Greetings adventurers, Asterdahl here to talk to you about the new Random Queues feature that launched as part of Swords of Chult. There’s been no shortage of discussion and I’d like to take a moment today to talk about a lot of the hot button issues, things we’re doing to address some of your concerns, and the goals of the feature overall.

We have some of the immediate changes. First, random queues were not intended to slow down anyone’s stronghold progression, so we’re opening up the “Random Dungeon” daily dungeoneering shard quest to all level 70 players. In other words, level 70 players will have access to earning shards from three random queues: daily skirmish, daily dungeon and daily epic dungeon. This means that those who can tackle the epic dungeon random queue will earn more per day than was previously possible and those who can tackle only the dungeon and skirmish can earn just as many as they could earn before Swords of Chult launched.

Speaking of the skirmish random queue, we’ve heard everyone’s feedback that the sudden jump to needing 10,000 item level to queue for random skirmishes, due to The Merchant Prince’s Folly, can be stressful. So for the time being, we’re removing the new skirmish from the random skirmish queue. This means that you will no longer end up in The Merchant Prince’s Folly if you queue for a random skirmish, and that you no longer need to meet the requirements for that skirmish to queue for a random skirmish. Of course, you can still queue for The Merchant Prince’s Folly directly. We’ll be monitoring the activity in that skirmish, and at some point in the future, we’ll be returning it to the random skirmish queue once everyone has had some time to adjust and increase their item level.

Both of these changes are going out this week on PC and will, of course, accompany the launch of random queues in Swords of Chult when it comes to console early next year. With these adjustments every level 70 character should be able to complete both the Random Skirmish and Random Dungeon queue with ease and earn as many rough astral diamonds and dungeoneering shards as they’re used to.

We want to acknowledge the feedback regarding epic dungeons, unlocking requirements, and item level. The changes coming this week were for high priority issues we were able to act on quickly but there are other areas we would like to improve. Something specific we are looking at is the inconvenience of dealing with campaign tasks that generate dungeon chest keys. We plan to adjust these in the future but were unable to get them in for the current release.

I’d like to take a moment to talk about the high level goals for random queues: improving the public group community, reducing queue times, and varying up what queues everyone is playing.

When possible we’d all prefer players to play with their friends and guildmates, and so we haven’t excluded the option to queue with a full group, but we’d like to create an experience that is generally positive when players do queue by themselves or in a partial group.

The fact that astral diamond bonuses were paid out identically from any queue created a world where only a small subset of queues were ever run. If new players didn’t have this tribal knowledge they could end up waiting in an unpopular queue forever. Additionally, we don’t think it’s particularly exciting to run the same dungeon forever. Of course, we know for many of you it’s about efficiency and that’s why we made a more varied experience the most efficient one. With that in mind random queues had to not just be an alternative way to earn bonus AD but the way to earn bonus AD from queues.

We want to reiterate that with a big change like this, we’re absolutely relying on all of you to provide your continued feedback. Our goal is that everyone feels they are earning roughly the same AD while having a more varied experience. We may not have hit that mark perfectly yet—we have to be a little conservative because it’s nearly impossible to rein things in if we overshoot—but we will continue to monitor the situation and make improvements.

Thank you for reading and your continued patience! Keep the feedback coming and…See you on The Sword Coast!

Douglas "Asterdahl" Miller

Systems Designer

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