Originally Posted by
jediknight14
That's the thing though. You're all treating like a single game can show your skill in soloQ but that is not the case at all. Look at like statistics in games like LoL or CSGo or other team based games where you don't get to pick your team. A single win or lose doesn't matter because what? Because at the end the skill is shown in statistics. Better people will get higher rating anyway.
Now that that's out of the way lets look at some of the problems:
The validity or meaning of a said statistic (rating, win/los ratio, ....) is affected by many things. For example there are classes that have higher pool of potentional good synergistic partners. Eg Ele sham can go almost with anything but something like holy damage priest (rofl. I have no idea about the meta of wow so I just made up something really stupid to prove my point. That doesn't mean my point is invalid, I can still do some basic analysis of problem) can only play with a few specific other specs (both the other damage and healer wise). What this means is that there will be a difference between a good ele sham (a ele sham might be considered good with 60% win/loss ratio) and a good holy damage priest (a priest might be considere good even with a ratio like 30% wins). Why? Because statistically, it will happen much less often that the priest will get a better comp over the other team and thus he's disadvantaged from the beginning.
You must not forget other very important things as well like the distribution of specs in the soloQ pool. For example there might be less rogues (which have a good synergy with the dmg priest) in the soloQ pool than destro locks (which will have a good synergy with the enemy ele shaman). This shifts the win/loss ratio even more becuase the priest is even more disadvantaged.
What this means in the grand scheme of things. Since rating is calculated (from the win loss ratio) equally for everyone, it doesn't represent players skill level accuratelly at all, it combines it's skill AND it's viability in the soloQ environment. Thus disadvantaging certain specs in a rating oriented environment and also disadvantaging them reward wise since you might be as good as the guy at rank 1 but because of low viability (maybe viability is not the right word, because viable are all specs. Rather compatibility) compatibilty with other people, you'll get inferior rewards etc...
How to fix things? There are few possible solutions.
I'll mention one thing I find was a really good idea and that was that titles at the end of a season will take your class into account. Unfortunatelly, some specs of a class are less compatible than others and that means there will still be a huge disadvantage for someone like a dmg holy priest (again, it's just a joke example, I don't think something like that should probably even be viable). Dividing it upon specs as well and using percentage based system for the rewards is the best way to go.
The way how to fix it in game? The best obvious solution (the utopian solution) would be to make all classes equally compatible (I beileve they were made equally viable using the 3.3.5b patch but still some of them lack synergies that would make them usable in SoloQ environment.). That is obviously near impossible.
Another thing that might work is shifting the rating calculation. You could change the rating you get/lose from a game using 2 numbers. One would be a compatibility constant which would be a set number saying how many possible comps there are for the spec compared to how many possible comps there are in total. The other number would be calculated from the current soloQ pool spec distribution. This would not make you win more with a spec like holy dmg priest but it would make rating represent only skill.
I believe combination of the first and second solution is the way to go combined with one more thing.
The win/loss ratio is not affected only by your skill you'll still lose more if you have less compatible spec. This combined with the second solution would destabilize the rating system, making less compatible specs as well rewarded as the rest BUT disadvantaging the rest because for example when a holy pala war (a high rating comp so they lose more rating when they lose (due to the constants work) than someone like the holy dmg priest) get someone like a holy dmg priest to them and lose, they'll lose a unfair amount of rating. This means that:
Either rating shift has to be calculated for the whole team (instead of for everyone individually),
or while team and personal rating (used for rewards like transmog and titles) would use this new system, MMR would not use it.
Uffff. A long post. Hope someone reads it.
