#1 - May 14, 2011, 3:58 a.m.
Currently rated battleground ladder is not really competitive because it is so easy to abuse the MMR system to get a high personal rating. To abuse the system all you need to do is keep replacing high MMR players with lower ones, this lowers your team MMR which then allows you to gain more personal rating as you will get more rating for beating the same team. This does not necessarily mean getting in lesser skilled players into your team, but perhaps people who have not done much rated BGs or alts that just got full vicious gear. A lot of teams do this, weather its intended as abuse or not.
Our team is approximately 2.8k MMR and since the highest teams we are facing are 2.6k MMR we gain little personal rating from this and our highest rated players at 3130 gain max 6-7 points. Compare this to other teams with MMRs of 2.4k but having certain players with personal ratings of 3.4k who are gaining 20 points from beating the same team. This is not fair.
Also, players who join teams later in the season may risk getting screwed over. On my alt team in Kazzak I started off with an MMR of 1.5k while the rest of the team had an MMR of approximately 2.9k. Since at this point they were mainly meeting top teams with slightly lower MMR (2.7k), I gained very little MMR on wins and lost a lot of MMR when we lost as our team MMR was higher than our enemies. So after 100 wins of playing, my MMR had only increased to 1800 and so it is impossible for me to catch up on MMR meaning my rating gain is EXTREMELY slow.
Funnily enough on my main team I have the opposite problem. If new players who haven't done much rated BGs join the team go on a winning streak their MMR sky-rockets. Where as my win loss ratio is not as good due to previous team. Therefore certain new players in my team who were initially 1000 MMR/personal rating below me are now above me due to a winning streak, even though i was present in all those games. Now they will continue to gain more personal rating than me due to higher MMR. Not that it matters much to me, but its still an issue that makes the game unfair.
I could go on and on about how flawed the system is, but the root of the problem is simple. Rated BGs is a team game, so the rating should be treated as such in terms of competition, and it does not make any sense to rate people individually, just pure logic. Imagine if arena was personal rating based... disaster.
Make rated BGs team based like arena. This will allow rated BG ratings to actually matter and make it a lot more competitive. You could also include a rank 1 title for the top team. (Also make rating gain/loss per game larger as rated BG games have a longer duration than arena.)
Please consider this. Thanks.
