That’s actually an interesting point extending the debate further. So let me ask the question: is it a matter of deserving? Will only the good children or the assiduous raiders “deserve” particular gear levels? If you look at it in terms of time invested, you surely have a point, but…

A hardcore player costs Blizzard a lot more than a casual. He’s usually active on the forums, for starters, and requires an armada of moderators to keep in check. He plays more often and for longer hours, meaning he consumes more power and cooling off the servers. He eats up content much faster and keeps clamoring for more more more.

In other words, the hardcore player is the demanding, high-maintenance, low-profit customer. The quiet casual on the other makes a nice profit and doesn’t make a fuss about welfare epics and balance and whatnot. The casual is the better customer, so arguably, he has a valid claim to better rewards.

But all of this is, in the end, a lopsided argument, because most of the changes favouring casuals have actually never been asked for.

Do people deserver ilvl 159 gear for playing 10 games a week? No luckily in most cases outside weapons its barely better then kara gear depending on the class.

But at the same time dont expect the arena system to continue on now as per normal. Even now in some battlegroups only 20 5v5 teams are good enough for S4 shoulders. Your average joe blow 1500 team is going to be capped on what they can buy incredibly quickly. The players right now are allready saturated with s3 because of the long seasons. Indeed I laughed my head off when my welfare epic alt drew a team with 4 players with s3 weapons at the massive rating of 1350 last night.

The arena system is a pyramid. Players stand on the backs of those with less skill. How will it climb when the bottom rungs just stop playing?

As for welfare epics for casuals its just not true. The casual player does not have time and exposure to grind up badges to get any more than (maybe) two items of badge gear in the new sets. So that difference of gear will make little difference. 150 badges is a heck of a lot of Kara runs, and a dreadful amount of H instances. Its not there for casuals, its there for raiders who don’t like pvp.

Next changes in a similar vein:
- PvE rewards will require Arena, Tournament, and Battleground games.
- PvP specs will get further buffed in an attempt to make it more desirable.
- Prot spec Warriors and Paladins will have a 15% damage reduction when not in a group – to make them group.

/sigh

Also, it’s ironic to talk about the new Badge Rewards being “Welfare Epics”, since these items are more for raiders than casuals, with all the changes introduced (BoJ from all raid bosses, each new Badge reward costs over 80 BoJ each, etc.)

@Argos: A loot whore is someone that is obsessed with getting all the gear for themselves. When they don’t get the loot, they act childishly, doing and saying stupidities. See Stop the Loot Whore. He doesn’t care about the loot distributing system. Had that been the case, he’d be clamoring for an improvement on the current need/greed rolls, which can lead to unnecessary drama.

There’s a proverb in Spanish that says, ‘Ladron juzga por su condicion’ (Thief judges by his ways). It means that those who do something, will judge others are so.

@Stop the QQer: I play my 10 games weekly, and I give it my best shot to win. It’s hard to swallow when your rating drops like a rock because you faced 3 to 4 point selling teams on a bracket they shouldn’t be.

And last time I checked, Shade of Aran still acts the same way as it did way back in 2.1. He didn’t play arcane/frost during 2.1, then frost/arcane in 2.2, then full frost in 2.4. The only boss I can honestly think that has changed was Loot Reaver, and even that was a “minor” change.

@Megan: As much as I agree with you, let’s give the devil his due. Some raiders are excellent persons and work hard for their accomplishments, especially those that use non-conventional tactics and group compositions to Get Things Done(tm). They shouldn’t be associated with people like Stop and Argos.

And perhaps yes if there are s3 geared teams the rating should be changed but should it be changed now or when gear resets in wotlk.
I think the latter, Furthermore people will not arena for no reward its nowhere near as fun as battlegrounds or World pvp (the epic sort of tm v ss not random gankings) and blizzard has an intent to push it on us as is clear from the past few patches and this latest tournament.
In short i think the best thing about wow is choice i can go raid i can go pvp i can do 5 mans and gear up and actually progress which is the whole point while not feeling “locked in”
And putting ARENA ratings on gear obtained via battlegrounds is stupid in my opinion if you really needed to fix it fix the afkers and up the honor/marks then not give it to some other travesty of a mini-game

TBH, for me that’s a compelling argument to actually support the change in rating.

That being said arena players should have something to set them apart E.g Vanity pets, tabards, tittles, mounts, teleports, buffs, novelty items and maybe even bigger bags.

