When you take a step back, you’ll quickly notice World of Warcraft players are ferocious serial killers that stop at nothing to get a single piece of gear or achievement with a matching title. The biggest offenders are, as you might have guessed, PvPers. Since the beginning of Dragonflight, there’s been a lot of discussion on how rating works in PvP, and here’s what the Blizzard devs had to say about it.
A WoW dev started a discussion on the official Blizzard forum today about the state of Dragonflight season one Rated PvP rating. In their post, they explained there are two main concepts the PvP team looks at when looking into PvP rating—rating inflation and mean rating.
While the mean rating refers to the reference point used to set the bar and separate the middle-of-the-pack players from top players, rating inflation is directly tied to the mean rating and it increases the mean rating over time.
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“Players above the mean rating have above-average skill, while players below the mean rating deserve our love and support. Under the hood, rating inflation increases that mean rating over time, meaning that while at the start of the season an average player will quickly gravitate toward a rating of 1500, towards the end of the season their rating may rise to 1800,” the dev explained.
Essentially, rating inflation is used to ensure players have truly earned their given titles and mounts. But in Dragonflight season one, which started on Dec. 13, 2022, Blizzard delayed the start of inflation until week 10 because the devs “didn’t feel like inflation was necessary during the early season when players are playing to earn Conquest to complete their gear set.”
Now that players are slowly wrapping up their grind and completing their Conquest sets, inflation will kick in “at 20 rating per week to help dislodge people from the top of the ladder and reach whatever their seasonal goal might be,” according to Blizzard.
