Oh no, what will I do! A nickname from Rákar! Oh the horror! 
What’s next, you’re going to tell your mommy that Jito is being mean to you on the forums? 
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I suppose it depends on what you emphasize.
The number of Gladiators relative to the total WoW population is miniscule. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a rating or percentage requirement. It’s few of many.
The number of Gladiators relative to the total Arena population is also miniscule. Again, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a rating or percentage requirement. It’s few of many.
You’re always left with a title that very few people get.
Now,
You can of course emphasize that 200 people got it before with a percentage requirement, and now 500 people get it with a rating requirement, and that’s 250% more!
(random numbers for purpose of example!)
But still, relative to the field of participating players, I struggle to see any effective devaluation. I would share the criticism if Blizzard had pushed the rating requirement down to 1800 or lower, where you’ve then gone from the top 0,5% to the top ~10%. That’s substantial. But going from 0,5% to ~1-2% or whatever, that’s insignificant.
Well they still are.
The rating system is pyramid-shaped, and there can only be a finite number of players at a certain rating level. And the higher rating you have, the fewer people will have a similar rating.
So not everyone can reach the Elite PvP bracket. That’s impossible. There simply aren’t enough rating points in the system for everyone to get 2400 of them. Some (the losers) end up with less, so others (the winners) can have more. That’s the competition. It doesn’t really matter whether that gets translated into a percentage system of rankings rather than pure rating, the dynamic is the same.
Again, it’s because the rating system is designed as a pyramid.
3000+ rating translates to roughly the top ~0,1%
2400+ rating translates to roughly the top ~0,5%
2000+ rating translates to roughly the top ~5%
1800+ rating translates to roughly the top ~10%
1500+ rating translates to roughly the top ~50%.
And below is the bottom 50%.
These numbers will fluctuate by a few percentages (of percentages!) from Season to Season as participation is sometimes very high (early Seasons) and sometimes very low (late Seasons). Those fluctuations are of course mostly felt in the top, because small differences amongst few is more noticeable than amongst many, but they happen on the rating side just as they happen on the percentage side.
That does make it easier.
Arena participation doesn’t fill up from the top. Participation comes from the bottom, either because it’s a new expansion and newbies want to try Arenas out, or because Blizzard have introduced a new Seasonal mount that all the PvEers need to get, or everyone learns that Arena is good for farming Echoes of Ny’alotha.
The hardcore veteran Arena players are fairly consistent in participation and volume. They’re a constant.
So if the participation goes from 100.000 (of which 0,5% is 500) to 200.000 (of which 0,5% is 1000), then those extra 500 Gladiator spots are created because twice as many scrubnubs like me decide to queue a couple of times during a Season.
That doesn’t affect the high-end competition at all, but it does create more Gladiator spots for those top players to distribute amongst each other.
That’s why BfA Season 1 will have had more Gladiators than BfA Season 4. It’s not because Gladiator competition was less fierce, there were just more people participating because it was a new expansion so the playerbase as a whole was much bigger.
They both change with participation.
The more people that participate, the more people will there be to feed rating points to the top players, pushing the highest ratings and the volume of players who have them. Percentage-wise it comes out to the same, roughly speaking.
0.5% vs 1.19% of the arena playerbase is a significant change and a lot of players. I understand if your casual mind doesn’t see that since you don’t care about the prestige of awards.
No. It isn’t, it’s ~1.19%.
Yes. That is what one should focus on.
That’s because you don’t engage in competitive gameplay.
No they aren’t. They’re tied to a set rating. If the inflation formula changes (which it did mid BfA S1) or the number of people that play arena changes the difficulty of reaching that rating is forever changed.
In Taiwan it’s impossible to get Gladiator nowadays.
No. It isn’t. It depends entirely on the season and the inflation in that season, and as can be proven 2.4K is closer to ~1.19% than 0.5%, currently.
If we look historically, 2.4K has been closer to Duelist than Gladiator for the majority of seasons of the game since MoP (with mainly the incredibly short Legion seasons diverging).
This is just nonsense.
No it doesn’t.
No it doesn’t. WoW is a very old, established, game with few new participants. The participants that change from expansion/season to season are mostly veterans.
You’re vastly overestimating the amount of new people playing this game, and you have 0 proof. Youngsters these days don’t play WoW, they play Fortnite. Veterans return to WoW. There is very little new blood in WoW these days.
Moreover, even if you have a steady stream of brand new players they will increase in skill over time and spread in the ladder (continuously), and old players (presumably better players, according to your logic) will continously leave the game in a “circle of life” such that this becomes a complete non-argument.
Do you even read what you’re writing?
There were approximately ~3 times the amount of available Gladiator slots available in BfA S1 as would’ve been the usual case prior to BfA given that ladder size. The competition was less fierce, because you didn’t have to be as skilled to get them.
