SE, can we please have some open dialogue on the PVP queue issue?

[PotatoTree]

I just want to know how it is possible for me and someone else with the same GC, same rank, same language, same job even, same everything, to have me queue up first and they queue up 5min later and somehow they get a pop first?

I mean it's infuriating. The queues should at least be first in first out.

Also, there are sooo many people that want to do PvP but can't because of the abhorrent que times. Please SE, just ditch the whole GC thing, nobody cares about the lore (which is really weak lore anyway). It would lessen queue times, allow us to play with friends, and remove GC imbalance on some servers. It basically fixes everything that's not related to class balance.

I really wish someone ask's Yoshi-P in one of those interviews or something about this, because it's really getting out of hand.

[JubjubTubs]

I really wish someone ask's Yoshi-P in one of those interviews or something about this, because it's really getting out of hand.

He recently said he will never implement a instanced 1v1 feature, because it'll be too imbalanced. To me, the translation is simply "I, Yoshi... do not really care about PvP in ARR.". It's not like war, smn, slaughter are and ever have been remotely balanced. They can't convince me they spent any more than 20 minutes developing Slaughter and half a day coding it <-- how much they care about PvP.

He needs to distance himself from the PvP area of the game, and put someone in charge to handle it and let that person focus solely on the PvP elements. This... probably won't ever happen. And given how Yoshi acts in interviews concerning PvP... expect ARR's PvP to continue to revolve around stigma of Pointless and Useless feature.

[Ultimatecalibur]

I just want to know how it is possible for me and someone else with the same GC, same rank, same language, same job even, same everything, to have me queue up first and they queue up 5min later and somehow they get a pop first?

I mean it's infuriating. The queues should at least be first in first out.

What likely caused that is that someone dropped out of a mostly full queue between when you queued up and when your friend queued up.

To illustrate what I mean.

The DF has the following matches set up:
Match A: GC 1 - 24 slots filled, GC 2 -24 slots filled, GC 3 -12 slots filled.
Match B: GC 1 -17 slots filled, GC 2 - 22 slots filled, GC 3 - 0 slots filled.

You being a member of GC 1 are put in Match 2.
Match A: GC 1 - 24 slots filled, GC 2 -24 slots filled, GC 3 -12 slots filled.
Match B: GC 1 -18 slots (You) filled, GC 2 - 23 slots filled, GC 3 - 0 slots filled.

Someone in GC1 drops from Match A during the 5 minutes.
Match A: GC 1 - 23 slots filled, GC 2 -24 slots filled, GC 3 -22 slots filled.
Match B: GC 1 -21 (You) slots filled, GC 2 - 24 slots filled, GC 3 - 0 slots filled.

Your friend queues and is put in the oldest open slot.
Match A: GC 1 - 24 slots (Friend) filled, GC 2 -24 slots filled, GC 3 -22 slots filled.
Match B: GC 1 -21 (You) slots filled, GC 2 - 24 slots filled, GC 3 - 0 slots filled.

Match A fills and the queue pops for your friend.

[Culfinrandir]

I was beginning to think I'd gone mad. This thread has confirmed my suspicions that something is wrong with PVP queues (and sometimes DF in general). I have a friend who is lvl50 BLM in Flames & he can get a MAXIMUM wait of 5-10 min whereas me, a lowly lvl30 SCH in Maelstrom can wait over 2 hours with no pop in the time he's had half a dozen matches!

There's also people in Mael & Adders in my FC who regularly cap esoterics in a day via Seize. I am lucky to get 2/3 matches in the whole gaming window of, say, 5 hours.

[JubjubTubs]

Basically. PVP is what keeps people subbed when they get tired of the PVE. But it's not going to keep people subbed if they are sitting 30+ minutes between matches . I just don't understand why their first and foremost focus isn't to get the queues moving at an acceptable pace.

PVP queues need to flow like a river, unrestricted.

SE doesn't get it. XI, ARR, interviews... is clear how clueless they are at handling PvP.

I don't even think they know that when people get hooked to PvP... these people level new jobs solely for PvP, jobs they wouldn't have touched otherwise. Creating new PvE time sinks for that player and their new job... all cause they got hooked to PvP.

