09-20-2005, 03:10 PM
Skandranon,Sep 20 2005, 08:55 AM Wrote:Widening the percentages isn't going to change the problem that currently exists regarding rank on Stormrage. Currently, a tiny minority of the players (perhaps twenty people total) earns well over 80% of the points available to the faction pool each week. The reason is because bad Horde teams just don't play BGs, meaning the majority of Alliance groups get stomped and only the Alliance teams good enough to beat the Horde's best actually earn significant honour.
However, given the way Blizzard's math works, this means that all the remaining players get very few points from the "faction pool". The high achievements of the group at the top is essentially stagnating advancement below them. The high-skill, high-time players shouldn't be punished for being what they are, but the system as it is causes high-skill, high-time players to damage the advancement of players who are either less skilled or have less spare time.
Casual players compete against casual players, Blizzard said, and so the system is fair. They were wrong on both counts. The truth is that when points are divided up amongst all players based on relative accomplishments, everyone is competing against the best, who essentially earn their advancement at the cost of casual players. If the margin between the best and the rest is small, the system works. If the margin is large, the system breaks.
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Untrue. Blizzard's system is based almost entirely on standings, rather then percentage CP. Surprised? The only stagnation you might see is because people perform well during one week, and bad during another, getting in each other's way. There was a test performed on one of the servers. Most people don't have the resources to pull it off, but these people were already pretty much alone at the top, so this group gained about 400k+ CP in a week, with highest being at 600K. The next week, they all went purely by standings, with highest member only having 350k CP, and maybe 250k for the remaining members. Meanwhile, the average PvPer stil had about same amount of CP per week, I believe standing 50 had 65k or so in each case. Mind you, all this time they all took the top 10 spots. In the end, the progress was about same.
Standing 1 at rank 13 gives you about 30% movement, standing 2 gives 17%, standing 3 does not move you in any significant way.
So really, you should laugh at the people who try to pull in absurd amounts of CP because they think it will help them rank faster. Smart people would coordinate who gets what standing, and "powerlevel" people to the High Warlord with much, much less effort.
Quote:They need a better queue system and more variety to their battlegrounds if they expect people to WANT to maintain rank. Right now it's just the big guilds rotating members at the top.
I don't see how that would help. No matter the battleground, top guilds would still outperform your average player, and thus earn more CP. And unfortunately, it is impossible to measure individual skill in a team-based game, so even if that person is the best PvPer in the game, he is nothing if he doesn't have a good group around him. Example:
On our server, one player got a lot of CP through just pubbing all week. He was in the Battlegrounds the whole week... Yet the PvP group on that server PvPed for maybe 3 days, and got double his total for the week. Why? This guy's games lasted 25 minutes a piece, and he didn't always win... Yet the PvP group had 5-10 minute matches, with almost 100% win ratio. So essentially a solo player would not be able to compete in the system, and his best hope is the widening of the ranks.
Perhaps Blizzard should just go ahead and make the distinction between casual players and hardcore, and implement two separate Honor systems - one for casual PvPers, that has good rewards, but is only limited to that particular server... And another system server-wide, where the rewards are higher, but the competition is also bigger - you are competing against the best guilds across all servers. That might at least give smaller guilds and casual players a chance to compete among themselves.