shuffle s1 was definitely insane, but I think blizzard balancing was the issue for the rets, not really shuffle mmr itself.
In either case shuffle mmr seems pretty good now imo (e.g., not impossible to get elite but not super easy either, at least not for most specs), but when I see 2200, 2400, 2700, etc., for the mmr of lobby, I’d like to know that the players in the lobby have a commensurate baseline of skill/experience, which is just not the case atm in blitz.
In shuffle, once you get out of the 1800-2k range where people might be trying fresh toons/learning new specs, I feel a general consistency in terms of the average skill level of all players in the lobby. For blitz I feel that the skill level per team can range from 1200-3k+ which is just wrong imo, not to mention it results in poor match quality where one team usually just gets steamrolled by the other or vice versa [e.g., oh the team filled with nothing but multi-duelists/glads steamrolled the team that was 50% career high challengers/rivals, who would have thought, what a great game].
yeah, I really wish they would just implement the effort they do for the trading post into the pvp brackets [e.g., pooping out numerous unique cosmetics every month, but just every season for each pvp bracket]. It really wouldn’t be that hard or resource intensive to have each bracket give different rewards at the rating thresholds, and I think it would go a long way in terms of promoting the health and participation in each bracket.