The timesink of PVP ranks
up over at Terra Nova that links to a set of graphs on exactly how much time it takes to get certain PVP ranks in WoW. Take a stab at how long you'd have to play to reach, say, Legionnaire rank.
If you said 30 hours a week, you're right at what they decided. And for Field Marshal / Warlord, they say 80 hours a week. I'm not sure I'm even awake that much per week! Now, to be fair, their reasoning is a little off here-- they simply monitored /played time of these characters and then related it to their PVP rank, but there's no way that all of that /played time was just spent PVPing for rank. And they didn't account for skill at all-- you'll earn honor much faster by being in a well coordinated premade than floating from battleground to battleground. Their numbers are no doubt a little inflated, just based on the way they're calculated.
But they're right about one thing: while I think it is perfectly possible to have a normal life and be a successful endgame raider, I don't think it's possible to have a huge PVP rank and not spend way too much time playing this game. As Nicolas says, the grind is just too steep. There will always be someone more willing to commit time to PVP grinding then I am, and so they'll always "win" the ranks, just by playing more.
However, anything else we could say on this subject is going to, unfortunately, fall into the World of Theorycraft, because we know there's already a change on the way. With the next patch, the honor system is completely changing. In Arena PVP, we already know that ranking will be placed in a much more skill-based rating system-- if you beat another good group team, your rating will go up much faster. And for the rest of PVP, all we know is that there'll be some sort of Honor Point turn in system, where you'll be able to exchange earned HP for items, ranks, and rep. Will that balance out the current time commitment requirements, and make ranks reachable for those of us who work 9-5? Only time (and maybe our beta testers?) will tell.
