Alrighty, time to get started.
First to bring up some major misconceptions that has been plaguing this particular part of the forum for a lot of years now.
- The belief that only the “dad gamers” are left, or the ones too busy with IRL, and therefore can’t play long enough to even find anyone to play with if it takes longer than a minute to search.
- There actually exists a lot of players with time to play the game properly.
- The belief that people can’t “plan ahead” to play together.
- There are in fact many players with the ability to plan ahead. Which, when playing with regular teammates, removes the need to search for players anymore.
- The belief that only more players can equal faster queues.
- This isn’t true at all. There’s no difference in speed to match up 6 players vs. each other in a 3v3 when they queue at the same time, compared to matching up 120 players in 3v3 when they queue up at the same time.
The amount of people is almost entirely irrelevant. (You just need enough people to get matched.)
- The belief that it’s the “player community” that is at fault for acting toxic.
- Which also isn’t true. It’s a reaction to the game’s design itself, which includes the social design.
- The belief that convenience is the solution to all your problems.
- It isn’t. There are many consequences to convenience, and even though it makes the feeble-minded happy for the moment, it also erodes over time what makes people invest in the game to begin with.
Alright, so with these misconceptions out of the way, I’ll get started on the real post then.
For starters, the rating system. A lot of people have a problem with it. Mainly the lower rated ones, who keeps complaining about things like how “everyone only asks for 2k+ exp” (seen less of these complaints this expansion, but it’s a recurring theme that has been going for a very long time).
The rating system means things like there being no teams anymore, the matchmaking system itself, and the way Blizzard have full control over the “knobs” that decides the rate of inflation/deflation.
As deepoxysbabe looked up in some other thread (cba to remember, just check post history) a separate MMR wasn’t implemented until WotLK. In the original iteration of arenas, they used a pretty straight copypasta of the Elo rating system, which meant no real instability in the matchmaking. Your current team rating was simply your matchmaking rating.
The points you won were exactly the same amount of points the opponents lost and vice versa.
This meant that there was no point of inflation just from queuing. The only time the rating pool itself would inflate, was when new characters would queue up. Teams all started on 1500 rating at this time.
It also meant, that because there was no matchmaking rating that would increase or decrease much faster than your actual current rating, it was a much more linear path to gaining rating. Basically it took a longer time. Required more consistency.
But because everyone started on 1500, the perceived value of the rating itself was very different. 2.2k meant something much different than 2.2k does today. Because in today’s rating system, the MMR is separate and every character has only its own personal rating and MMR. Because everyone starts on 0 in this current system, it means they had to build in points of inflation for it to work, or everyone would always be stuck on 0.
The inflation occurs when 1. a new character queues, and 2. when a player wins more points than the opponents lost.
Deflation occurs when a player lose more than the opponents win, which happens much less often because it requires a very uncommon mix of ratings and MMR in the match-up.
This is what happened in BFA s1 for a while, as an example. They had turned the “knobs” in the matchmaking and win/lose values in a way that made the ladder inflate more than what was “normal”. Basically they had tuned it for a lower expectancy of character participation than the amount that actually participated.
It’s not the first time such manipulations have occurred, they have kept going with these manipulations to the inflation/deflation points for every expansion, probably even several times per expansion. It’s just stuff that happens “under the hood” without announcing it.
Anyway, so the problem with the current system is that it shifts the collective perception of rating value of players as a whole. You can’t do worse than 0, which everyone starts at.
This in turn leads to more focus on how far above 0 you can get, instead of just making it above 0 with a positive win rate. I know the rating sounds silly, but that’s because the rating system itself as it is now makes you perceive it as nonsensical. Winning on 0 now means much less than what winning on 1500 did back in the day. Not like it ever meant much, but it had something to be compared to at least.
So in the past, as long as you were above 1500, people could have some more trust in your ability to win even as a beginner. Fellow beginners had reasons to trust in each other. Because at least they weren’t below 1500. (You could actually go below 1500 in rating back then, due to how the system worked.)
