Mearis

I particularly enjoy smaller brackets for PvP - I love 3 vs 3 and 2 versus 2, and even though I just started PvP'ing as holy recently, it is a lot more enjoyable.

The problem is with the way Blizzard assigns servers/instance spots in the smaller brackets - 2 versus 2 is vastly more popular than 3 versus 3, and infinitely more popular than 5 versus 5. This is because the logistics of 2 vs 2 are much easier, and a lot more people enjoy playing that more casually. The problem is that unless you are willing to play at ungodly hours, you will usually have 8 or 9 minute queues waiting for an instance to free up - while for 3 vs 3 and 5 vs 5 you almost always have under 1 minute waiting times.

Could server resources be shifted around so people can play in the smaller brackets without waiting an eternity? Queues suck, they are by far the worst part of arena after the honor farming required for the resilience gear.

 

Kaber

I hate the queues as well, but I see them as more of a balancing aspect for Arenas. 2v2 is hugely popular, but it also has the most gimicky teams and with the kind of rewards you can see, a lot of people would never bother with anything but 2v2 if you did not have to deal with queue times. This pushes more people into the 3v3 bracket that do not want to deal with queues. The ease of putting a 2v2 together is counteracted by the royal pain of 10 minute queues. Though I have to say, the only time I see 10-12 minute queues is on Monday during Prime Time when everyone is trying to get their games in at the last minute. Generally I see ~5 minute queues Tues-Sat.

I think it would be more bearable if you could queue into a battle ground while you waited for your Arena queue to pop.

 

◊ Yes

There's nothing balancing about not making enough servers to serve everyone quickly. It's the same reasoning that would say that on a 1-10 ration server in the olde times the more populous faction should wait an hour to do bgs.

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Cull

I would not mind the 2v2 and sometimes 3v3 queue times if they were created because of unbalanced population but Blizzard has stated that it is because of the cap they place on the number of games that can be played at one time. Which is pretty ludicrous considering that the amount of money they are taking in and can't even afford to support their players with proper servers for arenas. Waiting 10 minutes to play a sometimes less than a minute match is unreal.

 

Mearis

2 vs 2 and 3 vs 3 do have balance issues, but that's not what I am complaining about. They are by far the favorite brackets, and capping the number of matches that can take place is downright sadistic, I doubt their intention is to push people into bigger brackets.

I think they just drastically underestimated how popular arenas would end up being, and 2 versus 2 is by far the most resource intensive/player format there is. They have an insane profit margin, just buy more servers, having to wait 8 minutes between matches is just a killjoy.

 

Keline

Blutdurst 2on2 during prime is up to 20 minutes.

 

Suesse

I believe they made some official statement recently about 2v2 queue length. They said that they knew about it and had no plans to fix it.

I've had some luck playing before work in the morning (<1 minute queues); however, most partners are not willing to do this. Also, I'm not really playing my best at this time in the morning.

 

Angeron

I've resorted to doing this as well (EARLY EARLY queues) and it's really just a totally punishing requirement. If Blizzard really has no intention to *fix* 2v2 queues (a 5 minute queue time at eleven AM on a weekday is just absurd, let alone the 17-30 minute queues during prime time weekends and monday nights), the least they could do is allow people to queue for BGs simultaneously.

Though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable; I simply am not there.

On your server, causing econo-trauma.

 

Mearis

Did they expand on why they aren't interested in fixing it?

 

Suesse

I think they even suggested playing off-hours. I think it's a matter of "hey we'd love to fix this, but someone in management has determined that it's not worth investing our time at this time."

WoW BlueTracker: I'd love a response regarding 2v2 queues

 

• Avair

This is purely a capacity issue as far as I can tell. Basically, they have more demand for instance servers than servers to fill them. I suppose it's good problem to have, since it means you have a popular feature on your hands. Arena instances would seem to be a really easy problem to scale up. You need more instances? Add more instance servers. Each instance server should be almost completely standalone. They should be 'share nothing' architecture (as in the communication between 10 instance servers is no different than 20 instance servers), which is the most scalable kind of enterprise system.

