Let's say one plat ques up every 2 minutes. Then, you won't find your 5th player for 8 minutes. At the 8 min mark (each # represents a plat player in que):
- Has been waiting for 8 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 6 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 4 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 2 minutes.
- Finds a group immediately.
What if player 1 isn't willing to stay for 8 minutes and leaves partway through the que? Now you need to wait another 2 minutes to find another plat, so the que times look like this:
- [Quit] Would have been waiting for 10 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 8 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 6 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 4 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 2 minutes.
- Finds a group immediately.
Do you see the issue here? If (player 1) isn't willing to wait for 8 minutes, then someone else (player 2) needs to be willing to do that wait (and if they leave, player 3 needs to be willing, etc). So no matter what, someone needs to be willing to wait for 8 minutes.
*The same thing applies to finding someone willing to wait 6 minutes, 4 minutes, and 2 minutes, but even worse. * Here's why:
What if player 2 is willing to wait 8 minutes, but player 3 isn't willing to wait 6 minutes? Now you need to find another person, so everyone's que times go up again! Now they look like this. (also, the same thing applies if person 4 doesn't want to wait for 4 minutes, or person 5 isn't willing to wait for 2 minutes)
- [Quit] Would have been waiting for 12 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 10 minutes.
- [Quit] Would have been waiting for 8 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 6 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 4 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 2 minutes.
- Finds a group immediately.
OK, that's all well and good, but what if person 2, who was willing to wait 8 minutes, isn't willing to wait 10 minutes? Well...
- [Quit] Would have been waiting for 14 minutes.
- [Quit] Would have been waiting for 12 minutes.
- [Quit] Would have been waiting for 10 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 8 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 6 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 4 minutes.
- Has been waiting for 2 minutes.
- Finds a group immediately.
Now, there's a reason why I'm keeping the players who have quit in the listing: The group of Challengers has been waiting in que this whole time. So all of the challengers have to be willing to wait 14 minutes in this scenario. Your game didn't even take 14 minutes to complete! What's worse, 13 minutes of hilarious roflstomping, and then on to the next thing, or 14 minutes of que times doing nothing, followed by what might be a more even match, but is probably still 13 minutes of roflstomping?
Now, presumably they are willing to wait a long time, because they knew what they were getting themselves into. However, there are still a ton of factors I haven't considered:
- What if the players waiting 4 or 2 minutes respectively, didn't want to tough it out?
- When I say players “are willing to wait,” that actually means, “will sit in que for that long without hitting the little red X. Because after spending 7 minutes in que, you start to wonder whether matchmaking has forgotten about you, and might hit that button even if you would have been willing to wait, if you had known a match was coming.
- Players aren't found every two minutes, on the dot. 3 players might be found immediately, and then 2 more, 8 minutes later. In that case, 3 players wait for 8 minutes and 2 have no que time.
Anyway, that's my little spiel. I didn't actually end up doing much math, because I didn't feel like doing such complex calculations, and I felt like my point was well-proved without them, but I can and will do them if you want to give me numbers for the following:
- Number of seconds between each plat+ player entering que (in this example, 120).
- Chance of a player being willing to wait X number of seconds, where X is in increments of the previous number (in this example, 120/240/360/480 seconds, etc).
- Cutoff after which practically nobody is willing to wait
