After some time and having few days of thoughts I came to few conclusions.
Overall I have to say RSS is a success and it made PvP more active but sadly it killed the idea of grouping up and playing together and that’s what MMO is about.
Do we really need such format for RSS? I don’t think so. People were afraid of playing against RMP or other historically good comps. From my experience they are actually the easiest to beat in RSS as they need proper coordination and if they fail to get good kill setups they fall behind.
What RSS caused is underrepresented 3s ladder and overinflated RSS. Current PvP actually rewards players playing solo. It reminds me old Dota 2 ranked system. Team MMR was less presitigious than solo one. How Valve dealt with it - they made one MMR and allowed people to queue as 2-3 and 5. 5 man stacks are paired with 5 man stacks first unless there aren’t any (high end for example). On average skill level it’s fine as there are enough 5 man stacks and solo queuing players.
What I’d love to see is similar system in WoW. You can queue as 1 guy, 2 guys or a premade team with premade being firstly paired against other premade. This way it gives solo players a chance to play but also promote grouping up. I don’t think it’s such big of a deal because currently still a player who has highest winrate in a lobby gets rating in the lobby. Basically pushing would be about high winrate.
RSS created lot of balance issues. First of all it promotes specs with MS due to higher stacking dampening. 2nd of all it benefits healers and specs that their defs are based on immunities and damage reduction over these that are based on healing. It has to be like that because 1 lobby would take ages without it. With queuing for just one game it doesn’t have to be like that. Also I’m pretty sure it will reduce queue times. 50 min. is a bit too much.
If we look at the past it actually kind of was like that. You sometimes played against 3 people on comms with some randon LFG guys. How is this different? Queuing solo would be fine to gear a new char but once you have gear you want to queue a premade.
What I like though is the spec based rating and titles. It adds more replayability and pushes playing one char more.
That’s pretty much how I see it and how I’d like it to be. Nobody likes 50 min. queues and the fact that current PvP pushes playing solo over grouping up isn’t healthy. In fact nowadays people sit together on discord but each plays RSS. Something is wrong with it.
wow arena is such a minigame in the game it has nothing to do with an MMO at all. Before you joined the same group and qued but everyone was at different places getting ported into the arena. How is that different from Overwatch, LoL, CS:GO etc.? There is no difference.
A soloQ mode was needed and besides que times (which are almost never 50 mins to me, more like 5-30 mins) it a pretty decent gamemode.
Obviously it killed 2s and 3s participation. There need to be more rewards in these brackets if they want people to get out of their comort zone and look for 2 additional players to team up with.
Players always will take the path with less resistence and soloq is that path.
if your spec does not have an MS your teammate most likely have one with how many MS effects are in the game
idk wont say so, rshaman is the best healer right now and they dont have immunities for their mates. Would say it depends on how fast the meta is.
Evoker and Rdruid were the best in the beginning of the season and they lack immunities too.
i cba waiting 5 mins and then playing a super bad comb or my mate is terrible and i cant face him next round to get my points back. 6 Rounds shuffle is the best system i can think of.
thats how online gaming in 2023 works, blizz cant change that
Valve did it so I don’t see the problem with Blizzard doing it. Basically you can queue solo and queue with a friend. I don’t get it why the game should push you to play alone. Also Broxis if you are good then you get high enough winrate to push anyway. That’s all about it. I’m pretty sure you’d do well as you are above average player.
Also if all above I typed wasn’t truth RSS and 3s wouldn’t have slightly different metas.
dota2 - like pretty much every other major PvP game out there with a solo queue - got people picking what to play in the lobby though, with the only restriction being no duplicate heroes.
Because of WoW’s antiquated mixing of PvE and PvP in their designs, that will never happen.
Such a system would always be crippled by the lack of options to match people up in a game like WoW. It can’t even match people up fast enough now, despite everyone queuing solo.
