Cast your vote: http://www.pvpsource.com/bbs/viewtopic.php?t=4

The arena pvp scene has been a great addition to the competitive side of World of Warcraft. It was just what the game needed to refresh itself going into the expansion as far as pvp stands and blizzard has done a very decent job at making it successful. With the arena scene though, there has been many controversies and different topics such as class balance, competitive tournaments, the rating system not being as efficient as it could be and selling arena points? Yes, selling arena points has been picking up a lot of momentum in season 2, and has gotten a lot of top teams attention as an easy and efficient way to make some gold to help fund themselves. With this new scene though, there comes the controversy on whether or not selling arena points is the right thing for teams to do and if it hurts the games economy and community in any way.

Buying and selling gold has always been a problem with WoW, and with most MMORPG’s in general. It is just part of the game now days, and although blizzard has done some cracking down on it, their is not enough they can do to put a complete end to it, just like steroids in baseball. When the topic of selling arena points is brought up however, the views on it are very spread. In case you are wondering on how such a deal might work, it is actually very simple and a lot of top teams could easily invest time into this scene of selling arena points and make some good money. Basically, you can have up to 5 players sign up for a week on each team, depending on how many teams you actually want to run with, and you have them all play 3 games on that team. Once they play their 3 games, your main group joins the team and plays the other 7, adding up to 10 games total played which is the amount needed to gain arena points for a week. It can be hectic for the selling team switching back and forth between teams, but the investment out of it can make it worth it. So, it is so simple to do for successful teams, yet a lot of teams do not take part in this either because they just don’t want to put in the time and effort as little as it is, or they do not think it is the right thing to do. There is no real cash involved in most cases of selling arena points, it is just all in game currency, so why make a fuss about it if its just that? A huge argument that is brought up is the fact that all though it is not supporting gold farming sites directly, the people who pay gold weekly to buy arena points, may be purchasing the gold from the farming sites to help support them as well. Sure, the same might be done to purchase an epic off the AH or to power level a certain profession, but the more outlets their are to throw gold around, the more likely it is for people to buy gold off the farming sites to use.

Blizzard itself has stated that in future patches, they will likely be implementing some type of system to prevent this “problem” from happening. What problem is their though? How is this any different from a guild selling items in a raid instance, which was done back in the days of MC and BWL and still continues today. Well, its more so seen as a unfair advantage for people who have money to just buy their way into great gear from pvp, rather than earning it. After all, a large part of taking part in arena pvp is the get the best pvp gear eventually, and this just speeds up the process for those who either do not have the time to compete at a high rating or just flat out cant compete. Basically, an even playing field is what a lot want, and this just doesn’t seem like its the even playing field it should be for the wow community. But then again, if you put in the “time” to farm the gold and if the service is being provided, why not take advantage of it to get that little edge that a lot seek in competitive gaming.

I personally sell arena points with my arena team, and for nearly 6 weeks now, we have made a very decent amount of gold. Enough to in fact fund all of us an epic flying mount and more to use for raid consumables and respecs and alts even. As far as the customers go, they keep coming back, and week after week the interest in this scene seems to grow significantly. It has grown so big, that we sell arena points on 3 different teams now for a total of 15 people a week, and still fill up very fast and end up turning down a significant amount of players each and every week. I have received nothing but positive reinforcement from buyers and it has been a lot of fun organizing and making profit out of it. With that said, there are a couple other teams just from the same server that sell arena points as well. This here is more so for an idea of how big selling arena points has become, and it seems too continue to grow.

Whether or not you see selling arena points as a huge problem that needs to be stopped or a great way of helping out the community, it exists and will continue to exist until blizzard decides to put a stop to it one way or another. There is the possibility that it may be supporting gold farming sites indirectly or it creates an uneven playing field for others, but it does help those who do invest the gold into it and it is only growing as the season goes on. Arena pvp is and will be a competitive part of WoW and with that people will always look to get that edge over others. So if you are a competitive 5v5 team who has been looking for a way to make some decent gold, check this scene out and see if you can make it work. And if you are completely against selling arena points and hope that it is stopped soon, then keep throwing out your opinions on why it so harmful and I am sure, soon enough blizzard will put a stop to this so called “problem”.

Tags: Rants

14 Responses to “Selling Arena Points, Good or Bad?”

1. westcliff Says:
   September 20th, 2007 at 1:23 pm

   well the thing is. if you start up a new team it will start at 1500 rating. you gonna grind that team up from 1500 to 2xxx and on the way you play against teams that have no chance against you and you basicly steal 15 points instead of 1 point a match from them. and that with multiple teams. blizzard intended that equal strong teams fight against each other and if you fight against a weaker team you only get a minimal bonus.

   i’m pretty sure blizzard gonna put a limit of how often you can switch teams in a week. like have a cooldown of 7 days for it.

   now you can argue you are only 1 day around that rating. but with more and more people want to spend money on it more and more teams start to grind up another team to sell the spots a lotta teams will be around messing with the lower ranked teams and kinda screw their rating up.

2. Breaky Says:
   September 20th, 2007 at 1:35 pm

   Well, there is a risk factor involved, and I glad you brought that up. Of course, you are guaranteed to loose 3 games a week with the selling team because of the such high rating, and yes, in a worse case scenario they will lose up to 90 points.

   But, that is where planning comes in hand, like if you are gauranteeing 1000 points.. you need to have it maintain a 2000 rating. So you just get the rating up to say… 2100, then worse comes to worse they lose 30 points each game and drop it to 2010 and you play the next 7 and get it back up little by little.

   Again, I see your point and yes this can be a problem for some, but for the most part and from my experience, it hasn’t seemed to cause such a problem.

   And as far as the limit to switching teams goes, I dont see that happening simply because this would cause more problems then help with all the people who dont worry about selling arena points or take part in this

3. Garkar Says:
   September 20th, 2007 at 1:57 pm

   I personally believe that teams should be allowed to sell points. If people are willing to pay for it then why hurt the teams with the ability to maintain a high point rating and still alternate players and lose at least 3 games a week. I believe it adds more challenge to the team because they have to keep a 80%+ win rate (with the main team members) and that can be a big challenge at 2000+ rating.

   In short, if you can do it you should be allowed to. It’s just another bonus to being good. We all know blizz likes to nerf skill though :|.

4. Rike Says:
   September 20th, 2007 at 2:00 pm

   I don’t support it because in my opinion, the arena gear and weapons is something to strive for, and should only be awarded (atleast fast) by the very best of pvp players.

   Not by the ordinarie noob, who can hardly control his character.

   Takes the glamour away of getting the items, when people not having earned them is running around with the armor/weapons equiped.

   And you are contributing to this.

   Like your other articles though, keep up the good work.

5. Akkando Says:
   September 20th, 2007 at 2:28 pm

   It is bad because it hurts teams in the middle as they get stomped by high rated teams creating new point farm/point selling teams. A lot of casual people who like to play a competitive match get disappointed when they hit a 2300 team at 1750 just stomping them. Other than that I don’t have a problem with it.

6. shyst Says:
   September 20th, 2007 at 10:33 pm

   personally i don’t like the idea of selling arena points because

   1. It cheapens the whole “uberness” of gladiator epics when some key board turning noob has better gear then me

   2. It already sucks when you get steamrolled by uber teams that re roll to powerlevel their buddies…selling points just increase the number of re roll teams

   My 5v5 is sitting at the low 1900s at the moment and it’s not uncommon to get steamrolled by players we know are from the top teams…and then lose like 20+ points because they are on a low rated team selling points. And often time we are forced to stop arenaing that night cause if we continue we will just keep losing points for “free.”

7. snowbeard Says:
   September 21st, 2007 at 9:08 pm

   Me and 2 friends who are all experienced wow players with 70’s that have raided and pvp’d plenty decided to reroll and level on a new server.
   Once we hit 70 and did some arenas(with a few pvp epics each and mostly rares for gear) we quickly realized we needed and edge to get to where we wanted to be. As a brand new team we got smoked right out of the gates, goin up against fully arena geared people mostly. No matter how experienced and skilled you are, at a point gear matters.
   One day someone advertised in trade about selling a high-rated 3v3 team. I didn’t even realize it was possible before that. The guys selling the team weren’t big business or anything, we got in vent with the guy and he was cool. They just get thier points every week from their 5v5, so the 3v3 team is just for fun and a little profit every now and then. We bought the team, (with money we earned and chipped in together, not bought gold)and got great points, even losing every single match. Even so, I’d like to point out it’s not an instant fix, it still takes up to a month just to get one piece, and it sucks having no chance at all to win against the really high rated teams.
   So from my point of view, it’s not a bad thing of course. But I already have been through the pain/learning of leveling and raiding and all that shit. I don’t think it’s ok for noobs who bought/powerleveled their toons to be buying gold and arena teams, but ppl who do that shit don’t understand wow and they will always lose and /quit anyway.
   Crying about arena buyers=crying about: afk’ers in AV, gold buyers, bots, corpse campers, twinks, warlocks, and anything else in wow that you don’t like. You are wasting your time not having fun playing the game the way it exists, instead trying to change it into what you think it SHOULD be.
   ENOUGH WITH THE QQ GO PLAY

8. Rike Says:
   September 29th, 2007 at 6:01 pm

   Snowbear? lol.

9. Dave Says:
   September 30th, 2007 at 9:04 pm

   I see no problem with people selling arena points today. It is clearly a good way to make gold, and Blizzard has yet to do anything to prevent this type of activity. However, I also understand the need to put things in place to stop point selling. The bottom line here is, Blizzard wants people to earn arena pvp gear, not buy it, and I think almost everyone understands this. I’m only worried that the restrictions that they will put in place will cause an annoyance to people who want to move around on teams just to have fun. I hope any changes will only affect points/ratings and not your ability to drop and rejoin teams.

10. cavendar Says:
    October 15th, 2007 at 3:23 pm

    I think the main problem is that Blizzard made some of the arena items too nice for PvE purposes. PvP isn’t really my thing, but I do arena to get weapons that improve my PvE experience. If I could pay some gold to get those points faster, and thus save me considerable time, I would certainly do so. And I don’t see it any different from buying items from the AH.

    This may bother the PvP community to a certain extent but you should blame Blizzard for creating items that are highly desirable for raiding and relatively easy to obtain through a PvP outlet.

    It’s a little ironic that with 2.3 there will be several nice PvP items that can only be obtained through PvE efforts in the form of collecting heroic badges. I know this sounds nuts, but imagine a scenario where hard core PvP players could pay a PvE team to run them through several heroics real fast in exchange for gold. Would that be a problem?

11. Apraxia (Hyjal) Says:
    October 30th, 2007 at 3:19 pm

    “imagine a scenario where hard core PvP players could pay a PvE team to run them through several heroics real fast in exchange for gold. Would that be a problem?”

    That’s a strong idea to counter the whining in this debate. If high-ranked teams don’t mind sacrificing their score in exchange for gold, I think it’s fair enough.

    The end result is just one more noob that I can take down with ease (regardless of his nice new axe.)

12. Brodgar Says:
    November 6th, 2007 at 5:12 am

    Well, with the addition of personal rating to the game to combat buying teams to get the shoulders and weapons, they could easily change the system so the points you gain each week are based on your personal ratings rather than the team ratings you are on. Team ratings could still be used to decide rank and EOS rewards etc, but your personal rating in each bracket dictates how many arena points your get each week.

    I think this would put an end to team jumping and an end to arena team selling.

13. Auvria Says:
    November 10th, 2007 at 9:19 pm

    While it isn’t exactly a deplorable practice, it messes with the original intent of arena ratings. The purpose is to give each time a rating so that it can be input into their system so that they can give you rewards or losses based dynamically upon these ratings, as well as determine who you play based on these ratings.

    Any situation in which someone gives someone ratings or plays at a rating at which they are not really at, they mess up the stratification of the ladder. Some methods are less benign than others. But suffice to say, it isn’t really a situation that has a reason to exist, it is more like an unseemly after effect. I wouldn’t rely on it to be there forever.

14. Nac Says:
    November 18th, 2007 at 12:51 am

    If people decide to sell spots on their team and only let people play 3 games a week, then thats fine.

    Your basically losing 3 games guaranteed, and then playing the rest in the bracket you belong in anyway.

    The people who power level multiple teams up through the 1500-2k bracket every week, is where it starts to get bad.

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