Timing and rating

[Felbane]

ok, after seing us do like crap several late evenings, I started thinking about why. it might very well be circumstances, but the trend is starting to be clear, and I think we should consider changing our approach to deal with it.
Most likely, the reason we do this bad late in the evening, is because of training and warming up. at 21, almost all teams in the arena have been at it for hours. They are warmed up, they have their cooperation sorted out. If we enter arenas at this point, we will get killed badly. and we have, every single time. Same with swapping team members, the change in tactics needed, the new assisting circumstances, whatever... it all puts us at a huge disadvantage compared to those that ran the same team the entire night.

thus I propose:

Never Go into the arena unless we can start at 20, preferrably 19.

Never swap team members after 21, preferrably never swap members during an evening at all.

Yes, this means we will fail to get some people their 30% sometimes. Yes, we are doing this for fun and not for rating.
However, these are not reasons to aim for underachievement. we all need gear to do well in arena, we need points to get the gear.
We can choose between 400 points per week for everyone, and get our gear in 4 months, or we can shape up, do our best and get 1k points per week instead.


regarding the 30% issue, we should declare another arena day.
If we keep the attendance we have today, people should average two evenings per week or so. Assuming we can do roughly the same amount of games each evening, attending one evening is enough to get your 30%
(not to mention, if we want all 10 team members to get their matches in two evenings, without swapping a ton and ruining our rating, we need two completely separate 5 man teams.)

[bugrum]

Agreed. The only problem is that I can't make any other day then Tuesday and Thursday, maybe, maybe sunday morning.

[Felbane]

if some can't make it on the new day, thats fine. we need to have different teams every day anyway.

[Zianna]

Like Felb already know (cause we talked about it before) I totally agree to his points above. I can't personally mention a day that would be better or worse for me personally to pick at 3rd arena day but we should obviously avoid raid days, no?

Could you (both) post the regular days here, please? Just to have some sort of platform to build from

I know we went over which days people were available before, but the group has sorta changed since then so I'd like to see a recount personally.

[Asli]

To have an extra day would be good, I think.

The 30%-line is nice to achieve. If it means that some members play one of the three days, and not all three, that's good. If it would mean that one player is always left out because we don't want to change a winning team, then I think it's less good.

But I'm willing to try something to improve our results, sure.

Peyne

[Zianna]

asli said:

...If it would mean that one player is always left out because we don't want to change a winning team, then I think it's less good...

But that is exactly why we want the third day. As things are now, we have to change out fighters every arena day up to ensure everyone get 30%, which has always worsened our performance so far. Like Felb says, it's not about the individual playing better or worse, it's about the teamfeel and teamwork being weakened.

With 3 regular days, we can cover 10 games / 30% without swapping out over an evening and people will still have 2 days out of 3 to choose from.

Yes, there is a catch.

In order for this to work, we need the arena group members to attend 2 days out of 3 every week. People cannot see this 3rd day as another "hmn, which day can I be arsed to visit the inlaws?" it is an attempted solution to the problem we see currently, being that we need to be fighting 2 days every week to improve, which we are not, and to avoid worsening our effort when we do play by weakening our teamwork.

I’m tempted to rant on about what kind of teamwork/-feel I’m looking for but I’ll spare you

[Felbane]

current raid days for me and most tFO are wednesday, friday and sunday. Melo and his gang have a similar schedule, I don't know what it is exactly though.

[bugrum]

We're on monday, wednesday and friday with sunday on optional. But I can't saturday. Tuesday and Thursday is my only really.

[Cinxia]

First off.

Imho we're not trying to get rating currently, rather than training. People should be able to gear up outside arenas as well.

I disagree on the staticism of the team. I want this team to be able to hot-swap members very fast once we're going serious on a high rating, and working on exactly the opposite will have an adverse effect to that extent.

3rd day doesn't make it much easier to hit 30% in the future, for the record. Only as long as we mash thought tons of games it will. Once we go serious we will have to try and minimize our number of games and try to cover all people. Hence, we'll have to swap people in and out much more than we do currently, and I think our play should reflect this already.

[Asli]

I agree we're in the training period. With all aspects of the game, training is what makes us perfect.

Experience with the task, the surroundings and eachothers fighting will make us better.

I see it with all battlegrounds, it takes time to realy know when to do what.

I think it's best if we just play together when we can, and have faith that in a few week we'll start to kick ass badly (as I've seen us do in other battlegrounds). I can understand that a steady team works better, but I'm willing to try changing-players as Cyn suggests. Whatever form, I don't mind. That we'll need training, as steady group or shifting group is still what will be left in the end.

And while training, it's great to have fun in there with you guys. We lose some and win some, and have some realy nice fights.

Peyne

[bugrum]

What I think about all this is that, we should think crap about rating at the moment and do the most matches we can do, it goes up and down like ping-pong anyway, and if we can get matches going, the group will solidify and we will do better, just need a LOT of matches, when there's 5 on grab them and do matches, when we get 10 people, people do effort and get better gear, then we will talk about maximising rating. But the arena teams that i've seen do best, just play as much as they can.

My 2 cents,

Meloken

[Zianna]

I agree on the needing of training bit which is another reason why I want a third day. Currently, we have some that participate maybe once a week. How is that for training? Or teamwork? I do understand that people arent able or willing to commit every single Tuesday and Thursday to the team but to honor that we hurt the training. Ok so we dont want to mess up rating either. So we could just do skirmish battles? >_>

IMO we need to fight all we can to get the training and get the rating we need to get upgrades. So how to do that? Swap out randomly to ensure 30%, take the beating and be happy with 400 points per week? I'm game for that, if it's what we decide, I just dont know if it helps us. It's nice and all to lie around 1550 rating, it's teams we can beat and all, but will we improve from that? Much like any other part of WoW, to play with the best you do need the gear for it, some classes more than others. Sure a healer can cut corners gear-wise but a dps really cant do that. Yes, there is ways to get non-arena reward gear to use as "training gear" but above the 1600 rating, it's not enough. I'm not sure how we do this best either, hence my ranting here, but 2 things are certain: We need training and we need gear. I don't see how a third day would hurt us as far as the training bit goes. Making sure all get 30 % can be solved by setting a max games per night. Making Saturday or Sunday 12-15 a third day would mean even Slit can participate 1 sure day a week, even with his current schedule, as far as his connection allows at least. Sure, we can swap him in for 30 min on Tuesdays and Thursdays too but that is around 4 games per evening. But that only means that to ensure him the 30% he needs to get points, we can play no more than a total of 36 games per week, right? 18 games per arena night with 5 days break on the long side. I'm not convinced that's good for the training tbh.

/rant out

[bugrum]

And we also need a 10th member now, belf joined, which is good. I was told to post my suggestion here:

My suggestion is Darnaro, he's one d**n good healer, restoration shaman, I vouch, suggest, everything for him. Good friend, used to raid with him back in Mayhem. He's now with Echo, he'd like to join and he's available tuesdays and sundays regarding our schedule.

My 3 cents,

Melo

[bugrum]

bump? any progress on this matter?