Rating progression in RBGs is oof

PVP Battlegrounds
1

So… my guild’s been taking little weekly punts at rated BGs. Most of us are PvE people, but frankly that gearing system seemed quite rewarding, and we’ve generally had fun.

We are not a meta comp. We’re not going to be a meta comp, because we will bring whoever signs up. Some of us naturally had vers gear and stack around 20%; some of us started out with literally 0%.

We are however reasonably organised and communicative, we figure out how to divvy up the team before the gates open, our group-v-group game is pretty strong and we’re good at pulling reinforcements to where they’re needed.

Early weeks had good progress, initially getting thrashed then reaching more of a 50% win rate - not bad for carebears. But we’ve been stuck around 1200 rating for the last several sessions. We win a match, gain 13 rating, lose a match, lose 9 rating, repeat. Most weeks see us move 20 points in either direction.

At this rate, we will have to play 100 games just to come close to the basic point where we can upgrade our PvP gear. It’s starting to get disheartening.

Don’t think we’re really sure what to do. My instinct says that surely a 50/50 ratio should be enough to move forwards, otherwise the majority of players will get hard stuck. A lot of people had told us that ‘you don’t lose rating below 1400’ - well, you most certainly do, and it’s reaching a point where I’m not sure I want to keep persevering.

For saying how everyone has been bigging up the PvP gearing system, it sure is a pain to get a taste of it :frowning:

2 Likes
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All that matters is the MMR (matchmaking rating, it is only displayed on the scoreboard in the RBG) you’re winning/losing on.

If your MMR is the same as your CR (current rating, that’s the rating it shows you in the PvP UI) and your win rate is 50% you’ll stay on that CR, since you’re basically not improving.

If your MMR is higher than your CR and your win rate is 50%, your CR will rise until it’s close to your MMR again, since you’re keeping your 50% win rate, but are playing against better teams. The higher the difference between MMR and CR the more CR you’ll get for each win.

The same works the other way around if your MMR is lower than your CR.

So why does CR and MMR differ anyway?

Basically MMR moves a little faster than your CR. Especially winning/losing streaks will make your MMR increase/decrease exponentially.

So if you can manage to get a win streak you will notice you’re playing against better teams (theorretically) with a higher MMR. Even if you go back to a 50% win ratio your MMR should stay on the higher value and your CR should follow eventually.

I know it can be quite discouraging when you start (especially since the first rewards start at 1.4k), but technically the rating system works as intended. You’re keeping a 50% win rate against teams that are on the same level as you, which means you’re not improving currently.

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Well, very simply put:
50/50 against worse teams: lose rating.
50/50 against better teams: gain rating.

And if you constantly pick players with 0 experience you probably face quite some worse-rated teams.

And above 1200 you prob are going to need decent PvP gear as well.

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I feel like this is a case where “working as intended” is “the intended working is disappointing”.

If you are to do better than 50%, then someone else has to do worse. Most games, it would be the turnover of new players being that bottom tier, pushing those who’ve been around longer up and eventually taking their turn later. But WoW doesn’t really draw new players, so the implication is that we have a pool of players who never see the first rated bracket.

And even if they’re learning and getting better; so are all the other people at that rating. The difficulty of staying in that rating band increases as time passes because everyone else has been there longer and had more experience.

Which doesn’t feel very encouraging.

You’d think the system would be designed to provide access to the initial 207 stuff with mostly just time and dedication required. Because you have to give them a taste of the good stuff if you want them to come back for more later.

We’re not ‘constantly picking players with zero experience’; we’re picking people from our guild who want to come. It’s mostly the same 7-8 of us plus a couple of pugs. Most of us began this venture with 0 personal rating, but the regulars are now around 1200.

Some of us naturally collect vers gear from raiding and M+, and most of us are in the 215-220 range; but we don’t have access to the higher PvP gear bands yet. We have started swapping out 220 non-vers pieces for 200 PvP pieces, but this feels pretty bad and we’re not sure if it’s better.

As above; I feel like the issue we’re against isn’t that we just need to learn to be better - it’s that everyone else at this level is also learning to be better. We run for a few hours, pick up a few strats for next time; but so do other teams. The net result is that to progress we have to work harder than other people.

And as said, we’re mostly just a bunch of carebears who wanted to dabble because we were told the gearing was good this iteration.

TLDR, I think I’m just disappointed in the current state of RBGs. If we weren’t losing rating prior to 1400, we would at least have established a gear floor of 207, helping us fill out our last slots, but the system as it stands leans into causing us to stagnate.

It doesn’t feel good and my suspicion is that my group, and probably many others, will ultimately fizzle because of it. We’d do better to spend PvP night in dungeons and get some valor.

5

I agree that PvP is really newbie unfriendly currently. The rewards start at 1.4k, which a lot of the more casual players really struggle to get to. But I don’t think just giving everyone more rating is the solution. If everyone with a 50% win rate makes + rating all the time, everyones rating would just become inflated.

I think more rewards for the lower tiers could help to keep new players motivated. I don’t even think these would have to be power related. Just simple cosmetics would probably do. For the somewhat casual player 1.4k rating is just a really big obstacle to tackle.

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Personally, I do think it needs a lossless bracket to get people into the groove, and 207 is not a lot. That’s M+10 chest gear. People don’t even think it’s worth the faff of a +10 to farm that gear, they’re all just vault fishing anyway.

I’m fine with it if all subsequent brackets can get you stuck and stagnant, but if you want to hook a junkie, you have to let him have a free hit first.

