I’ll answer this question. This is actually very simple and I’ll bring you few reasons:
Ego - people think they are better they are in fact. I’ve been in many PvP communities and the scheme always look the same. There is bunch of hardstuck <2k players who complain there is noone to play with when there are 10 people online. I created such community last year. We sticked together and tried to learn together. There was one guy significantly better than others he ended up being rank 1 last season. Few other people ended with glads. 1 guy from 1500 backpedalling clicker with worst UI I’ve ever seen turned into 2200+ healer in 3 seasons. Teaching him wasn’t easy because he smoked tons of THC but he got there with hard work. I started teaching him and then our rank 1 friend took him over since he is also a healer. Do you know what happened with the rest? Nothing. 0 progress because they didn’t want to put any effort. Some of them only wanted to play with better players. When we tried to group them and create the team 1 always came up to us and said “I don’t want to play with these guys. I’m better”. I always said “But you aren’t because you have the same exp. You need to firstly proove yourself. Even if you carry these guys achieve your title with playing together”. It would teach him that 3s arenas are group effort. Working together and covering each weaknesses. It never worked because ego won at the end and they kept blaming others. They stopped playing together and play RSS. It’s always the same. Doesn’t matter if it’s a community or LFG it’s always the same scenario. You get into group with people with the same exp. 1 mistake you are kicked because guy thinks you are not worthy to play with him. That’s why people have no friends or don’t play with them even if they have them.
For the reason above that most of the community is affected with most people play shuffle. Means more inflation - easier titles so more and more people do it. Simple as that. It’s similar to the fact why people farm honor/conquest points with these stupid chest groups that aren’t in fact PvP. Not because they enjoy it but because it’s fast. Nowadays people aren’t ready to work on something - everything must be done fast. That’s why so many people buy boosts and then try to flex with them. I met at least 2 people like this in DF. You can clearly check it on Seramate. Also if you know someone who is a rank 1 player or near rank 1 level they know people who actually boost. So if you see such pathetic boosted animal playing with them regularly you know what’s cooked. I heard stories how they met them in LFG. Sorry but I’ve never heard of AWC multi rank 1 players with 2900 cr picking up 1900 cr players from LFG looking for a new prodigy.
You need to seperate the textwall abit so its easier to read.
As a summary then, if people dont think shuffle rating matters, why does it matter if its higher than 3s? People somehow have double standards with this aswell. We have had seasons where gladiator was equal to rival any other season.
If rating is this inconsistent, n shuffle rating doesnt matter, why is this a problem? You can que blitz n accidentally get elite sets n even elite rank while gearing an alt.
To me all rating is equally irrelevant because wow pvp never had any integrity to begin with.
Lets just make a simple comparison. If you push glad now as fury warrior, that is going to be easier than doing so on say enhancement shaman. Ele shaman is going to be alot easier than warlock etc. N other seasons the opposite might be true. A ladder that has no integrity cant be considered competitive, n as such no rating is worth crap.
Yes sure, but forcing people to find people they want to play with is back tracking. You cant expect adults to be able to make that schedule work.
Beyond that you typically make friends that you then decide to play arena with. It happens organically or not at all. All they need to do is inject 8000 mmr into 3s n 2s so the 9 players participating gets to feel good about it n stop trying to push overs back into the gamemodes that have low participation for a reason.
Wow simply isnt exciting enough to go through a background check n interview to even access. People like me have been around for 15 years, i have people i can play with if i want. But im also mostly still here due to nostalgia. If i was new starting out today id be unsubbed n gone in a week. LFG etc can work in a game with 40 million players, im debating if wow even has 1 million active players anymore n out of those maybe 1-2% do any form of PvP.
What is said few times now is that there should be both the arena and soloq along it, group content should also not have less value than shuffle
That they separated these options to play arena and soloq and the fact that they did no changes on the rated system at all to work with these changes what they made also just killed arena, whole ordeal became wasted opportunity to improve the game and arguably made it worse. I dont see 30min ques for random gameplay solo in shuffles as improvement.
