Forum Discussion

Not applicable

Re: I’d rather have long queue times than rank merging to fill

Waiting is a very big problem. it zones people out, breaking their flow, it is boring and eats valuable time. These are issues that affect high level players much more than casuals. Maybe we don't mind waiting 5 minutes instead of 30 seconds, but for them it would be more like 20 minutes instead of 10, which means 4-5 hours wasted for each 8 hour play session. That's bad for training, for creating content, for streaming... Many good reasons to abandon the game and, as more and more people would start leaving, that would just scale up the waiting problem exponentially. Smurf number would also increase because of this, potentially making the low ranks unplayable at times.

Allowing more people into diamond rank can't really fix it. If those people would come from lower ranks, this problem would just translate, we'd be getting more platinum / gold people complaining about getting matched with higher ranks, while waiting time for preds would just increase. If those people would be brought in from other data centers, lag would become a big issue. Only way I see is for Respawn to seduce more players to get into Apex and then involved in ranked and also convince somehow the existing players to stay, to keep queue numbers sufficient.

6 Replies

apostolateofDOO
Not applicable
5 years ago
@DoYaSeeMe I would have thought having more players to draw from with crossplay that this would have significantly improved.
DoYaSeeMe
Not applicable
5 years ago
@apostolateofDOOM Maybe crossplay just prevented an accelerated deterioration of ranked because of too few players in certain skill brackets / too long queues. Hard to know without numbers...
hayhor
Hero (Retired)
5 years ago
@apostolateofDOOM Crossplay didnt solve and was never going to solve anything in regards to this. There are only 500 preds on each system so 1500. And looking at the percentages that have been published masters and preds combined are like .3% of ranked players. That is not much at all. Diamonds are only like 1.5%. Again not many really.

So then let's look at crossplay. On PC you only get more people if console people squad with PC. I doubt that many masters and preds from console squad with PC masters and preds. And even if they did, now the console only population has lost people that can fill their queues.
apostolateofDOO
Not applicable
5 years ago
@hayhorThat's just the 1500 preds, then masters which will have much more and then diamonds too. With 35% of players playing ranked? I'm just guessing that but i'm sure they posted a similar figure if someone has a link as i can't be bothered. That should be a substantial amount of people to fill with a minimum of diamond in pred lobbies.

Golds and plats in my team at that level is no excuse and they drastically need to rework ranked if it's really that bad.
hayhor
Hero (Retired)
5 years ago
@apostolateofDOOM I'm not arguing something shouldnt change. Im just saying I dont think it's that many people. Just watch people like shiv queue for ranked. He already has to wait 10 minutes. And many times it's full diamond teams as champions.

I honestly think a lot of people that get to masters simply stop playing ranked because predator is capped at 500 now. Maybe if they allowed more people to get to predator more masters would keep going. The issue is to get pred and stay pred you have to grind for 4 to 8 hours every single day.
Gatorbaker
Not applicable
4 years ago
could just do it the way blizzard did arena
there isnt a solid number of people allowed in pred, its a percentage of the playerbase who plays ranked.
if pred was the top 1% of people playing the game, then 50k people would mean 500 preds. But apex has over a million players. You could literally do it exactly like arena and do .5% and it would STILL be a larger pool of people than 500. Being the top 500 is a stupid metric to go for, considering how much hackers get through without being caught. 1% of 1 mil is 10k. Thats a gigantic pool of people to make balanced lobbies.The average daily playerbase is 10 million, which would mean 100k would be predators playing in their own lobbies.
Its not hard to fix, respawn is just run by *