Class representation in arenas

[Devlin]

pardon the advertising, but i figured its much easier to maintain one post than two :/

http://devlin.warcraftmovies.com/2008/03/06/class-representation-in-arenas/

[kawe]

Goodness gracious me :')

When I see these numbers, I really can't understand why Blizzard doesn't appear to be trying to rebalance druids much at all.

Also a little sad in honesty to see rogues out-represent warriors in all brackets but 5v5, where both classes are a little bit under-represented anyway.

[Myogoblin]

I think its important about the talent spec's as well. A resto druid is one hell of a pvp healer with more hots than you can shake a stick at.

[forker]

I don't think specs are very important since Blizzard for most classes only made 1 talent tree viable in the arena, but yes there are still a few exceptions.

[Smorisha]

Feel free to call those numbers fake,  its a blizzard "what if this happens after" type of statistic where 100% is actually 100% of their expectation and thats imaginary number, to us at least. By the look of that list we see that there is nearly 3 times more druids at 2200 rating than they expected, without a hint what they actually expected this percentage means nothing.

[Cwave]

Worst % table in the history of mankind.

I can't believe they dare put those numbers out there when they mean nothing without propper number/relation/index whatever.

Fail

[Palmar]

I don't see the problem you guys do...

Blizzard's assumption is: if x% players play locks, then exactly x% of players above a certain rating should be locks.

It's not really rocket science...

All they did was to scale the %table to class population balance, very simple. And while this thing doesn't break down specs, it's a fairly good indication of class strength.

[Cwave]

No
Reread the blue post
This is a % based table of poop where 100% means the normal score blizzard would like a class to be.
We dont know what that 100% is.
That might be 2 shaman per 1000 chars
or 900 shaman per 1000 chars

Its really major fail and doesnt give any info at all.

[Palmar]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=5103773379&postId=51032556993&sid=1#74

No other warlock nerfs are planned for 2.4. One of the things we look at is class representation in arenas (although normalized for class popularity). In this particular chart, a value of 100% means the class is represented as we'd expect, a value over 100% means the class is represented that much more often than we'd expect, a value below 100% means they're represented less than we'd want (obviously this chart doesn't include a spec breakdown in any way).

although they dont exactly say it, the comment about "normalized for class population" makes me think that my assumption was correct.

Also... why on earth would they NOT want all classes to have the same representation?

[Gaeios(Graxlos)]

so we just discussed this on irc.

I have to agree with both parties.
 
The point is that the wording of the blue post is retarded. It says that the numbers are relative to their expectations.
If they are not utterly retarded they would expect druids and warriors to be overrepresented in 2v2.
But I think Palmars interpretation is correct, what they mean is that they want/expect equal distribution.

[Vdti]

What worries me is that this is the kind of information they balance classes around. So I guess they're going to nerf the druids until around half of them quit playing their chars in the arena?

[kawe]

What worries me is that this is the kind of information they balance classes around. So I guess they're going to nerf the druids until around half of them quit playing their chars in the arena?

We can only hope.

[Devlin]

update!

http://devlin.warcraftmovies.com/2008/03/13/a-different-class-representation-chart/

[Cwave]

Whats interesting is that shaman are the least played class AND come low in % of the brackets vs hunters and mages who come low in % of the brackets but take up a huge % of total players..

aka mages and hunters are shit. Shaman rule
Good graph!