For the record, everything you can do in a premade, you can do in shuffle, thanks to the in-game voice com. Theoretically, of course. But WoW’s in-game voice com hasn’t caught on as a social trend, and frankly it’s over a decade behind the convenience current voice com software provides.
So imagine them fixing it, easiest way probably being to pay big money to Discord to partner up to provide unique service to solo shuffle, and then that catching on as a social trend to use it. The worse players would still be lost, but we’ve all seen what people can learn about coordination in a solo queue from other games, such as MOBA games and FPS games.
Simply put, Blizzard sucks, they fail at their jobs, and yes while they’re restricted by budgetary constraints and so on, they’ve failed at so many things that even when they do something good, it’ll never outweigh the bad they’ve done in the past.
No, I would’ve always preferred it to stay like in vanilla, but “if everything stays the same then it’s only moving backwards” has kinda been their motto since forever. Maybe it would’ve died out like that, maybe it wouldn’t, we’ll never know.
You’d encounter that problem with how you can’t choose what to play in the lobby though, which those other games don’t tend to suffer from. It also messes with the standards of matchmaking, as everyone should’ve painfully noticed by now.
And the reason for that is the engine not being designed for it (although it can probably be altered to accomodate such a function), and PvE and lore and like that making it into an impossible feature to implement as long as PvE is part of the design concerns.
But remember, they can do so much more to improve the communication and thus the coordination in solo shuffle. Which in turn would increase the chance to bond with fellow players for everyone.
But they don’t, because they suck at their jobs.
But still it pushes you to queue solo and then communicate with random people you play with in the lobby over playing with someone from your friend list. That’s my whole point. That’s what is wrong imo.
To be fair, the group finder system was all about finding friends to queue with regularly. But it became so common to dump the person you find, only to look for a new person, over and over again.
If people had used the group finder the optimal way, then they would’ve only needed to look for strangers until they would have enough players on their list to play with regularly that’d match their time to play.
But because so many people kept using it like a “manual solo queue” it instead kept being used for the opposite purpose, only to return to the group finder over and over and over and over again.
True but being able to queue solo to gear a new char. To play when your friends are not online is cool but eventually playing with two the same partners should be pushed as the way to play the game. That’s what AWC format is even about. It provides the highest skill level games to watch. Coordination is what pushes players to their limit.
Many people had this issue that their friend had to unsub and they were left alone or as 2 players. This way they can queue solo or as 2 and then the system would find them third without sitting ages in LFG. LFG had the same problem as RSS queues. You spent more time waiting to play than playing. RSS is also slightly different due to different dampening stacking. At this stage I cannot see a reason why merging RSS and 3s would be a bad idea. What they could add are two buttons to each player at the end game table to add him as friend or invite to a party and it would actually help players group up. In old LFG people might not give you a chance to play together but with being queued together and enjoying some games together they might actually give that comp a try.
There are other ways, less intrusive ways that can be achieved. For one is improving the voice coms in the game as I mentioned earlier. Then there is also how they can add a pop-up window after every shuffle with “do you want to add 1, 2, 3, 4 and/or 5 to your btag list?” or whatever, just something simple to put the thought into people’s heads so they don’t immediately think it’s the end of it all as soon as the shuffle ends.
They can also focus way more of the designs on how to improve guilds, to make guilds more relevant and more enjoyable. Guilds have always been a way for people to bond, ever since vanilla.
So on and so forth.
But, again, like I mentioned, they suck at their jobs. So I doubt anything good will happen to improve any of these things.
You need to forget your preconceived notion that strangers can’t be friends. Blizzard just needs to offer a better design that helps strangers become friends.
For example, the only time I’ve played WoW with my actual IRL friends, was in cata, until they all quit. They’ve never been into the game that way, I’ve always had to get in-game friends to cover that need. And that always started with being strangers.
I still keep in touch with people I met in-game in wotlk and MoP, for example.
