[Post written by Sotek Sasara of Chaos]

Making this suggestion since we don't seem to get pre-seasons anymore, and training queue is entirely redundant at this point as a result. Honestly even its minimal use in pre-seasons wasn't ideal in my opinion. Simply put, it requires an adjustment, there really needs to be a "casual" option for Feast that's actually viable.

The first suggestion, and probably most popular based on people I know, is to delete training queue and bring back the 8v8 mode. Personally I was never fond of 8v8, but I know a lot of people enjoyed it so I'll at least mention the idea. Never really found it worthwhile given how drastically different to 4v4 it is, and you'd still be splitting the playerbase amongst two queues (an issue which long plagued Frontlines and has since been "fixed"), but 8v8 at least was more popular than training queue currently is.

Instead, I would prefer simply merging Feast training queue with the ranked queue.

Keep them as two seperate queue options, but put people into effectively the same queue. Ranked remains exactly as it is now, however queuing for training does a few things differently;
1) Obviously, if you queue for training you'd gain/lose no rating as a result of matches. That's what ranked is for.
2) You'd be treated as unranked, thus regardless of your current rank you'd only be matched with people who are unranked to silver (or gold+ who've also queued training).
3) Rating would still factor into matchmaking to maintain some balance (for example, 1 platinum + 3 unranked players vs 4 silver players)
4) Duo queuing for training may need to be removed. This was a good feature, but with a system like this I think it creates far too many problems. Not like we're getting any use out of this feature currently anyway.

The drawback of this seems pretty obvious, unranked to silver tier matches will end up having pretty wild balancing issues with golds to diamonds jumping in as well. However, I'd say unranked matches are already all over the place anyway, given peoples rating doesn't reflect any sense of skill at that low a level, and injecting some high tier players into that rank could actually improve the quality of matches by putting more people who know the meta in there. Ideally I don't think this would negatively impact top 100 matches, since once you're gold you'd no longer be impacted by training queue players. Only time I recall seeing silver on the top 100 is early season, where veterans wouldn't really have need for training queue. Ultimately I don't think "there are diamond players in unranked matches" should stop people from climbing to gold, if anything it should help.

For the benefits, well training becomes a viable option to queue all season long again, I'd hope. This gives people a means to play Feast casually and practice other jobs, without resorting to things like alts, as well as work on things like achievements without potentially upsetting things at higher ranks by rouletting jobs there. Currently our only real option here is customs, which offers no rewards (tomes/wolfmarks/achievements) and requires 8 people to organize. Ideally I'd like to simply queue up like I do for ranked and still earn rewards without worrying about rating, only way to do that right now is with an alt (although rewards like achievements become somewhat moot then), which creates some of the same issues and adds some others, namely taking up top 100 spots with alts.

The primary benefit I see to this though, which isn't for my sake, is activity at lower ranks should increase. An oft cited complaint with Feast, primarily from newer players, is that queues simply don't pop late in the season, so they cannot climb at all. If people who've finished climbing for the season (or simply cannot get pops because diamond is dead) start jumping into training queue, and thus fill out slots in unranked? That potentially fixes that issue and gives late comers a chance to climb into gold where they'd hopefully end up in gold/platinum matches for a shot at top 100. Again, balance of such matches would be an issue, but new comers would be getting matched with veterans and perhaps experience a bit more of the "good" etiquette and meta we tend to have at higher ranks, rather than the unappealing mess unranked tends to be currently. On top of this some veterans tend to actually be helpful (<insert discord link here>) and could help out new players they'd otherwise probably never encounter with the current system. Hopefully this would all help to retain new players and help them grow, rather than turning them off the mode.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read this, feel free to discuss. Special thanks to Adalric of course, for forwarding this.