Solo shuffle can and should be a great Arena experience, it is a lot of fun. There are, however, some very bad issues with it currently and that’s the reward system mostly but also people that leave after a few rounds.
There have been times where I’ve won 5-6 of the games and gain 0 rating. I’ve even had games where I won 4-5 of the 6 matches and somehow gained 0 rating or even sometimes lost rating.
The rating gains should be static and based on wins and losses, not based on the MMR of the teams you won or lost against. That should only effect the hidden MMR and not the actual rating. For an example of a static rating system, 1 round win would equal something like 21 points, 1 round loss would lose 21 points. In this example if someone wins 6-0 they would gain 126 rating. if they lose all 6 they lose 126 rating.
Conquest gains should always be rewarded statically based on wins. If a player wins 1-2 of the 6 rounds, they should be rewarded with 1-2 games worth of conquest. There have also been times that I didn’t get any conquest even though I won 4-5 of the rounds, this just doesn’t make any sense at all.
People that leave are a cancer to the entire Solo Shuffle. DPS players wait up to 30 minutes to get into a game. If someone leaves they waste all that time for 5 other players. For example, I played a Solo Shuffle on my Windwalker Monk, it took 27 minutes to find a game. There was a Demon Hunter that lost the first 4 rounds and then left the game because he knew he would lose rating anyways and get no conquest. No one got any rating or conquest for the games that WERE played.
The main two reasons why leavers really hurts the game mode is everyone gets punished instead of just the player that left. Everyone else had to sit long queues and get nothing for it in the end. The easy solution here is to only penalize the person that left while still rewarding the other 5 players with the honor conquest and rating that they have earned in those first 4 rounds. It doesn’t need to be anything more complicated than that. Reward the players that completed the rounds and didn’t leave. One of the main reasons people leave games after 3-4 rounds anyways is due to the flawed rating & conquest gain system for people that only win 1 or 2 of the rounds that I mentioned before. If everyone got rewarded per round, even after losing the first 4 games, at least they may stay for a chance at winning the next 2 rounds and not making their rating loss go down even more, while still being able to get some kind of reward for wins they do eventually get.
Also, there should be better rewards for the healers queueing the games, since they are in demand and DPS players have to wait so long. Extra honor and conquest just means the healers will stop queueing earlier than they should. They need a different incentive, maybe through a seasonal achievement for healing XXX amount of Ranked Solo Shuffle matches. Something good enough that people will want to grind for it and get it completed, even people that are just achievement seekers or want to ‘do all the things’ should want to join in just to get the reward from this achievement. Maybe a unique Dragonriding mount along with a title or something like this. If not a mount, maybe a unique Transmog set for completing the achievement. This would bring a lot more participation to the healing role more so than the buff towards honor and conquest that is currently in the game.
Thoughts? Would love to hear what people think because this is a hot topic and frustrating for a lot of people out there right now that want to enjoy Solo Shuffle.
