I'm High Rated So I Must Be Good

Crying is blackmail. Good girlfriends don't cry.

Gamers do. Non-fucking stop.

I really don't. (So I'd be a good girlfriend)

I think you can be successful generally with most classes as most specs if you have good skill, patience, good teammates, and play a lot. Is it fair that some have it easier than others? Dunno. But it's not like you get anything special for being high rated in arenas. A lot of the crowd that reads this site, Gameriot, etc. are players who won't have any trouble at all taking Gladiator basically every season. Will they take the top spot or even be top 10 much of the season? Does it matter? Aside from ego, not really. Everyone ends up with a title, a mount, and a set of gear.

It used to be that if you weren't in a video, you just really didn't matter in WoW. Talk all you wanted but, unless there was proof of your abilities, nobody cared. Accomplishment was measured by the calibre of play in said videos and, even today, the vast majority of the famous WoW players were first made famous through their recorded performances not their ladder achievements. The thing with the ladder is that ladder play, by definition, is full of metagame countercomping, queue dodging, and all varieties of bullshit to game the system to best climb the ladder. A lot of this has zero to do with how well you actually play once inside the arena.

I've never had the slightest interest in the whole gaming-the-ladder aspect of the game. It's not a moral highground thing (And I've obviously done it); it's just that the idea of logging in and not being able to play because there are currently too many countercomps running just drives me fucking crazy. Yeah, playing said countercomps is like bashing your face into the wall sometimes. But logging in to inevitably only tile hop is what really makes face meet keyboard.

For a brief while, rating seemed to become a substitute for videos in establishing rank within the WoW PvP community. This pretty much went to shit once a few high rated players released laughably terribad videos that demonstrated that arena rating was not so different than old school PvP rank when it comes to correlating with skill. It just really fucking doesn't. No matter your rating, you can still suck. Every week I watch a video from a "top" player that is so humiliatingly bad that I think, WoW BG X must suck, but the truth is, I've seen such videos now on every single battlegroup.

There are tons of rants on how WoW PvP videos have died. This isn't one of them. I still love vids. I still have a vision of what I want to do in vids to come, and honestly, if I didn't plan on releasing additional videos, I wouldn't play. That doesn't mean I'm close to releasing anything. Trainable IB really makes all of the old footage I have feel very obsolete, and I've been reticent to FRAPS too much lately with 2.4 on the horizon. I also haven't had teams where I was able to consistently play enough to get much footage, but that's generally an unrelated issue. Arena is difficult to do well in videos. The problem is that people just record randomly and fill videos with clips that don't really show anything. Great you beat so-and-so that game, but half the time, the PoV didn't really do anything. Showing wins is not entertaining. Demonstrating strategy and execution is. If you can't, don't bother.

None of this is terribly new and exciting, but we're coming to a new place in WoW with the upcoming tournament where we'll have a new metric for assessing player skill. Are we going to see clickers and terribads take top spots in the tournament? If we do, what does it really say about the state of the game?