We could had got both though and they still could do changes on rated system as well now that the other option of combining solo and arena got wasted.
If some dont want to play arena and rather play shuffle thats fine, but why would others that dont want to play solely soloqs have to play these just cause they deflated arenas. Why cant they do changes on the rated system to make it % based again as one example.
Arent it obvious that they could had implemented both and soloq and group content could co-exist just like it were suppose to and how it is in every other game. I had 2-5min dps que in some other soloqs for pvp, why in here its iteriated on a way that it becomes 40min. And why is playing in group made to be as less value?
There is people with 1.6 peak in arenas for years who were 3k in blitz last season and 2.4 first week of this season and elite achievements for their accounts, why would anyone even play arena with this type of difference in progression if we compare arena and blitz example. The rewards are the same and difference are too big, I imagine its main reason why arena is becoming more and more deflated.
But most of people don’t care about where did they get rating. They want the rewards. Average Arena player is probably below <2k exp. It’s just getting elite set at 1800 and they are happy. Why would you play 3s and build mmr slower if you can get it in few lobbys if you try it later in the season.
I don’t believe that WoW mmr system works well with solo shuffles or blitz. It’s easy to get to really high rating being clueless with a lucky blitz winstreak or easy to drop with unlucky streak. Top streamers also mentioned that sometimes it doesn’t make sense where your rating gets pushed that high that you have 1 hour of chance to even play a game because at different time there isn’t enough teams with similar mmr to even get rating.
You literally may win and get nothing and lost a lot if you lose because there is such mmr difference.
Tbh this is exactly how I think for waiting 30-50min ques for shuffles since dragonflight. Im just waiting for any new mmo to leave this game at this point. The m+ design of all specs and these soloqs made as the only gameplay for pvp but also with long que times and all the randomness with them the game is Imo quite bad. I wouldnt suggest this to anyone, for any new player coming for pvp now its just bad game, nobody will be interested to wait 40min just for a game to start, and just like you I wouldnt be here without the “nostalgia factor”
But if rating doesnt matter, why do people care? Idc if people get their rewards from Blitz. Rating based rewards as a whole is bad design.
If theres a reward i care about i can unsub for a whole expansion n just get my rewards in one day. What the game needs is a rework to its rating system that doesnt cause people to be inactive till last week.
Add rewards that requires a significant amount of wins but irrelevant of rating or something.
You cant say that shuffle comes at the expense of 3s because people abandoned 3s the moment there was an alternative. Putting randoms into premade is never going to work n would just kill shuffle aswell as 3s seeing as a change like this would purely help the 3s players at the expense of solo players.
In season 2 DF shuffle was artificially defeated n 3s rating was considerably higher despite having 10% of the participants. People still dident go back to 3s.
You said of such which I replied that rating likely is the only thing that ppl care about
But it factually did, it factually deflated arena since dragonflight
Soloq and arena were suppose to co-exist. Now we got shuffle with 40min q and arena is severely deflated, so… Its the opposite of what we were suppose to get with soloq and overall state of pvp is pretty terrible with 40min ques and healers and rest in general quitting.
Me neither and I think the same related number tied rewards if there is a lot of variations from multiple factors for those numbers.
However what I said were that if ppl with 1.6 peak for years can gain 3k in blitz on season 1 and 2.4 for first week of season 2 to unlock elites on their account, BUT they cant achieve the same even remotely close in arena (which share same number tied achievements with blitz) THEN there lies a problem on the system as whole.
You see the problem in this? Number tied system with shared rewards between multiple modes fails if in mode A this is 5000x easier push than in mode B its -5000x harder push but the rewards are the same. Whats the point of playing mode B? Rating is the goal, rating is the only progress to be made in pvp. Hence system hits critical failure, error error.
