WTS Instant queue 200g PST
So how many people have seen people either buying or selling instant queues in trade? Its a growing trend, and one that I absolutely detest.
Now, how many times have you zoned into a heroic, and instantly seen the tank (or healer occasionally) instantly drop group. Many people attribute this to not wanting to do a particular heroic, but what if you looked up that player, and they came from the same server as someone else from your group.
Coincidence? I think not. Assuming that all US English speaking realms are in a joint pool for LFD, there are 238 realms. The chance of 2 people coming from the same realm is somewhat… low, apparently about 2.5%. Then on top of that, what is the chance that they decided to, innocently, drop for whatever reason? That the person who did drop is the tank? There aren’t many reasons to drop, you don’t like the instance… and thats about it. How many of these tanks are actually tanks? What if you looked up the ‘tank’ up on the armory, and they weren’t actually a tank? A fury/arms warrior perhaps? Are they still to be assumed innocent?
If your interested, the realms are broken down as following;
12 Oceanic realms
72 Pacific
12 Mountin (wth is mountain? silly US people)
74 Central
68 Eastern
These numbers were (annoyingly) counted from the wowwiki realm list.
So what does this phenomenon actually do?
First of all, theres the most obvious, when someone drops out first thing occasionally the group will just fall apart. Hello new 40 minute wait.
The second, more subtle, but as far as I’m concerned its far more annoying. With these people choosing to cut the line as it were, they are artificially inflating the DPS queue time.
Picture back (or in if you happen to that age) in college (by colllege I mean the school you do from about 13-18, whatever that is called in the US), the lunch line. What if people could pay that annoying prefect $5 to skip the line? Now you would have to wait for the line + people paying $5. Your time you have to wait goes up, its now the original wait + people who pay. This is exactly what is happening in wow with the DPS queue times. I have to wait through the ‘natural’ queue time (say 30 minutes) and the time for everyone ‘jumping’ the line, say 10 minutes, to come to our actual queue time of 40 minutes, and then we have to wait another up to 5 minutes on top of that for a new tank. Do.Not.Want.
In fact with 10 man raid groups becoming ever more prevalent, there should be more tanks and healers all around. Typically the ratios of people available in specific roles for 5mans were driven by 25mans raids. There were far less tanks than there were DPS. In a average 25man you had a ratio of 1:2:5 roughly of tanks:heals:dps, while 10mans maintain a balance more like 1:1.5:2.5 (or with 2 healers 1:1:3, perfect!). Tanks were in less demand for raiding in previous expansions, so there were less to go around for 5man groups, that is changing, so why haven’t the queues changed to reflect that?
How wide spread is this instant queue selling phenomenon? I don’t honestly know, and I doubt anyone does. But how many times have you zoned into heroics only to have either the tank or healer instantly drop? What if 99% of those times were people dropping because they had fulfilled their job of shortening that DPS’s queue, and made a quick 200g in the process?
I’m now getting to the stage where if I ask you, and you admit to it, I’m going to try and vote kick you, if I’m really having a bad day and it looks like you’ve paid for the queue maybe I’ll just try to vote kick you anyway. I’ll look the tank up and do my due diligence, consider it done if they don’t actually have a tank spec.
Perhaps I’m just bitter from that day when I ended up going through 3 40 minute queues (ok, theres no maybe about it, I’m bitter) because someone decided to leave, and then the group fel apart. But what do they care? The healer just has to sit through another 4 minute queue, and one of he guilty people will pay for another instant queue. The tank is happy, hes going to come away with 400g for the day for 2 instant queues, and the 2 DPS who get shafted? Moar 40 minute queues.
If I were to step back for a minute, and make a suggestion for blizzard.I would suggest adding in some detection for people who constantly drop group upon entering a instance, and perhaps find a way to penalize them. Perhaps reduce the valor point return for the random dungeon, or just prevent them from queuing up in a group. The latter idea seems the best, the former wouldn’t actually hurt anyone who didn’t need/want valor points, however the latter blocks them from continuing the trend, but won’t actually prevent them from gaining gear through valor points.
Emberstorm 
I see people advertising it in trade all the time. It doesn’t actually happen to me all that much though, maybe a couple of times a week at the most, but generally only once if even then.
It’s not a “service” I’d either pay for or sell, but I guess it’s an option. It does piss me off when a group falls apart because of it though.
As for how to fix it? Treat people who drop groups constantly just like those who get kicked constantly – force additional time into their queue on top of the deserter debuff for bailing in the first place.
I don’t agree with your idea of a punishment. It would end up reducing the number of available tanks (I think?). If the tank has to wait in an imaginary line for 5 minutes, then there will be people that will wait as a result (assuming that tanks are still at 0 queue times). This punishes the tank, but also hurts everyones queue times.
Edit; the other point I forgot to make, unless this extra queue time was rather… large, and bigger than DPS times, it would still facilitate selling the queue time in some regard.
I understand your pain even though I do not experience it since I refuse to PUG at all. I would rather do dailies or even just fish than run a complete PUG.
The reason there are still long long lines for the general PUGger is that even though the ratio is more 1:1:3 with all the 10 mans those that are in the 10 mans now will not Tank a PUG. You still have your mass sea of DPS, some of which Feral,Arms,Fury,Ret should man up and L2Tank if they want to bitch about queue times. Now as a Warlock I know you don’t have that option without rolling an alt.
Also on top of it we have had the base level difficult of all dungeons cranked up to the point that you have to overgear the damn thing to not worry about CC as much and even then sometimes you HAVE to CC.
In the end for Tanks and Healers PUGging is too much damn work and pain for a pitiful little reward of 70JP or VP for only the first one of the day.
Your right. The longer queues could be a factor of less healers and tanks queuing in relation to DPS. I have noticed, since getting my healer alt to 85 that the healer queues have gone down by about a factor of at least half. (from 10-15 minutes in wotlk to 4-5 now). This could be caused by a number of factors, less healers queuing (seemingly obvious), or the ratio of healers to everything else approaching 1 (a factor of more tanks queuing I believe).
I think its rather likely that the longer DPS queues are caused by a mixture of not as many healers/tanks queuing, and by the queue jumping. Although, perhaps a topic for another time, would not the harder heroics attrition the number of DPS queuing as well? We sadly just don’t have the numbers to be able to look at this and come to conclusions, all we can see are average wait times and anecdotal evidence.
Either way, if I notice it, I’ll be kicking. If they’re going to cause me an extra wait, then I’m going to cost them 200g.
Hrm, yeah, I’m with psynister, I think it would really help if the deserter debuff got longer the more often you dropped group. Not quickly enough to deter someone getting out of a group full of abusive cockmonkeys, but quickly enough that if you’re selling queue times, you’ll eventually find the wait too long for the profit.
I’m not so sure that a longer deserter buff would work quite as well as people think, unless it began to push days (yes, plural). It would slow it down, but it wouldn’t eliminate the supply.
Perhaps it would work, I’m not to sure. I still think that just plain preventing them running LFD with others for a week would work better.