OK, just to state a few things before I begin:
- I’m multi-glad in multiple expansions, I’ve been playing the game on and off for 16 years.
- 8 years ago when I was in college, my 3s team reached 2900 and was once ranked 2nd in Taiwanese server.
- I studied game programming/design for my master’s degree and I worked as a game designer for 3 years after graduation, after that I switched to work as an engineer.
Not trying to brag about anything, just want to say that I know what I’m talking about, and I don’t want to waste people’s time for reading this post, that’s all.
Now let’s address the solo queue issue.
The major argument is that the whole PVP system is so complicated/unbalanced, it’s not going to work for solo queue, this is also what Ion was saying.
Well, it’s simply not true. Any difficult tasks or even those seemingly impossible ones can be addressed by great game design, that’s a fact.
Now let’s take a step back, and imagine that we’re just going to use a random paring system for the solo queue, just like the Arena skirmishes.
Is it crazy? Yes, it is. It’s very likely that you’ll be paired with people with bad gears, that don’t play PvP or even AFKs. But guess what, so are your opponents. Eventually, the good players, those who defy the odds and capable of pulling off 1v2s, those who are extremely resilient stay positive, will climb. And that’s a fact.
This is also what the early ranking system of DotA/LoL looks like. The only improvement is that they only pair you with similar rating players, but you would often end up in a game where all 5 players only play top lanes/support roles for example. But it worked, and that’s the point.
Now you have a system that “kinda” works, how do we improve it? Well, just a few ideas:
- Pairing players with similar rankings, this is obvious.
- You can choose to queue for 2s or 3s.
Now the system works better, how do we further improve it? Just an idea:
You can choose the specs you want to play with, but need to choose at least a few to speed up the queue times.
For example, as a BM hunter queuing to 2s, I would love to play with a feral druid, holy/disc priest, resto druid/shaman, etc.
The system would try to respect your choices but would eventually ignore them as the queue time getting longer, and you would also get a rough queue time estimate for those choices, so you might want to relax the choices a little bit if the queue time gets too long.
And this is exactly what the other games with a good ranking system did.
I guess my point is, non of those ideas are novel, it’s been done times and times again in other games, it just that the game designers need to really think about how to solve the hard problem, instead of complaining about how complicated the system is, because the truth is, it’s not that complicated.
But it’s been 14 years and we still have a system that, when the arena queue pops, there are no 8 secs ready check for all the players, like what the other games have, so you would often end up in a game that missing a player.
Is adding a ready check that hard? no it isn’t, one of the games we made in two weeks had that. This just shows how they’re unwilling to make the system better, and not having a solo queue sounds like an execuse for not wanting to tackle the hard problem.