In the old days Blizzard tried a few times to put Arena on a tournament server with premade characters and have people pay to play there.
It quickly turned out that most people only participated to play the bare minimum games to acquire a special pet. Once they had that the participation dropped like a rock, and Blizzard eventually stopped with the tournament server idea.
So the carrot on a stick driving popularity is nothing new. Solo Shuffle has it too. And I’m sure the title and mount is helping keep especially high-end players engaged in regular Arena.
But Solo Shuffle has one unique thing going for it, which is accessibility, and accessibility tends to beat all.
You’re kinda glossing over what you mentioned yourself there. I’ve highlighted it for you.
See, that part there played a bigger deal back then, since the chunk that’s adult now were mostly teenagers back then, and prepaid game cards sold in stores was a much more common way of paying for game time, implying they didn’t have access to a card with which to pay online.
Account-wide rewards weren’t big either, the tournament realm was just the vanq title and that pet as you mentioned, while now they’re able to make everything account-wide.
Isn’t this a bit drastic? I don’t think anyone would want to separate PvP in this way even though I agree that rewards incentivize even in regular arena.
This. LFG just can’t compare to instant queue button. I can’t come up with any improvements made on LFG that could compete with that. I wonder what is the future for the regular arena and coordinated teamplay.
It was an example to illustrate that rewards do wonders for participation.
I guess you could point to Skirmish Arena as well, which basically provides the same gameplay and accessibility as Solo Shuffle, but no one cares about it, because there aren’t any rewards.
Regular Arena has the rewards which has driven player participation for many years. And it’s been more accessible than Rated Battlegrounds. But Solo Shuffle has the rewards and the superior accessibility. So players go there.
Neither can I.
A former developer at Blizzard was known for coining the phrase that “accessibility is king”.
Guilds being their own tightknit communities once upon a time was a major selling point of this game back then, so people have proven in the past that “having fun with friends” is something players can enjoy.
But of course, the social design was less automated and more holistic back then.
Point is, making people connect socially can revive the “LFG experience”, so to speak.
Biggest mistake people ever did in WoW’s group finder, was that they kept going back to the group finder. It became routine, like second-nature to them.
Some people did well in it and built their social networks of btag pals, but others never even bothered. And so it made the time it’d take to get started, take longer than if they had been able to schedule ahead of time when to play.
Don’t forget, part of adult life is scheduling ahead, so it’s kinda weird so many people don’t like to schedule ahead.