PvP Ranks System

[Watto44]

I don't know if anyone's interested, but a systems analysist sat down and nutted out the way honor, standing and "rank points" work. Interesting reading, although I doubt there's amuch utility to it. :)

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.a...p=1#post5286625

Edit 1: Figured I'll put a summary of points here:

1) Unless you're in the absolute top 1 ( at most 2), you'll never see rank 14, ever, due to 20% decay to beat before gaining any grounds.
2) Unless you keep pvping more and more and more, you WILL hit a glass ceiling due to your playtime, again, due to 20% decay
3) The ceiling in 2) used to be that most people will never see rank 7+ (by design), now (post 1.8) most will never see rank 10+. Most being dedicated PvPers who do nothing but BG when they log on


Edit 2:

Thanks to Zeldyan From Alleria on the PVP forum for correcting my understanding of decay IF you did not beat 20% of your original ranking points, you will only lose up to 10% or 2500, whichever is less. My original post was wrong, you never lose more than 2500 rating points, ever.


I don't know how many have sat down and figured out the exact system of ranking points and ranks, but I thought I'd post it here for people to read. Forgive me if any of this was already proven wrong by others.


With the web site ( https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/pvp/index.html ) that showed us what is our overall standing and "rating", I wanted to see how far my given play time can get me in this pvp system, and being a system analyst, I thought, what the hell, it'd be neat to figure it out.

Let me quickly explain what the numbers on that page means:

Standing is your overall standing on your server for your faction, Lifetime kills is the total number of honourable kills you have ever

received, rating is the famed ranking points you have. This ranking points is that "hidden" number behind that nice little progress bar you have on your honour tab.

Please note that this ranking points is NOT your honour points get (and wiped) weekly. I will explain the relationship between the two in a little bit.

The ranking points above determines two things: your overall standing and your PVP rank

Overall standing is pretty straight forward, it's just from highest ranking points to lowest.

Your PVP rank is simply a lookup table (a quick check on the ranking website would show you this):

60k - rank 14
55k - rank 13
50k - rank 12
45k - rank 11
40k - rank 10
35k - rank 9
30k - rank 8
25k - rank 7
20k - rank 6
15k - rank 5
10k - rank 4
05k - rank 3
2.5k- rank 2
00k - rank 1*

*To make rank 1, you actually only need 25+ HK, from what I have gathered.

"So all I need to do is get those ranking points, cool! So why does it take months and months of 18 hours / day of honour farming to get to

rank 14?!"

I'm glad you asked that. You see, to make sure people do not stay on top of the rankings, Blizzard decided to add a weekly decay rate to your ranking points. After doing some cross reference analysis using multiple data points over 3 weeks, I figured that (at least for rank 3-6, but should be constant throughout the entire spectrum of ranks), the decay rate is at 20% of your ranking points. If you do not get more than 20% of your previous week's rating points, you will lose up to 10% decay or 2500 ranking points, whichever is less.

Taking myself as an example... I currently have 16562 points, if I pvp less and only get 2000 pts this week, next week I would lose around 3312-2000 = 1312 ranking points. If I do not pvp at all, I would lose 1656 (10%) points. That would also mean I would go down to rank 4 (14906) if I don't pvp at all.

In otherwords, if I don't want to gain any grounds, I have to gain at LEAST 3312 points to remain exactly where I am ranking points wise.

That is why the higher the rank, the slower you gain ranking points, you need to first get MORE than 20% of your current ranking points...

before you gain any grounds.

"Ok, so far that's good, I'll have to beat decay... so how the hell do I get ranking points?!"

Here's where your weekly honour comes in in a few ways.

First, your weekly honour determines your weekly standing.

Then the TOTAL honour on YOUR FACTION determines the POOL of ranking points available to everyone.
Then your weekly standing would determine how much of that pool you get.

