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Bornakk on arena ratings changes

Apparently there's been some confusion over the exact way that the new arena ratings changes work. Bornakk tried to clarify that a bit today.

As he tells it, The adjustment to a team rating will always be based on the other team's team rating, but the adjustment to the personal rating of everyone in the match will be based on the average person rating for the other team. He used the following example:

  • Team A has a rating of 1550. Team B has a rating of 1750.

  • Team A has an average personal rating of 1520 for the members participating in the match. Team B has an average personal rating of 1490 for the members participating in the match.

  • Team A wins. Team A's team rating is adjusted based off of a win over Team B's team rating of 1750.

  • All members of Team A have their personal ratings adjusted based off of a win over Team B's average personal rating of 1490 but it will be a smaller gain when compared to the rating their team got.

Bornakk says that this change is meant to promote fighting against teams that are statistically closer to them and promote true competition in the Arenas.

I honestly say that I'm not sure I see how this will help. The problem here is that Team A in the above example can't pick what team they fight. So if they get put up against a 1750 rating team B because of their personal rating, even if they win, they seem to be cheated. Because the jump in their personal rating was so much lower than the jump in their team rating, they may not be able to buy new gear because of the rule that states that team and personal ratings must be similar for you to be able to buy gear.

As well, it seems there is a new exploit in which a high rating player who wants a boost to his personal rating can recruit two low personal rating players (or have two skilled friends deliberately lower their personal rating) and use them to bring down the team's rating average, thus allowing them to trounce lower rated teams and slowly gain personal rating score (Since he'll be fighting lower ranked teams with this scheme, his team rating probably won't skip too much ahead).

Feedback on Bornakk's thread so far seems to be mostly in the same vein. These new arena team rules don't seem to have changed much. People have just found new methods to exploit them, and lower ranked teams are still forced to face overgeared teams farming them for points and rating. Some people are saying it's becoming unreasonably close to the old honor grind.

For now, I'm not sure Blizzard has really perfected the Arena rating system to any great degree. More rating requirements help, but they really need to firm up the way it's granted. I like the idea of going with a gear matching system, matching people in like seasonal gear as much as possible. That way, people who have used dishonest inflation to get their seasonal gear have a better chance being matched against legit Season 3 geared teams who can use those shoulders and weapons to trounce them, and people who are trying to legitimately move up the ranks won't be trounced by people who played the system to get better gear and overpower them - or people who are leveling teams to sell to these players.