On a wild tangent, I’ve tried to tell people this about the League of Legends queue system for the highest tiers.
Instead of having random queue times, set the games to launch at predictable times (such as every 15 or 20 minutes). The matchmaking gets much easier, and everyone knows how long they have to wait. Hold some people on the cusp for the high tier queue, and after it goes you can release anyone who doesn’t make it back into the general pool.
But it’s the same concept. Don’t make people wait for a random time between 2 minutes and 45 minutes, where they have to be attentive the whole duration. Just tell them when to show up.
There also has to be the illusion that something is happening. Take websites for example. After about 3 seconds on a blank screen, the length of time starts to be noticeable. If you throw a loading screen up, then 30 seconds becomes much more reasonable.
As I just learned at an AWS conference: people will tolerate waits, they just won’t tolerate unpredictable waits.
so, make the service slow all the time so it doesn’t come as a surprise when there is a reason for it?
Kinda, yeah.
That’s literally the idea of traffic calming.
On a wild tangent, I’ve tried to tell people this about the League of Legends queue system for the highest tiers.
Instead of having random queue times, set the games to launch at predictable times (such as every 15 or 20 minutes). The matchmaking gets much easier, and everyone knows how long they have to wait. Hold some people on the cusp for the high tier queue, and after it goes you can release anyone who doesn’t make it back into the general pool.
But it’s the same concept. Don’t make people wait for a random time between 2 minutes and 45 minutes, where they have to be attentive the whole duration. Just tell them when to show up.
There also has to be the illusion that something is happening. Take websites for example. After about 3 seconds on a blank screen, the length of time starts to be noticeable. If you throw a loading screen up, then 30 seconds becomes much more reasonable.
In the late 2000s this advice would have been divided by 10.
After about 300ms the time starts to be noticeable. If you throw a loading screen up then 3 seconds becomes much more reasonable.
People will only tolerate waiting if it’s for something that will personally benefit them.
Likewise, people hate waiting if it exclusively benefits someone else