22/01 Kalgan on New Arena System.

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Although I can't go into great detail at the moment, I'd like to make a few comments.

- The team/personal ratings and the hidden ratings are related to each other. Your team/personal ratings essentially drift toward your hidden rating, so if you deliberately lower your hidden rating and remake a team, your team/personal ratings simply won't get up to high ratings until your hidden rating does. His exploit as proposed simply doesn't work because his assumptions about the relationship between the visible and hidden rating are incorrect.

- Yes, a group of good players could still deliberately stomp nubs by intentionally losing lots of games to lower their hidden rating. A rating system won't stop that, but it still solves most cases of high rated players beating up on lower rated players. First, many of the cases where high rated players were being matched against low rated players wasn't because the high rated players were deliberately trying to stomp people, it was often accidental as high rated players had normal/natural reasons to change teams on occasion (helping friends, trying out new players, new comps, new strategies, etc). Second, it takes far more effort to deliberately deflate your rating down to low levels than it did to simply create a new team.

- Something that many of you have mentioned is that the rating adjustments are now not always "zero sum". However, a rating system doesn't need to be zero sum in order to prevent inflation. The new system uses a bayesian prior distribution in order to prevent inflation, which in simpler terms means there's math that enforces that players won't have ratings outside of some range (when working without bugs, of course). For the population size we have for arenas, this means we should see ratings range from around 600 to 2400 (again, assuming no bugs).

- There were two bugs with the system that we're in the process of fixing before we reactivate arenas (should be soon) that were causing serious problems (and distorting everyone's perspective on the system). One was in the functionality that seeded everyone's hidden rating based on their pre-3.0.8 patch performance, causing players to "drift" toward wildly inaccurate ratings, the other being in the way that personal ratings were adjusted.

Kalgan, lead PvP developer. Quoted from US PvP forums.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=14498233633&pageNo=6&sid=1#115

Just blue-tagging this to make it more visible, as not everybody may have read this yet.

Kalgan goes on to post several times in that thread on the US forums, so be sure to check those posts out as well if you have the time :-)

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I once again ask why we have to hear this information second hand, after a player has quoted it here. Wasn't even posted by Blizzard ffs

What is most important is that the information becomes available for everybody to see, more so than who posts it first or where it is initially posted.

Let's keep this on topic guys, which is learning more about as well as discussing the new arena matchmaking system.

If you wish to discuss Blizzard's forum posting policies or US compared to EU forums, then please refer your attention to the following thread on that very topic, where we have addressed many concerns and questions of this nature: http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=7701050350&pageNo=1&sid=1#6

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Alright....*takes a deep breath*...on topic,

What about the current state of PVP in general then? There are plenty of problems which hadnt even been touched by the post which we now have read...again. PVP as such is in a terrible state, not only Arenas. And as we had heard previously it was supposed to be balanced at 80 - it isnt. Resi isnt working, Burts is outrageous, BG's Arena, World PVP its a mess.

There are quite a few concerns indeed and although I do not have much new information I can give you at this point in time, I can assure you that we are taking steps to address these concerns.

One of the concerns that have been posted by many people since the arenas were introduced, was that teams were not always matched fairly together as it was not uncommon to see teams with better skill and gear fighting teams of players new to the arenas, who had not yet acquired the skill or the gear needed to compete more fairly. The new arena system is here to help address that issue, by matching teams of equal skill more efficiently.

Granted, there might be a few hiccups and whatnot here in the beginning, but we will keep monitoring this new system and update it as necessary in order to help us provide the best experience possible in the arenas.