Proposals to fix queue times

General Discussion
1

With all the threads popping up about long queues due to the decline of the player population, I thought it would be nice to have a thread to consolidate all the suggestions about how queue times could be improved to set up HOTS for a sustainable future (before it bleeds more and more players due to queue times).

Please post what you think can be done based on your experience.

My own suggestion is as follows. Please note that I play on the Singapore server, a comparatively low populated server compared to EU or NA, so my suggestion is based on this much lower population.

The Singapore server doesn’t have enough players to support so many game modes.

Therefore, there can only be 2 game modes. Ranked and unranked draft. In other words, quickmatch to be REMOVED. BUT, to compensate:

Unranked draft needs to be blazingly fast, almost as fast as quickmatch currently is.

Also, players need to be able to, most of the time at least, lock in what they want to play.

Therefore, unranked draft would work like this:

  1. No bans
  2. Very short picking times, no pick order. If no one on the team picks within the alloted (and short) time frame, player 1 randoms a hero (then player 2 etc)

This would work a bit like dota 2’s unranked mode (and there won’t often be battles over who can click faster to insta-lock heroes, contrary to popular belief, except for new hero releases).

Ranked mode also should be made way faster:

  1. For the first 2 bans, top 2 MMR of each team bans. Both teams and all 4 banning players to BAN SIMULTANEOUSLY. Doesn’t matter if a hero is banned more than once, he just gets banned. 10 seconds for bans.

This will reduce the entire starting banning phase (that usually takes 3-4 minutes) to 10 seconds.

  1. Pick order can remain or be removed, not sure which would be better. Picking time can be reduced.

  2. Players who don’t pick in time, instead of kicking everyone to lobby, they just random a hero. Also, if possible there could be a small MMR penalty imposed on the person who randomed if he hasn’t pre-selected a hero.

  3. Loss forgiveness. If either team has an AI for more than x number of minutes, the game doesn’t count and becomes “safe to leave”. This would prevent situations where someone afk randoms a hero in draft then continues to afk in game and gets replaced by a bot, causing their team to lose.

Can you guys share your thoughts and suggestions relevant to your regions too?

1 Like
2

Sounds kind of like blind draft. I suppose it could work.

3

Thanks. Anyone else?

4

Who cares about the Singapore server these days? Most of them have jumped to the NA one. The queue is much faster there. I have been seeing a lot of familiar faces around in recent months.

If anything, they should have shut down that server and focus the resources from it to create more contents. Maintaining it just so a few people can have slightly better ping is a huge waste of money.

1 Like
5

This thread isn’t about the Singapore server.

It’s about how to fix queue times on any server, and I gave my suggestion based on my experience on the Singapore server because that’s the server I know.

Do you have something against me? Cos you’ve been following me about trolling all my threads. This is the third time now. Can someone help report this guy please, “shutting down the singapore server” is hardly productive discussion

6

Therefore, you have no knowledge of the queue time from other servers. Which is fine, since I play on them often. And from that knowledge, I have come to the conclusion that shutting down the unpopular server would be an optimized option. Not adding unnecessary rules.

Edit: that’s false accusation. I also post on many other threads from various people. Don’t go thinking that you’re anything special that deserve my attention.

7

They shld combine Singapore and Australia server, even then i think there is still not enough players.

8

Introduce the game to new people.

2 Likes
9

They should get rid of both. Then the players would smarten up and switch to the much more populated server that is the NA.

10

Nope. They should combine Taiwan, Korea, Singapore and Australia servers.

11

whatever they do, they better keep you guys off the NA servers because this is the one game where I don’t have to deal with the bullsh!t latency unlike starcraft 2 when you guys host a singapore game on NA servers. 300 ping sucks.

1 Like
12

People from Singapore?

2 Likes
13

You know what…it’s easier to rank up in NA servers even with 300 pings…lol

14

Yea, because they are the majority of the playerbase. That’s real important there.

15

The SG server cater to the South East Asia population. It surely is an investment.

Thailand : 70m
Vietnam : 100m
Malaysia : 30m
Indonesia : 400m
Phillipines : 100m

16

All those countries and not even a big enough playerbase. That’s a failed investment. Yup, it derserve to be shut down.

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Nope. They need to combine servers.

Taiwan server for Taiwan: 25m population
Korea server for Korea: 50m population
Australia server for Australia & New Zealand: 30m population.
Singapore server for South East Asia: 750m population.

There is just too many servers in the Asia region, particularly Australia when there is an english SG server.

18

For some reason which I don’t know, the Australia region actually has quite high ping 100-200 for Singaporeans

19

What use are those numbers if the player base from them are insignificant?

Except for Korea, even if you centralize all of them to a single server, I highly doubt that it would be anything meaningful. It would be way better to transfer all of them to the NA server.

The AU server are horrible. It’s like the government are purposefully restricting access to the game there. Or they are still in the dial up era. When I was staying in Singapore, I had way better ping connecting to the NA than AU.

20

I’m out if they remove QM. So you won’t be consolidating anything if there are others like me.

I like to play what I want, when I want, all the time.

Queues aren’t even an issue for me (NA).