Now, I know you’re looking at yourself and saying, “Mommy and Daddy told me if I put my mind to it, I could be anything I wanted to be!” Yeah, they were just trying to get you to stop weeping on their shoulder and be something a bit more than a janitor at your local fast food joint.

In the past year and a half, maybe even two, years of watching people play World of Warcraft professionally, I’ve learned quite a few things. I’ve learned not to take anything a face value, I’ve learned that betting your future on a video game is completely idiotic, but I’ve also gained some insight into the actual relevance of a players habits and abilities in regards to their success as a decent WoW player.

By far, the single biggest flaw that nearly every one of you “up and coming so close to being professional but not quite there yet” players have is the fact that you are absolutely terrible at multitasking. More so than any other game I’ve ever seen played at this level, WoW is about being able to keep track of a hundred different factors (both visible and invisible) and when you have the A.D.D diagnosis of some Orange County devil child, there is very little hope for you to become the next HappyMinti or Xom.

If you don’t believe me, go watch the wrap up of any tournament in the past twelve months or download and immerse yourself in a video from any one of the top WoW PvPers. Back in the day of WLD and RMP in pre-3.0 terms, when it wasn’t about who could mash Arcane Barrage harder, you actively had amazing players who were able to keep in mind every single aspect of a fight while on LAN. Players who know how long their opponents cooldowns had to go before coming back up, who could tell where their healer was drinking or behind what pillar their opponent was running, all the while still managing their own information and communications.

Sorry to all of you who were expecting WoW Arena to be completely like CS 1.6 and be based round reflexes and intuition, but this game is definitely more than that. Or should I say was, when in the context of the current state of Arenas. I don’t have any tips for you to get better; I’m not here to give you the secret to reaching a 2.2k rating on BG9. If there was a way to get better at multitasking, after reading this, you should tell me said way so I can make a million dollars creating the finest WoW Academy in the world.

Otherwise, get the fuck out of my arenas because you’re just slowing me down from my top rated spot.

The usual cast is here except for Sam ‘oplaid’ Lingle who was scrimming for a finals match in Team Fortress 2 tomorrow. He also just announced a sponsorship with CompLexity Gaming. Grats.

Other topics include feral druids, Serennia getting banned, the new Arena System, our Warcraft Movies Movie of the Week (which can be found HERE if you care to download) and also a very special, awkward situation between Kintt and Sck, former teammates at Pandemic.

Our bot is now up and running (or will be by the time this goes live) in #arenacast.net on irc.gamesurge.net so go visit! Questions for next week show can be e-mailed to questions@arenacast.net, also. I feel like I’m forgetting to add something so I’ll add it in after I post this I’m sure.

Edit: Yes, our host is throttled for a shit ton of downloads at once. Yes, I’m a cheap bastard who cant pay for fast hosting, and No, I wont upload it to Filefront unless this url goes down. Also, make sure to just download it because the stream is completely fucked up for some reason when you try to play it. I’ll look into this.

The stories varied from person to person, but almost everyone came to the same conclusion: the system was FUBAR.

Arenas were disabled for a couple of days to fix the new system only for people to begin playing again today to see something was still not right.

Queues are faster, top players are paired up against other top players but the actual rating changes seemed more equivalent to a dice roll.

We ran 3s for a while with our previous comp of Warrior/Hunter/Shaman to fight some of the top teams on BG9 with a decent win/loss ratio only to see our team rating bottom out while our personal rating seemed to only rise.

Queues were almost instant, but what’s the point if the rating isn’t rewarded correctly? Serennia says the mysterious new rating which is used to place us in the queue is based on our gear, some say it’s based on your e-peen rating and you know what? I honestly think it’s just screwed up.

A very small percentage of the WoW community play just for the competition that is arena. So why throw this massive change in the middle of the season which was obviously not tested to its full extent?

The real question is: what are the intentions of the new system? Quicker queues? Gladiators not being paired against fresh level eighties? All things that would benefit any player in the World of Warcraft, but it will only work if rating is distributed properly.

We remade a 3s team just to see how things would go and queues were a little longer than usual but the results were pretty hilarious.

I was going to honestly sit here and try to defend the new system a little bit as it makes queues faster, but after remaking a team it’s pretty much complete bullshit.

Quick queues against the top 10 on BG9 only to see barely enough points after 10 games to push us to 1600. Then it gets amazing, we get a scrub team sitting at 1600 rating that gives us 29 points.

At this point, I’m completely confused. The only thing I can say about how the new system works is that it doesn’t work at all.

And since JP wouldn’t allow me to post without a video, here’s my current reaction about Arena, bat shit insanity.