Why is arena at the end of a season so much harder than the start?

PVP Arenas
1

Heya :wink:

So when I play Solo Shuffle and regular arena at the start of the season I’ve been able to climb up to 2.4k at my highest rating.

However, whenever I start late in a season, like right now. Its pretty difficult to get up to the same ratings like I do at the beginning of a season. But for some reason this season its even worse. I’ve known for a long time I’m playing a lot of glad or higher ranked people on alts etc and not many people are queue’n up so it made sense to face harder (more dedicated) opponents at lower ratings. But now the rating grind seems much more difficult late in the season. For instance in 2v2 i went on a 10 game run from 1550 to 1650. for 10 games all got was 100ish points, then when i lose its significantly more rating. I was used to this more around the 2k-2.2k bracket.

So did i miss some changes over the last couple seasons?

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It isn’t.

Crimson shuffle MMR was borderline bugged with how plentiful it was.

It’s generally much easier to push later in the season.

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I hear what your saying but i feel like atleast at the lower mmrs I face glads 75% or more of the time. whenever i Armory thats always the case based off achvs. Or im facing a brand new account with glad level like playing which im assuming is just boosted accounts they are selling.

At the beginning of the season you face a mix of player experiences not mainly glads on alts + people making money with pvp services. after the first two weeks is when things really open up and theres more lower rated players playing at low rateds because the higher rated players are competing at much higher ratings.

This is a trend I and friends of mine have noticed for many expansions, its nothing new. I’m not sure why you think rating is easier to grind now in the current season rather than the first 4 weeks of the season.

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Because you can actually get rating at this point in the season? First 4 weeks of the season like 3 people were over 2400 worldwide.

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So your saying the people your playing now from 0-2k are just as highly ranked as the people you play from 0-2k in the first 4 weeks of the season?

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The people at 2k at the start are now the people at 2400 currently for the most part.

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i was at 2.4k in SS by week 2 in season 1 so i don’t think 3 people were at 2.4k by the end of 4 weeks. Also are you saying that there not less of a player base later in the season? Thus the player base that remains are the more “dedicated” players and making it more difficult, alts etc.

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This feels like an extremely low-effort troll.

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I think it’s just that they’re comparing how stuff feels now to Crimson.

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It’s the opposite. o.o!

Comp diversity is at its highest near the end.

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What is blud yapping about

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This right here is your problem.

Everything else is false rationalization. You’re coming to the wrong conclusions ignoring numerical facts about arena and replacing them with conjecture to fit your hypothesis.

This season is harder than Season 1. This Season is harder than Season 2. MMR is lower across the board, particularly for RSS which was majorly inflated in previous seasons, especially 1 where your reference point is coming from.

MMR inflates over the course of the season so it is objectively easier to get rating the later in the season you are.

Everyone in this thread is telling you the same thing.

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In case OP or anyone else is curious, I will explain how MMR variance occurs.

It is not some magic lever in the sky that big daddy blizzard is actively pulling and controlling; it’s almost entirely hands-off (although can be adjusted remotely).

The single most impactful cause of “inflation” is, has always been, and will always be player participation.

For an analogy to picture this (not responsible for clean up), I want you to fill up a glass of water and dump it out on a hard surface. Measure the spread, or area.

Now, fill up a gallon jug with water and do the same thing. If done correctly, I’m sure that you’ll notice the gallon jug poured out has a significantly larger spread. If you were to do this 10000 times, the average of the gallon jug area would be SIGNIFICANTLY higher than that of the cup of water (unless you have some super weird cups).

This is how mmr range and inflation works. At the start of the expansion, there are always WAY more people playing than any other season. People always come in and try something new and exciting and rarely see it through in MMOs nowadays. However, even if they quit after a week, a month, or six, they have still added their data to the sample pool if theyve played their placement games at all, and increased the range and caused inflation.

