Pending Indicator that people are queuing for matches in a ladder

[Chlora]

Some ladders, namely OMs and older gen tiers, often (but not always) gravitate to having trouble finding matches, with upwards of 30m per wait time. I think this is partly due to not knowing if someone is queuing, which can be discouraging.

I think that there should be a small indicator if people are queuing for a certain ladder or not, like in the below mock:

(excuse the sloppy edit)
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If you know someone's queuing for your tier, you'll queue too because you want to play games. This cannot be replicated in any way to my knowledge, since active battles is not an indicator of if there are others looking for a match right now. There can be no public matches occuring but people searching and vice versa.

It could also go on a box below the "Battle!" button since it's already kinda big and i got rid of some text to make space, i'm not a web graphic designer so i'm just leaving it up in the air

I think this would probably serve to raise activity in not so populatied tiers and frankly see no reason why it should not be added since it should be just adding one more line to the button text + getting the number of people queuing with an update time of like 5/10s OR just a box somewhere in the "search" (i dont know what its called in the stylesheet) container with that same info

 

[DaWoblefet]

The trouble with this is that it ignores how matchmaking works.

If you are a 1500-ranked account searching, and another player with a 1000-ranked account begins searching, and there is no one else in the queue, Showdown will not automatically pair you two for a battle. Instead, it waits to try to find another player of comparable rank to pair you against. That way, the relative skill of the players being matched is approximately equal. Eventually, if time has passed and there are literally no other options available, Showdown will pair you, but most folks tend to view that sort of mismatched pairing negatively. For the lower-ranked player, you get curbstomped by someone of significantly higher ELO than you, and for the higher-ranked player, it's not a very engaging match and results in very little ELO gain. There's also other restrictions too, like that you can't pair against a player on the same connection as you, and you can't pair against a player you just played. All that to say that even if you know the current number of players in the queue, that doesn't mean you necessarily have a good idea of how quickly you'll get a match. Maybe you happen to be on high ladder, but all the matches occurring right now are a group of 20 people at much lower ELO.

It also would potentially make matchmaking slower. Now, instead of just putting you in the queue and waiting, the server has to report back to you an updated count of players queuing every time it changes, or perhaps just after a certain interval of time. That means the server is busy doing a whole bunch of extra work updating every player queuing on every ladder on Showdown. If you just check the current number of players queuing when you clicked the button, and it doesn't otherwise update, you might confuse someone who sees that initial number and wonder why it's never changing. Either way there's problems.

In general, I'm not convinced that this would result in increased activity on inactive ladders. If anything, it might result in decreased activity. If I'm queuing for a match and I see there's only a couple people in the queue, why would I stick around to wait? If I'm actually wanting a game in general, I'll cancel and just ask in the tier's room, or I'll switch to a more active ladder. As it is right now, these inactive ladders kinda depend on folks staying in the queue for long periods of time. I feel like advertising "yeah, there's actually nobody here!" would just cause it to plummet even further.

I'll also just add as an aside that, in my opinion, if a ladder can't, on average, produce a game of any ELO every 15 minutes, that ladder is unacceptably inactive and should be removed. I know different folks have differing opinions on that, though, with some thinking the time you have to wait should be lower and some thinking it should be higher. But in general, I don't think the way to fix inactive ladders is to add this information you're seeking.