[WotLK] PvP Rating requirement and starting rating

WoW Classic Mists of Pandaria Classic Discussion
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With WotLK coming later this year, I’m curious to hear what everyone’s thoughts about rating requirement for PvP gear and starting rating is now that we’ve played through the entirety of TBCC with the arena changes that differs from original TBC.

For context, the following are the difference between original TBC and TBCC in terms of rating requirement and starting rating:

  1. Team/Personal rating started at 1500 in original TBC versus at 0 in TBCC.
  2. Original TBC would match your personal rating to the team rating up to 1500 rating versus TBCC which would match it up to 1000.
  3. Season 1 and Season 2 of original TBC had no rating requirements on shoulders and weapons, unlike TBCC.

Another change with WotLK is the removal of team in favor of personal rating.
Taking that in mind,
What are your thought looking back at TBCC arenas on this topic?
What changes would you like to see for WotLK and why?
Are there any other arena related changes for WotLK you think are worth discussing?

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You wanna know how I really feel about rating on PvP gear?

Remove it completely.

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Gate-keeping PvP gear behind strict rating requirements is what kills the playerbase and makes boosting that much worse.

The top PvP players should be rewarded with titles, mounts, cosmetics etc not with higher damage/health.

Remove rating requirements from the PvP gear and
-ADD RBG’s to WOLTK.

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Zero reason to have any rating restrictions on gear. We all saw with TBC Classic that contrary to the original run of TBC, the welfare epics were raining from PvE rather than PvP. The whole point of gating PvP gear back in the day was because Blizz wanted the difficulty of acquiring gear to be the same on both PvE and PvP sides of the game. Well, PvE is a joke for the most part and everyone and their dad has tier 6 for free.

They should completely remove all rating requirements from gear in Wrath moving forward. Rewards for being a good PVPer are the glad mounts, titles, arena achievements, etc.

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I know it’s not really the topic but i 2nd rbgs being added.

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Arena rating on gear is a good thing as it creates goals to reach. What’s bad is when arena only has 10k people playing at most and the gear cut offs are high. When you have a million people doing arena like in wrath the requirements made more sense because it was generally easier to climb.

I can for sure tell you a 2k-2.4k player now would have been a gladiator/rank 1 in original tbc. Even at 2-2.1k mmr you chain queue into rank 1s.

The other problem that needs addressing is the constant arena booster spam that ruins all aspects of a rated ladder.

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Restrictions on PVP is fine. Your rewards are based on what you deserve via your skill level and your efforts.

That’s how end-game gear progression should work.

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If an arena player is going to be allowed to walk into a random BG with all his powerful gear, a solo random BGer should have the opportunity to acquire the some of the same gear.

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top players also earn gear quicker so they get and increase their edge anyway

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and antil social undergeared are the best pawn chum to destroy we need those ranks to swell as they chase gear

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I’m perfectly fine with rating locked gear.

Was fine with it back in TBC and for TBCC.

Especially when there is no transmog, shows a person can be proficient enough at their class in arena.

Also makes it super obvious when someone is buying rating if you know the ladder for your realm.

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As someone who actually enjoys having to push for shoulders every season… remove all the reqs if it means more people will queue.

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I personally have never been much of a fan of gear being locked behind rating. The main issue being that it made pushing arena rating later in a season harder. Not only do people have better gear because they have been higher rating longer, hence getting more points for more gear, but they also have the rating requirements to get gear that you cannot get unless you beat them. There has always been that “wall” of people that have more gear then you that you have to get through, having rating requirements on gear just add another one. I have always felt that if you are the better team, you shouldn’t need the better gear to get the win.

With that being said though I do think that players should be rewarded for achieving the higher ratings outside of just the end of the season rewards. It gives players something to work towards during the season, and is a cool thing to show off that you earned. Cata had gear that was same stats but a different color. Mist had the cosmetic weapon enchant. I would be completely find with either of those being added to Wrath, or something similar.

With TBCC the change starting arena team ratings at 0 I believe was a mistake and in the long term had a negative affect on arenas. The grind to get it up I believe caused people not to play. Also it hurt people even more if the decided to jump teams to play with other people. All in all I don’t think it added anything to arenas, but it did hurt them.

But because they are doing away with team ratings and adding in personally ratings, I have no issue with ratings starting at 0 for Wrath. No teams allows you to jump around and play with multiple people instead of waiting for your teammates to log on to que. I even see a world where players with que with complete strangers at the start of seasons just to get their rating up a bit from 0.

I have always thought that Mist of Pandaria had the best arenas. No teams and starting at 0 rating is what Mist did and it worked out. Having cosmetic enchants for players that got 2200 was always a good addition. The only thing from Mist that I did enjoy and it would help with alts or people that started to area later in a season, was your arena cap going up for each week you didn’t cap or play. Was a nice catch up mechanic and kept people playing arenas. Made it so you didn’t feel so far behind if you started the season late. How would a change like that affect Wrath areans? I’m not sure, but I think it could be something to look into.

4 Likes
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Lots of good responses so far. :smile:

I do think that the carrot on a stick is a fair argument in favor of rating requirement to some extent.

What’s your opinion on the counter argument that rating requirements leads to reduced participation because of the perceived imbalance of having to fight people that already has the gear in order to get said gear?

