This happened to me the other night: I took the screenshot at 10 minutes exact, but it actually took me almost 11 minutes to find a match. For standard multiplayer, queue times are getting really bad. Since the introduction of leagues I feel like standard ranked multiplayer has been suffering greatly. When there is a league going on, very few people queue for standard multiplayer matches and it can take forever to find a game. 10+ minute queue times are unacceptable. You could play an entire game of Starcraft in that time, queue and all. Not only are the queue times bad, but the matchmaking is awful. After waiting for a long time I usually get paired with a player far below my rating. There just aren't enough players queuing for standard multiplayer to ensure balanced matches. I think a big part of the problem is that standard ranked play has gotten very little love from the devs. Since the game's initial release, the loot payout of standard multiplayer hasn't changed at all. Your rate of loot acquisition is incredibly slow compared to basically every other form of play. Meanwhile, leagues pay out way too much loot in comparison and only discourage players from queuing up for standard games. Leagues are just too good of a deal compared to standard games. They have a minimal entry fee, give strictly more loot than standard multiplayer games, with no risk of losing rating, and strong players will have a higher winning percentage due to the lack of real matchmaking. Either the league payout needs to be reduced or the standard multiplayer payout needs to greatly increase. I have to question the wisdom of dividing an already small gaming community into multiple queues. A matchmaking system needs a high density of players queuing to function well and leagues have made things worse. I hope the devs can make some changes that will encourage more people to play standard multiplayer. There needs to be some incentive to play standard multiplayer over leagues.
Thanks for the feedback. We've actually been looking at the game economy quite a lot lately, and Jon just posted about it today: http://www.cardhunter.com/2014/09/get-more-stuff-changes-are-coming-to-the-card-hunter-economy/
Thanks Farbs! I hadn't seen Jon's post prior to making my post and it addresses a lot of my concerns regarding multiplayer loot. I am still a little concerned about the league vs standard matchmaking disparity, as the leagues will also benefit from the new reward track so players will still be incentivized to play leagues over standard multiplayer. However, I'm hoping the changes encourage more people to play multiplayer overall and we'll be able to achieve that critical density of players needed for timely and proper matchmaking.
One of the reasons I tend to play leagues more than regular MP is because, with the exception of QD, the matches are usually much shorter. As far as balancing rewards, I dunno if anything could be done to restore MP except cutting leagues out of the rewards ladder, which would have a poor effect on matchmaking for late pods.
I'm guessing this would be difficult to implement, but it would be nice (for both leagues and standard ranked) if you could queue a MP match and then go play SP while the queue runs. When the MP game gets matched you get pulled from your SP game for the MP match, and then at the end of it you get dumped back into your SP game where you left off.
I like this idea. And maybe have an option (defaults to Off) to allow other players (or just friends?) to invite you to casual games while you're in SP.