Now realistically, no one player is forcing inflation by themselves by playing on 10 alts, not even bigdam and his squadron of shaman or petkick and his division of DKs. However, when you have anywhere between 2 and 10x the population because a new season/expansion is exciting, it’s easy to see how mmr rapidly inflates.

The genuine truth of the matter is that if every single wow player was to read a post on wowhead or reddit and Q up 20 games or so tomorrow and play a couple games a week, you’d see literally hundreds of points of inflation, if not over a thousand, between now and the end of the season.

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But it worked none the less.

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15

Now, there ARE levers that blizzard can and does control. While the exact formula for the system has not been shared, there are at least two control “levers”. First is the artificial weekly inflation.
-There is an argument for inflation and an argument for decay, but in general they function similarly in terms of practical outcomes but inflation rewards everyone while decay really only punishes people who don’t play as frequently.-
This weekly inflation is something like average MMR increasing by something like 1 pt a day (arbitrary number, idk exactly what it is) that makes it easier for people to reach their goals later in the season, encourages participation and reduces stagnation, and prevents people from just sitting rating because people who regularly queue will build up more inflated mmr and finish higher.

The other lever is the mmr “cap”. I can do a separate post explaining how elo-based mmr systems work with math, but that’s a lot of math which I think most forumgoers both hate and struggle to understand so I’m going to move past that for now.

I haven’t pvp’d before bfa, but ONLY TWICE since then has that cap come into play, and that was in s1 of bfa and s1 of shadowlands. People reached that cap astonishingly quickly because both of those seasons had a MASSIVE influx of pve players dipping their proverbial toes into pvp because there were pve rewards for pvp. Now, these systems were almost universally hated which (while ironic because pvpers almost always have to pve) is a fair complaint. That being said, once people see or hear or recognize they’re at a cap, they often just stop Qing or pushing entirely and the ladder stagnates.

When people talk about “deflation”, what they genuinely do not realize is that the best and most effective way to “fix” that “deflation” (in quotations because it’s mathematically NOT deflation, just a LACK of INflation) is to literally Q up.

Tl;dr stop making posts asking blizzard to fix mmr or inflation. Just press Q and the system does it itself.

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People get so mad when I tell them to blame their friends who aren’t playing for the “deflated ladder”.

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welcome to smurfing these player always start a new character with fresh MMR on they character so yes you will cross more R1 and glad player my guild currently does it to have more a easy time to climb the ladder

it’s is stupid ? yes it is

is blizzard will do something against it ? no they will do nothing

i did suggest it on the forum that MMR should be account-character wide so that these player will stop gatekeeping the ladder and also there boosting also that doesn’t help

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OP got 2400 in solo shuffle in the most inflated relative season in the game.
I got 35-3600 cr in solo shuffle on 2 druids, but I’m not going around telling people I’m a 3600 xp player because I recognize that that’d be disengenuous and is also not an accurate representation of my skill.

OP is, on average, a rival player. There is nothing wrong with that whatsoever. It’s important to note that that 2400 dflight season 1 and duelist slands s1 are outliers due to inflation.

Then you’re playing around your mmr, which is totally okay!

I’ve grinded all the transmogs for every class every season and I never experience this. This just reads like another boosting rmt conspiracy tinfoil hat post.

I got baited with math :frowning:

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??? No one is doing this to “smurf” or “stomp low elo” players. Your mmr goes up INSANELY fast if you winstreak. I played some fresh games with a friend on shaman yesterday. We started at like 1684, then went to 1950 after the first win, then 2k, then 2050, then 2100 (lost here), then 2084, then 2100 again. Man was in greens and we were playing literal 2-2.2k players with the exception of what felt like a single “placement game” against a 1500 cr hunter and 1900 cr rdruid where the hunter was S-key backpedalling and keyboard turning.

We gotta stop this mass multiglad gatekeeping low elo conspiracy.

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We all do. lol I’m on another thread pointlessly telling people that healing in a starshower of random CC isn’t fun. No one on this forum is looking to make good use of their time, you’re good dude.

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