We’re excited to see Rated Solo Shuffle underway in Dragonflight Season 1 and are happy to see interest in the feature. In October, we posted an FAQ about Rated Solo Shuffle and we want to provide another update following the abundance of feedback and data we’ve received.
Title Rewards
As indicated in the first FAQ, we recognized the feedback around the end of season title for the top 0.1% of each specialization in Solo Shuffle, Crimson Soloist, to be an underwhelming choice of title. We discussed alternative titles and landed on one we think better encapsulates the prestige of the achievement: Crimson Legend. Going forward we plan to use the Season name as the prefix.
Additionally, Solo Shuffle is missing a goal for high end players who are not necessarily in contention for ending the season in the top 0.1%. Similar to how the Gladiator title works in 3v3, we will add a new seasonal title with a corresponding achievement in Rated Solo Shuffle: Legend. You’ll earn this title by winning 100 rounds of Solo Shuffle above 2400 personal rating. This title will then be available to use for the remainder of the season and will be reset at the beginning of each season.
These updates are coming to the game next week. Unfortunately, due to a technical limitation, the tracking for rounds won for Legend will not be retroactive.
Future Improvements
We also want to provide an update on some additional features and improvements we’re actively working on implementing. These will come to the game with future updates:
Rating calculated per round in games with leavers.
Deserter debuff being tracked account-wide.
UI improvements
Matchmaking Value for each player in a match will be displayed on the scoreboard.
Adding a warning prompt that displays the penalty for leaving if a player attempts to leave a match.
Mouseover on the queue time for a match will display the Average DPS wait time as well as the Average Healer wait time.
Indicator on the UI for Call to Arms for Healer, displaying extra rewards that healers receive for queuing.
Finally, we recognize that queue times for damage dealers can be extraordinarily long due to having a low ratio of available healers to DPS in the queue; there are nearly 4 DPS for every healer during the most active queue times. We’re actively discussing the best options to incentivize more healers to queue for Solo Shuffle and we’ll share more about that as we develop ways to address it.
You must be in a really rough spot when you have to create a big list of things you’re working on, when you can’t even provide a date for when these features will be implemented.
Good things you’ve got planned though, but these really are things that should’ve been put into the beta already where you had months of feedback.
You think a box of toys will make healers want to PvP? PvP is popular when it’s fun to play it. When you made healers perform so poorly except for the chosen few, of course the specs that doesn’t perform well in shuffle won’t be queuing for it as much.
You should already be able to tell how many of each healer spec is queuing for shuffles and there should no doubt be a discrepancy there between the different classes and specs of healers.
If you want to make that less uneven, then you have to make more of the healer specs able to hold their own in a shuffle, while not going oom in just a minute of gameplay, and be able to heal through a decent amount of damage at least.
It also makes ZERO SENSE to punish the losing players for leavers. If you’re teamed with the bad player 3 rounds in a row, followed by that player leaving the match, should you be punished for losing 3 out of 3 rounds? Should the others be rewarded for winning 1-3 out of 3 rounds? Or should the game just assume you would’ve beaten that player the remaining 3 rounds, where you would’ve been against them?
People tend to leave because they are performing bad. These underperformers are still teamed up with 2 other players, who they can and will drag down.
No, it does.
The key difference lies in having played the game. The rating will always reflect the rounds you’ve played, like that. Even though yes, you didn’t get your shot to not be on the deadbeat’s team sometimes, you still had a chance to win those rounds but didn’t. The others did.
What truly doesn’t make sense, is not giving out rating gains and losses when someone abandons a shuffle, especially when people abandon games in the 6th round out of spite.
The rating system will still do its intended purpose by giving out rating gains and losses for rounds played, which is to calculate people’s rating. It also respects people’s time a lot more that way.
Ignoring matches played just messes it up even more.
Hold up if you give healers Call to Arms what’s going to stop healers from joining and then afking for 6 fast rounds to get the free gold? Healers are going to make a killing if this goes live. And yes, this is exactly what I’ll do on my alts with heal specs.
If you win 5 rounds and someone leaves just to spit in your face, it’s an insult that you get nothing. This has happened to me twice today. Just calculating losses/gains at the point the player leaves is the way to do it. Don’t get me wrong I understand there’s no perfect solution for this, but this makes the most sense for me.
