The War Within Season 2 scoring issues (updated 24th March)

There were minor changes to the scoring rules for The War Within Season 2, but there’s been a few problems along the way.

Background

Blizzard’s Mythic+ rating consists of two parts:

• a base score, which is what you’d get for exactly matching (to the second) the key’s par timer
• a time-based bonus or penalty, which is what you get for being under or over the par timer

A run’s rating varies depending on the par timer: a 25 minute run of a dungeon with a 34 minute par timer is worth more rating than a 25 minute run of a dungeon with a 29 minute par timer at the same level.

The game client uses the MapChallengeMode database table (DB2) to show a timer in the game's UI.

However, for security reasons (cheating), timing your run and calculating your rating is done on the game servers. But as long as game servers use the same data as the game client, they will both report the same thing.

But this didn’t happen on Season 2 launch day.

What happened on Season 2 launch day?

As is normal, there were many changes to dungeon timers during the PTR, and between PTR and release day (4th March).

Unfortunately, on the Season 2 launch day, it looks like the game servers were out of sync with the game client. Based on changes from PTR releases, it looks like the live server’s timers were last updated some time before 4th February (PTR build 58945’s release date).

Because the game server is authoritative on what the run time, par time, and rating are, some runs got scored too high (if the timer was shortened), and some too low (if the timer was lengthened). Only Mechagon Workshop was unaffected, as its timer has not changed since its debut in Battle for Azeroth.

Blizzard applied a server-side hotfix on 7th March to correct this. This appears to have been applied to in-game ratings retroactively, but not the Blizzard Leaderboard API.

To add to the confusion, the timers were updated in the 13th March patch (which changed Rookery 31:00 → 29:00) and the 18th March hotfix (which changed Darkflame 33:00 → 31:00, and Priory 31:00 → 32:30).

Of course, this could all change again. It wouldn’t be the first time.

How are old runs scored, then?

Raider.IO seem to score everything with new timers, and so does our calculator. That’s the easy option.

Blizzard’s API generally uses whatever scoring rules applied at the time, even if it was wrong.

In the end, it won’t matter: you’ll probably do better runs at higher levels later in the season that replace your week 1 and week 2 runs.

Timer timeline