WoW Midnight: Blizzard makes higher PvP ratings easier to reach

On 17 September Blizzard significantly increased PvP rating inflation in Midnight Season 2. The change took effect straight away in all rated PvP modes, with the emphasis, in Blizzard's words, on Battleground Blitz, Rated Battlegrounds and Rated 3v3 Arena. Community manager Linxy wrote that the team had seen players' feedback that the ratings they can reach are not meeting expectations. Blizzard says the change is meant to improve progression as the season goes on and to support healthier movement on the ladder, the ranking of players in each mode. It will keep watching how ratings are spread across players and adjust again if needed. PvP Season 2 began on EU realms in the week of 19 August.

In rated PvP, players win and lose rating in matches against each other. Rating inflation is an adjustment to the rating system that lets ratings across a ladder rise higher over a season than they otherwise would, and Blizzard can change it during a season with a hotfix, as it did here. In a December 2023 post on the same subject, community manager Kaivax explained that rating gains through a season are hard to predict and depend on several things, including how much people play, and that how high the top ratings go depends on how many people play and on how much inflation there is. The new post calls the increase significant but gives no figures, so how much faster ratings will rise is not known.

Rating matters because many of the season's rewards depend on it. According to Blizzard's article on the start of Season 2, climbing through the ranks from Combatant to Elite brings titles and pieces of the season's PvP armour, among other rewards, and the Gladiator mount needs 50 wins in 3v3 Arena at Elite rank. The Legend title needs 100 Solo Shuffle round wins at Elite rank. The titles for the very top of several ladders go to a set share of players, such as the top 0.1%, so they depend on a player's place rather than on a rating number.

Blizzard's hotfix notes for the same day carry 3 more changes. The Font of Venomous Rage trinket now deals 50% less damage in PvP combat. In Ruby Life Pools, one of the 8 dungeons in the Season 2 Mythic+ rotation, Blazebound Destroyers and Primalist Flamedancers could fail to count towards enemy forces, the share of enemies a group must defeat to complete a Mythic+ run, if no player was still fighting them when they finished dying. Blizzard has fixed this, with one known side effect: their tooltips in the default interface no longer show how much they count for. In The Venomous Abyss raid, Blizzard also fixed Unnerving Fixation targeting tanks more often than intended at The Coiled Altar.

Players replying to the post in Blizzard's European forum are split. Some welcome the change; one calls it a bad one, and another expects players they see as weak to reach the Legend title now. One player reads the post as leaving Solo Shuffle out and expects long waits to get into a match there to continue; Blizzard says the increase covers all rated modes, with the emphasis on 3 others, and gives no figures by mode. Another links the change to the WoW Forever beta, saying the rated modes were already quiet and have grown quieter since the beta began. These are players' views; Blizzard's post does not mention Forever.