Arenas for the New Player

• PVP
• Sep 19, 2009
• 1 Comment

Welcome to another installment of Dead or Alive. I will be your host and today I would like to talk about the ins and outs of Arenas for the new player:

The first question is… What are arenas?

Arenas are areas set up by the Steemwheedle Cartel where players can create a team of 2, 3, or 5 and face off against another team of the same size to the DEATH for gear, titles, mounts and glory. You can find everything you need to make a team and play one in Dalaran sewers or at any one of the 5 arenas located around Azeroth. We have The Ring of Trials in Nagrand, The Circle of Blood in Blades Edge Mountains, The Ruins of Lordaeron in Tristfal Glades, and The Ring of Valor in Orgrimmar. Each offer a variety of different obstacles to use at your disposal.

There are three different scores a player can obtain and this is where it gets confusing for most people. You have a team rating, personal rating, and match making rating (MMR). The easiest to understand is the Team Rating so lets start there.

Team Rating (TR)

Every team starts at a rating of 0. Your team cannot go lower than 0 so the good news is, this will be the lowest rating you will ever be. If you win games your score goes up if you lose the rating goes down but never lower than 0. The amount of points you win or lose is based off your MMR but we will get into that a bit later. Your team rating is shown to you and everyone that looks at your pvp tab when they inspect you. Now all the gear that you can claim costs arena points which you can find under your currency tab or under your pvp tab and these points are given out each Tuesday based on your Team Rating. To receive arena points your team has to play at least 10 games and you yourself have played 30% of those games.

Personal Rating (PR)

Personal Rating was initially put in to avoid selling Arena Points way back in season 2 where you would join a team rated at 2000 plus and get points for a 2000 plus rated team for playing 30% of the games played. So soon after Blizzard put in a personal rating which is based on how well you do on the team for the games you played. For example, your 2v2 team has 4 people on it. You have played 45% of the games and your ratio is 10 wins and 3 losses. The other 55% of the games were mostly losses from the other players so the team rating is down for the week, but your personal rating is now higher than the team. This doesn’t get you any more arena points because as I stated before you only receive points based on the team rating so you ask, why do I need personal rating? Simply because to receive points based on the team rating your personal rating has to be within 100 points of the teams rating. If its not then you will receive points based on your Personal Rating instead of Team Rating and this is to prevent selling points and rating. You can see what your Personal Rating is underneath your PvP tab.

Match Making Rating (MMR)

This is by far the most confusing rating system to most people. MMR was first installed into arenas again to prevent teams re-rolling. A team who had achieved 2k plus would re make the team and begin fighting poor old teams in the 1500 bracket. How fair is that?! Not very so people complained and Blizzard came out with this rating which was also called your hidden rating. The sole purpose of MMR is to match players against similar skill levels. The rating will go up if you are continuously doing well in arenas and get lower if you are doing bad. The better you do the better teams you will face. MMR is the only rating of all 3 that will not reset at the end of the season also if you leave a team this rating will stick with you. This prevents extremely good players from ever fighting the lower rated players. On top of that your MMR is different for each bracket and does not interact with each other. Now as I stated before the amount of points you win or lose are based off this rating. The behind the scenes are trying to get your Team rating as close to your MMR as fast as possible. That is why you will see at the start of a season you will not lose any rating for a loss and gain 47 points per win. This is because your MMR is way higher than 0 so its racing to catch your MMR. At the same time as your MMR reaches your Team Rating you will start to gain less points for a win and lose more for a loss. Its all a little bit confusing at the start but once you get it into use you will see how it makes sense and it all makes the Arenas all a bit more enjoyable.

I hope this help you understand the workings of arenas to all those who don’t understand the lingo and what it all means. If you have any questions please feel free to hit me up at hugesack@rawrcast.com or follow me on twitter with @aellerian. Until next time, happy hunting.