No. They. Dont.
In Taiwan you can’t even get Gladiator now.
The more people that participate, the more people will there be to compete for the points amongst the top players.
You live in this fiction where the only people who join a season are bad players. They’re not.
Percentage-wise it will come out to about ~2.38x times more Gladiators this season (it will actually be even more by the end of the season).
Not the same at all, actually.
Here, I made this:
Like I said before, then it is a rather insignificant difference whether Gladiator amounts to 0,5% or 1,19%. Relative to the competition it is a small percentage either way.
Rubbish. Don’t gatekeep.
The prestige of the reward is for all intents and purposes the same. Don’t tell me for a second that when you logged into the game after Season 1 in BfA there were just Gladiators all over the place and you couldn’t even quest in Wetlands without some Gladiator popping out from the bushes.
Doubling or quadrupling a very small number doesn’t make it a big number.
I mean, if you turn it around, then 0,5% or 1,19% becoming Gladiators still amounts to 99,95% or 98,81% that didn’t get Gladiator. Those numbers are both similar by representing the vast majority of everyone.
Fluctuations in percentages is a given, that’s what the ~ represents. We’re talking about a changing environment here, and that most certainly holds true regardless of whether it’s a percentage or rating Gladiator requirement.
I would wager that regardless of it being a popular or unpopular Season, the majority of players will be less-skilled than the very top players. That’s a given, no proof required.
Hence in a popular Season there are far more less-skilled players to feed points to the top players, who are then presented with an easier ladder climb and a more secure Gladiator spot.
Whether the people who decide to play Arena are newbies or returning veterans is besides the point. The top players are a constant. Cdew is not going anywhere, and the more veterans or newbies who play Arena the more points get funneled to the top of the ladder for him to scoop up.
Again, because of the structure of the rating system, there’s a limit to how many players can progress to a certain point. I mean, it’s a zero sum system (with a little intervention by Blizzard). For one player to gain rating, another player has to lose his. It’s not like you play an Arena game and then everyone gets rating because you all tried your best! No. Climbing the ladder means trampling over those ahead of you and kicking them down.
Go play on Taiwanese servers then, they clearly got the most prestigious Gladiator title over there. 
Test to see if I have the powers:
Edit: Oh yes baby, Jito is forum Super Saiyan! 
Test 2:
Bloody hell, it works as well! 
Edit: Amazing. Okay I’m done.
It. Does. Not. Matter.
If we add the entire WoW population to the pyramid it will look even smaller. Or why not add the the entire world’s population? Or why not add all the stars in the world? It. Doesn’t. Matter.
What actually matters is how this impacts those actually fighting for Gladiator, i.e. the top 10% of your pyramid, and how it impacts the prestige of the title for those in that range who’re actually capable of achieving it and those who care about competitive PvP.
Edit: and those who care about competitive PvP.
Let’s make Gladiator mounts participation medals!
Rubbish. Don’t remove prestige.
Spoken like a true casual.
PS: It’s not, not for the people whom it matters for (you know, actual competitive people whom like competitive PvP).
There’s an explosion of BfA Gladiator mounts as compared to other mounts. They’re by far the most common Gladiator mount (and most PvPers try to flex the old ones because they’re more prestigious - so that should say something).
But that doesn’t matter to you, because for you to think it has devalued meaningfully at all “it has to be the most common mount in the game!!!”.
Jeez. You might as well be for participation medals.
Spoken like someone who truly does not understand the value of prestige in a competitive setting.
If EUFA decided to dole out the EUFA Champions League gold medal to 2 teams, 3 teams or even 4 teams out of the thousands of clubs out in the world you don’t think the competition would be seen as a joke?
Jito: “99.999% of teams will still not get the gold medal!!! omg it’s not a big change”
Actually, don’t answer.
The difficulty of achieving Gladiator doesn’t change when the reward is tied to the population size, it does when Gladiator is a set rating. Please get this into your head.
There’s nothing that says that the number of very skilled people re-joining the game will not be enough to offset the extra Gladiator spots.
Stop making these ridiculous claims.
No they aren’t. If you actually played Arena you’d know that. The old bigshot names from the TBC/WotLK/Cata era are mostly gone.
Just because some PvP streamers (whom are playing WoW for a living) are still playing WoW that doesn’t mean it’s the case for all, and certainly not a majority.
You really, really, are clueless.
Nonsense.
Or, you could build a system that isn’t inherently broken and which actually distributes rewards based on the size of the playerbase and the difficulty of acquiring a certain rating.
Stop pretending the new system provides results that are similar to the old. The Taiwan situation clearly shows that’s not the case.
Well it isn’t very impactful.
