The Delta is your change from last week. The Rating is some arbitrary number that only Blizzard employees know how it is generated. You can assume that a higher Ratings is better.

Via Mendron (from comments)

There are a number of steps involved in determining rating/rank. Although as far as I know the exact formulas is unknown to the general population here is my understanding of how it all works, please correct me if I’m wrong.

1) Essentially when you PvP, every time a horde dies some number of honor is assigned based on their rank and level as well as the level(s) of those who killed him/her. That honor is then divided into “contribution” based on how much damage you and everyone else did as well as how many people are in your group/raid and how many times you have killed that person recently (diminishing returns).

2) You can then get bonus contribution from wining battlegrounds or at least participating in Battlegrounds until the end. Once every kill you got is tallied up and the bonuses added you get your contribution for the day, week, lifetime, whatever.

3) You contribution is then compared to everyone else on your server (alliance to alliance horde to horde). The most contribution for alliance will get a standing of 1 (for that week), the second most 2 etc.

4) Finally, that “standing” is compared to your current rank and you are assigned a number of rank exp or “rating” based on the difference. And thus you have your rank!

If you look at the overall rankings you can see that the Marshals are around the top 3, the Knights around the top 200 etc. Generally if you are for example rank 2 (ranked around 8 or 900th place) and your standing is among the rank 8s (ranked around 50-100th) you will get a large boost in exp (Ryalt for example was ranked 749 overall and his standing last week was in the top 100 accounting for his unbelievable delta).

However it is generally accepted as impossible to gain more than one rank at a time past rank 3 or 4. So even if you were standing 1 with a current rank of 4 it would probably at best put you at the very tail end of rank 5 as opposed to shooting you to rank 8 or 9.

Essentially as you become higher in rank it takes a higher standing to maintain that rank (not lose rating). Although I am not sure how strict it is at higher ranks (not too strict I hoped) if you are ranked 10th overall and your standing is 800th for the week you will probably lose some of your rating and therefor rank level.

Anyway I hope this sums it up, I didn’t mean to write a thesis on the PvP honor system when I started out so after all the time I have invested in this comment if had better help someone out damnit!

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