Just curious participation wise, are there any statistics out there on how many people have done games in 2s and 3s this season in comparison to s4, (and for a more similar comparison, the first season of shadowlands)?
Judging by the huge deflation in those brackets, I’m guessing participation in those brackets has dropped significantly. Any thoughts?
Accessibility. You get full honor gear which is like 10k honor then press queue.
idk if those sites still track the numbers but 2s/3s is definitely deflated and dead.
What the rodent with a hat said.
Solo Shuffle is miserable to play but I’d wager most people subject themselves to it because it runs circles around every other rated PVP system in terms of ease of access.
Ease of reward is also a major factor to it’s success. It’s no secret that a Large Majority of the pvp population plays it for the rewards, more so the lower end rewards than the higher end rewards.
It’s just far easier for anyone to get them from solo shuffle which killed the “need” for these people to ever touch rated 2s/3s.
All the generic rewards being up for grabs and it being the path of least resistance just spelled death for everybody except the glad-r1 crowd. LFG is just so awkward and horrible, and people are super selective and despite long queues Shuffle just lets you play.
I’m sorry, he did make me laugh when he said that. But yea, do you think they should adjust rewards in someway?
so many people try to argue that this participation is them enjoying the mode
Yes, but also…yes. See, the mode is popular because it’s easy to pick up and play, but it being popular makes it easier to climb in, which further makes it popular.
I think they should.
The rated honor/cq gains from shuffle are so vastly better than 2s/3s that a 30 minute queue is worth it.
theres 7 ppl above 2400 in 2s and 237 people above 2400 in 3s, and we’re like 7 weeks into the season.
it is unequivocally DEAD and killed by solo shuff. im like 2k in 2s and the queues are like 3-5 minutes on a friday night, and im facing the same 2-3 teams every queue sesh.
what they need to do is add more achievements and cosmetics into 2s and 3s and incentivize players to get those achievements. realistically there should be individual rewards in each bracket to ensure they don’t die.
Used to casually play both, maybe around 100 games in 2s, and half that in 3s. Now I do neither, and just queue RSS. Guessing this is the case for a lot people now
Yeah I only do SS and maybe some 2s or 3s if my irl friends wanna chill in disc and play some chill games instead of SS lol
Blizzard shouldn’t attempt to drive players into brackets they don’t really enjoy. Those additional achievements/cosmetics are basically more free stuff for high rated players. They’re not easily attainable for lower rated players. They’d also have to go through the miserable LFG experience again.
If Blizzard has to artificially prop up participation, that’s probably not a good thing. The lower rated players are mostly there to get farmed and inflate the ladder. It’s not really a positive experience for them. These rewards just make it easier for 2k rated players to hit 2.4k and get glad rewards.
I see PvPers enjoying random bgs without Blizzard having to add more achievements and cosmetics to keep that bracket alive.
I only have fun in solo shuffle. Rated 3’s doesn’t even compare because of how awful it is to find teammates and I don’t want to be serious all the time
I mean people will always take the path of least resistance. Throw all the best rewards in 2s which just happens to be the easiest to climb in and it’ll be what everybody plays.
Like imagine how hard mythic raiding would die if you could just do keys for all the same loot.
https://media.discordapp.net/attachments/955017982684327980/1068682143280156732/image.png
this is recent games
so within the last ~ at least few hours roughly
we won’t know how many people are on ladder until they release early r1 tracker on the official website in the next couple months
once we have the ladder spot where r1 ends we can figure out how many total players there are since that’s 0.1% of the ladder
in SL s1 participation was padded heavily by PvP gear being BiS in raids (mostly badge)
there were like 450,000 total players on ladder i believe
Idk I think DPS preferring to sit in queue for a solo shuffie speaks volumes about how miserable the other brackets are
I think it’s more LFG and lack of people to play with than the brackets themselves.
In the past, I think Ion mentioned Blizzard could easily drive high participation into any activity by putting bis rewards there. However, that doesn’t mean players actually enjoy that activity, and it will eventually drive people away from the game.