The Queue: The queue
by Alex Ziebart 
May 26th 2010 at 3:00PM
In Monday's edition of The Queue, you may remember me doing a little whining about the sudden heatwave here in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was very silly of me. I should be celebrating the heat, not hoping it goes away. Why? Because summer is perfect for Hawaiian pizza. Who in their right mind could hate Hawaiian pizza season? Nobody. That's who. Nobody.
suh8lim3 asked:
"If there are 12-13 million players why is it that we wait in queues for a dungeon from 10-30 minutes? Shouldn't it take seconds?"
You don't have a pool of 12 million players to pull from for your random queue at any given second. A large percentage of those players don't even play in the same region as you, so let's overestimate a little and say you are only in the same region as half of the playerbase. So right off the bat, that's 6 million players you cannot have access to if you play on North American servers. From there it's broken down further into battlegroups. Battlegroups are based on server clusters in different physical locations throughout the United States. They're split up across Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles and Seattle. Players in different areas of North America can choose a datacenter closest to their area to reduce latency.
There are a total of 13 battlegroups. Those 6 million players are not split evenly across all battlegroups, but let's pretend they are. Rounding up, that would put roughly 500,000 players per battlegroup. You only really have access to less than 500,000 of WoW's 12 million players, and the real number is probably a lot less depending on your battlegroup. Of those potential 500,000 players, only a fraction of them are even queueing for randoms at any given time. A lot of them are leveling alts (or leveling for the first time), raiding, doing dailies, just being social or doing some other thing. And they're not all logged in at the same time. That's 500,000 players total, not 500,000 every second of every day. Edit: And has been pointed out in the comments numerous times, about half of that 500,000 is on the opposite faction and you can't group with them at all. That brings it down to 250,000 if you assume a perfect Horde/Alliance split.
That's not the end of it, either. Of that small fraction of players, how many of them are tanks, healers and DPS? They can't just throw any five people together. You need a 5-man group with a tank, a healer and three DPS. The number of available players are limited even more when taking group composition into consideration.
That's why groups are not instant.
Trdmiller asked:
"How high will the Strength of Wrynn go? How often is it increased?"
So far the buff has gone up 5% every 3-4 weeks and it will go as high as 30%. We'll be hitting that in 6-8 weeks, and by then we should have the Ruby Sanctum to keep us busy, though I can't say that with complete certainty. Considering testing is supposedly going well, I can't see Ruby Sanctum being more than two months away.
Babaloo asked:
"Why haven't they patched the under Stormwind glitch already?"
Is it gamebreaking enough that they really need to worry about it before Cataclysm revamps all of the terrain in Stormwind? I'm not saying that's Blizzard's reasoning, but on the list of things that absolutely must be fixed immediately in the interest of game balance and stability, being able to get underneath Stormwind is probably pretty low.
Have questions about the World of Warcraft? The WoW.com crew is here with The Queue, our daily Q&A column! Leave your questions in the comments and we'll do our best to answer 'em!Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, The Queue
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 10)
Tomatketchup May 26th 2010 3:07PM
Who dares to oppose the Under-Stormwind Guild!?
Beruza May 26th 2010 4:47PM
People getting under Stormwind is hardly a problem. The real problem that they need to fix is people getting underneath Wintergrasp and stealing all the Saronite and Titanium!
Jack Miles May 26th 2010 5:03PM
Very few "exploration" tactics like this are particularly game breaking. Wintergrasp is one of them. There's also, strangely enough, a fishing pool above northshire abbey that always fishes up peaceblooms. Still to this day I have no idea what that's about, and I only ever bothered to get there once.
Jack Miles May 26th 2010 5:05PM
Hey que, any idea whether things like that peacebloom lake, the "This" "that" and "the other way" sign near the dwarvern airport, and those dancing trolls will be around when we can fly to them with ease?
lawaryeneth May 26th 2010 11:57PM
The dancing trolls (Shatterspear, on the way from Moonglade to Auberdine) are already gone. :(
slythwolf May 27th 2010 9:39AM
I heard the dancing troll village was gonna be an actual Horde village in Cataclysm.
KrusherX May 26th 2010 3:07PM
I'm a tank, what does "wait in queues" mean?
Westane May 26th 2010 3:09PM
I'm a healer, it's when they give you that 45 second window to get rid of all your vendor crap and repair after the last queue.
Edmon May 26th 2010 3:09PM
Think of it as waiting for that last afk dps'er, foa a REALLY LONG TIME.
Eyhk May 26th 2010 3:15PM
Hate that last afk dps.. so annoying ;-)
Vitos May 26th 2010 3:35PM
What I hate more is the DPS who waits until the last second to accept. I'm watching my DBM timer tick down and then with a second left they accept.
Burnaphatone May 26th 2010 3:37PM
What the hell is a queue? Prot ftw.
