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Bluetracker

Tracks Blizzard employees across various accounts.

Team League changes have made it virtually impossible to find games above Diamond.

http://imgur.com/a/PHz6F

This is a master level TRIO queue (trio queues are famously suggested in order to REDUCE queue times). This isn't even the worst amount of time we've waited - queues have escalated up to a maximum 50 minutes. I won't pretend to understand how the changes were decided or why they were ever implemented, but a couple weeks into the season now my usual squad still doesn't even have placements done because we physically don't have the time in the day to sit in these queues, be it duo, trio, or 5-stack.

I'm kind of at a loss for words. I'd strongly suggest the parties capable of handling the issue to take a serious second look.

  • BlizzTravis
    Posted 7 years, 3 months ago (Source)

    I appreciate the response, but I have to vocalize that it's pretty demoralizing to hear, to an extent, that it's a burden to push higher into rank.

    If it were up to me, HL would be solo/duo again and TL would be 5 only. I know I don't share that view with the community at large, but I feel like this is an opinion shared by a solid number upper bracket players.

    TL in it's current form nearly encourages high-elo players to queue with a "handicap" somewhere between plat or gold in order to manipulate the queues for faster times and more "slaughterhouse" games. It's pretty unhealthy.

    By no means do we consider TL be to "solved". We keep plugging away at it and make progress with each iteration. It's important to remember where we started.

    When TL was 5-man only, there was a general population issue which led to long waits and low match quality.

    Adding 2s and 3s opened the pool to a lot more players and TL now had a much healthier population. But, the number of players queuing as 2s was significantly more than the number queuing as 3s, leading to long wait time for the 2s and, again, lower match quality.

    The latest iteration forces good matches and seeks to address the 2v3 issue by giving players the choice of either waiting a long time to get a game as a group of 2 or adding more members and finding games faster. So far, this appears to be working out pretty well for the majority of players and it's just the top tiers where the pool of players is naturally lower and wait times spike high occasionally.

    I know that's not much consolation when you're the one sitting on the other side of that long wait, but we'll continue to see what we can do to address that.

  • BlizzTravis
    Posted 7 years, 3 months ago (Source)

    Have you looked into a way to start a TL game with 4 sets of doubles? That seems like the only way to really solve the imbalance of 2s and 3s in queue. There are several possibilities:

    • 2+2 vs 2+2

    • 2+2+bot vs 2+2+bot

    • 2+2+1 vs 2+2+1 (where the single player is taken from HL queue, or TL allows singletons)

    2s vs 3s isn't as much of an issue as it was previously as players are self-selecting into 3s more frequently now that there's more obvious benefits to doing so. We have some plans for the future to make that even easier which should continue to help out on that front.

  • BlizzTravis
    Posted 7 years, 3 months ago (Source)

    It's something we're keeping a close eye on. Overall, team league is significantly better than it was before the change. The average wait time is about the same as it was before. Parties of 3 no longer insta-queue due the system immediately throwing them in with a party of 2 that had a long wait, but their average wait time is still pretty low and match quality overall is much better.

    There are longer queues at the very top end simply because there aren't a lot of players you can be matched against to make a good game and the system will no longer just throw any available group into the match in order to get a game going once the waits have gotten too long. As master tier players, the system will only allow other master or diamond tier players initially and, after a wait, expand that to platinum, but it stops there as that's already pushing the limits of what would be a good match.

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