Shuffle kind of killed my will to play the game which is funny, because I played a fair bit of shuffle prepatch and really liked it but the queue time was so much shorter. Honestly if you can only play like 1-2hrs a night, if you play RSS you spend so much time in the queue I lose motivation. Healer meta changes and having to level up different classes so often is also a pain despite the fact its actually super faster to do.
2s/3s was so dead early on and deflated, I dunno if there’s a good means to fix it but yeah. Tbh I’d even like a RSS 2s where it just constantly throws you into healer/dps 2v2 matches over and over. I think that may make more people play healer getting to practice in an easier setting.
I also think the general direction the game is going requires more classes to have some level of built in defensives.
Keep in mind that you’d need double the ratio of healers to dps as in shuffle 3v3, just to get the same queue time in a shuffle 2v2 as you have now in shuffle 3v3, under those circumstances.
But why? What’s wrong with playing with the same people? With having people that you hang with in the game. At the moment I noticed that on mine discord people sit together in one channel but… they play RSS alone at the same time.
What is wrong in having real friends.
Or what if your co-workers play WoW too. I work in an international company and I sometimes played with my team members from UK even though I live in Poland. Is there something wrong with it?
It’s not that it’s wrong. It’s that there’s no need for such a design. There’s already 2v2 and 3v3, and all other kinds of content the game provides, to play with your “real friends”.
But for RSS, it brings with it so. many. consequences to be messing with that. Hence why it can’t be done. It’s not a good thing to do.
But ok, I’ll explain a bit further then. It’s just that to go over everything tends to create so many sidenotes >.<
So with a better social design (that’s what it’s called), that helps people bond better on average, especially in shuffle since this is about arenas after all, then it brings with it a lot of benefits down the line.
For example, you want it to accomodate for “2 people that would have to spend so much time to manually find a 3rd”, yeah? And similar hypotheticals.
So with a better design, with a much higher success rate for people to bond, RSS can even be used like a group finder while inside. For example, let’s say you need a healer for you and your DPS pal and you’re both DPSers.
So then what if you both then decide to queue in shuffle, and eventually one of you connects with a healer, and et voilà, you’ve then got yourself a healer for 3v3.
But the important part is that you DID NOT mess with the queue times, and you didn’t mess with the entire structure of solo shuffle and its 6 rounds, and it wouldn’t be influenced as much as it would’ve been by the lack of being able to pick what to play in the lobby.
So to mess with that, to bring with it all those consequences just for the sake of making a “not big enough”-premade happier, would really not be worth the consequences.
Plus, the game wouldn’t be promoting “lonely gameplay” by improving the social design, which was your original complaint.
Thing is most people think shuffle=3s which isn’t at all, tbh most of the community never get any decent rating before shuffle was a thing (there is a lot of proof of that via twitter/check pvp etc…).
ofc when you can get rating for way less effort than you should in 3s why should you go 3s?
Also some spec work with everything while some are horribly hard or close to unplayable (like a mage with hunter or affli/dk for example).
Yeah like said above I told the same thing to my friend, why people wanna play a mmo then asking in every aspect to play alone, basically shuffle divided even more the community imo and people are even more toxic towards other (nice way to find mate xD)
Same than nexintus shuffle ruining 3s as littéral killed my motivation, tired of Yolo games in shuffle and seeing bad player getting rewarded cause of fotm reroll every week.
There is a game where you choose what you play before and allow to queue with one friend. It’s Heroes of the Storm. It has few issues but picking a here first isn’t one. I played multiple PvP games and I’ve never seen such game mode. I think people overthought the issues real solo queue would create and then Blizzard came with 6 game lobbys that created a lot of issues by itself. It shows that RSS as a solo game mode is successful and it should be there but I don’t think that pushing for solo play over team play is the way to go especially in MMO. In fact same problem that we have before persists. People used to wait hours in LFG and now they wait for lobbys.
like that making it into an impossible feature to implement as long as PvE is part of the design concerns.