Very inactive arenas?

[magwo]

Lately it seems really hard finding people to play arenas, as well as getting good matchups.
Out of my last ~70 games in 5v5.. probably more than 60 have been against top teams or rerollers from top teams.

What's going on?

[Dominian]

Yep thats how Blackout was and Misery is, when i was in blackout i actually got matched at the guys who are europes highest rated team and got 3 down but by then my priest was dead and 1 shaman. (no nerdy 5 dps) The rogue and shaman managed to solo my 3 shamans quite easy since i was pretty much oom

Now that im in Misery i normally fight teams with 1900+ and its good training.

2 weeks ago we got something like 8 wins and 16 losses but still we gained 100 rating.

[Stabface]

Short answer, ghost rating thinks you should be playing the top teams. Grats!



Long answer, we are facing a stagnation of the arena system due to a lack of available item upgrades at the lower brackets, resulting in a decline in the number of teams playing. This is easily shown with some math: per Blizzard, the definition of a 1650 team in both the new and old system is “Better than 68% of all teams on this BG in this bracket”. Given the lack of items below 1650, the majority of players who play arenas for 4 to 6 weeks will have as many arena points as they need to buy items.
Furthermore, pnce you've bought the gear available, the reason to play other than "I like arenas!" or to do 10 matches per week to stockpile points, would be to try and move up rankings to unlock new gear. However, most people will rather quickly become skill bracketed by the match-making rating and find it difficult to move up beyond what their skill dictates once they've obtained bracket-appropriate gear.


Hard numbers :

If you are below 1615 rating you need just 1475 arena points to buy every arena point item that is available to you. Since teams below 1500 are awarded points as if they are a 1500 ranked team, it takes 5-6 weeks max to earn this many points at any rating below 1615.

If you are 1650 rating max you need 2075 arena points to buy the 5 piece armor set (hateful legs/gloves, savage helm/chest/shoulders). This will again take 4-6 weeks to earn the points depending on what bracket you are in.

If you are 1775 to 1850 player, to buy a full set of Hateful takes 3050 arena points. This takes (again) 4-6 weeks at most depending on your bracket.

Above 1850+ there are some more expensive items, and above 2K you have weapons/ranged unlocked. So you need more weeks of playing to get those points. But only a tiny fraction of players are 2K or higher. And the more people that stop playing at the low brackets, the fewer high ranked people.


Also, the 350K+ honor points needed to buy a full set of PVP gear is not an insignificant time investment, pushing people to BG's instead of Arenas. On top of this the availability of alternate main slot PvP gear outside Arenas (Vault drops, WG tokens, badge gear) means that in actuality players need even fewer weeks of arena matches to earn their points.

[Stabface]

By comparsion, in S4 a 1650-rated player would have available the S3 helm/chest/legs and S4 gloves costing 5625 arena points.

[Souca]

Stabface,

I just wanted to thank you for posting this. This is one of the most informative and interesting posts I've seen on arena ratings and the effect that gear and skill capping has had.

- Souca -

[Dominian]

They should have removed savage gear, or just given it trought pvp and lowered the costs ALOT, savage is way way way overprized trought honor.

Upped the cost on hateful gear and scaled the requirments down to 1550 or something.

Its FAR to easy to get pve gear compared to pvp atm, people fking pug nax 25 wich is the hardest instance in the game atm.

In a nax 25 raid there is about 30 drops and you get 30 tokens??

[Stabface]

Eh? Savage gear is obtained through PVP, you can buy it for straight honor 180,000 or honor+arena 52800+1475. Alternatively you can buy it for heroic emblems.

Naxx25 is not the hardest by far, it's one of the easiest raids. Sartharion + 3 drakes 10 man is the hardest. And it's 16 badges for a full Naxx clear.


S1 arena point cost for the full armor set was 8250 arena points BTW.

[Bresquad]

imo.

1. Remove Vault drops.
2. Remove the option of beeing able to gear up by using emblems.

Items should be gained from Bg´s Combined with Arena only.

That would be a good start to get more people to Arenas id say.
And ye there is more to do but they are already mentioned in many posts everywere.

Im playing on Misery and i agree on the part of having hard time to find equal matched games.
Most of the games is versus high rated teams. They will slowly milk u 3-7 points per win but now and then i will get them if they make a mistake and so far top points earned from 1 game was 27 Points. Boy o boy did we get some angry whispers

It feels though that a few more teams are queuing now. But still pretty damned dead in the 5on5 Brackets.
And that suxx I want more action, the days i play i will play 20 games and meet more or less the same teams during that time.

[Dominian]

Eh? Savage gear is obtained through PVP, you can buy it for straight honor 180,000 or honor+arena 52800+1475. Alternatively you can buy it for heroic emblems.

Naxx25 is not the hardest by far, it's one of the easiest raids. Sartharion + 3 drakes 10 man is the hardest. And it's 16 badges for a full Naxx clear.


S1 arena point cost for the full armor set was 8250 arena points BTW.

Sorry m8 i thought it was 2 badges per run, and sartharion + 3 drakes is only a achivement as far as i know? You can do him and kill the drakes and still get the same loot right?

A druid from my old guild now have full feral,boomkin and resto gear on his druid incuding FULL hatefull without doing a singel arena match.

But the work you put into 180k honor should be worth the hatefull gear, 180k honor is about 60 hours played if you get 3k honor per hour wich is "ok".

Now you have to put 12 hours for a blue item wich is insane (unless you buy them for honor+arena points ofc)

I just cant see why hatefull should require such "high" rating when the pve gear on the same level is so easy to get.

[magwo]

Sometimes I kinda wish that the 5v5 bracket was cross-BG, so that all of US/Europe would compete against each other in 5v5.