so yesterday i made a LFG team for 3s…we played like 5 games…we lost the first one and on the 5th game our healer died in the same time as the one of the enemy dps…we managed to win but my healer has instanly left group the moment he died…80% of LFG is like this…i know we need solo q to get rid of this problem and many other but what we rly need is a new mentality on LFG groups…
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Solo Q fails in many aspect.
Firstly:
Toxicity: Ppl would flame after literally every losed game
Balance: Many many class just bad in this season and their only chance is the synergy with a specific spec.
AFK/Grief: Good luck winning those 1v2s when your partners keep leaving the game midfight or just trolling.
No synergy: Some classes only strong because they have a cc that breaks on damage like hunter trap, mage poly, rog blind etc. Good luck playing as mage when you get a random DK partners who will pull everyone together and try to cleave them.
No diversity: You would see only ret pala, balance druid and some rog. So classes that has good defensives, kiting skills and self heal. Good luck staying alive as a warrior or hunter with literally 0 self heal.
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Well, some would be easier than others to climb with since some works with more than others.
But the balance wouldn’t remain the same per se, for example when people are less distracted by the LFG troubles then they become hyper-focused on class problems, and with it fuelling emotional responses (more commonly negative ones) it would lead to a bonfire of complaints, worse than any you’ve seen before, which in turn would lead to a response from devs which would likely be to dumb the game down even more, and provide more handholding and more RNG in who can actually win in arenas by bypassing “skill”.
Well, as mentioned already, such things would be affected by the ripple effect of implementing such a thing to begin with, which in turn would likely lead to unbreakable CC instead, is what I’d bet. It’d remove a lot of the frustration when you don’t get randoms who breaks it, after all, which is only accomplishable in a macro scale by turning the CC itself into unbreakable.
Not literally, but you’d see similar behavior and emotional responses as in every other rated solo queue game. Which… isn’t good. It’s why those other rated solo queue games have had to take such strong actions and put in heavy countermeasures in the design to prevent players from being able to express their outrage when they lose. Doesn’t mean the anger goes away though, it just means apathy becomes even more of the norm and people trying to push the boundaries to find out how far they can go without being punished for it.
Well, let’s look at the process your healer went through to end up with those games with you.
- He’s presumably alone, just “wanna get some games in”, joins whatever random group, and starts playing.
- He hasn’t talked in particular with any of you. You’re just blobs on a screen to him.
- He dies, angry/disappointed at something, and instantly quits because he doesn’t want that to happen again and since you’re just blobs on a screen who “let it happen” once, from his perspective there’s nothing that really says it won’t happen again, and so he defaults back to the eternal game of anonymous shuffle in the group finder, because “at least others might be able to prevent it better”. Grass is always greener on the other side.
So, what you can conclude is that the social design isn’t there. It’s extremely inadequate. A solo queue wouldn’t solve that.
What can help prevent this eternal cynical loop of apathy, is bringing back reasons to invest in people. A way in the design to make people want to play with the people they’ve already played with, instead of thinking it’s better to play with another round of strangers.
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I don’t think there is anything they can add to stop this endless lose,leave,find a new group,repeat loop
Well, there’s that ^.
But people who thinks the only solution is more automation shouldn’t be surprised when more automation leads to much less (and much worse) social engagement.
People just need better motivations in the design to emotionally invest in other people.
The most epic stories people have from this game is playing with friends. Often friends they made playing the game itself, not from IRL.
Kinda hard to do that when it keeps becoming tougher and tougher to bond with other people. 
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What social engagement is there if noone plays at all? Or if ppl play 2-3 games a week? In a current gaming scene where all pvp games have close to instant acces to rated pvp, you cant expect ppl to settle for less.
I have about 100-150 friends online in GW2 during peaks hours. Those are 99% ppl i met via soloq. All of them i had at least a friendly chat with, with the idea to play with them another day.
Are there any wow players that can say the same? Does wow even allow that many friends in your list?
I never said the game’s current design is good or adequate. But a solo queue would be even worse.
And afaik PvP in GW2 is very different from WoW, and lasts longer. Longer interactions equals a little easier to get an impression of other people. In arenas however, that’d be gone in a flash.
Your experience from that is also one that stands out. There are certain types of people who are basically “magnets” who can maintain relationships of varying degree with several hundreds of people to a level where you actually know them, but that is very far from the norm. The norm in a solo queue is why rated solo queue games have had to go so far to prevent negative emotional responses from affecting others.
As I said:
You can also compare it to Classic. Classic has seen much greater social engagement than retail. And it is not because it’s more convenient, because it really isn’t.
TBC arenas will also be a good comparison, if they bring back the system they used back then. You’ll see very different behavior there compared to retail now.
It’s not because people are different because in a macro scale then people are people and that’ll never change, but the design brings out different behaviors from them.
And the current design often leads to the following:
It’s about activity first and foremost. You can’t have social activity if ppl are offline or doing other content instead.
I have enough RBG contacts but it took us 1.5 hours to fill up the last two slots of an RBG group last night. 2200-2300 MMR but that shouldn’t matter since I’ve been playing at 2.5 + MMR every season i played since 2012. Everyone is offline tho. While in GW2 a huge number of the friends i made during the same period is online. Soloq is the main reason for that.
In GW2 you have 3v3 aswell … which typically takes less time than wows 3v3.
The standard conquest soloq pvp is comparable to wows RBGs in terms of duration.
See, yet again you bring out quite a big number of contacts. You’ve established a social network even in WoW, although it seems to have required quite a bit of effort.
But another major difference between GW2 and WoW, if you wanna talk about “activity”, is that GW2 doesn’t require leveling or gearing to PvP iirc.
