Hi, I’m Choo. I play two engineers. I’m one of those weird people that played competitive team arenas solo most of the time. Here are my thoughts on your new changes.
Forcing people to now sit in the Mists while in ranked queue doesn’t make any sense. Well…maybe it does, from a programmer’s standpoint. It must’ve been changed for a reason. But nothing causes game fatigue like forcing your players to sit in an area that has nothing for them to do besides attacking dummies and reading map chat. It’s boring, and punishes your ranked PvPers by forcing them to isolate themselves in an effectively functionless No Man’s Land.
Courtyard does not belong as an unranked/ranked map option. Of all the decisions and changes made with this patch, its inclusion is the most puzzling. You are not going to see the currently model (500-0) change. If anything, it’s going to get worse. Why?
*The rez mechanics really make the imbalance of a deathmatch game mode obvious. In my experience: you wipe or get wiped once at the start of the match, and that is it. The end. There is no chance of getting your full team to congregate at the start zone before exiting because A ) the offset rez timers and B ) the fact that idling too long in the spawn randomly teleports you out.
*The map is not large enough to allow for comebacks. After the first team wipe and push to the spawn point, all three directions of exit are coverable, all within 5-6 seconds of each other. Pair this complete lack of rotational neccesity with the spawn timer and teleport and you’ve got a map that is literally designed to punish pug and solo q’ers.
*Full teams are going to abuse Courtyards availability as a quick and lopsided way to accumulate wins and boost MMRs. The new map select system essentially guarantees a full guild team a 50% chance to get Courtyard every time it pops up…and a competitive team would be foolish to select any other mode.
So, you might say?
-Allowing this is not healthy for the community. Period. I know there’s a balance that needs to be struck. At no point in time will there be a system that has full teams only playing against full teams and pugs against pugs. That would effectively have the queues grind to a halt for anyone interested in team competitive play…but why do pugs/soloers suffer the most when they are the largest chunk of your community?
-Being a competitive soloist was hard enough as it was with the old system, but this will make it impossible. The Leaderboard ranks were/are a rollercoaster ride that stopped, at best, around 200-250 rank. After that point I was getting solo-q’d against TOL teams (especially one night in recent where 2 top rated teams were basically kickballing a pug collection back and forth between themselves. They were not getting queued to fight each other.)
-The community was small enough as it is, and this will just make it shrink further. I’m sure your programmers are already aware of the fact that the new man check is ripe for abuse and has been abused liberally already. We (me and my fite partner) spent an hour during primetime last night, stuck in the Mists, doing nothing but clicking accept boxes repeatedly because trolls were intentionally not accepting the team check. We got in two matches and promptly quit to do something a little bit more fun/productive than watching check boxes and ctrl-T spam.
-The less people playing, the worse the queue situation is going to become. We already noticed that the queues had slowed considerably before the new system, and its only going to get worse as you lose more and more soloist and casual ranked players to an imbalanced system.
-Despite the time-honored suggestion to ‘team up or shut up’ flying around a whole lot, that is an unreasonable expectation to hold for everyone who wants to engage in your PvP system competitively (for reasons such as a player’s time constraints, general sociability level, etc. etc. etc.)
That is all. I for one am hoping that things settle a bit better by the time the ladder opens back up, but I don’t have high hopes. In all honesty and without malice, I find the majority of the changes to be extraordinarily disappointing.