TLDR:
- Free-to-play (tournament realm styled, F2P players locked to a location like Ashran).
- Team size based matchmaking for 3v3 (how skirms work). Consolidation of game modes & ladders.
Match making based on group size. 2+1 versus another 2+1 group. Full party versus full party group. Solos versus solos. We see parts of this system already in play with skirms and is how most other competitive games already do this. I’m not using a manual LFG system everytime I want to play a competitive game of Valorant, LoL, CS, Rocket League, etc. I don’t think a solo-shuffle 1 round is the solution, but rather creates another bracket the splice the audience into. We need consolidation at this time until the active playerbase get large enough. Games like League of Legends can afford to create quirky modes; WoW PvP cant.
Let’s be serious guys, most people finding randoms on LFG are not some coordinated group who’s at an advantage against a team that’s been compiled at random. Most aren’t on comms, nor are comms giving an edge to a lot of lower rated teams.
One of the other major problems for fast queues is we need to fill the funnel with new players - PVP that is free-to-play is the way forward. PvP only toons that stay locked to a place like Ashran. Easy gearing, cosmetic rewards (trading post as a “battle pass” already exists, even for F2P players).
PVP is already evergreen content - doesn’t get updated much (with new maps, etc); this part of the game fits into a F2P model. Otherwise as pointed out by others, you’re paying for the game ($60), sub ($15 a month), token to gear out ($15) - for $90 bucks just in your first month to try PvP. When all of the other Esport games mentioned earlier in this post are all free, you can see why WoW PvP just gets passed on. I don’t recommend this gamemode to my friends anymore and point them at Valorant, CS, League or Dota instead (this isn’t even bringing into consideration the volume of addons, macros, weakauras you need to get to know to be competitive).
Just not realistic, and leads us down a path of churn rather than new user acquisition. We simply can’t replace those leaving quickly enough, and filling the funnel with existing PvE players who aren’t sticky doesn’t work. (those players will always defect back to raids/m+).
Going to do some basic math on ROI here for existing playerbase - assume that half goes F2P, it’s approximately 25K PVP players (even this is a stretch):
- 25,000 x 60 (expac cost) = 1,500,000
- 25,000 x 15 (monthly cost) = 375,000
For context the new brutosaur mount made about $23.85 million in revenue. That means for a new F2P audience, only about 75k players would need to buy 1 $25 mount
(or tmog) over the course of 2 years in order to make up this difference. (to offset the cost of an EXPANSION).
The economics of this should be quite simple, especially considering how many games have this model already. It clearly works.