How many years did the devs neglected overwatch 1 to ‘work’ on OW2 (change the monetization and add a few heroes), 3 years if im not mistaken. The game was practically ran on a skeleton crew.
Their was a stagnation of new content like maps and heroes which did make players move to different titles as things got old. This of course would effect que times since less players meant less people to play roles. Not to mention how slow patches were, which most of you guys remember when GOATs became the meta and wasn’t touched on for months.
It wasn’t the player count that affected the queue times, it was the ratio between the roles. I don’t believe the player count was ever low enough for it to make a noticeable difference.
Declining playercount did have an effect on queue times - specifically, it made Damage queues shorter (not longer). Because there were fewer people queueing.
Yeah this was a result of the ratio, not the player count as more damage players were leaving compared to tank + support players due to the high queue times etc.
Yeah I’d what that and a bunch of other things that got forgotten or conveniently omitted.
The horrible blunder of globally nerfing tank armor. This caused a mass exodus of tank players. By the time the devs decided to revert this decision those tank players never came back.
That is what really made the role less desirable. Bad balance decisions ran off a lot of players. Not just tank. But having tank players leave was a population this game couldn’t take for granted.
Player count only technically affects queue times because higher player counts allow for more games to play and therefore a faster flow of players reentering queue when their games are done. However, it’s only noticeable when you get to very low player counts. Not like ten thousand, or even a cool grand. I’m talking double digits for each role. Once you have more than that, players start cycling through their games fast enough that it becomes almost entirely about ratios of the roles.