For a while we had a lot of PvE players saying how they were “forced” to PvP (we weren’t forced, it just looked like a good idea), but that’s really fading away with valor and the growing realisation that the carebear crowd may never get any PvP gear beyond 200 anyway.

Feels like you gotta go balls to the wall, else it ain’t worth the effort :confused:

It just seems like a shame that the system is failing to encourage dabbling and doing your best. If unrated PvP doesn’t give you anything above 197, and upgrading conquest gear is inaccessible; what’s left for people who just want a little bit of PvP mixed into their week?

1 Like
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I just don’t think making the 1.4k/207ilvl gear more accessible will be more motivating than the ilvl 200 gear.

In M+ you progress to a certain key level and then you have to keep playing more keys on that level to gear. But in PvP the progression is pretty much a “one and done” kind of deal. You hit 1.4k rating and it gives you a big boost, but then you’re instantly done and unless you hit 1.6k you will not get any progression there either.

You would basically be in the same situation than before with no progression just with 207 ilvl gear rather than the 200 ilvl gear.

I think if you can’t motivate yourself to play PvP for the fun in the activity itself, you will burn out either way.

I just feel the whole reward structure would need to be different to give the people who just want a little bit of PvP mixed into their week some long term motivation.

1 Like
8

what i saw with my rbg groups
they do same as regular bgs leech bot afk ignore objectives and focusing healers
leech honor for free ilvl 200 piece in the vault
is that players or is it bots returning to the game cant tell

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They should just bring back WOD Gearing system instead of this trash where everyone needs a certain threshold of rating to get 20+ ilvls better gear because funnily enough, those 20 extra ilvls make a huge difference now.

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Idk man, I’d have to see you play, 1.4 really is totally yolo, I got there with pugs.

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BFA was a proof that if RBGs have around similar rewards as other content, they would be dead content. In SL they were heavily sugarcoated but the fundamental issues making them unfun remained. People, including myself, would still dabble in some for cosmetics but its a side thing like scenarios or pet battles.

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If you want to make progress,you gotta play with same people,or invite people with same cr as you,or if you are really paying attention to progress and u want to make one,invite people with same win ratio as yours.

If you keep inviting new people all the time,you wont climb ever.

You weren’t supposed to lose rating until 1400 but you messed up your cr big time,that’s why u started losing points at 1100.

You have 37% win ,and its gonna take you a long long long time to make progress.

Its ok wanting to play with friends and new people,its good playing with guild and all that,but you gotta think about yourself little bit if your guild is keeping you down.

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We’re running a guild PvP night. It is mostly the same people, but we don’t have a choice about pugging 2-3 people if we can’t get a full team. Whether we need to be more picky is another question. I will ask our event leader if he’s checking people’s CR is at least similar to ours or whether we’re taking on people with 0.

Don’t think I understand how this can be the player’s fault? Either the game lets you, or it doesn’t? If it lets you start losing rating before you’ve gotten to the point where rating is at all useful, then frankly that does feel like bad design.

You can’t hook a player on a system they can’t access.

I’m not here for the PvP experience though. I’m here because my guild is running a weekly event that I want to be part of.

We’re trying to improve, but the rewards are minimal, and some days we end up on a lower rating than when we started. It hasn’t been very satisfying since the first few weeks of watching our ratings improve, and I’m starting to suspect it will just fizzle in a month or so.

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Win more than lose, easy solution. You need more than 50% winrate to climb, if you can’t do that, then you’re a perfect match for your rating.

Default MMR is 1500, so if you lose the same rate as you win at 1.2k, it means you lost a lot more than win overall.

Rewards are based on the performance, with that performance unfortunately you’re at the lowest performance tier of all. While it might be disheartening, there is zero chance Blizz will do anything about it.

15

No, previously (until this expansion) you couldn’t lose rating until 1400, now you can lose rating at any level. 1400 was a given provided you put the time and effort in to get X number of wins that will eventually push you over 1400.

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The problem is, that system puts 50% of players into a situation where they will never even get to the first tier of PvP gearing.

Which is exactly how you get people to dabble for a few weeks and give up never to return.

If you want people to dabble, get excited, and stay - there has to be an initial hit. That first unlock, 207, seriously not a high quality of gear by anyone’s standards - that needs to be the participation award. And then people say ‘oh, I like that, I want more’.

But I don’t know why I’m surprised. I have said for years that PvP in this game is an afterthought, and nothing over the past 2 months has made me change my mind.

1 Like
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Do you have any statistics to prove that?

Also Combatant gear is between normal and heroic raid gear. It’s never meant to be a participation award. You got basic Conquest gear for that, because you got Conquest literally from participating in rated PvP. Anything higher, you need to work.

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I mean, for every win, there is a loss. You can’t have 51% of players with a 51% win rate.

And WoW’s player base does not grow, so there’s no buoyancy provided by increasing numbers of newbies.

So this is a system under which many people (at least 50%) will plateau and never get anywhere.

1 Like
19

You start at 1.5k MMR, which means if you just keep an 50% winrate you can climb to 1500 at least. Which is half way to the 2nd tier PvP gear (213)

Also I feel like till around the 1.6-7k mark the system is pretty generous with MMR increases, so you can keep climbing even with a near 50% winrate.

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Went to 2k with my role playing guild by playing once or twice a week in a month or so lol I think your individual players lack the skill and therefore u get the clap, you should state the comp you are running anyways

Edit: Blizz manipulated mmr in Slands heavily though so I guess if you get stuck once you are done for – that’s how it is in arena too unless you begin winning rly crazily for a long mf streak