But blitz doesnt give arena achievements or titles. It gives elite n thats it. Why is that a problem though?
We have had several arena seasons where rating was so inflated that glad was equal to rival in a normal season. The entire rating system needs a rework but its unlikely to ever happen.
Wow PvP has tons of issues, people getting free rewards isnt one of them. With how low CR gains are its actually alot faster to get elite in other brackets if youre a decent player.
Blitz is a real sloggy grind. Im like 1800-1900CR n 2900 mmr on my shaman gaining like 36 rating per win. If you factor in que time n game duration its extremely slow.
Im geared now so i wont que anymore blitz this season but i have no issues with people getting their rating rewards. To me theres no prestige in any gamemode.
What wow pvp needs is to find a way to get people to want to play n more importantly get people to play a whole season rather than last week pushes which has always been a problem. Start of a new season is where youd expect the highest activity, not the lowest.
It does, duelist, elite etc are all shared and thats all that matters for ppl to shift playing what gives most easiest.
Yep, just like solo shuffle is slow with 40min ques and random games. Arena does not have this, ques are varying from 1-5min and you get to pick who you play with and the spec you synergy well with.
I think the soloq was meant to bring more ppl in pvp and be an improvement to the game, they just iteriated it wrong and made things worse. Instead of making them co-exist with the existing modes and increasing participation in same pool, they took from old modes and split playerbase in multiple different modes, all affected by participation in each modes separately.
I dont think its likely that shuffle even brought new ppl playing wow or in pvp in general, cause who wants to sit 40min waiting for a video game to begin. Any new players will be put off and get bored of these que times really fast I bet.
I guess it is important to also add that this is not about what we on individual level would want or like, its about having broken system with this disparity between different modes which in any case are sharing rewards but on one the same rank is easy to gain if not even free and on another it is not, so system fails.
The ones that would want to play arena are rewarded less for their content, their time put in the game is considered having less value now untill the situation is fixed, just like the situation of healer mmr in shuffles etc. Like you said a lot of issues that need fixing, and they came from these soloqs iteriated wrong.
Yes but this all backtracks to putting pugs into premades, people dont want to make teams, period. This has been shown extremely clearly. If soloq had been introduced in say TBC or atleast wotlk, it could´ve maybe worked the way you´re suggesting. The problem now is that the issue is self created, people simply dont want to interact with the PvP playerbase that exists.
This issue was created due to giving people full monopoly over a gamemode for two decades, anything even hinting at being forced to interact with these established people is not going to go over well with especially new players.
Mixing premade vs pugs will only benefit the premade extremely hard which once again brings back the problem, at that point we could go around saying that premade arena rating doesnt matter because if you´re a 2.5k player with a premade you´re going to be a 2k rating pug player due to the nature of the game.
Does anyone actually care about “duelist” “rival” or even “elite” though? if so, stop giving a crap. none of it matters, none of it holds prestige.
I do think soloq has brought more people into ranked gamemodes, people that previously exclusively played BG´s, maybe even some PvE players although unlikely to be all that many. There is no way to get people in mass to come play WoW PvP, it just doesnt have that kind of appeal, getting casuals into ranked is the best its gonna get. Using the casuals to feed the ego of the established players is by far the most harmful crap you can do though.
The solution is simple really, the only action that should be done to preserve 3s is to just mindlessly pump mmr into it, thats all people care about in the end, always was. inflate it to 4k rating R1 every season n call the job complete.
Well, obviously they do when whole playerbase constantly shifts to play whatever modes gives most rating for the moment. Just like ppl go for the strongest specs and so on if we look the statistics of EU. But I guess some might just also just enjoy waiting 40min for shuffle q to get random 20% win healer in green gear, ppl like different things who knows. But I think the biggest reason for all to play soloq now is that arena is more deflated and harder for them against the good teams so they rather yolo their ranks in blitz/shuffles “free”
Anyways both arenas and soloqs should exist and especially the soloq one shouldnt have more value than the one played by groups.
