Thanks for your response MArdA.
After you asked for more information yesterday, we got some people together and queued for a game on North America East. We had confirmation of at least 6 people in our group queueing separately and no game would start. When we did this, two of the players had already been queued for over 5 hours, here are those screenshots from CommanderAnder and Squirrel of Chaos.
Below are more screenshots from different people in the group when we queued on North America East Captain. You can see that the 'Estimated wait time' is stuck at 11:50 for everyone and we had at least 6 people which should start a game. Not a single game started.
After no luck getting a game on North America East, we decided to try queuing for North America West Captain. We were able to get a confirmed 8 people in our group queued at the same time with no parties. Some of us had completed the 10 evaluation matches for ranked, and some of us had not. The only reason some of us haven't completed our evaluation matches is because of this issue and because we refuse to play on EU with high ping. Again, we were not able to get a single game. We did notice that the 'Estimated wait time' was changing on NAW.
Someone earlier in this thread implied that no one is queueing. That isn't true. Hundreds of people normally play North America East Captain and it has been going strong for years. We had to ask people who don't normally use the forum to report the issue here because weeks have gone by and the matchmaking situation has not improved. We definitely proved again yesterday that something is very wrong with the matchmaking, at least as it compares to how it worked before 1.7.2.
It's unclear right now if this is an infrastructure issue or if this is new matchmaking logic.
If this is new matchmaking logic causing the issue, then please consider that there are some important features of the matchmaking logic prior to 1.7.2 that kept the waiting time reasonable:
- A game would start if two teams of 3 could be made. This means you only need 6 people to start a game.
- The queue prioritizes players who have been waiting the longest. This makes the queue fair and value each player's time equally. Being skipped on a game on any consideration other than time spent queueing could cause a disproportionate waiting time long enough to deter most people from playing altogether. Before 1.7.2, it was possible to 'catch the next game' almost every time in under 10 minutes because the queue prioritized those who had been waiting the longest. There is usually always a game going after working hours before it's too late and that game eventually ends which brings more players into the queue and causes a next game that has the people who have been waiting the longest. This feature of the matchmaking is particularly important during times when there are only 1 or 2 games at the same time.
Hopefully you guys have some data on the number of games completed on North America East before and after the 1.7.2 update. This would show that the changes in 1.7.2 caused the number of games
completed by the community to drop by over 95%. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this would be my guess based on every Captain player that I know saying that they haven't been able to play the last few weeks since the day the 1.7.2 update came out.