Here are some things that are unique to the solo-queue arena system:
- Fighting will be as anonymous as we can make it, meaning you will not be able to see the faces, view the equipment (except the usual attacking pets, gems, and class effects), or communicate with friends or foes in the arena.
- You must not be grouped to queue.*
- A new rating system has been put into place. Just like the last, it is an adaptation of the Elo system, but there are some key differences:
- Losing matches will not result in lost rating, however:
- Losing matches can instead decrease the amount of rating you get from the next few wins.
- There will be no minimum participation amounts to avoid rating decay because everyone's rating will decay daily by a small amount. This is unavoidable and you will not receive a message about it happening.
- You will need to register for arenas in order to queue. Cost is 25k. There is no way to unregister or reset your rating, but players don't need to worry about queue times getting longer as their rating increases with this system.
- There is not a bonus for being in queue. Instead, there is a bonus for having recently participated in a significant amount of arena matches. You can view your current chance of double drops from this bonus under "Arena Admin Options > Arena Stats" This bonus only decays at each daily reset, so you can still make good use of arena bonus while group PvE farming.
- You can be a PK and still participate in solo arenas in spite of the fact that you normally could not group with the other players. Flashing red as a PK (active PK Mode) will kick you out of the queue, however.
- Tokens received will be a flat 5 for a win, 1 for a loss, their amount still doubled by having 30 virtues of course.
- Dominance and territory gains from arena wins will not mention the name of the player who caused them.
- Minimum level requirement is 20
*Note that this queue system is much different than the way the previous system worked where there had to be lengthy delays to ensure the matchmaking system could work. With the solo queue arena, the matchmaking is basically a random draw of 6 people from the pool of currently queued players, meaning that queue times will be substantially shorter. We expect to hear some complaints about the fact that you cannot be grouped to fight PvE while queued, but the intention of this new system is that queue times be so short during peak hours that there will not be enough time to farm while queued. Furthermore, see the bold point above for info on how the bonus works, allowing grouped farming with bonus.
Solo Queue Arena Details
