Your friends are right, Gold has been popping, I have been playing with Gold and Diamond players both this week! Not coincidentally the PvP Revival Community has started an effort to notify people whenever 10+ players are available for play, which has a cascading effect that radiates out to players outside the community because as soon as a single match pops, the expected queuetime is drastically reduced, leading to more players queueing up in turn because they don't get shown the abysmal 30+ minutes.
I like this and I appreciate community efforts to help with ranked participation, it's actually very humbling and it shows that things can be done playerside. However: We shouldn't have to do this.
