Having been a week or two into the throes of the new Arena system, I’ve done a bit of research on some mechanics. This is partly because of my interest, and partly because it’s not been as well documented on the official site yet. Since I found that I’ve been answering a lot of questions on this subject, I’ll share some info I’ve gathered and some things that I’ve learned.
Instead of me explaining the nitty gritty myself, WoWWiki has put together a good baseline explanation here. To put things simply, you can climb and fall up and down a ladder against anyone else participating in the arena, based on the difference of ratings between the two teams. At the end of the week, you’re awarded Arena Points based off your rating, and the size of the arena you participate in.
There have been several attempts made at arena point calculators. I’ve found these two to be the ones that match the WoW Wiki. If I knew how to do logarithmic math I’d make one myself, but alas, these are good.
The points are weighted; the higher brackets award more points for the same amount of points then the lower brackets do. They’ve stated that the 5-mans are where it’s at, and they reward accordingly. It’s been my experience that getting the 5 people on your team online and willing to arena is a new phenomenon; it’s not just about getting ‘any’ 5 people, it’s your team. It then goes without saying that even getting a 2 or 3 man team together means less work. There are also more people doing the smaller brackets, so there tends to be more variance in the games you get chosen for.
At the end of every arena season, which I assume is a month or three, I then assume the Arena ratings are then reset, but based on the newly acquired gear and skill, the ladder will reestablish itself again.
Another interesting phenomenon; At the end of every season, the top ranking teams get some special perks, like custom mounts and player titles. However, the season finale awards are awarded per server, not per battlegroup; it’s possible that a team from CarebearMcHuggingLove server with a particularly bad PVP community will get the top rank on their server, and win cool awards like a custom flying mount, or a custom title, when a team from GanksalottaNubs, the PVP-rabid server will have a higher rating then carebear server team, but since there are other higher ratings on their ganktastic server, they see nothing.
At the end of the week, each team member who has competed in at least 30% of the teams weekly games is awarded points. The points are not ’shared’ per say, they are the same for each member of the team, but again, you have to have participated in enough games to qualify for the weeks points.
It’s also interesting to note that as long as you’re winning more then you’re losing, theoretically your rating will go up. At the end of a week, a team with 60 wins and 40 losses may be farther up in the rating ladder then a team with 6 wins and 4 losses. Remember that you get points based on your rating, not on your wins and losses for the week. While there is a minimum of 10 games required, it’s easy to see that, especially in the beginning, you want to get your rating up quickly to get deeper into the point pool.
The 10 game limit sounds to be more for the top tiers of the ladder; they don’t have to play much to stay on top. It also allows for more of a casual mindset as well; as long as you put in your initial gold investment, and do your 10 games a week, you’ll get some arena points, which can be saved up for some pretty snazzy arena gear. In the past two weeks, I’ve received around 400 or so points. If I want to purchase the Arena epic shoulders, which cost 1500 Arena Points, it’s easy to figure that at this rate, it might take me a month or so.
The theory behind it, to put it simply, is that if you’re skilled, your team will climb the ladder quickly. Once you reach a rating where you share the skill level with the teams you go against,you’ll stop climbing so quickly, and will hover.
This ‘disappointed’ arena player complains that it’s possible for a 5v5 team to lose 10 games in one week, and still get more arena points for that week then a
2v2 team that wins 10 games that week. While this scenario is possible for that first week, eventually you can see as explained above, that the team ratings will eventually even out, and the 2v2 team will eventually be getting more arena points then the 5v5 team.
Blizzard has, as of today, launched it’s Armory site, here. As expected, it’s bandwidth is currently being raped and at the time of writing cannot be accessed. I had some luck with the EU version of WoW’s site here. Once things smooth over, we’ll be able to look at the arena ratings of the players and track progress more effectively.
