He’s absolutely incorrect, and I’ll explain why since it seems I have to:
In this game, there is an insane amount of variables. Gear, spell variance, RNG, control over lag tolerance, extreme amount of differences between classes/specs, and different ways to play comps.
For example, let’s say you’ve got 2 different RMP teams. One team with 2k exp, and the other with 3k exp.
They’d have fundamental different understandings of how to play vs. different comps. That much is a given, right? Since one is vastly more successful as that comp after all.
But even when you compare two RMP teams both with 2k exp, you’d still see very different ways of playing it sometimes. Variations in how they think it should be played increases with more variations in the comps they face as well.
Then there are differences in opponents similar to that effect, not everyone plays exactly the same after all.
Then you have people not on top rating because in the vast majority of cases, they simply don’t know enough about how to play good enough to win enough to get that far as well. So you have to assume nobody plays without making mistakes as well, especially the lower rated you go.
Mistakes can have different levels of impact on the win chance as well, some are much bigger mistakes than others after all, and some can snowball as well.
People learn how to play differently, and this is not a single player game where rating is only a reflection of your own ability. It’s an approximation of your ability up to that point in time, with the people you’ve played with playing an equally big part in that as well.
But that doesn’t mean that what you’ve done to reach that far in rating was done in exactly the same way even if you’ve played the same comp that far.
So rating doesn’t “remove” the risk of assuming too much. Not even close. Thus conflict would inevitably rise, especially in a game where randoms on a screen caused you to lose something you use to identify yourself with, i.e. your rating. It’s already happening with the garbage group finder, but there you still run the risk of being forced back into it, so there’s still a small awareness of repercussions if you act poorly.
Making it entirely automatic doesn’t help in that regard though. Not even a little bit. It just makes the brain less engaged and you grow more anonymous, thus making you more emotionally hypersensitive which social media research has showed many times over.
This is why psychological hooks into reward schemes, or in layman terms “how they make you chase that carrot”, combined with increased online anonymity, will always cause a huge backlash. And it’s why those other rated solo queue games have had to go so far to combat such problems, and why it’s an industry-wide initiative to deal with it better as game developers.
Which is why more casual-oriented reward schemes are better suited for a rated solo queue environment, especially when you rely less on others by how the game is designed in the gameplay itself.
