GAME BREAKING Arena Formula Bug

#0 - Jan. 21, 2009, 1 a.m.

Q u o t e:
3.0.8 Arena
If you've read my articles here since WotLK started, you'd know that I've written many articles on how to improve the game including a thorough class balance analysis as well as countless detailed suggestions. That said, make no doubt about it, this article is a rant, and deservedly so. I believe the arena competitors, general playerbase, and myself deserve it.

Just when I thought arena couldn't get anymore stupid, Blizzard manages to prove me wrong. It's bad enough that the time investment for little to no gain beyond bragging rights is downright not worth the effort, or the fact that the queue times are absolutely ridiculous at higher ratings, but 3.0.8 was really just salt in the wounds. The old system had its flaws, but it never came to being anywhere close to as stupid as the new system already is.

What this patch has effectively done, to the best of my judgement, is basically remove the "risk" from the risk:reward equation when competing in arena. If you're high rated and you lose, you lose basically nothing. If you're low rated and you win, you gain rating at an astronomical rate. From what I was told, the reasoning behind this was to essentially "hyper accelerate players to the rating they 'should' be at." Of course, this new system is not only incredibly flawed, but completely undocumented and untested on the latest PTR, leaving internal testing as the only type done. Boy, I have high expectations for Ulduar already!

From what most people can gather, the new system basically uses a character's total amount of gear and ranks them accordingly with the combined and/or averaged weight of the item level of all of the gear in their possession. The reason why I personally feel this to be true is after playing lots of 3v3 games tonight, and ending with personal ratings of around 2850, 2900, and 2950 (roughly) on the 3 different classes makes it seem pretty obvious. The hunter who has the least amount of gear (because hunters only have 1 role/spec) had the highest PR because they had the lowest item level weight. The Death Knight (who has tanking and DPS gear) came in with the middle-value PR, and the paladin with gear for all 3 specs/roles game in with the lowest PR despite all of us playing an identical number of games (all of us have played 100%).

The biggest flaws here are not only the fact that personal ratings are completely and utterly broken (and thus completely trivialize achievements/titles such as Arena Master and Flawless Victor), but even if the PR changes wern't completely idiotic, the team rating changes themselves have been seemingly random with a huge number of reports that people's teams are receiving drastically different gains/losses from playing the same team.

This debacle has virtually invalidated this entire season to this point. Even though it's been a rather stupid season, you can't say that making everyone's efforts to this point worthless is a good decision. Simply put, the ladder is now more of a joke than it has ever been since the first arena season in TBC, people are getting gear, titles, and achievements that they simply do not deserve, and furthermore the system is easily exploitable with manipulation of the matchmaking system (specifically with regards to gear).

The only realistic way to solve this is to simply roll back the arena ladders, including all games played, all ratings earned/lost, all gear purchased, all points spent, all achievements and titles earned, and everything else in between back to the state that it was before the servers patched to 3.0.8. If the arena system stays in the current laughable and pathetic form that it is in now, I know for a fact that many people will outright quit the game as it completely ruins the one thing they enjoyed playing for still: the competitive ladder.

Greg, stop counting your money and start issuing orders.