No, that’s just misinformation.
Forming requirements is not what’s “causing” the asocial atmosphere in refail. It’s the social design.
Assuming a player base of, let’s say 30k arena players, with a variety of them ever being online at the same time, with half looking for groups to do arenas. This is what it would be like under more normal conditions.
BFA however has been about the PvE farming most of the time, and almost no alts being played, so the same players who would play with lots of different people on different characters now got limited to just a few if not just only one character.
And because even fewer characters share the same CR, it trims down the amount of players you can “pick up & play with” in the moment.
Now, this problem has been a thing for a lot of years for many people, with actually an increasing amount of people suffering from the problem, ever since arena teams were removed.
But anyway, so the key instead should be how to get people to play together “all the way” from the moment they first start getting rating, instead of this asocial toxic nightmare which is by design.
Arena teams solved that nicely.
Anyway, the problem isn’t that people lack the requirements for the various groups. It’s actually that people 1. don’t play together repeatedly often enough to reduce the need to go back into the group finder (which is by design, there’s not enough social glue), and 2. people are generally distrustful of random strangers in the group f***er.
Lots of people meet requirements to play together. Many of them just don’t want to play with new people. And because there’s no social glue, their old teams tend to dissolve over time as well, so they end up with that distrust for strangers in the group f***er.
Anyway, so you need to look at what makes people talk to each other, to get to know each other. Not just how the groups are formed, because that’s very robotic with the way things are in retail. It’s about what makes them want to play together repeatedly.
If people are so against reintroducing arena teams (TBC classic will hopefully bring back the glory of fun arena team names), I do know of another way to incentivize pushing through obstacles instead of a continuous search for shortcuts.
By putting in a penalty for the entire group when character(s) you’ve never played together with before on those character(s), that reduces the rating won. The MMR can still go up, but the rating won will increase slowly the more games the characters in the group have played together, up to the “normal” rating won today.
For example, if you start by winning 1 rating when you win, and losing 1 rating when you lose, then needing, let’s say 10 games before you start winning 2 rating and losing 2 rating, and so on and so forth, with increasing amount of games having been played together for the rating to eventually reach the normal numbers of today.
That’ll incentivize playing together for longer, and trying a bit harder to form a teamwork instead of just sticking with the asocial group f***er all the time.
inb4 someone mentions concerns about the way to exploit the MMR discrepancy with the CR like that, it can be prevented by resetting the MMR increase to the CR once the group has gotten past the required games needed to get the rating won/lost back to normal.
It gives room to try out new players on various MMRs and see how far they can go with them like that. Without losing so much of the CR, in case it goes bad.
