"Average Wait Time"

[OMega_ARcane]

How it works in reality: If you cross the average wait time by 2 minutes, it moves the AWT up until it hits 30 minutes, and then it just stays there. You can be in that queue for 2 hours, at that point I believe it just drops everyone.

How it works speculatively: If no needs are listed, the queue is empty. Whichever "need" listed is what the queue needs most, so in theory whatever "need" is listed should have an instant queue, but that also means that you could still be waiting since you need 2 DPS for 4-man content, and at least 4 for 8-player content and 24-player content.

In practice, the PvP queues are dead, and are always dead because of bots.

Yeah I get all of that I was more along the lines of wondering that since it was 8 minutes did I miss something? I can queue anytime and it'll always be a AWT of 30 minutes, but this day it was only 8...Guess "if I understand what you said" I had just missed a match that dropped the normal 30 minute queue down, is that right?

[KisaiTenshi]

Yeah I get all of that I was more along the lines of wondering that since it was 8 minutes did I miss something? I can queue anytime and it'll always be a AWT of 30 minutes, but this day it was only 8...Guess "if I understand what you said" I had just missed a match that dropped the normal 30 minute queue down, is that right?

Pretty much. The "average wait time" , will only be low if the queue is being cycled quickly. This is why when I queue as a healer, it's instant, even if it says "tank" needed. However if I queue for Alliance raids as healer, sometimes it will be 20+ minutes during off-peak, because of the number of players needed. The PvP tends to always say 30+ minutes because something like Rival Wings requires 48 players. It also has a fixed 20 minute time limit. So the average wait time should always be reported as 20 minutes if there is only ever one match running. If there are two matches running (eg 96 players playing), on 10 minute windows, then it will show 10 minutes.