Is Solo shuffle healthy for WoW PvP?
I will start off by saying that I do genuinely believe Activision Blizzard had good intentions with adding Solo shuffle to Wow. I also believe they are on the right track with the thoughtprocess of “Wow pvp needs a solo que system” like every other real competetive pvp game out there. Solo shuffle was Blizzard’s first attempt at an Alpha version of a solo que system, and this feature was successfully integrated to the game on October 25, 2022 during the pre-patch for Dragonflight. As an Alpha version and first attempt I would call this a decent success. Players can now que up for arena with minimal effort, without having consistent partners to play with. This has been one of the huge issues related to the “Entrance barrier” topic for wowpvp, and finally the time has come!
At first everyone was very excited and understandably so. But as weeks and months goes by the players who actively play Solo shuffle on a daily basis also become painfully aware about the flaws of the system.
These are some of the main issues that are especially bad in Solo Shuffle:
General bugs (Environmental bugs, lobbys closing before they are finished, both teams ending up in the same starting room etc)
Que times up to an hour (Consistently 30 minutes) for DPS cause of lack of healers.
Mmr issues (Mmr not moving up, causing no inflation and creates a feeling of making no progress)
Mmr distribution
Rating distribution
Players ending up on Mmr above their appropriate skill level due to the nature of the system
An unhealthy way to learn pvp
Abusing the Mmr system (Leaving the lobby without finishing and only lose rating but not losing Mmr)
Intentional griefing
Wintrading
Cheating (bug abusing, Botting, Third party programs)
Abusing the report system to get players banned by Blizzard’s automatic system.
Dividing the pvp playerbase between 2 gamemodes where 1 gamemode doesnt require effort to play.
I think this was how Blizzard went about it in chronological order: They go on to address the General bugs which they consider the most critical of these issues at the time. Then its the Mmr issues where the pvp community had to bring attention to the matter for a long time before Blizzard addressed it, and eventually made adjustments. I also believe they attempted to fix the que times issue by allowing lower mmr healers into higher mmr lobbys. It seems like part of these “adjustments” was separate dps MMR and healer MMR in the same lobby (all dps players in the same lobby share MMR, but the healers share another MMR). Forexample for me it can say I am in a 2.8k mmr lobby, but for the healers in the same lobby it can show they are in a 2.6k mmr lobby) I might be wrong here if Blizzard has released patch notes about this but I think its probably an intentional hidden change to attempt to make players happier with lower que times. The results however are that the que times might be slightly better, but it backfires by dramaticly increasing the skill gap between players in the lobby and essentionally lowers the quality of the games, and causes great frustration.
Time goes on and here is where Activision Blizzard makes a big mistake…they basicly deem the feature Solo shuffle finished and leave it as is for years to come without properly addressing the remaining issues. You would think that when one of the best game companys in the world creates a new feature to one of their biggest and greatest games in history, they would develop it further. World of Warcraft has the most unique pvp system in the world where no other game can match it, and a Solo que feature which the game so desperately needs get integrated to the game. And then this Solo que system gets stuck in Alpha stage for years to come, its tragic. When a company creates a new feature/product and they become aware of the pros and cons of the feature/product, most companys would ask themselves “How can we improve this feature even more, how do we fix/remove these flaws and still keep the positives. This process involves admitting to yourself that maybe something along the way went wrong and its time to go about it from a different angle to achive even greater results. Cause the feature Blizzard created is a good starting point with so much unspent potential, but by far not at it’s peak, and Blizzard has failed to achknowledge this.
In today’s Solo shuffle most of the issues/flaws mentioned above are still there with one or two Band-Aid solutions being implementet occasionally, but the issues keep getting increasingly worse every day. This is also because of lack of enforcing the TOS of the game from Blizzard.
Bottom line and my inevitable conclusion is: Solo shuffle as it currently stands is NOT healthy for WoW PvP and will not steer the game in a prosperous direction as long as it remains the primary face of PvP.
Let me know what you think about this in the comments below!