I’m a mediocre PVPer. I mouseclick buttons too much and find 3s a bit overwhelming to manage all of the enemy/friend cooldowns. But I really want to get the vicious frog from S3 that I missed out on when my PVP buddies quit. I can’t LFG 2s or 3s as Arms at the moment (due to spec sucking), and none of my friends are playing till DF.
I’m actually thrilled with the concept of Solo Shuffle. It lets me queue solo and (slowly) work on progress toward mounts. I also find it fun, even though I’m not particularly great at it.
But this mode has wasted literal hours of my time with absolutely nothing to show for it.
Leavers have always been a problem, but in the past 24 hours I’ve played 10 matches and someone has left all 10 of them. I don’t really care about the conquest you don’t get when someone leaves (although it’s dumb and should change), but won rounds don’t even count toward the mount %. So you literally queue 5-15 minutes, play 10-20 minutes of rounds, have someone quit the match, and get nothing.
I don’t really think penalties are going to work. People don’t really care about the MMR (since it’s not working anyway) and CR loss from quitting. So Blizzard, you’re going to need to pony up and give the victims something for their time. If you win a round, and someone leaves, you should get 50 conquest and 1% toward the mount (or whatever). If someone leaves and you win 2 rounds, you should get 100 conquest and 2%.
Or halve those values-- I don’t care. But after playing literal HOURS of this mode with 0 to show for it feels really, really bad.
https://imgur.com/a/fUZc0PZ
Unfortunately, Reflex! counts unplayed rounds (due to leavers) as losses, but this should illustrate the scope of the problem.
man. im rly rly rly loving solo shuffle. ive done quite a few games. sitting at 2071 rating rn on my DH, but only had like 2 rage quitters so far.
perhaps im just super duper lucky?
also i have only had like maybe 5 tank games, and only 1 of them was really nightmarish … 2 bear druids doing literally double every1 else DPS the rounds would last like 10 secs max lol
i don’t disagree that blizzard’s solutions even on paper so far are lackluster, but i think prepatch is a poor representative of even those solutions. in a real season people care about, after the tank change is implemented and the population is launch-huge instead of prepatch-scrawny, i expect a lot to be different
I’d normally agree. Prepatch is a really bad time to judge anything. But listen, even if the CR loss is punishing, it doesn’t change the fact that this can happen to anyone now or in the future. With decently bad luck, you could literally play 20 rounds with 0 to show for it. Once the tank change goes in, queues will take even longer to pop, and leavers will hurt even more.
the variable here is how meaningful that cr loss is. i contend that in a real season a massively larger percentage of your fellow players in a shuffle will NOT be angry quitters raging out when they lose a round badly, but will instead be diligently grinding to earn their mount credit and improve their rating. i could be wrong, of course, but i think on that basis alone it makes the comparison here apples vs oranges
Maybe. I guess it also depends on when in the season it is, if people are dropping intentionally, etc. Certainly there will always be lulls like this in the future, and that shouldn’t mean the entire mode is trivialized because Blizzard doesn’t want to reward wins in a scuffed match for some (unknown) reason. If the problem is truly as minimal as you’re anticipating, then it’s no skin off their backs to give a % of a full match back to the participants.
There will be a portion of players that view and use solo shuffle as a conquest faucet to cap for the week, and will place no stock into the rating associated with it so long as they are playing standard arena like normal.
Even with a timing penalty alongside a rating penalty, people will still screw others.
Want to stop this for sure?
-Timing pentalty that only goes down while logged in
-7 round losses for a leave
-stacking penalty wherein every solo shuffle match abandoned is 2 standard arena games where you cant gain rating. Not on a timer, the zero reward games must be played and won.
This is such a rose tinted naive take it’s almost cute.
The problem will exist until the cause is dealt with.
A wow account at least has built in value to a person through time investment and subscription cost.
Things like League and Overwatch had to put time investment requirements in their games along with adequate punishments in order to maintain their competitive queue experience. It is extraordinarily rare to witness the type of actions that happens in the majority of shuffles in those games’ solo queue experiences.
The people advocating for rating/rank ‘rewards’ for literally doing and proving nothing is amazing to me. It’s the participation trophy generation mindset in the flesh. They already award honor, and I’m sure conquest will be added eventually and that is all that is needed.
