Hello again my avid (and mostly imaginary) readers, it is again time to talk about how to get the most bang-for-your-buck from the arena system. There has been some huh-bub in the forums over Kalgan's post regarding the Elo system (which, for those who are unfamiliar, is the queuing and rating requirement system to promote a competitive and fair environment in the arenas). Kalgan makes mention that they have a PhD in-shop with Blizzard's developers who "did his dissertation on competitive ranking systems" (source). The reason he brought this tidbit of information to light was because there is a new and shiny "exploit" that has started to appear, though Kalgan stands firmly behind Elo and claims that this new "exploit" is nothing more than a way to increase the number of wins necessary to get to rating plateaus (i.e. 1850, 2000, etc).

The exploit works like this: first, have a 1700 2s team. Sounds easy right? Have your team mate drop the team and rejoin, knocking his personal rating down to 1500. Next, give him ownership while you drop from the team and rejoin, knocking your personal rating to 1500. Here is where the interesting quirks of the Elo system take effect. Queue up! The theory here is that because your personal rating is more than 150 below the team rating, you will be matched as if your rating is the average of your two personal ratings (1500). Presumably, if you have a 1700 team rating, then you earned it, and therefore should be facing opponents in the 1700 skill/gear range, but if you are queued as if you were a 1500 team (as this case proves to be), then you would expect to face teams who are of a skill/gear level of 1500. This is where this particular "quirk" gets interesting.

Presumably, if everyone (but you) is playing legitimately, then you (as a truly 1700-skilled team) would be able to make short work of a 1500 team. So, you do this 10-15 times and have an amazingly high win percentage (something like 80-100) and your personal rating is 1700-1750 because you were getting about 15 points per win and 15 per loss; at an 80% win rate, you would net about 120-180 personal rating and your team rating should no longer be 150 above your personal rating because of your high winning percentage and the fact that your team rating was getting prorated for being much higher than the opponents you face. Now, you have another quirk to play with.

You have 1700 personal rating, and your team rating is up to 1800 (you made 200 rating, your team made 100... that's about right after a few losses and the steep prorate). Bummer, now you would be matched against an 1800 team because the lowest person in the queue would be within 150 personal rating of the team rating, so the team rating would be used in match-making (in practice, it would have happened before now, but I am just showing an example). Party's over right? Now you have to legitimately earn those last 50 team rating and 150 personal rating, right? You have completely screwed yourself... had you done it right from 1700, you would have hit 1850 in fewer matches... ... ... but only if you had won in the same fashion you have been winning in while facing scrub teams. That is the big "if" to the argument.

But wait... you did it before... why not do it again!? Except, this time only ONE of you is going to leave and rejoin so that the other can keep his personal rating. Alright, you drop and rejoin, now your personal rating is 1500 and your partner's is 1700 while your team has an 1800. How does that help? Well, right now the averaged personal rating of the members is more than 150 less than the team's. So, your team is now being matched via the Elo System's rule of "150 below means average the two queued members and match on that rating." The average of 1700 and 1500 is 1600, so you will be facing a 1600 rated team (and remember you originally got your team to 1700, so you are good enough to beat 1600 rated teams, most likely)(source). From here, it should be relatively straight forward to see the progression this takes. A team can reasonably easily push one member into the 1850PR/TR level to get their weapon as long as one member bites the bullet and gets fewer points and lower personal rating.

Problems with this system:
Well, for one, if this is becoming the way to power someone to an 1850 rating for the s3 weapon, then all the high-level weapon-sellers will be doing it too. That means that the 1500-1700s will be littered with s3 shoulders teamed with s1 teammates in hopes of getting their 1850 PR/TR for the weapon. If the aforementioned situation arises, then this method will not work because your team will be facing other teams who are doing the exact same thing (which means that your 1850 team, with an 1800 warrior, and a 1500 druid will be facing the exact same except it will be a 2000 team with an 1800 paladin in blues and greens, and a 1500 rogue in full s3).

Conclusion:
Really, this is not the worst situation in the world. I hypothesize that if you play at peak hours, then this is the best thing ever because the 1500 teams you face are more likely to actually be 1500 teams, whereas the off hours will be littered with these types of teams trying to power up against scrubs. Additionally, this is not even cheating, per se, because your are not abusing the system in underhanded ways, you are simply rejoining the team. Even Kalgan states that this is not a form of cheating as far as he is concerned because one would have to play (and win) more games to get to 1850 than you would doing it legitimately (source). What he fails to realize, however, is that he assumes that your winning percentage is constant at all rating levels. He is making the assumption that we would have that same 80% winning percentage in the 1800 brackets that we have using the Elo-reset system in the 1500-1600s, which is just unlikely.



