- Yes
- No
As it currently stands, queue times for the most popular gamemodes is very short, and you can often join a match within a few seconds. But other gamemodes, such as Bluewater Naval, and especially Coastal Naval, can have very long queue times. This results in waiting nearly as long as a typical match, just to get into it in the first place. It is not uncommon (I know for a fact I have done so many times) to give up and do something else, instead of waiting in the queue for a match to form.
It can be fairly routine to remain in a matchmaking queue for naval, especially in off-peak times of the day for 10-15 minutes, maybe even longer, and with the recent Nuclear Escalation events, I saw several screenshots of players waiting in excess of 30 minutes to get into a match for certain nations. Ground Simulator is another gamemode where it is very common to be waiting 10-15 minutes just to get into a match, especially on the least popular rotations.
Even during periods of server instability, longer queue times can occur for even the most popular gamemodes.
For Silver Lions and Research Points, the effect is quite notable, if you can earn for example 10k RP per match, and a match typically lasts 10 minutes, then you can earn around 60k per hour. But if you are spending 10 minutes to queue into each and every match, then you are only earning 30k per hour. A 50% reduction, purely waiting to get into matches.
Naval is especially affected by this, and researching new naval vehicles can take a significantly longer amount of time than researching either a new aircraft or tanks, and the rewards gained per match are not that different (Id actually say naval earns more on average proportionally speaking than ground does)
For events this can be particularly frustrating as they are time limited, and so you might be spending a notable amount of time just waiting to get into matches, not earning any score towards a token. This might even result in missing out on a given token as a result.
So what if there was both a reason to stay, and compensation for staying. What if there was a reward multiplier applied that accrues the longer you queue.
The proposal is this, the longer you remain in the queue for a match, the more Score, Silver Lions and Research points you earn from the eventual match. This then directly compensates the player for the lost potential earnings created as a direct result in remaining in the queue, waiting for a match. Which would directly mitigate a core issue with both the time-limited events, and the time it takes to research new vehicles within naval, in particular coastal, where the queue times are consistantly the longest.
Players may also be far more likely to stick with a long queue time, as they know the eventual reward/payout from the subsequent match will be much higher.
Ideally, if more people are willing to remain in the queue, then the queue times would begin to decrease, which would then directly improve the overall experience of the playerbase and increase the popularity of the less popular gamemodes, which in-turn further decreases queue times.
I have seen long queue times cited as one of the reasons people have given up trying to play naval, or as a reason why they never got into in the first place, despite enjoying the actual gamemode
This reward should continue to accrue for the duration of the queue time, as the direct impacts for waiting in the queue increase proportionally to the amount of time spent in the queue. Though, to avoid exploitation, it should eventually start to receive diminishing returns, once queue times become unreasonably excessive.