I’ve played on PC and had 1 Yeti game in 3 hours.
Then switched to console, immediately got a Yeti game and won.
So either I got lucky, or… I suspect there might be some skill-based matchmaking issue where your mmr can somehow negatively affect your chances of getting a Yeti game.
My PC account is relatively high skill, while my console account is (almost) new, and my console mmr must be low.
That’s just an assumption, though. Maybe I indeed just got lucky.
The really offensive part about this is that they are forcing people to play modes they hate against characters they hate (MEI) which is really not fair to all those people who love the modes and the character (MEI)
As a tip for winning as Yeti, go on offensive more. Don’t just go for the meat only, if you see a couple Meis (not the entire group) jump on them, plop shield down and go for kills.
lmao. i got yeti on my first game, won it, and didnt even get the drop. such a broken system. i did get a whole 200xp though 
Yeti is really just a myth, nothing more.
Hey everyone. I get that it can take a while to actually be selected as the Yeti in Mei’s Yeti Hunt, but here is a tip to keep in mind to make it easier. If you are playing on your own, remember to consistently queue for the Yeti and complete your games as Mei, this helps increase your chances every game.
Translation: Just do the other challenges it’s way faster.
We love you Craig but of all the things to communicate with us on, blizzard chooses this? I appreciate it but it’s just kinda funny 
Why did they change the mechanics? Before we could almost be the Yeti like 80% of the time queueing for it. I’ve been in games where there is no Yeti with 6 Meis and the game just ends.
You can queue as hunter and always get yeti like me when i never want it.
I already have done all others. If the reward was just exp nobody would care but it is exclusive one to the winter event.
They didn’t change anything. You get reward only when winning as yeti and therefore everyone queues only for yeti.
There is no point to play that mode for anything else. In the past playing mei was the fastest way to get done with the weekly missions.
30 games is unacceptable.
Clearly it’s not working for some people the team is deafly unaware of it, just like the matchmaking.
Just wondering: does this mean that the player who queues as Yeti and has the most consecutive completed consecutive games as Mei will always be the Yeti?
That if someone really goes 30 completed consecutive games without playing Yeti then someone else in the game has gone 31 or more?
Sorry but that’s a bunch of baloney, I played yesterday afternoon and all morning today and didn’t get Yeti despite selecting to “Prefer Yeti” and playing through ALL my matches as Mei. I played at least 50-70 matches before it finally gave me Yeti and when it did my controller started bugging out disconnecting, can you imagine how infuriating and frustrating that is, and faced with the prospect of waiting another 50-100 matches just to try again? Nope!
Thankfully the match itself bugged out for unknown reasons (read: trash servers/programming), and even though I didn’t kill a SINGLE Mei the game just abruptly ended and gave me the victory, everybody was confused not least of all myself, but whatever! It was like the gaming gods themselves looked down and called BS on this nonsense and spared me the misery.
One thing’s for sure, I’m not touching that mode again, thanks for the horrible experience Blizzard.
Leaving just makes things worst, queue for hunter decreases your odds to actually be yeti. If you want be an yeti queue for it. But expect about at least 1-12 matches to actually land on it.
More folks to play and several folks to do the challenge. The queue prioritize the ones who are longer on it, if you leave a game often receive penalty which would affect in certain ways your odds to effectively be an yeti.
This only works if the game is actually putting you into the Prefer Yeti queue when you select it.
Many of us, and I believe OP is included, are experiencing a long-standing bug that seems to force us into Prefer Hunter queue despite selecting Prefer Yeti. I first reported this bug during WW2019 Anniversary 2019, and that bug report contains detailed evidence of other players in my lobbies getting “Prefer Yeti” behavior while I got 18 Hunter games in a row, despite having selected “Prefer Yeti”. It’s harder to get this clear evidence now because there’s no auto-queue keeping lobbies largely intact from game to game, but there are many reports on the forums of players getting 15, 30, 50, 80 Hunter games in a row without getting a single Yeti game.
It’s simple math. If you are in the Prefer Yeti queue, the worst-case scenario should be an average of 1 Yeti game per 6 games played. That’s the scenario where literally everyone queued for Yeti Hunt has selected Prefer Yeti. Realistically, that’s not the case. At the very least, any groups queueing for this mode can only choose Prefer Hunter. So, someone who is queuing Prefer Yeti should be getting more than 1/6 Yeti games on average.
I know that it is not your fault, and that you are doing your best to do your job here, but when so many people are reporting playing literally dozens of games without ever getting to play the Yeti, despite selecting “Prefer Yeti”, it is not working as intended. This isn’t the players misunderstanding how the queuing works, it is a BUG. And it’s really pretty upsetting to see that it’s still not being acknowledged as such when there are reports of this issue going back to 2018.
Edit: I want to add that there are other indicators that also suggest that I’m actually being queued into Prefer Hunter, such as the “Priority Requeue” badge appearing on the Prefer Hunter card after a backfill, even though I selected Prefer Yeti. In past years, it also said “Prefer Hunter” on the loading screen, though maybe that was just a copy bug.
Hey Craig,
I strongly suspect that there is a bug with this matchmaking. I wrote about it here:
At the very least, there IS a bug with the amount of XP that is being awarded after completing Yeti Hunter, that much I can prove with screenshots.
I mean, you’re supposed to get a Yeti game pretty quickly if you clock Prefer Yeti. Getting it on the first try might be lucky, but it shouldn’t take more than 3-4. Even if literally everyone was queued as Prefer Yeti, we would all be getting Yeti games 1/6 times.
What you experienced, playing for 3 hours and getting a single Yeti match, is consistent with what would happen if you queued Prefer Hunter. The only time it should be possible to get a Yeti game when queued as Prefer Hunter is when there are no Prefer Yeti players in the lobby, and then you get lucky (or unlucky, depending on your perspective) and roll the Yeti out of the 6 Prefer Hunter players.
I like this mode and have been playing it for years and observing the queueing behavior for years. I am very confident that there is a bug that causes some players to be placed in Prefer Hunter the vast majority of the time, despite picking Prefer Yeti.
In OW1, auto-queue actually worked in arcade modes, and I found that every once in a while, I would actually get queue behavior that worked like expected for Prefer Yeti. About half of the games would be Yeti games, sometimes more, and often I’d be alternating 2 Yeti games at a time with another player in the lobby who had presumably chosen Prefer Yeti too. I would keep seeing this Prefer Yeti behavior as long as I kept auto-queuing, but if it stopped and queued again later, I would to back to getting 1 Yeti game in every 10-20 games maybe.
I used to be able to actually manipulate this. I’d queue and play 3 games with the auto-queue, and if they were all Hunter games, I’d cancel the queue and try again. Once I started getting Yeti games, I stayed in that auto-queue as long as I could. I still didn’t get Yeti queues that often, but this strategy yielded more Yeti games than naively queuing once and letting the auto-queue run for the entirety of the session. Last year, though, it seemed impossible to get into the Yeti queue at all, so I just gave up. And this year, there is no auto-queue.
Anyway, point is, there is definitely a bug here. It’s not just a misunderstanding of what “Prefer Yeti” means. I’ve played Yeti Hunt pretty much every time it’s been available since the mode was released, including during the anniversary events, and done a lot of observation and experimentation to try to understand the queue behavior. It’s real. My best guess is that it’s somehow putting some players into Prefer Hunter, because the rate of Yeti games (back when I could actually get Yeti games, before they incentivized players to fill up the Yeti queue) seemed to be the same regardless of which queue I chose.
Some of these numbers of matches people are throwing out sound difficult to believe lol