Thing is though, from what I’ve seen through my years, the matchmaking system matches people up before it has found a full group. Then it can move people out of this “pre-selection” sometimes, in favor of other groups, and so on.
But there are cogs in the background designed to “average out” queue times.
Honestly, what I suspect is that there might be issues in the invisible “cogs in the machine”, that’s designed to match people up. And the timing of when it started going like this according to what people have been saying on the forum, was when they made those changes to tanks.
Don’t get me wrong though, tanks should stay gone. But mechanisms involved in achieving an “average wait time” for players on a macro scale, involves the rating spread of players queuing and what the system then is designed to think is best to achieve an average.
Easiest way to explain it is by using an example of a very small scale:
So imagine you’ve got 10 players. One 200 rated. Then another 400 rated. 600 rated. 800 rated. So on and so forth until 2k.
But what if the system would only start with a matchmaking range of ±50 rating in the search parameters? It’d then take a while for the parameters to expand by spending time in the queue, until it starts to consider those players as players that should be matched with each other.
So what if the system would already have figured that out from the start, and therefore start with ±100 in matchmaking parameters, with it favoring matching every 400 rating with someone who’s lower rated? It’d then have achieved an instant queue (not using roles as part of this example). (Also, I meant it as 1v1, for the sake of simplicity. Forgot to specify that.)
Now imagine intricacies like this, but in a much larger scale as well as way more complex, and designed to have tanks face each other. And then mess with it by making non-prot pala tanks only be able to have max 1 in a shuffle.
But then also include the norm that Blizzard doesn’t tend to have a normal MMR system for prepatches for some reason, ever since off seasons started.
A lot of things could’ve gone wrong in many places, by them doing the changes that they did. We all hope they counter these things before it going live, but we should all be aware of Blizzard’s track record already.