Extremely Long Queue Times

I play Apex Legends on Steam in US-East Servers (in NYC) and the queue times for most game modes are extremely long. Unranked BR and Wildcard usually take the longest to queue me into matches and I’m guessing it’s because they use a different form of SBMM compared to Ranked and Mixtape. Every time I do get queued into a match of pubs, the graph shows the lobby skill level at the furthest point to the right in the curve and my team (the red line) even further up than that (on solo queue). I’m not complaining that I am being put into high skill lobbies, but I wish the game would begin to relax the queue requirements if the queue took too long. It’s not like I’m playing on a server with a very low population, US-East is probably one of the most populated. When my friends from the same region join to play with me, they complain that the queue takes too long because I’m in their party and that it never takes this long for them to queue on their own or with others.

I get home from work/school on a regular day and want to relax by playing some laid back pubs or wildcard, but matchmaking for ONE match takes between 2 to 5 MINUTES (sometimes even longer) where it used to take me maybe 30-40 seconds 6+ months ago. Please tell me someone at least knows about this issue because I feel like I’m the only one experiencing it and it’s driving me crazy