This helped lead to better teamwork. Because trust is essential. Especially when people can easily start believing they know better than some random stranger if they have no reason to trust the one they’re playing with.
This small amount of trust can actually make such a big difference.
But they don’t have that reason in this system.
In this system, the only reason to have any faith in a stranger, is by matching the exp, but of course because of the social design turning people more egocentric (yes, it’s because of the social design it has become worse) there are also those pretty common events of people only trying to get people with higher exp to play with them.
Then there is the lack of team rating (you’d lose the rating if you got kicked or left the team on your own). When people aren’t given any social glue, and the convenience of the xrealm group finder, you’d imagine all the players out there making it easier to find people to play with whenever, right? But that hasn’t actually worked out for many, has it?
That’s entirely the social design’s fault.
Basically, it leads to more egocentric decision making and a very dry way of thinking. It creates the eternal loop of “the grass is always greener on the other side”, because every stranger keeps comparing the one they just teamed up with, to the hypothetical player they could be playing with instead. It never ends. Years later, we end up with a huge chunk of the recurring users of the group finder having been alts in Legion, while in BFA there’s a gear req which made many players skip even playing on many of those alts.
Because so few players ever settles down anymore. There’s no reason given in the design to care about it. It’s too convenient to just “click & queue” in the group finder. Of course in reality it hasn’t really been more convenient because of the difficulties, but people aren’t hyper-rational beings to begin with.
So the “player community” takes the blame instead, and the feeble-minded masses remain unaware of the deeper issues.
There are more technical things like how it overloads the brain’s ability to remember names which in turn creates the bad habit of not remembering anyone in particular and so on, but that’s another wall of text for another day.
Anyway, I could go into why the group finder and xrealm is so bad with another wall of text, but I’m too tired for that. I’ll just leave the end here with a comparison to what works better.
So in retail, you can barely find people to play with for PvP anymore. Even if you find people to play with, they rarely talk. They’re quick to give up.
Meanwhile, in Classic, premades are such a big “problem” for the casual player type, that they keep whining about it nonstop. And those premades are created in the “good old fashioned” way, by saying something and having people respond. There are also those who keeps playing with the same players on a fixed schedule each day.
Think about it.
Grouping up for PvP is SO DIFFICULT in retail, but in Classic it’s SO COMMON that it becomes a “problem” for the “solo players” in Classic PvP.
Yet retail is obviously the game with MUCH MORE CONVENIENCE.
There are deep unconscious reasons why this is so, but it shows some glaring problems with the game’s design itself (including the social design).
Keep in mind, there are two distinctive types of players playing games, as defined in the game industry.
The core player type, which actively seeks out depth, wants to invest a lot of time and not have it finish quickly, and remains loyal and active in the games they enjoy.
The casual player type which is basically the direct opposite, not wanting any particular depth, only seeking enjoyment for the moment, and are so fickle they jump from one trend to the next in a heartbeat.
There are combinations of players inbetween these, but these two types are the most distinct definitions game designers follows and try to create systems to milk money from.
As Jito said in another thread, WoW has been following the “doughnut model” which is supposed to target both in an encompassing gameplay loop design, but with the automation of gameplay and ease of acquiring rewards and turning it into an aRPG-esque type of game, it shows there has been a heavy focus on pleasing the casual player type more than the core player type, compared to the past.
So with more of this fickle player base remaining while the core player type which gets turned off from those attempts to please the other type, it naturally leads to a lower average participation per player in the PvP scene and the group finder for it. It’s just so much simpler to do an m+.
You can also question why they’ve tried so hard to get their PvP players to PvE in BFA, and vice versa with stuff like essences locked behind rated PvP, when they surely can’t be so incompetent they wouldn’t know of their own player trends.
My best bet? Probably to forcibly boost the player engagement metric for the quarterly earnings reports, to make up for the loss of players.
Anyway, I can go into the group finder and unlimited xrealm later, but for now this wall seems long enough.
