below 1500, and personal rating now starts at 0 instead of 1500.

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Just because changes have occured does not mean that they should just keep changing more aspects of the game.

This is the strawman argument that people try to claim doesn’t exist while at the same time advocating for changes because we already have changes…

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Agree with alot of the things said in the post. It would be nice to be able to find partners and get into arenas easier.

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17

I’d like to see if any other people have thoughts about this and may want changes to be made as well (bumping for visibility).

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I’d like to see some data as to the rate of team swapping, to see if it is actually impacting the lower brackets. Is this traceable with some of the census type sites out there? You could imagine a graph with rate of team swapping, compared to amount of games played in various brackets. Seeing high team swapping matched up against an inflated, say 1600s bracket would indicate there is a larger than usual amount of players in that bracket that are more highly skilled, than would otherwise be expected.

I think the point (from what I can gather of the OP’s argument) is that the representation of players and associated skill levels at lower ratings is bottle-necked, as more skilled players battle it out to get their teams’ rating to match their skill, leaving lower skilled players at the bottle-neck.

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I feel like there is some potential for a massive abuse of this system if left like this.

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How’s the ladder looking now, boys?

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