We can all agree that solo shuffle is a flawed bracket. MMR issues, toxicity, PVE-like gameplay, lack of healers / long q times, you name it. At the same time considering how gaming in general, and WoW especially, has developed towards valuing solo game modes over team activities, a solo mode is perhaps in either way required. My suggestion (I’m surprised not to see more people advocating for this) is that the shuffle format is scrapped and a normal arena solo q is implemented in its place. Reasons:
• MMR issues are much better handled when it comes to one game being played at a time instead of 6 rounds. It’s easier to balance the MMR of the players and MMR / CR changes are not so extreme. You also avoid these terrible scenarios where someone goes 4-2 or even 5-1 and doesn’t gain rating, since you can track MMR and CR after each game played. A one-round game mode is what the current MMR system is developed to handle.
• My experience is that toxicity comes from the 6-round lobby format of being stuck with the same ppl for multiple games in a row. It’s much easier to grief, complain during the following rounds, punish, wintrade, leave after some rounds, etc, when playing this format. Pretty much all these points except maybe rage whispers will be solved by changing to one arena game played only.
• Due to the nature of shuffle having dampening ramp up so rapidly, together with standard CC nowadays being devalued, the gameplay tends to be extremely PVE based. I’m not saying that normal arena gameplay is amazing right now in that regard, but it’s at least a bit better from a healer point of view. It is not fun to play healer being global capped and spam heal PVE dmg while avoiding micro-CC from people not knowing/caring about DRs in high dampening %. What’s fun is doing offensive / defensive plays while healing reasonable pressure and rotating CDS in a decent way. Implementing a one-round game mode that mimics real arena rules fixes these issues in my opinion. It’s also easier to balance the two game modes, removing “solo shuffle changes” e.g. 90 sec healer trinket, that only make the real arena quality worse in general.
• Connected to the bullet above, healer participation is a big problem for shuffle. Making the game more fun for healers, as described above, is a good way to address that. Another positive consequence is that you don’t lock people (healers) in the same lobby for 20-30 min at a time, which will drastically lower q times for DPS players. It’s also much more rewarding to see progress after each game instead of waiting 6 rounds just to see you gained 0 points.
So, what is the biggest argument against this change? The one I can think of is that some might say one game at a time has situations with unfair advantage / balance problems for comps. But that is already the case right now. You can find yourself in a lobby where you know you will go 0-6 before the first game even starts. Only difference with one game lobbies is that you are not forced to stay in that crap for 20 minutes or more. Now instead of rolling the dice once and get 6x games, you roll 6 times with 6 different outcomes, and it makes this change an overall balance improvement. Blizzard has also altered the classes to be extremely like one another, making most of the comps today at least playable.
Hopefully more people can push this agenda on multiple platforms since I strongly doubt Blizzard reads the forums.