When you start your journey through the World of Warcraft arena play, everything is based off your team's rating. Arena play basically rewards you based on skill as opposed to experience, or paying someone to run you through an Instance. The better your team is, the higher your rating is going to be and the rewards will be plentiful. However, the arena calculator can be quite difficult to understand.

The easiest way to explain the WoW arena points system is by going over the process. If you don't know by now, you must be a level 80 to compete in arena play, although you can start practicing in the skirmishes at level 70. There are 2v2, 3v3, and 5v5 options available.

Now, we'll see what these abstract ratings really mean. When you place your team in queue for the match, the arena calculator will find a team that is within 150 rating points. So if you're just starting out, the other team's rating will be anywhere between 0-150. Now if you lose in your initial match, you aren't going to be hurt as much as if you take down the higher ranked team. Just remember though, it can happen to you as well when your team starts taking on weaker opponents.

Obviously there is more to the WoW arena points system, but the rest of it involves ridiculous formulas, algorithms, and geeky stuff most of us will gladly ignore. The main goal right now is to help you understand how to use an arena calculator for your team. This way you will be able to keep track of what your rating is going to be at the end of the week.

Enter the Weekly Guidelines. We avoided to mention that part until now to keep everything as simple as possible. However, once each week comes to an end, the system will tally up all the information and provide a rating for each team. In order to get it, your team has to have played in 10 matches. It's also important to understand that you can't bring in "ringers" for half the games. In fact, in order to get any points, you have to be in at least 3 of the 10 matches.

All this brings us to the point of using an arena point calculator. One of the biggest questions around the many arena calculators that crowd the web is: if Blizzard already does it for you, what's the point?

Now this is a great question, and a pretty common one, but also one that can be easily answered. There are three main reasons why you will want to use an arena calculator:

• You can check to see how many points you're going to receive that week
• You can figure out your rating ahead of time so you can get a head start on choosing from the rewards
• You can find out how long it will take to reach a specific level

You should think of an arena point calculator as an ethical way to gain insight into your team's status, realistic goals and expected timeframe to reach them. The time you spend planning, will then be repayed by the strategic decisions you'll be able to make.

The arena calculator is one of those things where we could write about it all day and you might still be confused. As for learning everything, the best thing to do is try it out for yourself and see it in context of your team's situation.

Even if you're not a level 80 yet, it's a good idea to get a better understanding of it now. Even though you may not fully grasp the WoW arena points system in the beginning, you will definitely be able to take advantage of it in the end.