Add cost to create a new Arena team

[Lelol]

The arena situation on this server has been pretty bad for a long time now, one of the main reasons for this is that people re create their arena teams almost every single day, sometimes even several times a day, and since there's no MMR in TBC, this fucks up the whole system.

On retail you couldn't create a new team every time you lost because you'd run out of gold in no time. Here though creating a team is free, that + the low population makes it so people just keep attempting to grind noobs and comps they counter to high rating, often with only losing a few games since they aren't actually facing anything challenging.

Here's an example of some healthy Top 10 ladders:





The teams have a lot of wins, but also quite a bit of losses, which is a sign that they actually faced a lot of other good/high teams.


Now here's Smolderforge Top 10:



The stats doesn't make sense, it's like they have never even faced each other in arena, if they would have, then the teams would have had a lot more wins & losses. The entire Top 50 on this server looks pretty much the same, very few teams has actually met each other in arena...


Now to the point, just add a cost of about 10-15 badge of justice to create an arena team(or maybe a cost that increases for every new team you create in a short amount of time, kind of like reseting talents but a lot more diminishing on the cost). I'm not saying this will solve the whole ladder issue but it will at least help it a bit. People will be less inclined to disband their team and create a new one when they actually have to pay for it every time.



Implementing this will be good for everyone, new players will be able to face people that is at their skill level more often at lower rating and higher rated teams will actually get to play against other higher rated teams.

Also implement a "queue zone", just like they have on 3.3.5 Arena-Tournament(random locations all over Nagrand etc). Because currently it's a sausage fest in Tanaris.



Thoughts?

[Irwikatti]

I usually never post anything in forums but this is actually a really good idea and long needed fix so have my upvote.

[Itslovelol]

Upvote on this, but my suggestion would be to make it like it's currently on retail. No teams, each player has a team similar to the current 3vs3 solo queue team which cannot be leaved or reset and you can play with whoever you want.

[Discyo]

Thing about peaople don't meet each other is because top10 or maybe even top 20 consists of the same 6-8 players.

[Lelol]

Upvote on this, but my suggestion would be to make it like it's currently on retail. No teams, each player has a team similar to the current 3vs3 solo queue team which cannot be leaved or reset and you can play with whoever you want.

That's a great idea, I like it a lot.. But some people might not, since there are a lot of people on this server that literally "live" for their stats. Some might even go as far as stop playing entirely if they can't re create their teams.

It's a very strange behavior, I'm guessing they get some sort of feeling of being respected or something similar. Perhaps someone who has studied psychology could explain?


I'm all for the change though, and I'm sure most people are too since it would essentially fix everything I stated in my previous post.

[Henhouse]

I'm all for this, and agree with OP. We've tossed around the idea actually of what we could do, have a badge / honor cost to create, or first one be free, or simply a cooldown on deleting and remaking teams. I suggested this idea months ago to the staff but nothing really took off. I was suggesting a whole new NPC menu to create teams that would allow you to recustomize the emblem, add people and disband all from a menu (mainly because we get tickets all the time from players who have _ZERO_ idea how to disband their teams).

[Corbin]

• This is a really good idea. However this would have some negative impacts if it is not done correctly, taking in some considerations.
• If the price is too high it may turn off new players to the server who want to start doing arenas asap. For example when me and my friend irl friend made accounts here we really just wanted to get right into arenas, if there would have been a price which required to spend a significant amount of time farming just to make an arena team I don't know if either him or I would be here.
• This would be most optimal for the server as a whole, not just the arena ladders, if the currency for making the arena team is honor. This more relates to the economy than anything, something that is quite lacking on smolder-forge. In a general sense when you buy something the price should complement what you are paying for. As such when paying for access to PvP content, you should not have to pay for it using a currency that does not have a strong correlation to PvP (Like BoJ or Gold). Because of this honor should be the currency used for paying for an arena team.
• Equally in importance as the last two things I think it would be more wise to put it on a temporary test period at first and monitor it to see if it actually helps the state of arena. After a few weeks or more/less ask players who are experienced with arena and have been here a while so you know they care about the server enough to give an authentic review. Also I imagine a developer could go into the servers archives and check to see any differences. THEN you could put this into place permanently knowing that it will work well (or not). Maybe even put it into place right when the next arena season starts.
  
  
  TL;DR - Make sure price is not too high, Currency required for making the arena team should be honor, implement this temporarily at first and see if it actually helps the state of arena.

[Irwikatti]

I suggest you either make a limit how many times a player can remake a team in one week,month,season or find a good currency that could be used for buying arena charters. Honor or badges don't work because it would give an advantage to those who farm battlegrounds on daily basis.

How about you make a custom quest that awards you with an arena remake token when you've completed certain amount of arena games, 100 games for example?

Yes this would give active arena players an advantage over pve and battleground players when it comes to remaking the team but I don't see a problem because after all it's about arenas so it would only make sense that you had to play arenas in order to be able to remake the team.

[Apuclevercow]

The BoJ cost seems to be nice here.
In example 0 for the first created team and then, an exponential cost like 10, 30, 90, etc. The cost must be high to dissuade them not to recreate a team. It should be reseted to 0 every new season.

However, not to be the party pooper here, SF arena top players have got various rogues, warriors, druids or priests on their account. I guess that most of them would prefer to switch their character instead of paying the cost to recreate a team. This is why making a limit number of team they can create per account could be a solution. Nobody play arena in the 10 possible characters, therefore a limit of 7-8 seems legit.

[Lelol]

What Itslovelol suggested would be the absolute best solution. However, another alternative to it would be to implement MMR like in wotlk. But since the interface doesn't really support it you could just add it to the queue NPC like this: