WoW PvP rankings

On the official WoW websites you can now find PvP ranking tables for all servers and sides, and see where you stand exactly. Pretty depressive reading, in my opinion, because it clearly shows the competitive nature of the PvP system in an otherwise non-competitive game. Other people can not stop you from leveling to 60, but they can sure stop you from reaching a high PvP rank. To get a good reward, like a PvP reward weapon, you will need to be in the top 3 of PvP players every week for a couple of weeks. As long as there are a significant number of players which are as ambitious as you, and who have as much time or more than you to spend in the game, you will never make it.

So the only good thing about the PvP ranking tables is that they give you an idea how high you can get. Play as much PvP as you are willing and able to for one week, and the game will tell you your weekly ranking (Raslebol's was 471th last week). Then look up the PvP ranking on the website, where your lifetime ranking will be lower than that (Raslebol is 590th there). If you do the same performance every week, your lifetime score will match your weekly score. Thus you can scroll up the table and see what PvP rank you are likely to reach. Well, I'm headed for Sergeant, and unless I seriously step up my efforts, I won't get much further. As the Sergeant's Cloak was the PvP reward I was targetting, I'm okay with that. But things like the PvP epic mount are clearly far out of my reach.

In a way this is worse than grinding. The worst grind ahead of me is killing 1400 furbolgs to reach friendly status with the timbermaw. But at least that is a fixed number. Somebody else killing more furbolgs than me will not throw me back. And if I don't kill furbolgs for a week, I don't lose any progress either. In PvP, a week of not participating will cost me ranking. And even if Blizzard just adds the new battleground with the next patch, and everybody goes there to try it out, I would need to play more PvP than before just to keep my rank. I'm not a highly competitive person, so I don't like this system at all. Your mileage may vary.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:18 AM Permanent Link