Yes you can do that but that is your choice. Why would BlizZard penalize you for choosing to play an alt?
People switch from unrated to rated play with alts all the time.
The goal of this change is to prevent queue dodging in rated game play brackets primarily. It is to be determined if changes anything in unrated queues.
They gave a somewhat vague answer and just said “PvP” so I would be surprised if they phone it in and just add the debuff to Qs across the board but make it like EXTREME for rated
I personally believe it’s a response to Blitz/Shuffle. Especially Blitz. We’ll see though.
The problem with this Icy Veins article is I don’t know where they are getting that info from. Ion only mentioned it in passing. They haven’t put out anything official nor has the PTR been available to even test it since this interview.
They are 100% doing something. We don’t know if it’s rated only or not, and we don’t know what the penalty will be. This looks like it’s based on the system that penalizes you for LEAVING rated RSS or Blitz. Not any actual info.
I was going to try and get people on to the PTR to test this in unrated and rated to see if the queue penalty was live on the PTR yet. Can’t yet.
People have (me included) giving this suggestion directly to Blizzard employees. Not sure why you are getting silenced or banned for suggesting a queue penalty honestly.
Premades already negatively affect queues. They cause people to leave games early, thus forcing others to back fill into a losing effort then sometimes leaving themselves. Those players now have 15 minute debuffs and can’t queue for 15 minutes again, taking them out of the queue. Think of how many people leave games too lol. Back filling also messes with the queue times because it doesn’t specify if people are getting faster times because they are back filling.
Then there is them just dropping queues. I am actually not sure how this affects the queue in regards does the QUEUE pop itself count towards the queue times like making them look faster even if queues aren’t taken? Or because they are not taking queues does that make the queues look longer because when they don’t take the queue it adds to queue times. Then you have the backfilling into a game they didn’t enter etc.
This will also FORCE (hopefully) premades into taking queues earlier instead of dropping queues getting a debuff.
Ya unfortunately they PTR has been down since Friday when they did the interview. I wanted to actually try and test to see if this applied to unrated too, or if the new debuff was even live yet.
Party, the queue drops/misses do happen a lot, and at the end of the season at the higher ratings it can get SOOOO bad. But I do know for a fact they are aware of queue sync premades. But as Ion admitted, they move slower on PvP things because the base is smaller. Like they will 100% make all PvP cross faction at some point. They are just slow doing it….