Except... people can't get hooked to ARR PvP cause the ques are terrible and there is zero open world PvP. They have no idea how much money they have lost and continue to lose cause of their poor PvP development decisions.

[Buff_Archer]

Frontline Roulette doesn't help speed things up at all, it actually is worse than queueing for Seal Rock by itself. Because sometimes when queues for Seal a Rock alone are less than half an hour, Frontline Roulette will shift me from a queue that's listed as below 30 min, to the > 30 min category on a whim and then I'm actually waiting for a lvl 50 instance that's never going to pop. But if I then cancel roulette and queue for seal rock by itself, I'll once again see that lower queue. If it wasn't for the GC restriction it might not be so bad- roulette would fill up any one of the three modes quickly. But as it stands, two of the modes are going to take even longer than before to get enough people to start and all roulette does is screw some people by moving them back and forth between a slow queue for the new FL mode, and impossible queues for the old FL mode.

[morpheus]

I wanted to chime in on this as this is something I have been experiencing on Aether. I'm sorry but there is no excuse for 60+ min queue times during prime time on Saturday night. Matches should be popping up back to back. From the OP:

1: GC requirements cause the queues to be at the mercy of the least queuing faction. <--This is the biggest issue and its absolutely dumb that we still have GC pvp in this game after all this time. Everyone has seen how dumb it is when a game can't start because 200 flames are queued up, 200 mael are queued up but oh wait there is only 20 adders queued up so the game can't start. Before people saying anything and say that this isn't the issue it really is. It's easy as shit to test if you have an alt. People use to force pops frontline(secure) matches by queuing up adders on alt accounts.

2: Who gets selected by DF in pvp is pure rng. This is something I didn't see the OP mention and it's something most people don't even know exist. We found this out in wolves den when pvp was first introduced. Back then the most demanded role was melee. A melee would get instant queues, least on primal they did. So at night when we were trying to get rank 30 a bunch of us would be on teamspeak with most of us on melee and one healer. It was pure rng out all the melee who get picked for the next match. Some times the same person would get back to back to back pops while other people waited around. They weren't stuck in a void or anything like that, the df system just didn't pick them. Eventually luck would go your way and you would get picked. I still see this today with seal rock. Yesterday i saw a person in my flames ls get 3 pops before myself and others got even one. No waiting list and no priority system I think most people don't understand this aspect that's why there is so many theories out there about why queues take so long.

Remove the GC crap from pvp and put a waiting/priority system for pvp df and things will improve a lot. It's what other games do and I have no idea why SE doesn't do the same.

[Cero0]

This is very old, i saw this problem coming when they announced first FL,back then i was hopping for a non-GC pvp restriction coz i knew it would ruin the whole pvp, and as i predicted it does(we have posted several threads about this problem since then).I really expected a reaction from SE in this patch with the new PvP mode but nopeeeeee! They are blind or they dont want to fix the problem, MAYBE COZ JP servers dont have this issue, average time waiting in JP servers are like 5 minuts? thats what some friends said to me.

I believe they will never fix it coz after SEVERAL threads like this they still wont do anything, it feels like they dont give a f** about others servers than JP.And most of things you guys have said about Q are true... they are completely f*cked, or you get in the train or it will never pop, it doesnt matter if you are rank 1 or rank 50, black or white, lalafell or Miqo'te, Also you can see 4 healers in one alliance and 0 in the other, this Q system makes no sense.

[Turin]

2: Who gets selected by DF in pvp is pure rng.

I think this is the rank matching. It's not RNG. The DF in Wolves' Den tries to match people so the average rank is the same for both teams. I still think this is happening in Frontlines too.

[Turin]

I don't understand why you don't even talk about removing those 96 players match and improve 8vs8 or 8vs8vs8.
8vs8 is the best formula since it lets express the very own skills of the players. And the queue's time would logicaly decrease a lot.
Let's have more 4vs4 arena too.

I made another thread a week or two ago discussing how we need some smaller objective based matches. In the last paragraph, I do mention "providing a smaller scale map for two GCs (or GC agnostic - flames can battle other flames)" which I meant something like a 8v8.


I guess the big question is, how do they keep 72 player matches relevant if they add a smaller scale map? Then again, if queues are quicker and more reliable, I think more people would continue to requeue.