EDIT:
After going onto Wikipedia and reading more about the Elo rating system, I found that this system suffers from a few flaws that were ignored by the Blizzard developers. Initially, the Elo system was created for the Chess circuit so that chess players around the world would have a ranking system by which to set themselves. This is a natural idea, so the Elo system was created, which would state that if you were a 1600 and played against a 1600 and won out-right, you were obviously more skilled than your opponent, so you should be rated higher, and consequently, he should be rated lower.

This is interesting because the adaptation to other games seems like a reasonably good idea. However, if we look at the aspects of chess, it becomes rather clear as to why this cannot (rather, should not) be adopted to WoW arenas. Chess is a one-on-one game that pits skill AND ONLY SKILL against an opponent. Chess is a dance amongst pieces that can all take other pieces (except king cannot take king, etc); that is, there is no chance that when I move my rook down the board and onto your knight's square, he will overcome my advance and defeat my piece in a defensive maneuver. Likewise, there are no auto-attacks that are made for me without my having to play them fully aware of their consequences. Therefore, we can plainly say that the game of chess has no luck associated with it (unless you count your opponent's inability to see your next move... but I would argue that such is skill rather than luck).

Because there is no luck in chess, then it is completely suitable to create a rating system that states when player x beats player y, x is better than y. Logically, the argument holds water, so to speak. However, the moment luck is introduced into a game, such a rating system is dashed to pieces. If, for example, I make a last-ditch effort to take your piece with my piece, and this move will either win the game for me or lose the game for me, and the outcome is based on probability a la "20% of the time, this move will succeed," then we cannot say conclusively who is the better player. Sure, the argument to use such a low-percentage move in such dire straits could (and would) undoubtedly be argued as a gamble rather than skill, but what if the move had a 50% chance to succeed? Could we then argue that player X's defeat was due to lack of skill when player Y quite obviously had a similar chance to win? Such would be the arguing over whether flipping a coin the way the flipper wants requires skill. Quite clearly, adding any luck-based components to a game diminishes the ability to, without bias, state who is a better player.

Another reason that the Elo system is inadequate for use in the arena rating system of WoW is because the Elo system accounts for ties and close matches. Yes, the arena does account for ties as well, I have seen screenshots of zero gain matches that ended in a no-decision because sinister strikes landed at the "same" time. However, in chess, if two players play amazingly well and end up with just kings left, and one player finally corners the other player into no possible moves, then this is a narrow victory for the cornering player. It could be argued that such a victory was as close as victories come, and therefore the players were pitted equally against one another. So, their ratings will change very little after the match is concluded because of the nature of the victory. In this example, 'close' matters in both horseshoes and chess. The arena system does not have a way to determine close matches as "near-draws" and award points based on narrow victories or losses. If we play an arena match that lasts 5 hours and ends in a narrow victory with one player killing the other while keeping 2 hit points at the end, with comparable healing and damage done (etc etc), then one could argue that such a match (epic though it may be) would be a "near-draw" resulting in only 1-2 rating differences between the two teams because they were obviously near-equals with regard to one another (so long as their respective ratings were equal).

Personally, I feel the need for a new "fair" rating system that 1) is impossible (read: extremely difficult to do, or easily noticed and punishable) to exploit/game, 2) renders fair judgments and rewards between losers and winners, and 3) pits skill against skill, rather than gear against gear. I do not have any ideas for such a system, but I will have about 2 weeks (taking a vacation) to mull it over and talk with my brother about it. Such a system would need to be WoW-specific, and therefore take a grand scheme of things into account when determining rating. For instance, two undead rogues should always be able to defeat a warlock+shadowpriest team... every time if the two rogues are not incompetent. This is due to the nature of the rogue class having magic immunity, fear immunity (as undead and the pvp trinket), and amazing damage output against low armor classes. Sorry for the tangent here, but I know first hand how annoying it can be to go against a counter-comp team and lose 18 rating with no chance at winning, and I think that these scenarios should be addressed and accounted for the in fair rating system for the arena.

Oh well, if I come up with anything good, I will post on it back here.

