If you had to choose one, would you prefer RANKED Solo Arena, or UNRANKED Team Arena?
Definitely ranked Solo Arena.
I think the hot-join system has its flaws, and we need to try to move the players to a more structured environment, but not for the cost of the SoloQ.
All the PvE & WvW I talk to are mostly complaining about three core points, why they do not enjoy SPvP:
- Transition from PvE/WvW is too difficult, they cannot play the same way they are playing PvE/WvW, too to stat, rune and sigil limitations.
- There is no reward involved, which would interest them to play more SPvP.
- SPvP is just a mindless zerg fest.
While the first two points hopefully will get fixed with the feature patch, the third one remains a problem.
In hot-join you just jump into a most likely ongoing match, follow the zerg from one point to another, farming other players or getting farmed, resulting in constantly leaving players on the loosing team, auto-balance and more leaving players. I don’t think you can really get a good playing experience out of this mess.
The only good thing from hot-join is that you can test out your trait setup for the first time, and jump out immediately if you forgot something or made a mistake somewhere.
Changing the ‘play now’ button from 8vs8 to 5vs5 might help as a start, but it will not fix the problem.
A perfect league system coupled with a good reward structure might help to lead the players to the better structured play experience in the form of the SoloQ or TeamQ.
I just think, that a lot of players are afraid of their performance in the rated queuing system. Other people will see them at a the low end of the ladder or after climbing it, they are afraid to loose their achievement, and therefore they are looking for a unranked queuing system.
Since the player skill level can be very different, you’d still need a MMR-mechanism in this unranked queuing system, to avoid unbalanced matches and frustrated players.
BTT: Since we cannot have both, I’d still prefer a better league system, taking care of those fears (mentioned above), instead of completely removing the SoloQ.
We have enough players who wants to play on a casual-competitive level, achieving in SoloQ as much as possible, to show off their individual achievements, without being forced to play TeamQ to do so. [Not to mention, that I don’t like the idea of better TeamQ rewards per match, which pulled a lot of players from SoloQ into queuing TeamQ alone. The MMR system is only good as long as the pool of players is big enough, and with the higher teamQ-rank point rewards, the SoloQ playerbase is far too small.]
We all want a good league-based system coupled with rewards for better incentives. With the removal of the ranked SoloQ you’d take those incentives away from of your players.
