As anyone who tried playing PvE recently knows the queues are quite empty now. This was inevitable with permanent access, as even if there are a bunch of people saying “yeah I kind of feel like playing PvE right now” they aren’t all saying it at the same time. You just can’t have this many queues open at the same time forever and expect them to all have players in them at any given time, regardless of quality or price.
This problem will only get worse in the future as more PvE missions come out and more queues are present. The thing is people are going to want to replay all of these missions eventually, but they aren’t going to want to do so with bots, especially not on the higher difficulties. Without changes to the current system however, within a few months from now you will never be able to find a full lobby without bots for any of these missions ever again
Some solutions
- Multiqueue
Let us queue for multiple missions and difficulties at the same time and get matched in whatever one it can find a match for first. For instance say I want a slight challenge, so I queue on Rio expert and legendary, toronto expert, and gothenberg expert. Not only am I in 4 queues now, but the people I’m trying to match with are in several queues as well, so the likelihood it can find 4 people in at least one of the same queues at the same time is greatly increased. This is in why in tf2 you can still find MvM lobby despite there being close to 30 missions that are all several years old and require 6 players.
- Allow us to disable bots
You start getting matched with bots after only 2 minutes of attempting to find a match. Players who don’t want to play with bots should be allowed to disable this feature and just queue for however long it takes for a real team to be formed. I and many others would rather wait 5 minutes for a full match than wait 2 minutes and have to play with a bot.
- Popularity indicators
A simple icon on the card of a given mission and/or difficulty that indicates that there are currently other players queuing for this mode would go a long way.
- lobby system
Similar to the old LFG system. I just want to play a random mission, I go to a lobby browser, I see there is a lobby for Toronto on hard mode and they have 2/4 players already and they still need someone to play support and someone as sojourn. That sounds fun enough, I’m fine with playing either role so I join as “flexible” so we can find a fourth guy faster, and we play a workshop mode while we wait. Then after the mission we have a premade group so we can get into another one right away. If I wanted to be picky and play a very specific mission as a specific character I could just make my own lobby.
LFG wasn’t really used much since it was only really useful for the social aspect, but one of the only times it was active however was during the archive’s events, where you’d see groups trying to form for specific challenging modes and achievements. Premade groups just make a lot more sense for PvE than for matchmade PvP, especially when it’s difficult to find a full lobby to begin with. To prevent the abuse of the system that was rampant in LFG (account selling, boosting, deranking, etc.) they could just simply disable giving your lobby a title since it’s not really necessary.
- Incentivized play windows
The archives were only available during two seasonal events each year, so when they came around everyone was eager to queue for them. Despite being old missions, people still wanted to play them occasionally, and the event system created a shared window where everyone would play at the same time.
Now they can’t do this with these missions, since they were advertised as permanent access, but they could say add some extra incentives to play specific missions at specific times. Say if there was a random weekend where you got 2 battlepass tier skips for beating the ironclad mission (or maybe do some other objectives within it so people aren’t just incentivized to pick the easiest difficulty). That wouldn’t have people dying to play these missions, but it’d get enough blood into them that you could find a full match.
Of course the big problem with this is that blizzard isn’t willing to make anything earnable in game aside from battlepass exp and credits, which are both completely worthless to much of the playerbase, so there is a limit to how many people this could draw in.
A “free weekend” where anybody could play a certain PvE mission without having paid for it would also accomplish this. They’d obviously have to wait like a year or so to do this though or else people would probably just stop buying future PvE missions and start waiting for the free weekends.
- Standalone PvE
After a PvE pack was out for a few months let people buy a standalone version for a reduced price where it isn’t bundled with any OW coins and the rewards for completing missions aren’t earned, and let them pay with OW coins instead of real money. They can later pay to upgrade to the full version and get the coins and all the rewards they earned.
It’s just a ludicrous price if you don’t care about the cosmetic stuff and I can’t imagine how many players skipped out on this great content entirely and now aren’t in the queues as a result.