What’s New in Season Two

With all this looking at feedback and taking things into consideration, is there also a chance that the stance on cross server queues might also be reconsidered? I mean I think plenty of players were under the impression that BioWare is working on cross server tech before the PvP FAQ revealed that it is not even on the to do list. And now with all the people asking for it in various threads, shouldn't that also tell you guys that many PvP players want that?

That would be fine.

If everyone did this, yes that'd be a problem, but as there will be hardly any effect if only a small group of people do this, they will have little incentive to do so.

People that are willing to do something they might not otherwise do to get a reward would probably not be so easily discouraged under this system, relative to the season 1 system.

There's no evidence supporting either side on this so for all I know you might be right. I think we'll lose a big chunk if it happens though. It is however well established that people arent playing Arena for the sake of competition , just look at how few teams there are and how, on some servers, non-existent the solo queues became once those with a reasonable shot at dinging 1500 had reached their goal. If you ask me they should have just cancelled the whole thing and labeled it what it is, a massive failure. That's a different discussion but I strongly believe that 8 vs 8 ranked with a solo queue would have been much more successful and the go-to queue for most people.
Making it more casual or simply catering to the masses? I went from some high-end compettive gaming to this game for the sake of playing something casual for a change and the game has always been casual. In all the other games I've played I would have been totally against catering to the casual player or balancing classes around them (I havent really played a game before where balancing came into play) but this game has time and time again proven that it can never move forward if the top 1 % has their way or is being catered too. And that's how I see it, there's no spectrum of skill in this game, there's one small good click and then the rest..and they mix like water and oil. It would have been significally easier to pull something as Arena off in a game where there had been a fairly big population close to the top tier followed by the rest of the population. Don't trust me? Look at the tank situation, possibly the determining factor in Arena. If you don't have a good tank you'll never be able to compete. The thing is just that there are only.....hmm...five decent PvP tanks per server. Good luck getting a bunch of teams queueing under those circumstances. It doesnt matter if you're the 20th best DPS on the server, you'll still not be able to find a tank your own skill to play with and no one wants to queue with people they beleive are significally worse than themselves.

Just get rid of ELO rating and calculate it like:

Team Leaderboards

1. 3 Points per win
2. 0 for a loss

Solo Leaderboards

1. 3 Points per win
2. 3 Points for being Top Player of your team based on all Stats:
   Prot score, dps, heal depending on your class, would require some new formular tho to make this balanced
3. 0 for a loss

something like that, I don't think it's fair that you lose 20 points vs. another team and gain only 5 - 13 for the next win...

Your rationale?

Proves my point?

Catering to bads is bad. You also just can't add elo gain modifiers based on games played- that screws with the whole system.

How in the world has this game proven that? This game has never (unfortunately) catered to the 1%. If anything it's given evidence to the contrary.

*Clique*. Do I have to respond to this; seems like a rant. Honestly I don't get what you're trying to say in the post as a whole either.

I'm in favor of some form of indivdual performance ratings but I think it would be really difficult to balance around all specs. If the DDes on a team instantly die there's no one to protect or heal etc and even if you're the best DD in the world you can sometimes find yourself in situations, usually 4vs4 DD games, where you are getting mauled in 5 secs. It doesnt really reflect your own skill.

Then again, there are also numerous games in which one DD will do 3 times the damage of the next DD and single handedly end the game through a 1 vs 2. It would have made a difference in those games.

Either way, I would have been much more inclined to queue if it felt like my rating wasnt merely the outcome of my luck with team mates, which for the most part it is since games rarely are balanced enough for one person to be the determing factor.

No no no... no. No. No? No.

The elo system is fine, it just needs more people in order to function correctly. While your idea would be good for me personally, it would be terrible for the overall system. It would also heavily favor certain classes/specs. Getting bad teammates sucks, but a win needs to be a win and a loss needs to be a loss. Just gotta suck it up and keep queuing.

On the team rating I have to disagree, the ELO system is useful there, otherwise it would just mean groups who will just play a lot will end up on top, even if they are not that good and lose quite a few matches...

On the solo rating, yes, there should be looked on individual performance and not at the team, since you cannot choose your team, so one shouldn't get punished just for being put into a team with bad players.

So let's discuss your system by using TOFN as an example.

TOFN has 133 pages with listed players.

94 of these pages contain people with ten or less than ten wins. I think it's reasonable to assume that these people had no interest in Arena or the rating, they were simply checking it out. These people would be even less inclined to play a season where they continuously had to play throughout the entire season. Bonus opinion, there's a good chance/risk that the next season will be 94 pages short because I don't see why these players would return. Throw a couple of releases into the mix and the total for season 2 might stop at 30 pages.

So now we're left with 39 pages. A lot of those pages contain people who also didnt play much and/or managed to break into the higher tiers. I don't see why players who couldnt or didnt care enough to be placed in a high tier in season 1 would play more when they have to put even more time and effort into it. For the sake of argument I'm not going to subtract any pages here but my personal estimate would be atleast 10, possibly 20.

Back to the 39 pages, how many are alts? I would say that the vast majority of high tier players also played on atleast one alt. There goes another couple of pages. The alts would have even more incentive to queue in a % system because they are the ones you made it easier for and not the guy who has to put in houndreds of games for a rating.

Another factor, online time. Even if 40 pages, which in reality would be more like 15-20, full of individual players all would play during the same week we'd still have to deal with the fact that they're not all going to be on at the same time. ELO will never work under these curcumstances, people will get steamrolled by players way out of their ELO leagues and ultimately stop queueing. Hence, there needs to be some other form of incentive where a player can feel like he/she is progressing despite all the flaws in the system.

Or to make it even more basic, I played 18 games, got a crap rating and still ended up as ranked 5200 across all servers (in the 400 range on TOFN). So there's basically not more than 400'ish per server that cared more than me and I didnt care at all ( I probably just queued for the ranked comms for some gear). ELO wouldnt even work if those 400 were queued at the same time.

Anyone with common sense will know that they don't have to play throughout the entire season to get a reward just because the elo requirement doesn't get announced. For example, some people got over 1500 rating in the beginning of season 1 (long before 1500 became the announced cutoff), then stopped. They remained in the top 5% from when they got their highest rating all the way through till the end of the season. Doing this will still be possible.

Yeah I really don't think you get how this works. It doesn't require more time and effort, unless you're considering glancing at the leaderboards every once in a while. I don't want people who are too lazy to even do that in my game anyway. Your actual required number of games/performance will not be different.

No there doesn't. The flaws are not with the system- they are with the population level. "ELO will never work under these circumstances"? No, NO system will work under these circumstances. If there aren't enough people in queue to match everyone up with/against people in their range of skill, there just aren't enough people. We can fault BW for driving away their ranked playerbase ever since ranked didn't come in 1.2, but faulting them for using the solid Elo system is stupid. I'm aware that there have potentially been in-game misapplications of this system in the form of one team's combined Elo being unnecessarily higher than the other's (in a same faction match), but other that...