Last May, most of my friends were in the higher brackets — 2500-3000, whilst I was in the lower ones. I thought it would be fun to join them in on the battles, so a friend trained a groupie for me up to ~2800 stats. But this time, when May rolled around and I had finally kinged him .. the brackets feel so, so slow.

It took me ~40 minutes to make a match one morning, and just now I was the first 1/8 .. ten minutes later? Only a single other player had joined. This had made the brackets feel pretty frustrating — I can’t progress the same way that other players can, so there’s no chance for me to make it on the leaderboard.

I think that there should be some kind of adjustment to this system to help the queues go a little faster. Perhaps after a certain amount of time, the bracket will just commence if it’s at an even amount of players (but, this could have its problems..) Or, the tiers could be widened — to ~750 stats as opposed to 500.

I want to add that I’ve noticed this problem as well on my side account, which is in the beginner bracket due to having kinged a hybrid with <150 stats. Queues are taking me a bit longer than usual there— but not nearly to the extent of the way it is on my main account.

All in all, it’s just been frustrating to have to wait long periods of times to queue for the challenges. It makes it harder to get groupies because of the slower rep pickup, and as stated earlier kills any chances of being on the leaderboard. While I’m not 100% sure on what could be done to fix this, I just felt it could help to voice my concerns and bring this problem to light. If any other bracket is experiencing this, I’m curious to know.

(& as a note, I do understand that the higher you get the slower matchups will be — since it takes more effort to get those stats, and more players care about generation > stats recently. But still, 40 minutes is an extreme change from last year — and I feel my king’s stats aren’t too outrageous).

EDIT: From the time writing this post, it took me exactly 20 minutes to queue into the arena mentioned when I discussed being 1/2 players present in ten minutes time.