WoW Arena season nears

Sound the war cry! Rally your allies and take to the arenas… It’s team against team as World of Warcraft‘s PvP season nears. While many speculate that the new PvP system should be nothing more than the old Honor Grind mode, people are hopeful that this time around the game will honor skill, rather than time invested.

Well for those who haven’t participated in the old bloodbaths, the old system only ranked you higher as long as you kept on playing. You could probably get on the rank of Marshal as you have played a couple of hours or so. Any higher rank would require that you played for more than 12 hours a day.

What players are continuing to cry about is that once you stop playing for a day, you could lose your rank. Time was not only of the essence, it’s what you need to spend to keep your rank steady or go higher.

Blizzard has set up the ELO system such that you can be sure you are rated by your achievements, and not by the time you spent achieving them. That means there will be not much difference between a team that has competed 10 times in three days than another that has competed 10 times in three weeks, given they both won and lost equally.

What’s different now is that exceeding the 10-match requirement gives a team a chance to rise through the ranks much quicker, as long as the team keeps winning. Of course, the higher they rise through the ranks, the higher the number of levels they can drop from your current position the very moment they lose.

Yes, this even means that a team could lose just once after a winning spree and end up dipping lower than the rank they started out with. The 10 match limit was set to keep time spent to a minimum, while giving out effective. They couldn’t remove the rewarding of time spent, but at least now warmongering, arena dominating teams have a lot to lose, just by losing once.

As Drysc foresees the beginning of the Honor trials:

The first couple weeks of each new season is going to see some rapid movement as all of the teams settle into their general ranks. If a team tries playing as many games as possible in attempts to beat the odds it’s likely that you’ll see them cut back in future weeks as the payoff is usually going to be minimal and the risk extremely high.

So draw up a battle plan and sharpen those swords. You have a hard fight ahead.

Via WoW Forums

Sound the war cry! Rally your allies and take to the arenas… It’s team against team as World of Warcraft‘s PvP season nears. While many speculate that the new PvP system should be nothing more than the old Honor Grind mode, people are hopeful that this time around the game will honor skill, rather than time invested.

Well for those who haven’t participated in the old bloodbaths, the old system only ranked you higher as long as you kept on playing. You could probably get on the rank of Marshal as you have played a couple of hours or so. Any higher rank would require that you played for more than 12 hours a day.

What players are continuing to cry about is that once you stop playing for a day, you could lose your rank. Time was not only of the essence, it’s what you need to spend to keep your rank steady or go higher.

Blizzard has set up the ELO system such that you can be sure you are rated by your achievements, and not by the time you spent achieving them. That means there will be not much difference between a team that has competed 10 times in three days than another that has competed 10 times in three weeks, given they both won and lost equally.

What’s different now is that exceeding the 10-match requirement gives a team a chance to rise through the ranks much quicker, as long as the team keeps winning. Of course, the higher they rise through the ranks, the higher the number of levels they can drop from your current position the very moment they lose.

Yes, this even means that a team could lose just once after a winning spree and end up dipping lower than the rank they started out with. The 10 match limit was set to keep time spent to a minimum, while giving out effective. They couldn’t remove the rewarding of time spent, but at least now warmongering, arena dominating teams have a lot to lose, just by losing once.

As Drysc foresees the beginning of the Honor trials:

The first couple weeks of each new season is going to see some rapid movement as all of the teams settle into their general ranks. If a team tries playing as many games as possible in attempts to beat the odds it’s likely that you’ll see them cut back in future weeks as the payoff is usually going to be minimal and the risk extremely high.

So draw up a battle plan and sharpen those swords. You have a hard fight ahead.

Via WoW Forums