Here it is a Monday night and I'm trying to get 3v3 games in so I can get points for the week on my warrior. Right now on Ruin I'm looking at 7 minute queues. Earlier in the night I ran some 2v2 on my druid and it was 12 minute queues. When are the best times to queue for each bracket if your goal is the lowest queue time? Both teams are currently in the 1400 ratings on Ruin (for obvious reasons if you check the gear on my 3v3 team).

I suspect this will vary by battlegroup and rating, but I'm curious if there are times when there are actually quick queues with a variety of teams. I would have expected Monday nights to be good since people would want to get games in, but that's very, very mistaken.

Oddly enough, the busier the night, the longer the queues. This is because Blizzard's matching or arena servers can only handle so many games at a time. They have stated a fix will not be coming soon unfortunately

Well that was incredibly anti-climactic. It's good to know, though.

Basically you're looking for offpeak times. Your BG doesn't seem to have any of the servers that tend to have Oceanic players so weekdays anytime from about 3am to when school/work is out would be good. Also I'd avoid the day before, of, and after reset. Basically today is easily the worst day to play because everyone is trying to squeeze games in before the reset (like you are doing). Just playing on a Thursday/Friday night would probably bring those queues to 5 minutes depending on how active your battlegroup is. Playing midday Thursday/Friday should be <1 minute.

Quenes for me during the week and weekend are usually 1-2 minutes for 2v2 and the same for 3v3 but on monday nights my 2v2 was 12 minutes and my 3v3 was around 5, I suggest always trying to get your 10 games done during the weekend.

I also play on Ruin as well.. Madoran.

From experience Monday nights on Ruin aren't the time to PvP. Any other day however I don't think I've had a queue longer than 3 minutes. So just try to get your games in before Monday.


Don't play on any other realms but I would assume it is the same or a similar situation.

Blutdurst is so large that even at 3am on weekends the queues are 4+ minutes. 5on5 is the only bracket I can actually enjoy playing in because of this, even 3on3 is unbearable at times. If their servers can't handle more games then they need to get more servers. To me, playing during the week at 3am is not a solution as I'm usually too busy getting sleep to wake up in a timely fashion in the morning.

Yeah, on Ruin your "sweet spot" is usually around 1-2am on weekdays and 3-4am on weekends. Too long before that, the queues are long. Too much after that, at least at high ratings, the few other people that stayed up will stop queuing (unless you get 1 or 2 really persistent teams) and you'll only be left with the 30-point-loss 1-point-win teams for the rest of the night.

Misery-EU has 8-12 mins 2vs2 ques on weeknights half that on 3s and less on 5s.

The thing that bothers me most is that one cannot join a BG or acctually do anything in the mean time

Our realmpool (I play in the same one) has 20 servers in it which is quite alot. The only time one can enjoy 2on2 is before 12 o'clock on the weekend, but at that time I'm usually not going to be playing wow (nor wanting to).

I wasn't at BlizzCon nor do I remember reading anything about plans of blizzard regarding this aspect of arena play. Can anyone who read about it, or maybe even was there elaborate on if they have plans to splitt some of the battlegroups up into smaller pieces to reduce the wait times?

Did they say why the problem is so hard to fix? Seems like a weird issue for them to just leave in place, especially given how new the whole arena thing is

The guy at that panel said specifically that there is an artificial constraint for max games for each group 2'3, 3's, 5's. This is why 2's gets brutalized where 5's had no queue for us at all last night.

If you do 2's or 3's on a monday night you are not waiting to me matched up, you are just waiting for games in progress to end so that slots can be freed up.

Seems like 5v5 games have priority over 3v3, 3v3 over 2v2. Blizz needs to do some kind of rotation so that those who are not on 5v5 teams can actually get their games in.

no no. It is not special treatment for 5's. They all have a cap (maybe the same, who knows). It is just that 2's are more popular than they expected and 5's are less popular. So the 2's caps are reached every monday and 5's are never reached.

I wish you could spectate in arena games while you wait. 2vs2 is soooo boring.

So they need to adjust the 5v5 queues to free up some bandwidth for 2v2s.

I can see why 2v2s are more popular. It's less "intensive" as far as managing the game and easier to find 1 player to play with you than it is 4.

Since our Battlegroup (Retaliation) is fairly small, queue times are very quick almost all the time (except very late at night/early in the morning, when virtually no one is playing).

It seems strange to me that the Arena servers have an 'artificial' load limit, when the instance servers don't.

Instance servers have a limit of 5 per hour per person

Prior to that rule, servers would suffer from lag because of people (mainly gold farmers) creating and leaving lots of instances, which is essentially what arena players do

Sorry, let me rephrase - there is no limit to the number of instances that can be created simultaneously. Arenas would, by this logic, appear to have a ceiling to the number of simultaneous instances that can be in use.

I too encountered 10+ minute queue times last night for my 2v2, so to pass the time I figured I would queue up for WSG while I waiting (being WSG weekend). But I was greeted with the message "You cannot queue for a battle while queued for a ranked arena match". Any ideas as to why this is? Is it to prevent people from joining a BG only to start their arena match a few minutes later, potentially to the detriment of your BG team? Or is it just a technical limitation?

I generally try to avoid playing tuesday nights (arena updates at 8pm aussie EDLT tuesday) if I can help it. If I do need to get games in though, I generally allow for 2 hours to get the 10 games in, as queue times can be up to 10 minutes long.

Apart from that, I generally queue in Nagrand or BEM, so I can farm stuff while I wait.

Really annoying that if you want to play 10 games in one night, it takes 2 hours, with 1h30m waiting and 30 mins playing. I hope Blizzard increases their server capacity.