Do you think that argument as merit? And do you think more rewards, such as cosmetics, titles and mounts, that doesn’t lock gear behind rating would be a good compromise?

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I would add to this that the problem is compounded between seasons.
When someone enters the next season with best gear versus someone who couldn’t afford it due to rating requirement or point gain in the case of TBCC slow grind and short season.

That issue was lessened with discount at the end of a season, but it in turn created a separate issue of people having to hoard their points rather than spend them, creating an even more uneven field between the higher rated players and lower rated players when lower rated players had to save their points for the discount week.

1 Like
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Rating requirements promoting boosting is a good argument against rating requirements.

Do you think there’s any possible compromise that would keep some form of rating requirements while simultaneously reducing the boosting problem?

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No rating requirements. Try to adjust the formulas so that Challenger ends up at 1600ish. Challenger at 1400 plus rating requirements is just insane. The original TBC rating system was much better where you stayed at 1500 if you were “average”. Now the average 50th percentile team is at what, 1200, 1300? Who knows. Terrible system.

I do appreciate the buff they gave to points so that even the lowly scum (myself included) feel like they can make progress and pick up one piece per week. When it gets to the point where you aren’t getting a piece per week, it probably kills motivation for a lot of players.

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You have kind of heard my thoughts on this in a different thread, but i will try and give a but more detail here.

PvP participation in classic is VERY low compared to the original release of these expansions. This is due to a variety of things such as a stale pvp meta, no class/spec balancing, time investment required to gear and much more.

While i personally dont see rating requirements as a bad thing, part of this is bias as i play above the rating required for any items. For casual players, it has become VERY apparrent that the time investment required for casual pvpers to even finish a base set of pvp gear is well above what they are willing to commit to. Combine this with the fact that less players are living in ignorance and know just how handicapped they are going into BGs with full PvE gear and you see more players not even trying to get into pvp.

By removing all rating requirements for items it becomes much more accessible to non-pvp focussed players and encourages them to pvp to fill out some slots of gear in PvE due to the targetted nature of pvp gearing. This is completely fine, as PvP items are rarely ever competitive against their PvE counterparts in a raiding environment. High level PvPers are typically only interested in gear as to ensure an even playing field rather than to improve their performance.

Both expanding the pvp brackets and providing fun cosmetic rewards for the lower brackets (i.e. challenger, rival and duelist) could also go a long way to encouraging casual pvp participation. Examples could be unique weapon enchant effects, tabards, costumes, toys and much more.

More important to ensuring higher pvp participation than rating requirements is simply lowering the time investment. Using TBC as an example, it requires 10s if not 100s of hours to grund the honor needed to completely gear out a new character in gear 2 SEASONS out of date. This is a HUGE time sink only to still be at a significant gear disadvantage going into the arena. Blizzard has partly addressed this by reworking the arena point calculation to give significantly mlre points for lower rating, however, I would argue that addreasing honor gear is FAR more important than arena gear when it comes to boosting pvp participation.

The move to a personal rating system is a welcome change as it allows more flexibility when playing with different groups of people.

Lastly if we dont change anything and leave wotlk in its original state. I fear we will see a large drop off in casual participation as without a decent casual playerbase, reaching those rating requirements for gear becomes much, much harder. This fosters an environment where the only people participating in pvp ARE the min maxers, as many casual raiders will simply ignore even trying to arena as there are no rewards that interest a PvE focussed player AND reaching a rating to recieve any rewards is incredibly difficult.

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I too agree that placing requirements on high ticket items like weapons will encourage boosting, and with the upcoming changes to reflect more of a shadowlands experience with the removal of teams boosting will be far easier to do. At least right now the booster(s) have to team hop or make new teams, a very small barrier where as in wrath there will be zero.

Boosting when I was playing shadowlands was everywhere and I think it will be worse then it is in TBCC now come wrath.

The carrot on a stick argument has merit, but its simple and I offer two thoughts…

  1. based on the low arena population pushing rating is harder then it was, so simply lower rating requirements to be far more attainable.

  2. Another idea, After 8 weeks remove all requirements from gear. This way the high ELO arena players can get weapons early whilst most everyone else has to wait, they may be more inclined to play games to get other items with the knowledge that they will eventually get a weapon. I think that could encourage more players to arena.

However KEEP the requirements for 2200 weaps and 2300 for tabards as those are very prestigious items.

An arguement agaisnt that however could be, based on the ease of PvE content in Wrath and TBCC getting an equivalent weapon could be far faster and easier in PvE so the idea of weapons with rating seems to make little sense. How easy is it to walk into BT in greens and walk out with a Glaive or something as such now? It’s common.

People tend to use arena gear and honor gear as a form of gear catch up as well. Its very demoralizing to not be able to acquire decent gear from pvp if it requires a huge rating.

I think the rating requirements back in the day made sense, but in this day and age not as much.

So, remove them and have the titles and recolor gear as the carrot, or lower them a significant amount, or after a set timeframe, perhaps half way through the arena season remove them

There is probably typos and errors in that post.

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That sounds like a good idea to me.

2200 weapons in WotLK did have better stats than their 1850 counterpart, so, as you said, with the argument of ease of access to gear from PvE, would that be necessary?
Tabards at 2300 seems fine to me as they don’t affect gameplay.