Already done a thread with a suggestion for how to improve the rating system used for shuffle, which you can check out here if you so wish to: Suggestion to fix the rating system in shuffle
The growing disapproval of the shuffle format
There’s a growing disapproval rate creeping up amongst a few people, concerning the time it takes to play a shuffle after needing to spend such a long time queuing for a shuffle. It locks people into the activity for quite a long time, where they don’t get much to “show for it” after having spent all that time.
We all know people are sensitive to investing time, especially the target audience for which this game mode was intended. So we need ways to reduce the time people need to invest for it.
One way of doing that is of course to improve the quality of life for healers, and make the tank players understand that they’ve still got their precious tank queues as long as they play prot paladins.
But the other way to make the time investment more efficient, is to increase the “revolving door”-effect, which means to make the shuffles faster. So one way is to make changes that helps reduce queue times, while the other is to make changes that helps reduce the match lengths.
But how to do that without making people dislike the gameplay is the tricky part.
The suggestion for how to fix the solo queue
It’s not exactly a secret that designs are first made to fit into the PvE challenges in mythic raids and then m+. And then the unfortunate souls in charge of PvP designs take that, and do what they can to somehow turn those designs into PvP-esque viable designs.
But what if the designs would be for PvP from the ground up? For starters, one of the main reasons why you stand still to cast and so much of your time is spent hard casting as certain designs sometimes, is because PvE has encounters where part of the challenge is getting that damage etc. out while dodging stuff on the ground. That isn’t as much of a thing in PvP, so those kinds of considerations can be scrapped for PvP to make it more fluid.
Another would be designs for mobility, they’re meant to provide challenges for PvE encounters, but what if they’d be designed entirely for PvP? What would that kind of gameplay look like? Lots of untapped potential there all around.
But you can’t get designs entirely for PvP without separating the UI entirely between the two activities, and for that Blizzard would probably need to create new characters on new realms.
But what if those realms would have no leveling, would just exist purely for PvP, have a solo queue where you pick what to play after having been matched up, and only play one round? Because you don’t need that shuffle format with every combination possible, when people aren’t locked into only playing that one class and spec that they had to choose before knowing what others had picked or would pick.
It’d even be possible to put in that Legion template for such realms, and without ilvl differences just let people save stats points distributions like they save talent builds and gear builds.
It’d be a proper PvP solo queue & game, adjusted for WoW. 100% freedom to design skill expressions solely for the sake of PvP, and let people express themselves with variables like different talent builds for different stats builds, and more freedom to try different classes and specs.
It’d be what they’ve failed to deliver with the rated shuffle in DF.