Hi there!
We all agree that playing healer is not the same as playing DPS in 3v3 right (or fire mage VS frost mage, sub rogue VS assass) - different positioning, CDs, role, strats.
For instance, I main resto druid and would like to play more balance. However, I can’t if my cr is too high, I will just throw games and my teammates will complain of me dropping my cr / mmr.
My suggestion: one rating per spec per role (heal, dps OR even tank for RBGs). If one changes specs roles, the rating changes. (Say I am at 2k cr as a resto druid. If I want to play feral and respec, my feral cr will start at 0. If I swap back to resto, it will be back to 2k.)
What do you guys think? That would make it easier to play with friends who are not as rated as you without having to have 10 times the same class. That would also open up playing alt specs in arenas.
Good point. The problem is that people do not play consistently with the same players: it brings too much sparsity. I think spec rating is much better and has much less friction. What do you think?
It’s more ideal but less realistic in application. I don’t know how it would look on our screens to have up to 4 different potential ratings for classes.
If we had teams, it would be a viable solution to the lack of consistent partners to give the option to replace inactive members. Or even further, increase the amount of players you can have on a team so you don’t always have to ‘kick someone out’. Then, you can keep your rating on that team playing x spec without having to disband it and start over.
A potential downside would be that it’d be much easier to manipulate the MMR for glad wins. For example, a sub rogue playing as assa wouldn’t be that much of a difference yet they’d get to play with their fresh MMR just by swapping the spec.
The artificial inflation would also need to be recalibrated to accomodate for it.
(inb4 someone mentions it, I mean someone on the team would swap to a different spec that’d still work, if the meta allows for it to work, to help the other 2 on the team get their wins in an even easier way than people have done it thus far.)
Oh right, and there’s also PvP/PvE tunings while a season is ongoing which can change the meta, turning one spec for a class into dogpoop while it makes a different spec as that class much stronger to compensate. Should all the players playing that class then feel like they’re pushed into swapping spec and resetting their rating, based on Blizzard’s whim?
I’m not saying it’s that bad of a thing to just “play the rating back up”, but it’s a matter of principles and how Blizzard would turn your time spent pushing rating as one spec meaningless while you’d then have to spend time getting the rating back up which you could’ve spent playing from where your rating was already at.
At this point and time, it’s incredibly bad idea, serving extremely well to boosters, especially when it’s 3-dps spec (Rogue, Mage, Lock).
It’s already bad enough, when new player faces duelist-geared players (geared from RBG) in Arena. There’s no shot he learns anything in one shot meta, because he gets one shotted through cooldowns because of gear. Even with full gear, some one shots take less than a second.
What about the ones with only one role? Why would they be discriminated against?
I’m not saying I’d think like that, but you have to put yourself in the mind of designers and carry a broad view of every potential consequence, and that would be one of them.
Consumers aren’t known to be rational, on a grand scale.
The same argument of equality can be carried to several aspects of the game, e.g. why can some classes, tank, DPS, and/or heal? Why can some classes walk on water and other do not? This role “discrimination” exists in PvE as well.
TLDR: it’s not because a change does not affect all the player base at the same time that it is a bad change.
That’s more like comparing oranges to apples. Fundamentally, your suggestion would give only some classes the opportunity to reset their ratings with a simple change of spec, while others would be stuck with just one rating.
It’s fundamental inequality, and the public perspective on that wouldn’t be sitting and comparing those oranges to apples. They’d simply be looking at others getting what they won’t get, basically resembling systematic discrimination.
Also, the inspiration for your idea to have different ratings for roles instead of for specs, is based on a game where the account got the ratings. Not the characters. People pick what to play for the match in that game, they’re not stuck playing just that one character when queuing with that rating. Which is why having different ratings for different roles fits in with that system.
Simply put, you’re trying to graft a piece of one system onto another, when the systems themselves are different. They’re not compatible.
They’re still one of these at any given time. But with your proposition, the player would hold two ratings.
I don’t know, I’d like there to be a solution, maybe it’d work if they fixed gearing first.
Maybe even the spec one would be better then…
But it’d have to be voluntary in a way.
But thinking about it, it might not be too crazy to implement, transmog works like that already. You can transmog sets separately for specific specs, or all together.
Except everyone can do that. What do you think the response would’ve been, if pure dps classes with no alternative role wouldn’t be able to save different transmogs for different specs, while every other class that got more than one role would be able to save their transmogs for different specs which would depend on the role of the spec?
I dont think the change would require a lot of work. I can code and can tell you that it’s just about adding a column in the arena DB stating the spec of role of the person (as of now, it’s just player_id and rating)
Yes, I am a programmer.
The issue is you have to realize the impact of the changes (titles, where you end up…), you have to check for all those things + even recent implementations to LFG and basically everywhere where rating is refered to.
Then you have to implement a way how to distinquish it UI-wise (if any). Might be simply showing you your current rating as the spec, might not be too crazy, sure.
Then you have to determine whether its something players want (at this time and point, I don’t because of how gearing works) and how much they want it (whether it’s worth spending money on that).
I am not entirely sure it’s worth right now as the solution isn’t perfect and have its own issues.
It could be spec-wise, but first gearing needs to be reasonable and second it has to be optional, for people not to be forced into this system (which then is another UI element to implement).