It’s completely different. If You face who have better draft deck and you lose (or concede) does not put you into the other pool. It only applies when you repeatedly retire your runs.
As an average player, i dont see any reason to always retire arena runs right after draft. Sometime i retire because of terrible draft, but not always.
I also see the longer queue time at high score runs, however i 've never seen smth like 30 mins queue time or longer (the longest queue time i saw were shorter than 20 mins at 11 wins).
I started cycling through the collections of two different accounts that I am using to collect Returning Player Rewards.
These accounts have not been played much, and they still have the noob-advantage of starting an Arena run with one hidden loss to make Arena a little less daunting for new players. The irony is that barcode accounts (botted accounts that engage in super-drafting) also start off with a hidden loss, which greatly increases a new players chances of facing a barcode account with a god- draft.
So as I switched servers on these returning accounts while playing Arena to earn the Catch-Up packs, I just faced 8 Mages, 1 Priest, and 1 Shaman. All of the Mages and the Priest played Artanis and had a large Protoss package. The mages often had at least 2x Colossos. The opponents’ naming conventions were what you would expect from barcode accounts with names like BeigeHydra, random characters or Asian characters.
Such things as facing 8 mages over a short period of play who all have Artanis demonstrates how prolific barcodes accounts still are.
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