So here is why I am asking. Last night 6 of us, all DPS spec, queued for random Heroic - we did it one a time 5 seconds apart. We wanted to test the system.
I was first and got in. it went in order until number 4. So number 4 got the pop up, then the healer declined. It says they stay at front of line… then 6 got the pop up to join, then 5, then 4 got the re-invite.
This isn’t a flame or anything, I just am confused on how it works:
Lets say 100 people all hit queue at the same time, does Blizzard do one group at a time put them together and wait for them to enter and THEN do the next group? Or does it queue all 5, they get the pop ups, then immediately queue another 5 even before the first 5 accept?
I’ve suspected that the “next in line” thing was a lie or only functions properly sometimes. I’ve been in dungeons, both old and current, where the tank or healer left but we’ve had to wait up to 20 to 30 minutes to get a new one.
People in the dungeon are supposed to have priority just like someone that gets declined. Doesn’t always work that way.
I suspect there is more to how they group folk up than just where you are in line. I’ve had notorious issues with this where it will show averages between 1-7 minutes, even though I was in queue for 30+ minutes. I think they try to group you up with similar ilevel as to not create a team imbalance that might mess up something with scaling. Again this is supposition on my part, I can’t prove that is indeed the case, just a suspicion. I can say that the “put back to the front of the queue” is misleading at best.
With Blizzard’s spaghetti code, this is what I feel is more likely. Personally I’ve had both; one where my DPS queue pops immediately after a tank or healer declined, and one where, like you, it was 20 minutes later. I’m at the stage where I don’t know if Blizzard is lying and instead just incompetent/unable to work with the absolute nightmare that a 17 year old server with years of new content slapped on top of old code that is WoW.
So what possibly happened here was number 4’s group already had 3 dps since the healer declined, and 5 and 6 most likely had a healer in their group and were waiting for a tank.
Since 4 got ‘put to the front of the line’ and they already had a tank and 3 dps, they needed a healer to queue to be prioritized.
So between 5 and 6, the order may have went in reverse based on which group had a tank or a healer first. Let’s say group 6 had 1 Tank 0 Heals 3 DPS and group 5 had 0 Tanks 1 Heals and 3 DPS. So maybe a healer queued before another tank did giving group 6 a priority over 5.
There’s also the factor that people in your group waiting to be queued decided they didn’t want to wait and cancelled their queue which would need to find a replacement while another groups members decided to wait.
It’s complicated but I think the system does work as intended, there’s too many variables that can change when a queue gets declined or there’s a surplus of healers and less tanks, or visa versa.
