TLDR - solutions below.
- Short-term solution: Just pay overseas contractors to play healers and spam solo shuffles at below 1800CR. Just pay. Money solves all the problems. Playtest is so cheap. Hire some studios from Keywords or whatnot to just play the game. Just 100 or so headcount should do.
- Mid-term solution: set up mechanisms to incentivize healers with free game-subscription. For example, monthly quest that gives you a free WoW Token, if you COMPLETE 50 solo shuffles at or below 1800CR (obviously you can’t AFK). If you climb, you have to play alt to cap. You can drop intentionally but you still have to play. Not perfect but history tells us money is the best incentive for healing.
- Long-term solution: NEED MORE NEW PLAYERS. The player population triangle is basically reversed. We need new players to form the largest layer at the bottom instead of having 10-year veteran arena masters as the majority. More fresh blood, more healers and better arena experience, because you are not playing against Gigachads like myself, who can’t beat R1 but gatekeep newbies. Just increase User Acquisition budget and ramp up channel marketing. Go go go! Game is great, no reason not to capitalize on that!
Now time for the rant.
The causes for the shortage of healers in solo shuffle can be:
- Naturally just less people playing healers. Harder to master. Steeper learning curve. All the other reasons. You name it.
- If you are a good healer, you most certainly have ample friends on BNet, who constantly ping you to queue in Rated 3s. As long as you want to queue, you WILL have games to play. Then why would you put yourself in the solo shuffle mayhem, playing with people who calls you “trash” and getting ego checked all the time… That gives us the problem of “not so good” healers being more inclined to play solo shuffle, while the game mode is less attractive to good healers, who are more socially connected (no matter how much Bluedrew hates the game - if he wants to queue, he WILL find people wanting to play with him in Rated 3s, just not the rank one powerhouses he deems worthy). In other words, you are missing a portion of the healer base, who don’t need solo shuffles.
- Once a healer climbs CR, there is no reason for drop back down to que lower CR. So there is this artificial drought for healers at lower MMR. Not because none are playing, but rather they are concentrated at the mid-to-top bandwidths. Then you have to deal with the weird matchmaking, where higher-rated healers gain no CR from wins and they just quit altogether.
- Healing is just tough man - but you also can’t make it too OP or easy, otherwise game balancing at high MMR is going to be a nightmare. I tip my hat in advance to whoever solves the problem of flattening the healing learning curve, now that the game is so complicated.
There you have it.