I doubt ppl in mythic raiding would not be too happy either if suddenly all raiding and whatnot were just decided to entirely replace with looking for raid.
Yes i agree it shouldnt have more value, but thats entirely based on blizz abyssmal rating system that takes participation into consideration, with that logic 3s is actually the inflated bracket because it has artificial inflation to make up for its lack of playerbase.
The whole rating system needs a rework but as stated previously, i just dont see it happening so get whatever joy you can out of the game n cut your losses. PvP is not going to magically get attention.
Rating shouldnt gradually inflate over time, it should be fixed every season in a manner that makes actual sense. The whole “dont que till last week” is the most hilarious form of season ive ever seen in any game, theres a reason no ones copying WoW´s rating system.
I think they should just both co-exist and now that they decided to separate soloq and group they should implement % based system back or rework the rated system for something new. The mmr system isnt working so well with shuffles and blitz anyways, it worked for arenas but now it creates tons of problems in shuffles example and for healers specifically
I agree, the most boring part of this system currently that its optimal to come play the season for last 2 weeks and all before that is whatever. The game should be meant to be played and not the otherway around.
Or like somebody said recently related the whole participation varied design of this that it would make as little sense if people would become stronger in a gym only depending how many other people go there, and thats exactly how our rating system works in wow. Terrible system, definitely needs rework
The rating design is intentionally made like this because they just look at participation, aka sub time. If people can push their desired rating they belong in after one day, people will unsub pretty much since theres nothing else to work towards.
However since gearing is a thing, we´re gonna stay subbed for several weeks by default due to gearing, even if we unsub after being fully geared n resub at the end to push rating, it still accomplishes more total sub time.
Ontop of that most people are too lazy to actually unsub n just let it run despite not really playing, i havent really played much at all in a couple of weeks n i havent bothered cancelling my sub because the amount of money it cost is simply irrelevant.
But thats what ppl do already, there are people with 1.6 peak for years that took 3k in season 1 blitz and all the elite achievements in the bag and whatnot with it and in season 2 first week they took 2.4 with negative 40% win rates in mere day or two because blizzard didnt even reset mmr. This obviously affects peoples will to play arena when its made this free in another mode, it also makes all achivements meaningless
Anyways rating is still the only progress to be made in pvp so people will play whichever gives it most. There is fundamental problem with the rating system as whole that would need to be changed for there to be any sense in general if we have shared rewards between these modes for solo and group.
This is exaclty so true. And i do it myself. Although I have two friends to play, one very new to wow with green gear both of them and in first steps in arena we meet glads with 2100 mmr at rating under 1k. My friends die in miliseconds. They now rather prefer to play delves. So, yea lets make arena a fiesta for the very few elites and let rest of us playing SS.
Nobody is forced to anything. That’s natural thing that people group up and play together. Messi wasn’t also playing with 10 other random players every single time because he wouldn’t have as much time. When you play together you work on schemes, setups etc. When a football team plays together they work on schemes executing corners, free kicks etc.
And that’s awsome. Because people will start grouping up to have more chances. I see no problems here.
I don’t and nobody would ever force me to play solo shuffle anymore. Since I stopped doing it I enjoy the game more. On the other hand I’d probably play some proper solo queue in my free time.
Its byproduct from how they implemented ss in df and then never did reworks on rated system so arena just died. I hear you and I agree, I dont care sweat against same ppl on low mmr either in any modes if it dont feel sensical for the rating its played on or for the reward from it (playing 8min game vs two mglad to gain +15 points on 1.8 is not worth). But hear me as well that its not how they were supposed to put soloq in game, other games have soloq and group gameplay co-existing too. Its very counterintuitive situation they have created if playing with friends for coordinated group gameplay is significally less value to make progress than queing alone to yolo in modes with pugs