In a recent video with Styloza from Unit Lost, Jeff Kaplan claims that with no behavioral change, if there was a role queue in place, a DPS player’s wait time would increase from 1-2 minutes to 13-26 minutes.
13-26 minutes?!?! I don’t buy it. These calculations are off. They must be. Here’s why:
If, for a specific SR, the matchmaker today finds 12 appropriate players to put in a game in a minute and a half (average of 1-2 minutes, as stated by Jeff), it would mean that it will find 104-208 appropriate players for the same SR in 13-26 minutes.
If Jeff’s statement would be accurate, and this is how long it would take for the matchmaker to find a game without a behavioral change, that means that out of these 104-208 players, only 4 of them actually want to play tank (the least popular role). Thus, he’s claiming that only 2-4% of the player base want to play tank right now.
I just don’t buy that at all. I’d like to get a response about this.
Here are some other facts though:
There will definitely be a flex queue option, which would mean players can queue in multiple queues at once (ie they can place themselves in tank queue, dps queue and healer queue). A portion of the player base will utilize this. This will increase the number of queuers from what we have today.
Presenting some statistics of the current player queue in the game client will be eye-opening for a lot of players, and a huge behavioral change will be encouraged. Imagine what would happen if the players were able to understand that there are a lot fewer healers and tanks than DPS players to get better than to climb in rank!
For him to reference these specific numbers it means that they’ve looked at the numbers and run some preliminary calculations themselves. I think I’d side with them since they actually have the hard concrete stats of playerbase numbers, what people are picking, how their current matchmaking system works, etc.
I don’t know how you find it hard to believe when you’re operating completely off of speculation yourself.
few days ago i waited 5 minutes to get a comp match (gave up), queued up in qp, 5 minutes, no match, gave up…uninstalled , i’m not waiting 10 minutes to get a match.
he might be off, but he knows the playerbase in numbers, and i dont doubt its very low at this point, so the role queue is not viable
So you dont belive only 4% of people is actually willing to play tank?
For me sounds about right. If you look at formations of LFG you notice tanks are last roles to be filled and you wait for them most. And there is issue of what Tank you play with.
Most of “tanks” are good guys who wanna boost their chances by filling for team needs. At least from my experiance.
You don’t have any numbers, statistics, or data. You have no clue how many players insta lock dps. You have no clue how many compositions consist of 2/2/2 or 1/2/3 variations across all ranks.
If a lot more people want to play DPS than healer or tank, then they’ll have to stand on line that much longer.
This is accurate. Tanks are usually the last filled role in any game. It’s that one guy/gal who waits till everyone else picks and then is like, sigh Click Reinhardt.
You have no idea of the playerbase numbers or exactly how the matchmaker functions. They said they worked on the matchmaker for a solid year(don’t remember the exact number but it was very long), that dictates that it’s not going to simply function off a rudimentary equation of players.
There’s much more that’s going to factor in besides total number of players, such as number of players per region, average ping, etc. It’s fine to have speculation about it, to outright say that the calculations are off is pretty foolish and shows you’re not using logic at all.
Stop trying to pretend you understand things when clearly you’re not.
Here is my data, derived from attached video (I even have sources):
Jeff Kaplan states that a queue time today takes 1-2 minutes.
A match contains 12 players.
Here are some calculations:
Assuming the average queue time is 1:30 (the average of 1-2 minutes), this means that it takes the matchmaker 1:30 to find 12 players that are appropriate to match in the same game, ie they have similar SR.
I realize that this is different for different SRs, but according to Jeff’s statement, this is the average queue time, and this is what these calculations reflect.
This means that for a specific SR (one that reflects average queue times), about one player per 7.5 seconds presses “Play Ranked” in average.
These are hard facts.
Now, using these facts, and assuming no behavioral change, which is EXACTLY what Jeff Kaplan is doing, if you would weigh in hero category preference, the matchmaker would instead require 13-26 minutes of queue time. Since we have NO behavioral change, one player per 7.5 seconds for the same SR will press “Play Ranked”. But the matchmaker, who now will require not only 12 players to be able to create a game but 4 DPS, 4 Healers and 4 Tanks as well, will - according to Jeff - have to wait for 13-26 minutes instead of 1:30. During 13-26 minutes, 104-208 people of this SR will press “Play Ranked” (because we have no behavioral change), and for it to be true that the matchmaker cannot find a game sooner than this, only 4 of these 104-208 players have queued as tanks.
You have to take into account that the current matchmaker doesnt take role preference into account at all.
Lets say that we have just as many players for roles as many heroes for the said roles exist. We have total 30 heroes, 7 heals, 7 tanks and the rest 16 is dps.
Lets say it takes 1 min to create a team, in our case this means in 5 min all players are in the game.
If we go with 2/2/2 rolequene that means we can create 3 teams in 3 minute but will leave out 12 people who are mostly dps. To get them in the previous players have to return and rotated in again what could mean an additional 5-6 minutes in quene if on top of the playtime of the teams.
The sad reality of role quene is that it generates horrific wait-times and if you dont believe it ask any wow player how long it takes to get into a popular endgame dungeon as dps.
I found it a questionable number but since he didn’t provide background so we can’t really judge.
The only game I can compare it too directly is FF Online… it has this sort of queue system for dungeons, and you know what people do there if queueing for DPS, they either
wait it out… sometimes a long time…
breakdown and decide to tank or heal and get in games quickly…
give up waiting and do something else and check back.
I am not sure how you claim that a flex queue option is a fact… he kind of indicated this wouldn’t work because the same people would still end up going tank healer while selfish dps one tricks just stand their ground …
The problem is that if you get to choose, people will choose dps,
If you queue, you are queued and could have 6 mercy mains on ur team. u flex to make comps but if u say u can queue as what u want, me and 13 of my friends agree we would stop maining support and tank and just play dps since its more fun and what we want to play.
Thats the reason, once u tell people u can queue dps and well have healers and tanks so dont worry, people will play dps knowing theyll get that.
He really sounded more like he was talking about it in Character specific rather than Role Specific… I think he mentioned if you want to play 76 specifically… it would take that long if all DPS where split by either character or sub role (Hitscan, Sniper, etc)
If it was character specific I can’t even imagine how long Genji would take.,… probably around 2-3 Hours
If it worked like LFG 2/2/2 Groups do… DPS just gets matched without any pre-determination to WHAT DPS is played… it’d surely be much faster.
Once upon a time, tanks (at least, certain ones) were more popular in my experience, but over time and various balance changes, the role has become more and more miserable and some tanks (like Hog and D.Va to a degree) have lost their former charm for many players. Pair that with the limited number of choices and even more limited tank parings synergy-wise and yeah…
Tank is pretty much always last picked in my games, if its picked at all, and especially, no one wants to pick main tank. Whereas Support? Usually at least one is insta-locked and a second usually follows quickly.
That said, there’s ways tanks could be made more appealing and it would be a lot easier to do so if triple+ tank comps were taken out of the picture.
Click Reinhardt.