In case it isn’t painfully obvious to everyone already, there are MANY different variations of solo queue that people ask for. And “que” isn’t a word in English.
People can’t even agree amongst themselves what a solo queue should even look like, and that’s just because you’re all extremely ignorant when it comes to the subject matter. These topics are part of university courses and research & development fields you’re all trying to say you know best.
For one thing, social design in online gaming is related to social psychology and sociology (i.e. micro & macro scales), and game design itself is also part of higher education (although it tends to include more than just programming, such as the fundamentals of game philosophies and various forms of games and so on).
Yet because everyone is trying to please themselves, they’re only looking at it from their own isolated perspective. It’s truly sad.
Solo queue can work. It just requires changing the game at its core. There’s no reason why WoW classes wouldn’t be able to work like a moba, if you take out the entire leveling process and gear acquisition and borrowed powers and so on. Just a simple instant creation of fully prepared characters, some extra time setting up the UI for each class and spec, and then a lobby just like in a moba where people take turns choosing what to play. That way, you wouldn’t be locked into what you’re playing.
And before anyone tries to say “but what about filtering what to play with?! KEKOMEGATRULWUTLOL”, then you must first understand the nature of automatic matchmaking. For you to be able to filter what to play with, you need an exponential increase in the amount of people queuing as each separate thing, and even then you’d see HUGE differences between what people prefer to play with and what the supply for that demand would look like, if they don’t go with a lobby where you can choose what to play after already being matched up.
If they just copypasta a rated solo queue as is into the game, then it’s in direct conflict with the way the game locks you into what you’re playing, and becomes a California wildfire of toxic outrage caused by space lasers. (This way of putting it probably fits you better.)
As for the people saying it’s only because of the time, that isn’t exactly true. It’s not faster than premading. Just schedule a time with predetermined people to log on and play, and then you get 0 wait time.
Then there is the problem of premade exploits that has been a thing for years already, by matching the queue timing and so on, which would be exponentially exacerbated with different sizes of matchmaking pools at different ratings. Which would defeat the purpose of a solo queue in the first place.
It’s not just a “cut & dry” problem you can solve over night.
With that said though, the group finder sucks. The social design overall in the game sucks. Realm communities were an integral part of the game, which is of course gone, but the group finder lacks the structure to support social bonding properly. It’s instead being “gamified” as people like to call it, to minmax whatever they want for that moment with little to no care for that social side to it.
The game needs to bring in designs to encourage people to never need to use the group finder again for things like this. A fundamental problem with the group finder, is that people are trying to find groups way too often. In an ideal world (of Warcraft), you should only need to use it once, or at most once per season if not less.