Apex Legends dev boldly declares that 'queue times are too short,' but let's hear them out
Have you ever sat around waiting to find a ranked match in your FPS of choice and thought, man, I wish this queue could take a bit longer! I'm having such a nice time doing nothing?
You'll have your wish in Apex Legends: Respawn Entertainment declared today that «queue times are too short» in a blog post opening up about Apex's recently rebooted ranked mode (as spotted by PCGamesN). The lengthy, surprisingly candid post examines the mode from every angle—what's working, what's failing, and the problems creating friction at higher levels of play, one of them being queue times.
Bold of a studio to tell millions of players that they should be waiting longer to play their game, but before we detonate a review bomb, let's hear them out. Respawn believes Apex Legends' matchmaker isn't working hard enough to find good matchups for its highest-skilled players—or in other words, that it's more concerned with finding quick matches than fair ones. The losers, in many cases, are the lower-skilled players those high-skill players end up matched against.
«Matchmaking is failing at the extreme end of very high skill,» reads the post. «These players are getting into matches too quickly, creating unfair matches with a too wide MMR range—mercilessly eliminating the lobby. We’re working on improving matchmaking for that end of the ladder to combat this.»
Respawn illustrated the problem with graphs that admittedly look very boring, but are pretty convincing. You can see above that the skill difference between you and other players stays low and consistent throughout most ranks (good news: most of your opponents are around your skill level), but the variance skyrockets at the highest divisions.
Below, you can see that the average wait time
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