So if your side pvp'ed /very/ heavily and your weekly standing's 400, you'd probably get more ranking points than if your side pvp'ed very lightly and your weekly standing's 200.

What does this all mean?

Taking myself for example: prev week my ranking points was 13359, and I decided to pvp much more heavily, and scored a standing of 76th last week. My total ranking points moved up to 16562. Given 20% decay on 13359, that means I actually got 5875 ranking points (decay ate 2671).

If I keep getting the same ranking points, that means my max total would break even at 5875/.2 = 29374, just shy of rank 8 (30k).

The biggest evil here, as you can see, is the 20% decay, which is laughable as blues stated "casual players would find it they would be very viable in the pvp honour system". I was NOT casual last week.. casual is 2-3 hours a night, and that was my previous weeks (standing around 300-400) doing nothing but pvp. Even then, my max achievable is at MOST rank 4-5, meaning I won't be able to get /any/ of the pvp gears

even if I worked week after week after week unlike grinding instances. I'm not talking about epics, but just let us get to rank 10 as casual players instead as the gear is not a lot superior to ones you find in high level (non-raid) instances... the amount of time required

to play each week is just not balancing out with the rewards vs pve time invested.

I hope folks found this an interesting read.

Patch 1.8 came along, here're the changes:

First a few new facts that I found out (and was like this before 1.8):

a) PVP Inactive people actually lose 10% OR 2500 ranking points / week, whichever is less. If you were active, you still lost 20%.
B) It turns out, if you had a weekly standing of 1 on your server and faction, you get a flat 13000 ranking points, this was not changed at

all in 1.8 as well.

Now, onto 1.8 changes:

I was under the misconception that with the new marks of honour in 1.8, total faction and honour would increase, which in fact did not. I dont remember, but I believe the actual bonus honour from winning a AB match dropped from 1.4k to 1.1k (please correct me on this one, I'm working from memory and it's not the greatest :-p).

One thing that I was lucky regarding 1.8, I actually pvp'ed very heavily (for my standards) in the week right before release, and got 88.9k honour and recieved a standing of 61.

So since I've been keeping taps on this, I figured it'd be good to see how things changed... I logged in and saw myself 1/3 into rank 6! Considering I was only 1/5 into rank 5 the week before, I have to say I was pleasantly surprised. I figured at most I'd be almost to rank 6...

So I got to work with the ranking points tabulation I've been keeping, and found the following result (before decay, obviously):

With standing 61, I got a total of 8545 ranking points
With standing of 66, 8358 ranking points was achieved
With standing of 125, 7366 ranking points was achieved.

This is quite a significant boost for the data points I keep checking, since it means they've increased ranking points available to top X number of standings. Compare this to 5875 ranking points for standing 76 before 1.8, that is a very significant increase.

"But this increase could have had been an increase on pvp activity too!" you say?

Of course it could have! That is why I kept track of the honour points associated with the standings too! Brilliant!

1.7:

Standing 76 with 71k honour = 5876 ranking points.

1.8:

Standing 125 with 48.6k honour = 7366 ranking points.

So it's very obvious they increased the ranking points rewarded for at least top 125 standings, if not more.

"But they could have decreased decay to 15% or less!" you ask?

Ah... you sceptical you... that's why it's always great to have multiple data points. By comparing relative ranks, ranking point deltas, I have eliminated this possibility. More precisely, decay has to remain at 15% - 20% for the observed data to exist.

So... how can I say they did not decrease decay?

Go back to B) above. I kept track of the top pvper on our server and faction. Pre 1.7, standing 1 rewarded 13000 (well, 12999 with my rounding being a little off) ranking points... 1.8, same 13000 for the top dog (new top dog, good thing I kept tabs on top 2 people as I knew the top dog was going to stop pvp'ing in the previous week that he would have achieved rank 14).

So while blizzard DID increase ranking points rewarded for most people in the higher standings, poor top standing didn't get any more increase... and it kind of makes sense within their framework. I will explain in a bit.


