It’s that time again! No, not firework time. The outside is scary. Keep that blasphemy to yourself.
Nope, it’s time for rank 1 drama!! Every single season this seems to happen. Whoever gets rank one on any server is instantly accused of win trading, mmr exploiting and whatever dubious methods people may feel they used to cheat their rank 1 rating. Now, let’s be honest here, half of those teams probably did cheat. Especially given the massive MMR exploit that was still going on at the time. There were just *far* too many teams that came out of nowhere to suddenly secure a 3100+ rating. The primary excuse I hear for that is that lots more good teams are queuing, giving more opportunity to move up. While there’s some truth to that, I just can’t buy it in a lot of cases.
Hydramist has a more in depth analysis than I do, given they know a lot more about players that are actually capable of rank 1′s. Personally, I can’t imagine ever wanting to try for a rank 1. Of course, I couldn’t get rank 1 if I wanted to, but if I could I still won’t try for it. Seriously, this is a video game. Look at all that drama. I can picture half of these players spending hours refreshing their web browsers hoping Blizzard gets around to resetting some teams ranking. I have a lot of respect for the skills of these players, but it just seems like having the best skills doesn’t get you rank one. You have to figure out an overpowered comp. Then you grind and grind. Then you queue dodge and play the system, so to speak. Ugh. My head hurts just thinking about that.
Speaking of Blizzard, they’re going to have a fun time sorting through all of the petitions about this stuff. Honestly, I’m not sure how they figure this stuff out. I assume they must sift through log after log to find proof of exploits. I don’t envy whoever gets stuck with that job. They’ll be working some serious overtime.
On a less drama filled note, anybody else find it interesting how the makeup of the top teams on each battlegroup tends to vary so much? Just take a look at the top 10 on some of them. You’ll look at one and see 7 priests in the top ten. Then another will have 0 priests and 7 warlocks. Then the next will have 1 warlock, but 7 dks. It’s like they copy cat or something.
The top of the ladders seemed to have a pretty fair spread of classes, all things considered. Warlocks and shamans seemed to show up the most overall. Even druids were showing up more than I expected. Paladins and hunters seemed to be the two classes that were consistently under represented.
Season 9 was arguably one of the worst seasons overall. The MMR bugs are what really ruined it for me. To be fair though, the first season of an expansion are almost always pretty bad, so this was mostly par for the course. Hopefully balance and MMR bugs get ironed out before the next season!
