Not sure if it’s made such that placement players can only match with placement players? It wasn’t like this last season, and I have friends queuing as parties of 3-4 but they played 3 games in my 1 hour queue without me getting into any games.
Can’t join them because I’m in placement, so not sure if this is working as intended. I was queuing on a Saturday late afternoon btw, so I don’t think it’s because of the time of the day. Unless there are really nobody playing this game anymore in my region (SEA).
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SEA and ANZ servers are almost completely dead and have been for more than a year (even before HL and TL were merged).
Unfortunately you’ll have to check into whether your ping is acceptable on the Americas server (namely US) if you want decent que times (or if you are a higher MMR player you may not get a match at all on SEA).
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There is no point playing this game in the minor regions anymore. When I played in 2015 on Southeast Asia and Australia I got games within a few mins.
Now after 2017 or so as an aussie my record que was 10 hours (yes, I was at the PC the whole time so I didn’t risk afk penalty) without a match. Nobody is playing.
I just dabble into US or EU now to play. Practically nobody in the oceania region plays on that server unless you know you can get 10 people to que at once from discord or social media. But then you might as well make it a Custom match.
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Can’t speak for SEA, but ANZ you can still get SL games in around 5 minutes in peak times. They are mostly rainbow matches though as Acti changed the rules so people wouldn’t wait the hour you pointed out.
You never wait longer than 1minute for a Quick Match either. I wanted to point this out before your comments discourage even more people from playing on the server.
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That might well be, I was just commenting on Ranked since OP is playing Ranked. The ques there can get well into the 1+ hour territory.
I didn’t mean to discourage people from playing on smaller servers. The ideal situation would of course be that all servers had a big population.
No worries, I was speaking about ranked too. On ANZ if you play in the afternoon/evening or after midday weekends you don’t have to wait longer than 5 minutes for a ranked game. It’s longer if you happen to be a Master, GM or Bronze 5. Otherwise it’s still not that long getting ranked games, but they are often rainbow matches.
I just didn’t want to lose even more players if they got the impression 1 hour is usual at peak playing times.
One way to stop ANZ or SEA from bleeding players would be simply stopping those rainbow SL games from being created at all, but since that will lead to higher queue times it might have the opposite effect and make even more people quit.
Tough nut to crack for the engineers… I don’t know if people rather prefer these rainbow games than no match at all & waiting a bit longer.
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SEA server is as dead as its own forum is. Go check it lol. It has about 15 threads total in 2 years.
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It is, but besides SEA and Oceania there is also a separate server called Singapore.
Don’t quote me on this (since there is no proof or dev links), but I think they force some chinese to play there to increase the player population so the queue times stay normal. The region on its’ own could not sustain short queue times.
I’m not surprised if all SEA players are posting in #general-discussion instead #aus-nz-general-discussion in the first place due the activity.
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They properly are since ANZ forum has like 7-8 active players posting on that forum
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I was just gonna post that. Nobody uses australian forums, discords etc. anymore plus the server is nearly dead anyway.
Many of us changed to US and can finally play hots normally. And they post on this american forum.
I did not try changing preferred server to Singapore yet, though. That may be a solution as well.
ThIS gAmE iS mOrE aLiVe tHaN eVeR