2.4 changes should keep "Ringers" out of Arenas

It’s funny but based on my arena rating I've always just assumed that me and my friends suck at PvP in World of Warcraft. We have okay class balance but we never seem to be able to get our rating above 1600. We do tend to win a lot in battlegrounds and we made a good run of it this weekend in Warsong Gulch. We only had a premade of about five people but we managed to beat numerous full premades and won about 20 games in a row. This was the most success we've ever had and actually resulted in me spending left over WSG tokens on potions. Never thought I would see that day!

However, in the arenas this weekend we got our normal ass kicking with every win giving us only around 8-10 points and every loss costing us about 16 points. It’s funny but our win/loss ratio is about 2-1 but we actually end up barely increasing our rating. Well it was about half way through our 5th game when we noticed that a lot of the teams that beat us in the mid 1500's had one or two people in full sets of Vengeance (S3 arena) gear. These were the teams with apparently much worse ratings then us and yet somehow they managed to have people who had already achieved the 2000 rating requirement for the shoulders.

Unfortunately, it’s become common practice for players to switch to lower rated arena teams once they have fully geared themselves out in the latest arena gear. Since the arena matching system is currently based on team ranking it ignores the obvious advantage a fully geared season 3 player brings to the table. The practice is especially brutal since most of these Ringers are high damage classes with MS warriors being the most common. This makes it especially hard to catch up at the end of an arena season especially if you didn't have an active team for the first month or two.

It looks like Blizzard has noticed the problem and is changing the matching system in patch 2.4 to prevent Ringers from smashing lower ranked teams. In the next patch you can expect the matching system to use the highest personal rating of a team member to match them against their opponents. All of a sudden having someone with a personal rating of 2000 in your team doesn't seem like such an advantage. This should reduce the amount of teams in the 1450-1650 rating range which make use of Ringers to artificially boost their arena rating.

Blizzard is getting closer and closer to cutting out most of the cheats for the arena system. People will always try to game a system to get rewards faster but for the longest time PvP has been more vulnerable to it then PvE. It’s only natural since massive PvP systems in MMORPGs are a lot less common then standard reward systems which use dungeons and raids. Still it looks like progress is being made and one only has to look at the greatly reduce gold spam to see that Blizzard can effectively change their code to restrict undesired behavior. Now if only they would work on the hack that allows people to start early in Eye of the Storm.