Does anyone know if there are rating floors for rated pvp? Always sucks when you’re having an off day and rating plummets just cause your head isn’t in it, but I never really keep going if I hit a losing streak and feel that it’s because of my performance.
Was reading up on elo rating (which if memory serves correctly is used in wow) and found rating floors used by the USCF, so I know the rating theory supports it, just not sure if wow does.
Feels like if it isn’t already a thing a lot of people would appreciate it, both for just having something to take the pressure of when you have an off day, but also as a balancing factor when it comes to pvp gearing as a pillar of content. Less relevant for pvp in DF since the ilvl is set to max, but since we are always forced into pve content in one way or another and need to gear up that pve ilvl anyways, it doesn’t feel remotely comparable playing at a glad level to have pve gear equivalent to like +15 keys.
If anyone is interested in the theory of it, since I can’t link to external pages, you can look up “ELO rating system” on wikipedia and see the subsection on “Rating floors” there.
(it isn’t used in WoW, hasn’t been used in WoW since TBC ended, and I don’t mean Classic TBC)
There’s no rating floor per se, it depends on how low you can go. Some people play on ratings like 800 with that kind of MMR, because they are truly that bad or not caring about their performance.
But the ladders all have a bottom. There’s always someone rated the lowest, the same way someone is always rated the highest. They can still go lower though, but it depends on how much they play and lose and what ratings their opponents have when doing so.
Blizzard uses an original adaption of the Glicko systems, which you can read all about at http://www.glicko.net/
^ In case you (@the OP) think that explanation is too vague, then to make it simpler, you can drop your rating in a free fall in WoW. You can go straight down to the bottom, but as @Axram mentioned, it starts becoming more “lenient” past a certain rating, eventually making it so you’d need to lose 2 matches in a row in order to lose as much as from 1 lost match on higher rating.
Think of it in terms of win rates, in the middle of the ladder you’ll do fine with a 50% win rate if you never get any streak whatsoever, just 1 win, 1 loss, over and over again for hundreds of matches. You can even climb like that, depending on small differences in MMRs from match to match.
But on the lower part of the ladder, you can keep a relatively stable rating even with a lower win rate. In the higher part of the ladder, you however start needing a higher win rate than just 50% just to keep a relatively stable rating.
It’s because of small differences in MMR, and the rate of which you face someone higher or someone lower than your own. So the system ends up “squeezing” a higher performance average out of those going for the top, while doing it in an opposite way out of those going to the bottom of the ladder.
Anyway, you can find out why streaks matter if you check out the Glicko systems.
Also, the reason why there are rating floors in the professional world of chess, is because tournaments are held for varying levels of ability all over the world, and many of them have cash prizes. So to prevent players from manipulating their ratings just to “farm” the lower-rated tournaments, stuff like those “rating floors” can be used.