The World of Warcraft community have voiced their concerns over 3v3 matchmaking ratings and how it feels nerfed. Blizzard has chimed in with their thoughts and potential solutions they’re looking into in order to address the community.
The forum post began first on March 26 with concerns levied that the 3v3 matchmaking ratings ladder felt nerfed when compared to before Shadowlands Patch 9.05. The forum post notes,
“It feels as though the 3v3 ladder MMR has been nerfed compared to Pre 9.05. Whether this is true or not, the perception remains and higher rated players decline to q because of it.”
The post continued, requesting a weekly or biweekly CR/matchmaking ratings decay for any inactive players in order to push more ladder play. Blizzard chimed in and noted that Arena has seen more participation in Shadowlands. They explained that with their current ratings system, if more people participate, the greater the chance that the best players will reach high matchmaking ratings.
However, they note that the player numbers capable at participating at this extremely high level is limited. Therefore, if those players don’t participate, then players just below that rating will find it very difficult to achieve those ratings. They note there are two solutions, one of which is implemented.
“First, over the past 7 years World of Warcraft has had a rating inflation system in place that increases the mean rating of competitors at a rate of 10 points per week (note: This is the rate of increase for clarity but the number is actually increasing with each second).”
The second solution involves actually increasing that upper boundary for their matchmaking system,
“Second, we are going to increase the upper bound of our matchmaking rating system with weekly restarts this week. This should mean that players at the top of the ladder should have less matches that reward no rating change.”
In recent news, it sounds like the 9.1 Shadowlands patch could potentially be in beta soon. Additionally, it looks like The Burning Crusade beta in WoW Classic received a bump to level cap.