Unless there is some weird poorly designed architecture which prevents just plugging in more servers, I would guess they think they might add too much capacity for what might be a temporary problem. I.e. arena are popular now, but they don't want to over buy. I don't really buy that though, since I was having queue problems last season too. Monday night 2v2's have been impossible for months.

It's kinda excusable in my mind that one of the most popular feature's in wow is mostly inaccesable during prime time.

 

Mearis

Yeah, I understand why there are long waiting times, I just don't understand the justification for it. It is by far the most popular arena setting, and what most people want to play, yet we want to push people to do something else?

That makes no sense to me at all.

 

◊ Vectivus

Part of it is a user-density issue - everyone transfers to the 'big' battlegroups to face the 'real' competition.

In Retaliation, I've never - literally, never - seen a queue of more than 2 minutes.

 

Tower

Well, Rampage is an "old" and "popular" cluster, I don't think anyone is transferring to the battlegroup to PvP though. And 2v2 queue times are 8m+, anything over 4-5m in my opinion is ridiculous and should be fixed. It's bad business to have a part of the game become so popular but you continually to ignore the growing need to support that popularity.

 

• Snowy

On Stormstrike, our 2v2 queue's during prime time can easily shoot over 10 minutes, even 15. Even at times like 4 pm, they're usually at least 5 minutes or so. As noted, Blizzard actually posted suggesting that you queue for 3v3 or 5v5 instead, or queue at off-peak times, as they had no intentions on alleviating this problem.

It's not quite as simple as shifting resources from 5's to 2's -- 2's are VASTLY more popular. Just look at the number of teams in 2v2 compared to 5v5. Now consider how easy it is to play those 2v2 teams. Your teammate is on -- great, queue up. It's not like 5v5 where your teams probably schedule their times in advance and maybe play once or twice a week.

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◊ Praetorian

I think this is pretty much exactly it. Right now you have lots of people trying to: a) reach their natural rating for max points/wk; and b) trying to get their personal rating up to 1850 for those amazing weapons. That leads to people playing a lot of games at all times of the day. A lot of people likely will soon settle back into their "10 games a week on Monday night" pattern, reducing traffic.

That said, when 3v3 queues are 5+ minutes as well, it really isn't an acceptable situation.

 

Mearis

2 vs 2 has always been exceedingly long though, and it isn't like WoW isn't already extremly profitable. I am just not sure why they think that they need to shift people away from the facet of the game they enjoy the most.

Imagine if Blizzard posted that since people enjoy 10 man raiding so much, they should do 25 mans instead since they take up less instances/player.

 

Grymm

I play 2s almost exclusively on my druid alt. One, because I'm not going to play more than 10 games a week and being able to get those 10 games pretty much any day after a raid is key (my 2s partner is also a raider). And two, druids are strong in 2s so our team would probably average out higher in points than other class balances minus player skill. All of last season, 2s queues were on the order of 6 minutes. When they would get up to 8, 10, 12+ minutes, we'd call it a night. 6 minute queues, however, pretty much kept me in flasks last season for raiding as terocone and mana thistle are both 30 second flights from queueing. I did notice, however, on Monday nights when we would finish out our games that even if we waited 15 minutes for a match, the odds of a rematch were pretty good. I'd greatly prefer that if I'm going to wait that long for a match that I face different teams. Even when we beat a team 3 times in a row (last season it was usually our warlock/druid beating paly warrior because I kite a warrior better than a druid decurses), the wins aren't really exciting. And if you come up against a team that just blows you out of the water, you aren't very excited about playing them again either.

 

Aphyrax

I am pretty sure it actually is a scalability issue. The queues on BG9 have been 5+ minutes since the middle of last season. This is not a temporary problem and is not likely to go away any time soon unless WoW tanks in popularity.

