Arena is Serious Business

[Xame]

Well rogues hiding out is an easy problem to fix - just increase the uptime or effective length of the seeing eye thingies. Even without changes I don't see any real problem finding them eventually - every class has a way to try to keep a rogue visible if they have nothing else to worry about.

Rogue's can vanish every 5mins. Thus if you cannot search the arena in 5 mins, you are doing something wrong. With Prep, they get an extra vanish/10mins but it really doesn't matter since once you found him, you should be able to kill him.

A problems come up when you have two rogues alive at the end. Both don't want to take the debuff to see stealth and both want the opener. Talk about a stupid way to spend an hour, looking (sort of) for the other rogue. Lucky rogue takes home the win.

Splitting the points doesn't mean giving both teams something. I'm not on expert on chess ladders, but they have some way to handle a draw. Something like the lower ranked team would have gotten 18 points from the higher if they beat them, so they get 6 for a draw. You can keep it zero-summish. The lower rated team should get something in the case of double DPS kill, which seems to be the most likely cause of unwinnable matches.

Points really don't get split in chess ladders. The higher rated person losses points and the lower ranked person gains points in a draw (I believe its half the points as if a win happened for the lower ranked person). In chess, many games (30%) end up with a draw. Thus its up to the higher ranked person to win the match. In chess, a lower ranked person will sometime try to "survive" a match by pushing a draw, forcing the higher ranked person to play more aggressively. This creates more openings for the lower ranked person to exploit and thus a more interesting game.

For WoW they would have to tell you before the match the rankings for this to have any bearing (in chess, you normally exchange rankings before the match with the traditional handshake). But with the data unknown, both sides would be playing aggressively unless they saw a combination that they just wanted to get away from. Put in a 20-30min clock and you would see some of the pure defense teams maybe? changing to a more aggressive style. And really, who wants to watch two healers dueling it out for hours (I would rather watch paint dry if I'm the dps toon laying on the floor). I've also wondered while in my 20min queues for arena on Sunday/Monday how many of the machines are busy with healer duels,