Again, what’s impactful on the volume of Gladiators – percentage or rating requirement – is the overall level of Arena participation. The higher participation, the “easier” the Gladiator title becomes for those top players.
But whether a percentage or rating requirement is the de facto easiest requirement, well that depends on who and when you ask.
You yourself brought up Taiwan, and for them the percentage requirement would always be easier to fulfill than the rating requirement.
Because the EU has by far the most healthy Arena population, the rating requirement is easier to fulfill here – our rating pool is bigger because participation is higher.
And if you ask during a popular Season, then the rating requirement is easier to fulfill than in an unpopular Season, regardless of who you are.
And if it’s a percentage requirement, then it’s easier during a popular Season, but only harder during an unpopular Season if you’re at the lower end of the percentage requirement.
So it depends.
But again, the by far most impactful denominator is participation. The system revolves around it. Both percentages and ratings are a result of participation.
If one was to champion this notion of prestige, then the ideal design would be that the best player becomes Gladiator, and no one else.
Everyone chases the same goal, there’s one winner, and it’s the same competition every Season.
I could support that.
But don’t sit here and say that a fluctuating and unknown number of Gladiators is bad because the title is rewarded based on rating, whereas a fluctuating and unknown number of Gladiators is good because the title is rewarded based on percentage.
That’s silly. They’re two sides of the same coin, both flawed for the same reasons and subject to the same fluctuations.
If you were serious about the prestige of the Gladiator title you’d want it to be a fixed reward.
One title. The best player gets it. The rest are losers.
Well not really, rating in general varies greatly depending on season. S14 for an example had a R1 cutoff at around 2.6k, meaning if we go with some people’s suggestions to raise it to 2.7k, it means we could run into situations where there won’t be any gladiators at all.
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I think thats US cutoffs, if you look at the 3v3 leaderboards (eu and us) its the same numbers for both of them and its been these numbers for a while now, I don’t think you can really do any calculations until season is over.
And that’s also because since Gladiator isn’t an end of season percentage it’s boostable now. Every time that I queue, be it on an alt at 1800 or on my rogues at 2700 I play versus tournament players (forums say you can’t name people so…) who have 2800 rating, are boosting a random dude to 2450 so they have a safety net, then they tank to 1.4 so that their team has 1800 MMR or so and they actually far the glad wins of the 2450 guy at 1800 MMR.
This shouldn’t be allowed as it’s disgusting, it’s giving false gladiator titles, and it also prevents 1800 players from actually playing the game.
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Thankfully the current gladiator mounts represent that. 
I agree though, Gladiator has definitely lost its prestige.
The comparisons to old Seasons are troublesome to make without additional explanation. They rarely compare 1:1.
For example, prior to Season 13 Blizzard always reset the MMR after a Season. This led to a lot of abuse and made for less-than-ideal Seasonal transitions. So with Season 13 Blizzard started carrying over the MMR into the following Seasons, changing the pace of the rating climb.
The existence of Battlegroups in earlier Seasons also makes it harder to compare what’s effectively fractured competition versus region-wide competition.
The length of Seasons and the introduction of rating inflation also makes for weird comparisons.
Ultimately, then the rating in one Season isn’t very comparable to the rating in another Season 8 years ago. The ratings really only reflect the Seasons they were played in.
No. Again: That. Is. Not. The. Case.
If the participation is higher there will also be more top players.
And this is why you shouldn’t have a system that’s at a set rating, because it isn’t actually a good measurement of the difficulty required to achieve it. In our region, it turns out it’s a massive decrease in the skill level required, in others it makes it impossible to achieve.
It should just return to 0.5%, as it always was.
You are actually the king of completely missing the point.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a gold medal which only 1 team/person gets, or if it’s a Gladiator title that only 0.5% of people get.
The point is that it’s an established prestige reward, and that the prestige of that reward is diminished considerably when you widen the amount of receivers by what turns out to ~2-3x in our region.
If you don’t see this then that’s a you problem.
Convinced a friend to return to WoW and playing PvP and Hunter for the first time ever and playing around 1.8K rating and you face no-names (who just randomly got 2.4K achievement the current week) together with 2x multiglads/R1s that you’re used to facing at glad ratings.
It’s incredibly demoralizing and disgusting.
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Yes, that is exactly what I mean, hence why a flat rating mark will in some seasons easier to reach, and in others way harder. % cutoff is never unfair, it’s dynamic and adjusts itself
If the top players are defined as those with a rating of 2400 or higher, or within the top 0,5% of rankings, then any increased participation will err heavily toward being below that rating or that percentage.
There’s no reason to assume that a popular Season is driven by a disproportionally high participation of top players.
If anything, the opposite often seems true. BfA Season 1 had a high participation, because the rewards were busted during the first few weeks and everyone and their mom queued for Arenas to get epics.
