deadly-gladiators-frost-wyrm
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65% fewer Arena teams in Season 5
Roma Victor over at Gameriot had an eye-opening entry recently that gives some hard numbers to a phenomenon that I'm sure a lot of players have known for a while... fewer people are playing Arenas lately. A lot fewer. About 65% fewer. He perused the Season 5 ArenaJunkies title calculator which allows players to see the cutoff for titles according to Battlegroup and compared the numbers to Season 4 -- a season already notable for having low participation due to its proximity to Wrath of the Lich King and steeper ratings requirements on gear.The numbers were, as Roma Victor put it, "not pretty". Actually, the numbers were downright ugly. Take, for example, the cutoffs for the Bloodlust Battlegroup, the notorious BG9 where Arena participation has historically been intense. Last season, the top 235 teams in 2v2, top 92 in 3v3, and top 27 in 5v5 brackets were eligible to earn the Gladiator title. This season, those numbers dropped to 93, 36, and 8 respectively. That's a whopping decline in participation across the board in the most active Battlegroup in the US! ArenaJunkies also has numbers from Europe, Korea, and Taiwan and all of them show the same thing -- there are fewer players participating in Arenas than probably ever.
Arena Season 5 mount is a Frost Wyrm
This one has been in the game files for a while -- the screenshot above has been with MMO Champion since November of last year -- but the latest PTR Build reveals that the Arena Season 5 reward mount is a Frost Wyrm. Just as the otherworldly Armored Nether Drakes were representative of Outlands, the Deadly Gladiator's Frost Wyrm is the perfect symbol of Northrend. As with past seasons, the mount is expected to be a 310% speed flyer awarded to the upper 0.5% of Arena participants in each of the three brackets. With Arena Season 5 expected to close soon, perhaps as early as the release of Ulduar, players now have a small window in which to earn that Gladiator title and what might arguably be the coolest-looking mount in the game. In mount-related news, the Coralshell Turtle was renamed to Sea Turtle, whose tooltip reveals it as the first aquatic mount in the game: "This mount can't move very quickly on land, but she's a great swimmer." Better practice that fishing...
