A common theme amongst those for solo queue, is that they’re only looking at it from their own isolated bubble. There’s no real further thought than “I can just click a button to play instead of needing to sift through the garbage that’s the LFG for a long time every time.”.
But solo queue does have ways it can work. It just requires more changes than they’re aware of beyond that little bubble of theirs.
For example, if you look at barrier of entry, that includes the sub fee, the time spent leveling, the time spent gearing and so on. Every other esport game with solo queue is a pick up & play-type of game, often being free of charge or at most a one time cost for the game, with cosmetics being monetized.
They’re also all with lobbies. There’s not a single solo queue afaik that locks you into a class/spec before you’ve even been matched up in the queue.
And every single esport game has had to go to extreme lengths to combat toxic behavior. Outrage. Emotional responses. It’s because the investment is gone from a solo queue, little to no social awareness whatsoever, and so they have all had to find other ways to calm people down against their will.
Solo queue is definitely not a place where you make friends often. It can happen, but it rarely happens. Very rarely.
But anyway, so with that out of the way, the way it can work as much as it has worked in other games, is by separating rated PvP into their own arena tournament realms, where you don’t load into the game world. You queue up from the interface. You also create ready-made characters with the click of a button in that interface, and set up the UI by loading into an empty world or whatnot.
So by queuing up from the interface, you end up in a lobby once a match has been found. In that lobby you pick what to play, similar to mobas.
That way comp is not an issue, since you’re not “locked” into only playing 1 thing every match.
Account-wide/class-wide rewards on the account enables rewards being used on the “real” characters as well, so there’s the hook to keep people playing it.
But the social toxicity is unavoidable, and can only be mitigated with extensive reworks. For example, disabling whispers from the interface before queuing and only allowing bnet whispers would dramatically keep the toxicity down, since people can’t bug you after the arena.
Unfortunately, people playing music at loud volumes in the in-game chat would undoubtedly become a thing, the same as it has been a thing for a long time in other esport games. But choosing not to play with the in-game voice coms can be a thing as well, since barely anyone speaks proper English anyway.
There you go, now that’s a “solo queue just like every other esport”.