My feedback why I don’t queue solo shuffle as a healer is because it’s simply not fun to heal that mode, the only healers on which it feels acceptable are Evoker and maybe druid and mistweaver which both do get nerfed. Nerfing the good healers won’t make the mode more appealing for healers, buffing the weaker ones would do it. Resto shaman, priest (both specs) and pala seem to struggle right now, they don’t have options to defend themselves from being trained by melees and either their throughput or their mana (or both) are bad.
Extra rewards like gold, toys, transmog etc would be appreciated for sure but wouldn’t provide a long term solution (at least not for me), the role needs to be enjoyable. Take Evoker as an example of a fun healer: Has mobility, good healing throughput and doesn’t rely on casts. That’s what is fun to play. It’s not fun to be constantly trained by meeles, not being able to cast a spell because you get kicked, stunned, kicked, heal debuffed (on top of dampening), stunned, kicked… No healer that relies on casting heals and has low mobility can ever be considered fun.
Edit: It would be also nice if more things would be spec related. Rewards for being the top 0,1% of the spec which you are playing are out of reach for most people, there should be something in between as well (not only CR based but more spec based as well).
I’m not sure how LOSING rating because some deadbeat decided to die before the 30 second mark 3 times in a row while the opponents in their infinite wisdom blew their entire kit to avoid the same fate and would’ve been an easy 2v3 even with the deadbeat out of the way, respects my time. Mind, this is hypothetically speaking, I’ve only played 5 matches so far and while 2 of those had leavers, neither would’ve impacted me negatively.
If they want to add this, at least let us play out the entire round. This can lead to longer matches, but I’ll be damned if they start causing people to lose rating because of others leaving rather than punishing the leaver SIGNIFICANTLY more harshly to avoid it from happening in the first place.
Because you still had that unknown future of maybe being able to win such rounds, and you did play those rounds, so the rating system can fairly use that as a metric to fulfill its intended purpose, i.e. to calculate your rating.
Or are you saying it’s not fair to use your losses in the rating system? Because you did in fact play the rounds, after all.
You mean the entire shuffle, or you mean even when the deadbeat is dead the other 2 get to continue playing?
If you mean the entire shuffle when someone leaves, then I’d vote no, but if you mean playing out the entire round even when the deadbeat died at the start then I wholeheartedly agree.
This sucks of course but looks like a pretty rare worst case scenario and will also go the other way around (you might get carried 3 games in a row and when someone leaves before you get 3 losses). Your MMR will always fluctuate, no matter how good you are but you will always end up within a certain MMR range in which you belong to in the long term. I think that you’re too much worried about that change, I’m pretty certain that you will reach the same ratings as before (even faster than before).
I think it’s still a lot better to make games count (especially for dps players who have long queues) instead of rewarding nothing to 5 players because of a worst case scenario.
fix the mess of random mmr players paired in same game, resulting in 5/6 wins from where u gain +0 rating even 4x games a row apparently
obviously the matchmaking and healer ratings need be reworked as people have no incentive to play if theyre just put with any rating dpsers there and gaining huge - or nothing at the end of it
The leavers generally do so because they have no faith in their own ability to score any (more) wins. I’d say it’s fair to assume then that the rest would’ve won every round against them. Denying them those wins while punishing them for the losses remains unfair to me.
I indeed meant the round where the player died. The current meta is so volatile that 2v3 comebacks are entirely possible - I’d dare say even 1v3 in many scenarios. Losing because one bad player died while the entire opposing team is on the brink of death is infuriating, even more so if that person decides to leave afterward and denies you the ‘free’ wins.
That’s a pretty big assumption though. Why would they leave, losing that big amount of rating (or just the big amount of MMR if they’re on 0 cr, but nobody stays on 0 cr forever after all), if not to spite, unless something IRL forced them to?
Purely for personal gain, people would probably just afk the last round instead of abandoning it, if abandoning would only do harm to oneself and not cause any harm to others out of spite.
But because it does cause harm to others, since they get nothing for the wait time they’ve invested and the rounds they’ve played, it incentivizes leaving out of spite for some people.
This I agree with entirely though, it ending as soon as the first player died in the round just further rewards zerging gameplay, which is bad.