WoW however requires an obscene amount of preparation.
To get more lasting activity like GW2 as you say, they’d first need to get rid of that which is gatekeeping like crazy.
And for the record, you are not the norm. The norm is more socially isolated than even you are. You’re bringing out quite rare examples over and over again, seemingly without even being aware of it.
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Exactly. Thanks for making my point.
And how many of your friends list did you get to know solely through that 3v3 solo queue in GW2? Even more interestingly, how many did you get to know from just 1 game played in that 3v3 solo queue together?
That’s just a symptom of the poor design in the game right now. Doesn’t really prove your point about anything though. It’s exactly the same as what I mentioned earlier:
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I hear stories of ppl who try to do RBGs and spend multiple hours during multiple days to get in to a group. To play just 1 game of rated pvp.
Is this the social interaction/community building aspect you’re going for?
The community building / social interaction you’re going for would exclude a huge number of the players from ever doing that content.
Like vanilla where during the old days only 1% of the playerbase actually stepped in to naxxramas.
Such a social system…yet noone ever did it.
So many misunderstandings in that post… It doesn’t even touch upon what I said.
Then you try to say I’m “going for something”, which doesn’t even make any sense.
All I can say is scroll up and read again.
How would you fix it? How would you fix that its almost impossible to do fun rated pvp within a reasonable timeframe.
- Most gamers are used to instant acces pvp in other games. This wasnt the case back in vanilla / TBC.
All I can say is I’m tired to sit in a q every day for 4 or maybe 5 hours straight trying to make a group only for people to leave after 1 defeat…and nothing is getting done and will never get done for this
Well, to dispel your fundamental misunderstanding:
There are many people with time to play the game. The sheer amount of time invested to prepare a character for PvP rn is an indication of that. Many people are getting burned out though, but that’s kinda besides the point.
Secondly, people can adjust to scheduled timeframes. Every single raiding guild since the start of Vanilla has proven that, and such scheduled way to play exists even to this day in many games, not just this one.
So to go out of your way to design everything about a game to cater only to those without the time to play it, is… idiotic, at best.
And I’ve already linked to a suggestion to mitigate social issues in the group finder:
Try to read it this time, please.
That is a way to make people naturally and unconsciously invest emotionally in each other in a systematic way, in a macro scale.
It doesn’t even lock you into only playing with a few people, but it’ll make those people you’ve invested those games with much more appealing than the strangers in the group finder again.
This is social design.
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Some days only 30 ppl played RBGs at 2200+ according to Xunamates activity tracker. That’s 30 ppl across all servers in Europe.
Very many indeed…
Your idea works in theory but doesn’t work in practice. I wish it worked. It would be a dream for me personally.
Theres are only a very small group that plays actively. The ones that do are typically boost groups. 3 out of the 5 groups we faced last night were boost groups.
So youre basicly saying that they should only cater niche/ boost groups.
You have the incorrect idea that rating gains / losses is what keeps ppl from joining LFG groups. How a system that blocks CR (and not MMR) loss will make ppl think…i will join all random groups to test them out now.
It show you totally misunderstand the system and the issues we face.
- First of all MMR is way more important than CR. Since MMR decides how much CR you gain / lose. So to test a group out, dropping your MMR in the process will just lead to rapid CR drops at a later moment.
- The main reason its hard to fill up groups via LFG is not fear of losing CR/MMR… its the hassle. Being forced to spend hours to find 1-2 extra players or even get in to any group in the first place as new player.
Solo q will fix community time spend for playing the game, instead of do nothing in Oribos. Cuz 99% PvP playersbase think they underrated R1 players but sit on 1400/1600/X rating.
Uhm, now you’ve strangely seem to only have locked into RBGs, but if you only wanna talk about RBGs then RBGs has seen a huge rise in participation figures just by using this kind of gear system as a motivation.
So what that points to instead is more like people have no real reason to play it or continue to play it after they’ve got their gear, same as before that rise in participation figures.
RBGs needs its whole reward scheme redesigned tbh. It’s outdated, and doesn’t serve as proper motivation to do it.
Then the problems with the game’s current overall design makes it all harder as well.
For example, look at Classic BGs. In retail, it’s hard af to get “proper” teams going for RBGs. But in Classic, premades have been so common throughout the entire lifespan of Classic, that it has caused huge problems for the “casual solo players”.
It has been one of the most consistent complaints throughout Classic, that people have gotten “stomped by premades”. Yet Classic doesn’t even have xrealm for grouping up as a premade, and they don’t have a group finder user interface either.
Weird, right?
It’s because the emotional investment is inherently different.
They can’t even queue up from the interface, they have to go to an NPC to do it.
Uhm… What?
No, people identify with their rating. So the “essential truth” is that they don’t want to lose it, instinctively. Which in turn affects behavior.
Besides, as I wrote which you seem to have missed, just resetting the MMR to what it was before the penalty games, after they’re over, solves it.
This suggested system either way makes you prefer playing with the same people more often than not, so in the end it just works as a deterrent to keep people from defaulting back to the eternal game of shuffle in the group finder. It’s just a nuisance at start, but helps the bonding process in the long term.
Makes no sense. Period.
Noone is going to play rated that isnt really rated. The charme of rated pvp is the chance of winning / losing rating.
The only thing that makes it that RBGs arent super popular is the hassle of finding ppl at X rating.
RBGs are the main content that would benefit a lot from a soloq system. So yes ive been focused on that from the start.
What? RBGs has seen a huge rise in numbers? When did this happen all of a sudden? This morning? Show me the numbers.
RBGs are by far the easiest way to get good pvp gear in. Its far easier to get rating in RBGs than in arena. Despite that its dead.