Back when pvp managed to be relatively well attended on this game "1v1 me bro" was an attitude that got you laughed at.

No they don't. Make a friend.

What are you talking about, casual pvpers form premades all the time, they just do it as a guild.

Rebuilding the damage solo queue arenas did to pvp on this game is going to be the work of years.

Midbies have been a mixed bag to rush through since launch my dude. There's really no fixing them.

bro most of the playerbase doesn't give a squirt of urine for pvp. They just don't do it.

Its going to drive people away from arenas. After some amount of observing the effects of this change whats going to happen is arenas are going to be treated like an appendix and focus will end up on 8's where it should have been from season 1.

People always say "quite a few" or "a lot" but at the most generous interpretation where every single name on the ranking boards was a unique individual who played throughout the season rather than tried and quit, ranked pvpers never so much as hit 1% of accounts.

Ranked 8v8 never happened. It was played with by a lot of guilds but at no point was there ever a season, matchmaking, or rewards. Whoever was making decisions at the time decided that they didn't see enough people self organizing and playing for no rewards and they went for 4v4 arenas instead.

Exactly what they're doing now is what can be done now. Putting people into a situation where the population is going to decide what format gets support going forward. Turns out 8's pop far more than arenas do once people aren't forced into them. By the end of whatever period of information gathering they have going on only one of these two queues is going to get pops, it isn't going to be 4's and you can expect any future pvp efforts to be directed at 8s.

welcome to f2p mmos

The only way you could create a format where the presence of stronger or weaker classes makes a worse meta is by taking TDM arena and reducing the number of players per side. It is literally the worst format for game balance ever created in an mmo where the players toons aren't functionally identical. Its a format for a FPS game.

There has never been balance in arenas. In any game with the tank/heals/dps trinity format that has attempted them. There also aren't enough people playing arenas for any matchmaking or elo to have a visible effect. Dying format is dying.

4's or 8's. I have suspicions one queue is emptier than the other.

I'm not sure there shouldn't be a disincentive to quitting a queue, but it should just be a flat 10 minute wait. There's no need for the timeframes they've got right now if ranked isn't a thing.