In all fairness, arena players get more status symbols than raiders at present. I think they require something more to show for their work than what they have now before arena gets added rewards. Stop has an interesting idea here which I’d fully support if you added the caveat that all the bonuses get disabled when you engage in PvP action.

Next Gear is meaningless unless used to complete an objective E.g raiding gear for further raids and PvP gear for PvP

Stop you are right PvP is not linear which is why we DON’T need ratings look right now the kinds of teams you can run up against if you are a fresh 70 Full s3 geared teams in the 1500′s and hell even lower. Now i know you can get season 1 after fighting in Battlegrounds note that fighting i find it very unlikely if you afk every match you won’t die of boredom i hate Afkers and report them at every opportunity so do not use that as an excuse for “Welfare epicz”. Because last time i checked you need lots and lots of marks and you get 1 mark for losing 3 for winning so I’d rather win.

If you are in season 1 and vsing s2 your right the difference isn’t huge but it gets worse and worse with season 3 lets assume you are running a cookie cutter build your outgeared so right away you have a disadvantage. So whats left skill? well yes but not only do you have to be better than them you also have to account for their gear furthermore its a ladder system so you could simply run into a wall where your own improvement is matched by that of your opponents a wall which you can not earn anymore gear and the only choice is to raid or Badge of justice

Thats assuming you are lucky enough to be in a cookie cutter build plenty are not and they have to work even harder which is downright impossible to beat against the overwhelming odds of both cookie cutter builds and the gear discrepancy At the very least when s4 is introduced the previous season season 3 should be removed of all ratings at least then the most they would be behind is 1 season.

Ladder systems fail so terribly its not even funny there will always be class imbalance and as far as the cookie cutters go it will simply be the first there getting the best and staying the best.

if you take 100 of the best players put them on a separate battle group someone is still going to be in the 1300′s and if they didn’t get the gear earlier they are probaly going to be stuck there because of it or class choice.

That being said arena players should have something to set them apart E.g Vanity pets, tabards, tittles, mounts, teleports, buffs, novelty items and maybe even bigger bags. Things that have no impact in terms of balance but that are still highly desirable i know i would love any of the above
And this still allows casuals and newcomers a chance to fight in the big leagues the best move blizzard did was giving everyone the same gear on the arena tournament server.

Now i won’t get into the issue of raiding v pvping or world pvp or even battleground pvp this was just about the arena and i could still post more. Heck, i might even make a blog post of my own about it that being said sorry for hijacking your thread Gwaendar.

P.s sorry for the grammar

True, the raiding game does expand, maybe I just don’t feel it’s equal, but that may be because we’re winding down right now and most raid content was front loaded. I don’t know if we’re upset with the game, I believe we would say we’re upset with the choices Blizzard has made recently.

You still got new raid content, and it’s only through circumstances tied to the timing of your guild’s progression that you aren’t yet fully ready to compete for the world / serverfirstmobile. A couple of days ago you admitted that you might have let the world first mentality carry you a bit away. Seems you’ve recovered pretty well in the meantime. Had circumstances given your guild two months more in BT / MH before the patch went live, you’d be perfectly happy with the instance. The new people who are “blowing through MH / BT”, unless they nerfed the content (didn’t bother to read that part of the patch notes), will not just hit the sudden raised difficulty you yourself blogged about in December when the free loot bosses give way to the harder stuff, some of them will also lack the experience granted by Kael and LV because they skipped them. They still have catching up to do – not that I believe this should matter at all, but I’m not you.
Post 2.4, it is a casual’s game, and it’s very inviting right now. One has to wonder if this isn’t all a marketing scheme,

Insert your favourite ORLY owl picture here. But you’re being very lopsided with your assessment. It’s a more casual game patch by patch, but the raiding game gets expanded step by step as well. Blizzard caters to the unwashed masses but also keeps raising the bar for the small hardcore fringe. It’s called appealing to a broad audience. And they do a good job at it. You and Arthos do certainly sound quite upset about the game, yet neither of you has quit. It’s a marketing scheme alright, and guess what, it’s working pretty well.

In a year from now, will Gwaen and I be arguing about T9 and S6? Probably.
If we keep it up for that long, someone’s bound to compare us to a bickering old couple at some point in time. I think we can both agree, for once, that it’s probably best not to get there.