VOTE: http://strawpoll.me/6023254
For an extremely long time now we the sPvP community have been forced to sit inside Heart of the Mists and endure excessive queue times.
Topics about this issue pop up often, but as often as they pop up, they are ignored by the developers. Players reply to the threads in unanimous support and then forget about the issue before sheepishly returning to play the game and putting up with it.
Queueing outside of Heart of the Mists is indisputably the #1 most requested (begged for) feature by the sPvP community. In fact, the requests to “bring back soloQ” pale in comparison to the requests to stop imprisoning players inside of Heart of the Mists.
When I come back to sPvP after taking a break, I am immediately reminded what pushed me to take a break in the first place. Not the abysmal queue times, but the fact that I have to wait out abysmal queue times in a gloomy lobby that hasn’t changed since release at 2012 unable to do anything else.
This issue is even worse at the high end of the MMR spectrum. Newer players may be unaware of the issue entirely because they get quick matches, but once you win a couple of games, it becomes really old waiting out 20 minute queues for 7 minute matches.
There is absolutely no reason this should happen.
It is time we, the sPvP community, stop putting up with it and become vocal in our distaste with this issue. Please vote on the above poll and please post your experiences in this thread. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.
Here are the facts:
1.) The sPvP community unanimously agrees (or at least by majority since there will always be trolls) we do not want to be imprisoned in Heart of the Mists.
2.) The only changes to Heart of the Mists since 2012 have been changes to NPC placement or removal of NPCs. It is a dark, gloomy, boring, uneventful and depressing map.
3.) Long queue times at the top tiers of MMR are in part due to the severely reduced veteran player population queueing matches. The algorithm won’t match us with new players and it can’t find any veteran players to match us with, so have fun with a 20 minute queue time. Why are there so few veteran players queueing? Because veteran players quit the game over silly issues like this that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
4.) Many people who stream sPvP tab out of the game client and do something else while waiting out queues. Who wants to watch someone run around Heart of the Mists for 20 minutes? Why is ArenaNet actively deflecting people from playing the game by not allowing them to play other aspects of the game while waiting out queues?
5.) The technology to allow players to queue outside of Heart of the Mists already exists and is simply disabled. Before ArenaNet revamped the tournament system in the game players were able to queue anywhere. In fact, when they first revamped the tournament system and included map voting, the game tried to lock you in Heart of the Mists by displaying a message telling you the queue would be broken if you left the map. It was actually bugged and would still keep you in queue. I vividly remember playing hot joins, keg brawl and other activities while waiting in my “broken” queues. I had no issues accepting those matches when they popped. The fact that queueing outside of Heart of the Mists was previously a thing suggests that it is indeed possible to implement again with little effort.
6.) ArenaNet stated as recent as August 2015 in their blog post for raids that one of their goals with raids was to make sure players didn’t feel like they were (and this is a direct quote) “waiting to have fun.” [source] Isn’t being locked in Heart of the Mists EXACTLY what they describe as something that players shouldn’t have to endure? Why do I have to wait out 20 minute queues to play 7 minute games?
7.) The closest I’ve gotten to getting a response from ArenaNet employees about this issue was in game from Grouch in December 2014. I asked why we have to wait in Heart of the Mists to queue. He replied “It’s a 20s timer for queue accept, load times are longer than that. If you are loading when a queue pops, you’d get dishonor.” [source] I have no idea why we keep hearing about this “dishonor” system that is not and has never been, implemented in the game.
Why could ArenaNet possibly want us to be locked in Heart of the Mists while waiting out queues? These will all be guesses since they still haven’t given an official statement about this issue.
1.) “The Dishonor System.”
- This can’t be a valid excuse, see point #7 under “facts.”
2.) “People take a long time to load maps.”
- There is no way people take over a minute (the current time before a sPvP match starts when a queue has popped) to load the very low-resource-demanding sPvP maps. If anything increase the time before a match begins or start the timer only after all players have loaded into the map.
3.) “To make sPvP appear more active.”
- This is a borderline conspiracy theory but it might be true. Heart of the Mists certainly appears a lot more active since people now have no choice but to wait in there. Even though 75% of them are afk and tabbed out of the game.
4.) “People doing other things while waiting in queues will cancel their queue to finish what they’re doing and further prolong queue times.”
- Nobody queueing on a team is going to do this because they will be yelled at by their team.
- People solo queueing won’t do this because ArenaNet have deincentivized the biggest instanced content in the game (dungeons) and no one cares about leaving uninstanced content like map completion and low priority content like activities. Even then I highly doubt anyone is going to start something important knowing they’re waiting on a queue to pop.
Proof many people feel as I do:
There are literally hundreds- if not thousands, so I will stop copying and pasting and just leave this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aforum-en.guildwars2.com+queue+%22hotm%22+OR+%22heart+of+the+mists%22+OR+%22lobby%22
