Ok, so I posted this in another thread just now, but the post was a bit long so I’ll make it into its own thread to hopefully get more people to read it:
Alright, so a fundamental issue in the group f***er is that people are generally distrustful of random strangers there, and want to increase their own rating but not lose it.
If people don’t want to bring back arena teams which also used to serve as the social glue for people to work together, there is another way to do it.
This way is a bit of a mix inbetween the rating system as it’s now, with the ability to play with anyone at any time, as well as bringing in some social glue for people to want to play together regularly.
Wrote it in a block quote to hopefully make the intro easier to read.
Anyway, so the suggestion is this:
- Implementing a group-wide rating penalty, where you only win 1 rating and lose 1 rating per win/loss, for X amount of games, whenever your character is playing with character(s) it has never played with before.
The MMR can still go up and down, but the rating won/lost will stay at that low amount for those X amount of games. - The rating won/lost is increased incrementally, meaning after those X games have been played together with the new character(s), it then increase to 2 per win/loss for another amount of games, and so on and so forth.
- To prevent MMR exploitation of that CR/MMR discrepancy this way, it’s possible to just reset the MMR to what they all started with, once those “penalty games” have been cleared with the new character(s).
- This is to be repeated whenever there’s a new character in the group, to provide a new form of investment in forming teams. It doesn’t limit you to just one team or just a couple of characters, but the more you want to play with, the more penalty games you’ll have to go through.
So what this accomplishes is that people would be able to “try out” new characters (alts also falls under this umbrella, even if you’re playing with the same people), WITHOUT needing to lose a bunch of rating just for trying out new people/comps.
The MMR increase during the penalty games also provides the possibility to see how it’d go on various rating ranges with those characters, and the MMR reset after the penalty games, brings it back down for you to “play for real”.
It helps drastically reduce the need to jump into the group finder all the time, helps reduce social toxicity (strangers are less inhibited than people who have already socially bonded when online, so the negative emotions like cynicism or anger are more common between strangers in rated PvP online), while it also doesn’t actually prevent the possibility of just playing with new people via the group finder.
Thing is, this convenience of the group f***er and the lack of social glue is the fundamental reason why so many people struggle to find others to play with in the group finder. Realm communities works better, which Classic has shown many times over by now, but since that doesn’t seem to be coming back to retail, Blizzard need to find new ways of introducing reasons to socially bond beyond just the quickly forgotten arena match once in a blue moon.
Thanks for the input. People leaving after the first loss is a consequence by design, keep that in mind.