World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

We’ve continued to test rated Arenas in the Burning Crusade Classic Beta, and we agree with a lot of feedback about the Rating requirements on Arena gear, which caused us to take a closer look at how we’re updating the system.

One change from the original game that we’re including is having your team and personal rating start at 0, rather than 1500, because we want players to work with their team to improve and push their rating higher, rather than give up because playing more is only causing their rating to decrease. However, we also recognize that teams that are starting out or still learning could feel unfairly penalized by a lower rating than they would have been able to achieve in 2007. While the updated MMR system does rapidly increase your rating for your earliest wins, we want to make sure the points you could expect to earn while improving were similar as well.

• We’re going to increase the Arena points granted to teams and players with less than a 1500 rating. A rating between 200 and 1500 will earn you:
• 214-344 points per week for 5v5 arenas
• 188-302 points per week for 3v3 arenas
• 162-261 points per week for 2v2 arenas
• The formula for ratings above 1500 remains unchanged, from the original Burning Crusade formulas, and rapidly starts awarding a lot more points once you pass 1500.

We also realized that putting the final Season 4 rating requirements on the Season 1 gear was a bit too restrictive for Season 1, which is when we want to encourage a lot of participation so players can have a wide field of competitors to measure their skills against. When original Burning Crusade first came out, lots of players felt compelled to join Arenas to improve item slots they hadn’t had luck with in dungeons, and we want to make sure that possibility continues to exist, while preserving the prestige of earning the best gear for the higher ratings.

• We’re going to use the rating requirements that were originally introduced with The Burning Crusade’s 3rd season, which requires a rating of 2000 for shoulders and 1850 for weapons.
• The rest of the gear will have no rating requirements.
• When Season 2 launches, we expect to use those same rating requirements for the Season 2 gear, while removing all requirements from the season 1 gear at that time.

We’ll keep an eye on how this feels in Season 1 as we watch how players approach this system, and we’ll keep Seasons 3 and 4 in mind as we develop potential tweaks or further improvements.

Overall, our goal remains to make Arenas accessible and rewarding, while reserving the most prestigious rewards – such as the new rank 1 title “the Infernal Gladiator” – for the very top players, and we hope these changes will help strike that balance.

On Tuesday (May 18), we’re going to end the current “season” in the Burning Crusade Classic Beta and we’re going to test our end of season calculations and rewards. Please feel free to test rated Arenas for the next couple of days and then check back into the Beta after Tuesday to see how that went.

Thank you!