Artificial May 26th 2010 3:43PM
lol... but serious, are people really seeing bad queue times? I've never done randoms as anything but DPS (I heal for my guild from time to time and have tanked for them in the past, but not in randoms), and granted it's not instant, but I don't think I've ever waited more than five minutes. Last night, I was surprised to see it pop up saying the average wait time was 14 minutes, but I didn't actually have to wait that long, in fact I didn't finish the flight from the tournament grounds to Dalaran before I was tossed into Azol'nu'bug'hunt'whatever...
Carr0t May 26th 2010 3:49PM
Dammit, you beat me to it ;)
It's quite funny, I actually get more almost-guild runs with the dungeon finder, because due to the wait DPS normally have I generally have 1-3 DPS from my guild clamouring to group with me as soon as I log on to do my daily, cos they know it means their wait time disappears.
agnoster May 26th 2010 4:00PM
Last AFK DPSer should suffer a penalty. Maybe make it like a deposit: to queue, you pony up a badge and some gold. If you AFK out of the queue, you get dropped from the queue and your deposit is gone. If you stick it out, you get the deposit back (plus the usual bonus).
Yeah, I know there are problems, but trust me, it's a lot more fair than my previous plan, which was "if you AFK while picked for a random group with *me*, and you miss the ready check, your WoW account with all toons and gear is permanently deleted, your credit card is emptied, and a special agent comes to your house and cuts your nuts off."
feniks9174 May 26th 2010 4:05PM
"What I hate more is the DPS who waits until the last second to accept. I'm watching my DBM timer tick down and then with a second left they accept." - Vitos
I do this on ocassion. I queue up as a DPS as I'm heading out to do my dailies and farm. Every once in a while, I'll spot a titanium node right as my random pops. I know tanks and healers like their insta-queue's, but I have no problem with making you wait 30 seconds so I can make some extra cash.
"lol... but serious, are people really seeing bad queue times? I've never done randoms as anything but DPS (I heal for my guild from time to time and have tanked for them in the past, but not in randoms), and granted it's not instant, but I don't think I've ever waited more than five minutes. Last night, I was surprised to see it pop up saying the average wait time was 14 minutes, but I didn't actually have to wait that long, in fact I didn't finish the flight from the tournament grounds to Dalaran before I was tossed into Azol'nu'bug'hunt'whatever..." - Artificial
WTB your battlegroup. I'm genuinely surprised if I'm in a random in under 10 minutes. I've waited up to an hour, sometimes. Not that I'm complaining, it's still better than standing in Dalaran for hours on end (sometimes all night before I /ragelog) trying to get into a heroic.
GrumblyStuff May 26th 2010 4:05PM
@agnoster
Aww... c'mon. Think about it from their perspective. Half hour queue, don't wanna do dailies, out of chips/snacky foods, can't leave earshot of the computer. ...gotta go to bathroom eventually.
JoeHelfrich May 26th 2010 4:07PM
"Hate that last afk dps.. so annoying ;-)"
It's not as annoying as coming back to your computer to find out that your estimated 20 minute queue decided to turn into a 15 minute queue in the minute you took to run to the bathroom.
Thyen May 26th 2010 4:28PM
I don't know if I'm right on this, but this is a reply to the comment about DPS queue times.
I've noticed on my s-priest and my hunter, and my paladin when I just queue as DPS, queue times are as high as 10-15 minutes. sometimes a little lower.
I just recently hit 80 on my warrior. Interesting thing is... my poorly-geared level 80 fury warrior got in in less than a minute... and it wasn't a fluke. For about seven queues in a row, it was less than a minute.
As my gear went up, the queue time got longer and longer, now I wait about 3-5 minutes.
I was trying to figure out this odd phenomenon, and then it came to me. I THINK my theory is correct, but I could be wrong.
The LFD tool does it best to equalize gear score with other people queued, to an average ilvl. With an increasing number of heavily-geared people queueing for randoms, that means that the LFD tool will look for an equally LOWER geared individual to round out the team, placing that person in a higher priority. As more people get geared, fresh 80s will queue faster and faster to even out the gear in a 5-man group.
I only have my own experience to go on here... anyone else notice this happening... the higher-geared your character becomes (DPS only) the longer your queue time gets.
I've noticed this as well from the other side. Whenever my group is very well geared and we lose a member, they're usually replaced bye a low-geared character.
Rob May 26th 2010 4:47PM
@Thyen I agree with this, my newbie 80 tank had instant queues to normal TOC, and half the time got dps instead of tank as an assigned roll. Lately when I tried it I gave up after 10 minutes of not getting in. I'm a bit more geared now, and there is alot of tank/dps competition. On the other hand, on my healer (ICC geared), when i forget to set it on heroic LFD, I would get an instant queue into normal TOC. So they probably need healers much more than dps/tank there, esp at higher gear levels.
Also the game keeps throwing me in to hPOS/hFOS even though I only have the 245 bracers, 226 feet, and a 245 badge ring, with the rest being 200/187 blues/purples. So clearly I'm well undergeared for this instance (avg ilvl 200), but I've gotten these two 4 times and I've done maybe 10 heroics so far. I also notice that a fresh group in hPOS has gear just as bad as me (we still cleared it, skill>>gear).