I’ve been loving the idea of Solo Rated Battlegrounds (Blitz), and I really want it to be my main PvP mode… but the queue times are killing the experience.
Why are queues constantly 20–30 minutes long?
I’ve queued on multiple characters, some around 500 rating, others at 1600 or 1700 — and it makes no difference. Whether I’m low-rated or mid-rated, the queue time is always over 20 minutes.
I thought maybe the issue was a lack of healers, but even when I queue as a healer, the wait time is the same. That just doesn’t make sense. If healers were the bottleneck, shouldn’t queuing as one result in faster matches?
What is this matchmaking system really doing behind the scenes?
I’m genuinely confused. I want to invest my time into this mode, but waiting 20 minutes for a 5-minute BG feels rough. I’d love to hear from Blizzard or anyone who can explain what’s going on, and more importantly, what can be done to fix it?
I recently saw some napkin math in r/worldofpvp and it broke down that for every slice of mmr, there is barely enough ppl to fill 1 lobby. As a consequence, new games can only start, when another game ends. So you can either decrease mmr/class matchmaking or increase the playerbase
Yeah, that actually makes a lot of sense, thanks for sharing that.
If the matchmaking is slicing things too finely by MMR or class balance, then no wonder it takes so long to form lobbies. It kind of defeats the purpose of a “solo queue” mode if it can’t keep up with demand due to those restrictions.
Maybe Blizzard needs to loosen the matchmaking rules a bit, especially during off-hours or below certain rating thresholds. I’d personally prefer a slightly less “perfect” match over sitting in queue for 25 minutes just to play a 5-minute game.
Also, increasing the playerbase would obviously help, but that’s hard when long queues are already turning people away from the mode.
Really hope Blizzard takes a look at this. The mode has huge potential, it just needs some tuning to actually be playable for more than a few games per hour.
In my opinion they should have made the RBG titles e.g. grunt, warlord, seasonal. Everyone got High Warlord last season so there’s less motivation to grind now.
I think also a big problem, besides pretty low participation overall ( like pvp overall, not just blitz), is the MMR range is way to big for zero reason, and is only detrimental to both reward structure and queue times.
There is no need for Rating to ever reach 4k like in first season, while the max title/reward to get except r1 is at 2.4k.
Then you have people at 1.8, 2k, 2.2, etc all the way to the top, that need to find others within 50 mmr of them, it would only work during a massive participation season, but not now.
Now the mmr is already up to 3300, god knows what it will be at the season end, while it should have been capped at 2500-2600 first month, and slowly top out at 3000 at season end. That would be much mofe healthy overall for the game.
Now you see someone with High Warlord and it might as well be a M+ player who had 3 days of spare time to play in the last 3 weeks of S1 lol, just a bad optic overall on the entire bracket, and a reason for ppl to meme on it.
The queues were around 7-15 minutes for the first month or so of the S1, then one Wednesday we logged in and they had made some “improvements” for “fairer matches.”
The intent, i think, was to stop occasions where one team has 1400 healers and the other team has 2700 healers. Obviously that didn’t work, all it did was increase healer queue times from 2 minutes to 5-10 minutes, and increase DPS queues from 7-15 minutes to 15-30 minutes.
heres a thread about it from the time. I ended up just logging out and not playing for 5 months because of it. they straight up strangled the game mode to death during its prime.
Also everybody knows at this point that you wait for mmr inflation in the last few weeks of the season to play for rewards. The whole system is just completely broken.
yeah, tww is dragonflight bought on wish, close to nobody wants to play the current mess
pvp lacks of rewards
mmr difference is too big for the current “participation” (long que times)
button bloat
devs color their own hairs blue “should be a crime ngl”
barely meaningful class patches/changes
Class reworks what makes a class in pvp everytime broken and it took them Months to tune it down properly, sometimes they even overnerf this spec at the End only to make another class rework again.
short term, they did nothing for PvP, with the exception of making rewards even worse (look alone at the Tabard)
They simply Dont care, meanwhile they selling now every 1-2 Month a new Goofy mogg package on the Shop for only 25-60 Euro i thought bobby (acitivision) is Greedy, but Microsoft is a complete new level, as bad as Apple
Fingers crossed that Blizzard recognizes how many players are still enjoying Battlegrounds. They must have some kind of statistics to track engagement, so hopefully, they see that PvP still matters to the community. I really hope the next expansion puts more focus on PvP, it’s my favorite mode in World of Warcraft, and I’d love to see it get the attention it deserves.
They can start by deleting the pathetic pennants nobody asked and nobody cares about and giving real Glad mount rewards for Shuffle and Blitz.
Make it 100 rounds at 2700+ for Shuffle.
Make it 25 wins at 3000+ for Blitz.
There is literally zero incentive to push past hitting 2400 flat, the titles are temporary, the queues are too long to just play for fun the rest of the season, you can only try to push for Rank 1 and hope they are not already sold on boosting sites, and they will reflect actual skill, or it is all for nothing.
I’m doing my part to lengthen the queues. I stopped healing after the latest nerfs to healers. I have both Elite Sets on my Mains so i am not missing out on what i wanted.
I’m playing normal BG’s only atm. Maybe at the end of the season ill see how far i can push.