When the root problem is addressed the issue will cease to exist, and it will actually be surprising if it ever does.
this would be interesting but none of their deserter debuffs work like this so it seems unrealistic to me
this is tech they will never build from scratch, for one, but also it doesn’t seem to me like this would agree with:
if they’re here for conquest only, they don’t care about rating. why would rating be the best way to punish them? it’s academic, because this would never get implemented by the morons we subscribe to, but i don’t think it makes internal sense
this is just the splitting point. i believe the cause is in NO small part to the facts that
prepatch is meaningfully worse balanced than any of the real seasons of this xpac,
wrath classic is still booming,
the tank change has not been implemented so a large variety of specs are just incapable of using their skill to protect their rating if they do get into a game
none of these causes will be present in DF. it seems like you have a dispute somewhere with this line of reasoning-i think that’s where we’ll have to agree to disagree.
It absolutely falls in line with the previous suggestion.
People care about rating in normal arena, so you punish the people that use solo shuffle purely as an end of week conquest capping mechanism by striking at the format they DO care about. They will either then not bother with solo shuffle at all (a net win for everyone frankly) or they stick around till the end of round 6.
As far as deserter timer while logged on only and character side rating negation, these are not complicated client side coding endeavors at all.
Yep, soloQ absolutely can not go seasonally live the way it is now.
They made it so leavers count as losing all 6 rounds but that literally doesn’t do anything since the leavers ARE the ones losing all the rounds anyway. Literally doesn’t punish them at all.
Make them lose bonus cr/mmr for leaving AND reward the stayers with bonus honor/cp per match played so they don’t feel like they’re wasting their time.
oh, i didn’t understand. you’re proposing they lock 3v3/2v2/rbg rating gains until you play your penance shuffles, if i correctly understand you now.
it will shock me if blizzard ever does that. their deserter debuffs have never worked that way
and they’ve never worked this way either
i’m not trying to say they’re difficult tasks to program, just that i do not believe this company is willing to change anything even 1 iota in the fashions you’re describing. it would fly in the face of what they have universally done for almost 2 decades.
i just started back after months off and i’ve gotten up to 1700 rating in no time and had 1 match where someone left bc the one rogue was trolling.
I hope i don’t jinx myself but i think the problem is over exaggerated. I don’t see the point of leaving. If there is one terrible person just power through the rounds where you get them as fast as possible.
The only thing that seems to need fixing is your outlook on arena / pvp. You admit to clicking and not being great yet don’t seem to want to improve. That’s what i would work on first.
3s is not easy and I still feel overwhelmed but this solo Q gives you a chance to learn it without really worrying too much about teammates bashing you since i’ve noticed very little talk between rounds other than who to target (which can be toxic bc we usually all know who to target)
Also if you’re unhappy with arms you can always reroll or switch to fury.
The only thing that seems to need fixing is your outlook on arena / pvp.
My own personal position on PVP isn’t really the point here, and I think you’re making a number of assumptions based on a 2-3 sentence introduction intended to soften the message.
The point is that it’s 100% possible for Rated Solo Shuffle, in its current form, to literally waste hours of someone’s time-- regardless of how good they are, how much they win, or what spec they queue as. Just because you’ve been lucky and haven’t experienced it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
oh yea im sorry, you’re absolutely correct. I actually just ran into for the first time. only been back playing since Monday night and it’s like i can’t get one to complete if there is a guardian druid on the lineup all the sudden. Someone ends up rage quitting round 4-6
I think they need to find a way to make leaving early more hurtful to the person doing it. Make them lose points or a stacking deserter buff that sticks around all season.
ex-
30 mins for time 1-2
1 hour for times 3-4
2 hours for times 5-6
24 hours for times 7-9
no titles / rewards able to be collected on that toon for times 10+ (plus 24 hours each time)
resets each season
or if you leave you lose 100 rating each time. possibly in addition to a deserter buff.
only thing is i wouldn’t want someone that gets accidentally d/c due to weather or PC problems to get caught up in this.
I still think they just need to stop your account from playing rated content for the rest of the season if people leave too often. The penalty should start low and scale up as they continue leaving mid game, once they leave too many give them a warning the whole account will be blocked from rated content and if they continue after that go ahead and lock them out of it.
This is rated content and it wastes everyone’s time. Every other game has something like this where people who mess up the rated matches by leaving, throwing and the like are punished and removed.