... let me start by saying that IF Blizzard keeps the talent trees comparable to how they look now, WotLK might not be a complete disappointment. Rather, it looks like they actually listened to the concerns of the player-base and have attempted to implement them accordingly. No no... don't think me crazy, what I say is true (as of now).

I am going to list every complaint I have ever had about druids in WoW briefly:

1. Very weak survivability as a healer, no shields, no burst heals, ToL imposes a snare making the situation worse


2. Feral has no snare


3. Feral has no ability to kill a healer due to lack of cc/ms


4. Feral has no cooldowns to use in PvP/PvE scenarios


5. Feral is very susceptible to cc forcing them to break form and lose damage output


6. Boomkins are undesirable in raids due to lack of cc


7. Boomkins are undesirable in raids due to lack of AoE


8. Boomkins are undesirable in raids due to lack of raid buffs


9. Omen of Clarity is dispel-able

This is the WotLK alpha leaked talent tree for druids. I almost shat myself when I looked the talent overs. The first issue is taken care of by Improved ToL, which gives the druid a grand amount of armor for survivability, and now ToL can actually cast Barkskin. They added a snare as the 45 point talent in feral, which also takes care of the "cannot kill a healer" issue by adding a "mind-numbing poison" effect as well. A big ability with a cooldown was added as the 51-point talent for feral which either breaks all cc's a la the pvp trinket, or does that and leaves the druid in a rage a la "The Beast Within". Moonkins were given an AoE aside from TreeBrigade called Typhoon... which no one has any idea how it works except that it seems like a projectile that hits everything it comes into contact with (a la shadowfury) except it sustains... like hurricane... and it's instant cast... how confusing. Additionally, the moonkins have a talent that will improve their dps ability and cause them to land a debuff which increases arcane and nature damage received, and the improved moonkin aura improves the haste rating by 100% after a crit.

All these changes are amazing, and will likely be toned down before the actual release (or even announcement by Bliz) of the WotLK, but I must say that I am impressed by Blizzard's appeasement strategy. It has always seemed that Blizzard does not care about off specs and they would rather help the "traditional" specs of the game rather than the weaker offspecs. However, it definitely seems like they took the community's comments to heart when designing some of these talents. The snare is my favorite... though it will obviously be nerfed into oblivion before the release of the game. While it is true that a 50% snare is needed by ferals, and making it stacking to 50% so that they could not keep it applied indefinitely was needed, it can also be noted that 50% spell-slow is amazingly high. Also, the talent tree does not say precisely the type of debuff that infected wounds places, but my guess is that it is either a disease or a physical debuff. I really would have thought that this would be a 1-application effect that would have a 30% chance to get applied... but I like it better this way (as it is quite clearly overpowered).

There is probably more I would like to gush about... for instance, the fact that ToL gets armor, a bonus healing ability that gets applied to the target getting your heals, and can cast the very first flash heal resto gets (called Nourish)... but I have to go, for now...

Pitted in an epic struggle, two teams enter the arena not knowing who their opponents might be. Their opponents may be the counter-composition to their team, at this point there is no way to tell. The team talks strategies briefly while buffing up for the fight to come. They say things like "if it's pr, then focus the priest and I'll try my best to cc the rogue after CloS" to try and calm their nerves while, at the same time, enhancing their senses for the battle. This team is dedicated, they are ready to try and vie for glory as they do their 10 matches for the week, hoping to improve their barely-over-break-even record by a margin better than 6-4. They grit their teeth as a thick silence falls. Their hearts beat faster, and the familiar sound of cast-iron gates swinging open rings in their ears, revealing an empty battle field and the faces of enemies.

Every week, this is the feeling as we start our matches. Every week, it seems that we find only the counter-comp teams. Every week, we do our best, and occassionally beat a team that should have beaten us, and we often lose to the cookie-cutter makeups that tend to win against non-cookie-cutters.

Why do we continue? Why do we strive for what seems to be unattainable to us? Why do we put ourselves through this toil and struggle for what seems like little-to-no gain, especially when considering that the next season will force us to get fewer pieces of gear and stockpile arena points that we will never end up using? We do it because we enjoy the struggle. We enjoy facing a team of equals who will pit their best against ours. We want to win, but we know that it is not such a reality. We keep coming back because we have a desire to be the best, even though that is essentially impossible.

We are self-masochistic.

