If you didn't already know the end of season 2 was rapidly approaching by the arrival of the public test realm and patch 2.3 then you could have easily guessed it due to the total lack of arena on nearly every battle group. Now, I fully understand that as the season winds down teams are going to be playing less often. Though it's quite unfortunate that this slow down has to begin 2 months or more before the season is supposed to end.

In order to try and play teams with comparable rating my arena teams have tried queuing at a wide variety of times throughout the week. Weekday evenings, weekend days, weekend evenings, whatever the time, it doesn't seem to matter. The closest teams we play are typically 150-200 rating lower than us.

55% of the top 20 teams on Reckoning didn't play any games at all during the past week. Most teams that did play only played a minimum 10 in order to gain points for the week. I thought that perhaps the legendary battlegroup one might be different, though even there where competition is supposed to be on a higher level, only 55% of the top 20 teams played.

But who can blame any of these teams for not queuing? It's the sole reason why my 5v5 team has stepped back to only 10 games a week. There is virtually nothing to gain. Everyone has just about every piece of arena gear available and the 5,000 points saved up. It's sad that rating and rank mean so much that it inhibits late season play.

All that aside, I'm exciting for the new arena season to begin. New gear and a reset ladder should invigorate a very bored player base. It's my greatest hope that Blizzard won't allow this next season to go on as long as this past one has. The total lack of motivation to play has resulted in stagnation across both PvP and PvE, though I'm confident patch 2.3 will reenergize the whole game.