about 3 years ago - Retroman - Direct link
Hello everyone,

we will make some changes to the cluster queue, to prevent strategies that gave a big advantage by playing around the system. That strategy was based on zoning in via the queue and then immediately leaving the zone again, to get enemy players zoned out and then prevent them from re-queuing again by camping all entrances.


Changes:
  • Players who are removed from a zone via the cluster queue will receive a special Queue Removal Protection: As long as they stay close to the entrance and do not perform any actions, they will stay invisible and invulnerable, but they are also silenced and can’t attack other players for up to 150 seconds. This will allow them to stay in the queue to re-enter the zone for at least 1 queue cycle.
  • If a player moves away from the entrance, or after the 150 seconds ended, the Queue Removal Protection will be canceled, and the player will instead get a normal zone change bubble and will stay silenced for an additional 3s.
  • Players who queue into an overcrowded zone and then immediately leave that zone again through an exit within 60 seconds will receive an Early Retreat ebuff. This debuff prevents them from re-queuing for the same zone for 10 minutes. This Early Retreat Debuff is only applied to players who joined by the queue process into the zone, not to players who just regularly walked into it!
  • The length of the cluster queue cycle time (the time it takes for the cluster queue to let in or remove additional players) has been increased from 90 seconds to 120 seconds


The above changes are designed to counteract a strategy used by large groups who managed to gain control by repeatedly join via the queue and immediately leave again. The strategy was based on getting enemies removed by the queue and then attacking the enemy players who get zoned out. The zoned-out players then often died and could not re-queue for the zone, which meant that the next time the cluster queue updated, additional players from the defender group would get removed. This cycle could then be repeated until the enemy force was significantly weakened.

The changes above are intended to prevent the attacker from using this strategy, while giving the defender far better counter-play options.

First of all, if the attacker zones in and immediately leaves again, they won’t be able to queue up for the same zone again for 10 minutes. This makes the strategy much weaker, because not only will it be much slower, but the attacker also loses the weighting of these players for a few cycles, which means these slots are now freed up again for the defender.


Secondly, the defending players that got ported out will be able to stay in the queue for at least one full queue cycle. even if an entrance is completely camped by the enemy. This means that if the attackers leave the zone again, the defenders will be able to join the zone again - returning the overall situation back to the initial status quo - with the key difference that the attackers now cannot re-queue for the same zone.

We plan to release these changes with Queen Patch 14. We will then observe if the changes have the desired impact and might iterate on the Cluster Queue in future patches.

Cheers,
Retro


Related posts:

Skip Overcrowded Clusters
Cluster Queue
Explanation of manual cluster queue priority system