Let me speak plainly, for a moment. What makes the best teams the best? Arguably, at the top of the ladder, there are teams who will end up facing each other 50 times a week. That one warrior+resto is going to play that warlock+resto 50 times in their week of trying to get to the number one spot. They do not have the same options that we have. At the 2300 rating, there are only a handful of teams (let alone comps) one team will be pitted against, and so they only need to have strategies for those few teams. At our level of competition, there are at least 15 compositions in the 2s bracket, and 10 of those are counter-comps to our teams. Of course, everything becomes much simpler when we break down into "rogue+healer" as opposed to the four different permutations possible, yet there are times when these generalizations are purposeful.

On our warlock+spriest team, going against rogue+healer is almost always a loss. This is because rogues are impervious to death against casters, but most especially against dotters. Additionally, we are counter-comp to most healer+warrior variants, so we tend to ignore the specifics. However, we also face a slew of teams that will never get above an 1850 rating based on their composition, but we are one of the teams that they can beat. For instance, rogue+rogue will never be a top contender, but they will beat our team every single time if they are both undead, and they will win 75% of the time if they are not. Additionally, it does not matter which team we are on, warlock+healer will essentially always beat both our teams, even though the top-level contender version of our warrior+druid team will always beat it.

Maybe there is something to be said about this. Maybe there is a method to the madness that is arena matching. Before the 2.4.2 patch, it seemed that we would face more comparably geared opponents reliably. Sure, the matches took 10 minutes to pop, but now it seems as if there used to be some match-making module that would take gear into account, and now it seems to be missing, possibly accounting for the quick match-up times. Perhaps, since it is so easy to get matched up against a team, we should look into hedging our bets, so to speak.

We play, mostly, on Wednesday nights at around 9 P.M. server time. This, while not strictly peak hours, is a high-point in server activity amongst hardcore PvPers. We have been farmed at this time on more than one occasion. Perhaps we should start looking into different times to play, or at least, try to come up with some data as for when certain opponents play, and when we can best avoid them. I do not think that we continually play against the same teams; we do not continually get Jim and Bob from ServerX in our battle group 3-4 times a week, but we do get a few repeats. My brother is constantly of the view "queue again, right now!" However, I find myself wondering if this is the best strategy.

Obviously, if we face one team that beats us, queuing against immediately is not the wrong answer as the likelihood of us facing the same team immediately should be slim. However, when we face the same druid+warlock team 3 times in a row, I have to wonder if we should not step back and say "let's wait a half hour and see if we cannot get a new opponent." Furthermore, I am starting to think that we should change the dates and times that we do arena, if we see the same teams as the same times weekly (and I am not saying that such is the case, as I have not been documenting our opponents... though I am strongly considering it now). Could there be a "golden time" for each composition on each realm?

Could it be that a hunter+priest team will do better on ServerX if they queue at 10:00 A.M. server time, rather than 9 P.M. server time, simply because the players who constantly play at that time on that battle group are counter-comped by the hunter+priest team? On the corollary, could it be that warlock+healer simply gets to face the teams that they are the counter-comp for at 9 P.M. server time for BattlegroupX? Perhaps we are simply playing into the hands of lucky players; concerning luck, I would almost say that it is a certainty that we are unluckily paired against our counter-comps at our current play times/dates.

With this season drawing to a close, the amazingly improved queue times, and the fact that my brother and I no longer have nightly obligations (read: school-work), I will likely be recreating our second 2s team so that each team can play more than 10 games without destroying the chance for the other to get points and personal rating. Additionally, I want to broaden our sample-size of times that we do arenas to see if such a statistic matters. Sadly, our warrior+druid team will likely be losing their titles for next season, as they have not played 10% of the games played on the spriest+warlock's team, and were I to recreate the other 2s team, they would not likely have enough time to get to a rating that would give any title besides "Challenger".

Perhaps with my, and my brother's, knowledge of lua scripting, we could write a light-weight plugin that will capture the name, server, class, and races of our opponents in a file that we could later parse to see what we play against most at what times. This would certainly allow us to best chose when to play to gain the most ground when doing arena, should the data point to a statistically significant segregation in team compositions. While I am intrigued by this, it would take a wider adoption to truly get the data needed to compose such a document.

I like this idea, I will be putting some effort into writing such an add-on in the next few days to see if I cannot hammer one out rather quickly, and try to get it adopted by a larger number of players to see if there is not a way that such teams can better organize their play-times.