There are a few point which I would like to bring up, any points that I found from other posts I will reference them.
PvP normal winrates
I personally think that winrates in a non-ranked section of the game don’t make sense, a lot of people may want to maintain higher winrates, wanting to win is usually find but it brings about a few problems:
Toxicity, having something to lose is bound to generate toxicity, this is why ranked matches in any game can be toxic, keeping winrates in normals doesn’t seem to achieve much in terms of competitiveness - if people want to argue about who is “better”, there is a ranked system specifically for this.
Discouragement from trying new things, normal games should be about practice and getting to know the game, if I want to try a new build out I shouldn’t be discouraged because a my winrate will go down if my build turns out to be rubbish.
Customs don’t have the same facilities as normals, it is harder to find people in customs than normals.
Winrates mean nothing as the matchmaking in normals will never be as good as in ranked.
For those who will say that no one cares about the winrates and just play the game, this is exactly my point, remove it, it’s useless.
I have encountered toxicity even in the beta (though 99% of matches people are super friendly), I can’t imagine what will happen when people actually care about their winrates when LA is released.
(Just wanted to say that this was not because “I have a bad winrate so I want it to disappear post”, my winrates in beta in my few games as a new player are actually pretty good 60%+, this is just because normal games should not carry the responsibility and consequence of ranked games, it defeats its purpose)
A clear notification of when a gear upgrade is available
One of the biggest things many others and I have noticed is that sometimes we forget to open our inventories to check for an upgrade, this should be made clearer and it obviously should have an opt-out option to avoid cluster for those who don’t want it.
I like the winrate. Rank in this game is account wide, not per character, so when I try a new class I’m gonna practice it in norms. Being able to see that my main has 90% wr and a new class I’m trying out has 30% winrate is a good thing. I’ll be able to see improvement right there in the numbers.
Though as much as I do think that winrates in normal games do somewhat indicate how good you are at a class, it doesn’t seem like it would even be a helpful metric for someone trying to improve their gameplay on a certain class.
To elaborate, much like in many other games, such as LoL, CS:GO, WoW and more, normal games seem to be a mix of people either trying out new things, having fun/trolling or taking it as serious practice. In ranked however, the mix is still there, but it’s heavily weighted to the serious side. This mix also makes matchmaking incredibly unbalanced, so all in all, winrates in normals just don’t mean much in the vast majority of the cases.
Also, the lack of stats provided after each game and the lack of a replay system makes it so normals seems more for fun than to be competitive. I think that there are much better ways to improve than relying on a winrate system in a non-ranked gamemode.
IMO It just seems like the negatives far outweigh the positives in this case. Though I completely agree that many people will use it for the purpose you stated and that it can be useful for it.
I love seeing my overall and individual class win rates, especially in Team Elimination as that’s is the best place for me to mechanically improve on my class. Seeing how my alts compare to my main via win rate over hundreds of matches is very insightful.
Unfortunately normal win rates aren’t indicative of anything, you can refer to my above comment. The mix of views towards normal games makes it so.
A possible solution to this is adding a training mode, one which doesn’t affect a rank, but rather includes a win rate and better matchmaking. This would filter the mix further and make it more indicative of skill. It would make it such that someone with a completely new build or trying out the game can start playing normal games, once they feel like the build isn’t troll, or is competitive material they can test it out in training mode where people take the game more seriously, then if they feel comfortable enough to stake their rank on it they can move to ranked. However it is not a good idea to essentially punish new players that didn’t play on RU or the beta before, or people trying to have fun.
In any game, if casual players aren’t taken into consideration that part of the game will be harder to get into, and if any casual player that isn’t very good wants to try PvP and they care about their characters stats they will get disheartened knowing that it will negatively affect their win rate. Win rates in normal non-ranked games causes more problems than it solves.