Soooooooooooooo.... what this all means:

It means for the same amount of effort, you'll probably recieve 2-3 ranks higher than you could have pre 1.8.


Now onto the actual design blizzard has in mind:

Blizzard designed the pvp ranking system in a very simple manner: They expect you to pvp for the same amount of time over a period of 10 weeks to achieve your highest rank possible, and they achieve this result by spreading the ranking to take 10 weeks. No burst ranking up for you!

Here's the reason: 20% decay of your previous week's ranking points.

Let's say, I'll pvp all my time online and get 90k honour, and let's assume, for the sake of simplicity, I'll always get the same ranking points: 8500, and let's assume I start from being a complete pvp newb with 0 ranking points:

My max rank will be rank 10 (40k required) with 8500 / .2 = 42500 ranking points (where my 20% decay = weekly gain).

Here's the progression:

Week Rank Pts PvP Rank
1 0 Rank newb
2 8500 Rank 3
3 15300 Rank 5
4 20740 Rank 6
5 25092 Rank 7
6 28573.6
7 31358.8 Rank 8
8 33587.1
9 35369.6 Rank 9
10 36795.7
11 37936.5
12 38849.2
13 39579.4
14 40163.5 Rank 10
15 40630.8
16 41004.6
17 41303.7
18 41542.9
19 41734.3
20 41887.5
21 42010.0
22 42108.0
23 42186.4
24 42249.1
25 42299.2 Still Rank 10


Yes, I love MS Excel for these things.

You would see a similar pattern if you had a weekly standing of 1 every week... at top rank-3 or so, it will slow to 1 rank every 2 weeks, and generally last rank will take 5 weeks. Total of 14 weeks.

More fun, want to see the progression of someone who's top dog every week from newb to rank 14? sure you do:


Week Rank Pts PvP Rank
1 0 Rank newb
2 13000 Rank 4
3 23400 Rank 6
4 31720 Rank 8
5 38376 Rank 9
6 43701 Rank 10
7 47961 Rank 11
8 51369 Rank 12
9 54095
10 56276 Rank 13
11 58021
12 59417
13 60533 Rank 14
14 61427
15 62141
16 62713
17 63170


So why does it take less time (13 weeks as opposed to 14) to get to rank 14 if you've always been top dog?

13000 / .2 = 65000, rank 15. You are actually working towards rank 15 with 13000 a week, so it won't take you 5 weeks to get from 13 - 14 as it does for a lower standing person to get to their last rank. Interesting side effect, no?

Hence why my earlier statement "it makes sense".



If you're still here, which I doubt most still are, I really wish that blizzard makes it easier to rank up to rank 10, expecting people to 100% pvp for 10-14 weeks to get to their highest rank is stupid. The rewards for rank 10 pvp set is just much inferior to running ZG/MC raids all the time for 10-14 weeks.

To make it easier, they'll need to make it so that decay's down to 10%, and ranking points awarded would be a LOT lower for lower standings than expected 11+ ranks. I want to propose a solution, something like "10% decay until rank 10, then it's 20%". That'll let a LOT of people get to rank 10, then everyone would lose rank 10 right after because their weekly ranking reward would be less than that extra 10% decay.

Removing decay would also make everyone a rank 14 eventually, so no go there, and I agree.

One way is to increase the quality of the PvP rewards (let's not even discuss the grind for reputation here), other is to make it easier to rank up so risk vs reward matches the Vision ™ (that one's for you old EQ folks out there!).

I do have faith in Blizzard doing the right thing eventually, but hopefully not so late that the majority of the causal player base decides to leave the game because they realized it turned into a grinding exercise that they have 0 chance of seeing the fruits of their labours before months and months of doing the exact same thing (pvp ranks and BG faction... look at WSG and AV, AB will be like that when the next "great" BG comes out).

Nothing that new, but it's nice to see how the figures play out. :)