Well boys, with classic wow coming out in 2 days. Bid your fair wells, salute to your pvp teams, because once classic hits, not only retail wow will die out but PvP will be decimated completely. Even at rating which queues pop the fastest might take 4-5 mins whereas before arenas queues were instant for the most part. Talking about 4-5mins, it can even take upto 10 mins. And RBGs, might take up to a hour or more.
If Blizzard wants to really save retail. They might have to do a complete overhaul of the game. Unprune classes, bring back proper class fantasy, balance out classes, let each class have a win condition against other classes, bring back pvp vendors with pvp resilience, LET THE PVP DEVS TALK TO PLAYERBASE, take out sh*tty neck grinding, remove azerite traits, remove GCDs, etc.
GL boys, if you’re coming to classic, see you there.
In other words, they just need to shrink the rating pool size or increase the predetermined numbers for winning/losing, and reduce the amount of rating ranges in the matchmaking for the queue to go faster even with fewer people.
The rating pool size and the speed of the matchmaking queue depends not on the amount of players per se. What decides it is the metrics in correlation to the player pool. Doesn’t matter if the player pool is large or small, if the metrics aren’t optimized for it then it’ll still go slower.
Also, average wait times makes it take slightly longer for everyone in order to prevent outlier events, and the server configuration for hosting it can have its own internal queues too, which would then also affect queue times.
This illusion that queue times directly correlates to the amount of players is preposterous. The only real effect of more players is that the skill differences in the matchups becomes more equal on average. That’s all.