<Tinfoil hat>Kalgan PvPs on my server and I am sure he hates the queues. If they had an easy solution they would have implemented it.</Tinfoil hat>

They said at Blizzcon that the problem is that they can only make so many matches in a given amount of time. Which makes sense. See, while making a match they have to lock down the entire queue. Otherwise, if they are making multiple matches at the same time they risk one team getting into more than one game simultaneously. This is called a race condition and is obviously bad.

When you lock the queue and make a match, you basically restrict access to a single CPU on a single server. That CPU is the bottleneck. Just adding more servers does not solve the problem, because they still have to wait for the one CPU to make the match. In other words, it is not a hardware but a scalability problem. More hardware cannot overcome it and can actually make it worse.

There are solutions to this, but if I had to guess, this happened. Blizzard estimated the demand for arenas and built a non-scalable solutions for exactly this demand. They were off and now they are having a hard time fixing it. This is not exactly new for them. Remember when they underestimated demand when the game came out and could not bring enough servers online for months?

<Tinfoil hat>Or they simply realized that 2v2 is an unbalanced PoS bracket that is not worth all the whining it causes and this is their attempt at killing it. Sure worked for me. </Tinfoil hat>

 

• Calantus

Yes exactly. Kill it. Kill it with fire. If that doesn't work, kill it with queues.

Not that I hate 2v2, but Blizzard would have to be sick of the amount of bitching that comes from that one little bracket. Druid OP and warlock OP cries are almost entirely from 2v2 (even though they are also strong n 3v3). They wouldn't actively try and kill it of course, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was a little low on the priority list, right next to balancing for 2v2.

 

Juli

While it was just a post from a user that got a 'thumbs up' from Drysc, this post indicates that they're just holding out for a fix until after the season3/holiday playing spike dies down before investing in hardware upgrades:

WoW Forums -> Regarding Arena Queues
So they're not ignoring it completely, but I wouldn't expect a fix until early '08 at least. Sure sucks for now though.

 

Mex

All I can really say is that as frustrating as long queues are, if I were in Blizzard's shoes the last thing I'd be doing right now is running out and investing in a lot of hardware two weeks after starting season 3. Previously, my experience with queues was that on Tuesday nights they'd be at 8-12 minutes, on Mondays maybe 5, and any other time around 1-2. This was for 2s primarily, with 3s and 5s being under a minute. FYI arena update is on Tuesday night my time.

Since S3 I've noticed 5-12 minute queues for 2s almost permanently, and just last night doing 3s we had queues from 1-8 minutes long. Honestly, I'm not surprised in the least. People are PvP'ing hard in order to try and break through the cluster of 1400-1600 teams and get into more competitive territory. The holidays are coming, there's new gear, new 2.3 and 2.3.2 changes to test, and the rating reset has meant that everyone is playing everyone. I wouldn't base a highly expensive potential hardware upgrade on this sort of situation.

I have no doubt that if this trend continues Blizzard will upgrade their hardware, but this current period is the exception rather than the rule at the moment, so making a large investment based upon it would just be silly. It's sort of like a shopkeeper filling his shelves with tinsel, christmas cards and plum puddings in January because they sold so well in December.

 

Currylaksa

Although the point you made is there, it's not a good analogy because of so many things. 10man is a PvE with static content which can be highly tuned and balanced. It has a reset timer. 10 people may be less than 25, but it still isn't exactly as easy as seeing one friend online and "hey lets go get some games."

2v2 is just a mess. It's a massive dilemma between highest popularity (high reward + easy pickup-and-play) and balancing/logistical nightmare. They should just bite the bullet and reduce the high-end rewards from 2v2, such as much tighter gladiator quotas and stingier personal ratings, but keep the ratings->points. Take the "hardcore" out of 2v2s and let the casuals enjoy it.

 

Aphyrax