I agree.
Fundamentally the Arena rating and reward system could use a serious re-design so it actually accommodates the varying degrees of participation and player activity across regions.
But I suspect Blizzard are hesitant to embark on such a re-design, since the PvP community tends to be rather sensitive and very conservative about it. Reactions are almost always negative, so it’s unlikely there’s much bang for the design buck, so to speak.
And why was it that?
Have you ever thought about why Blizzard landed on 0,5% and not 1% or 0,02% or 10%? Or why they decided on a percentage in the first place?
I mean, back when Blizzard designed this – prior to TBC some 11-13 years ago – we were using the old Honor system. The one they have in Classic WoW now. The weekly standings were derived as a percentage of overall player participation. And that’s what Blizzard carried over into the Arena system (hello pyramid!), and then they infused it with the chess ELO formula for rating calculations and used that in lieu of an Honor grind.
It’s super arbitrary, and it strikes me as odd that someone will sit here a decade later and defend an off-the-cuff decision a random designer made prior to TBC as the best decision they could have made.
It’s an archaic system. I will defend Blizzard’s decision to transition to a rating requirement because it’s easier to understand than a completely unknown percentage that you don’t know squat about until the Season is over.
But if given the choice, I would see both of them scrapped in favor of a complete re-design.
The percentage requirement though, that’s the most outlandish design of all.
You need to be in the top 0,5% to get Gladiator.
Okay, so what ranking does that translate to?
No one knows.
Okay… What rating does it translate to?
No one knows.
How are you then supposed to know if you get Gladiator?
You aren’t. You either just end up in the top 0,5%, or you don’t.
Okay, so when I hit the top 0,5%, whatever it may be, I’ll get Gladiator?
No.
What?? But you just said…?
You have to wait until the end of the Season, then Blizzard will do some shady behind-the-scenes calculations, and then you’ll log in and if you qualified you’ll get a mail.
That’s good design?!
The best.
A little musing, bear with me.
There used to be Arena Teams.
There used to be ELO calculations.
There used to be Battlegroups.
There used to be MMR resets.
Then there was cross-realm groups.
Then there was rating inflation.
Then there was faction-separate titles.
And now there are brackets, ratings, and win-requirements.
Oh how established it is.
Is there actually a class that has been “so strong” every single season?
Viable and pretty decent:
Warlock, shammy, druid, priest, and shammy.
And seemingly, as far as Blizzard were concerned, your opinion was placed in the dumpster bin and put on fire, so…
Why can’t we just have a discussion, fiery as it may be, without it devolving into this weasel attempt of trying to attack the poster rather than the argument?
I mean, you originally replied to me, and you damn well know who I am, so you also know who you’re getting a discussion with.
If you don’t fancy my thoughts and perspectives, then don’t engage in discussion with me.
Your lack of tolerance isn’t really my issue. I tolerate your opinions and am happy to discuss them. If you struggle with mine, then friggin’ talk to someone else.
Talk to Rákar instead if you want the pro PvPer perspective and everything.
That’s not very kind to ask anyone.
Go yell into a pillow or something if you have issues managing your temper.
And you’re the guy who eats 10 BigMacs at McDonald’s every day and thinks that makes you a great chef.
See, I can do that too.
What population exactly? Because those eligible requirements for being counted in the pool of participating players changed too, two times I think?
It’s so arbitrary. It’s 0,5% of who, and in what context, and under which conditions? Doesn’t matter, so long as it’s 0,5%!
Like I said, I’m the last person to say much good about the Arena rating system; it’s garbage.
Still, whether it’s a rating requirement or a percentage requirement for Gladiator is all the same, generally speaking. I’ve yet to be swarmed with Gladiator mounts by AFKing Arena players in Stormwind, so it’s still a title for the very few. Whether it’s 99% or 98% who fail to get it shouldn’t be such a massive issue that it prevents going from a completely arbitrary requirement to one that’s actually tangible and can be pursued.
And it didn’t.
I can understand that it’s a sensitive area for you… Not sure I’m seeing similar sentiments expressed on a wider scale. I honestly can’t say people have by and large been upset because it’s not percentage-based but rating based.
I’d say that the general reception was that the new rating requirement made more sense than the percentage requirement, but it was set too low. And that’s what people tend to criticize, not that it isn’t a percentage.
He didn’t trash talk anyone, all he said is current glad title is a joke but people who are finally able to achieve it because of how low the rating requirement is + how easy and faceroll the game is right now feel inferior and take it personal because deep inside they know they wouldn’t have achieved it if the changes didn’t happen.
Not all players play just for the sake of winning, there are players out there who enjoy improving and getting good at the game first then go for the win, sadly the only thing you can improve now is your gear because the skill cap is way too low.
Hello aybid didnt u want to go?