Ranked queue and parties

The Ranked queue page pairs you with players of your skill. When a match is found, a server holds a room for exactly those players and the game starts by itself when they are all seated. You need a confirmed W4 ID: guests can play open games but not ranked ones.

Queueing alone

1. Open the queue page, pick a mode (1v1, 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4) and press Find a match.
2. The page shows your place, how many players wait in the mode and an expected wait. It asks the service every few seconds while the tab is visible, and that is also how the service knows you are still there: a queue entry that is not asked about for a minute is dropped.
3. When a match is found and a server takes it, the page says so and gives the address. Start W4: it connects. If you closed the page, the Rejoin or queue banner on your W4 ID page and the home page tells you where you are. See You can always come back.

The wait grows shorter the more players are queued. If no server is taking matches, the page says so and you stay queued; it may take long.

How close the rating must be. Everybody starts with a window of 100 rating points around their own rating, and the window grows by 10 points for every second you wait, up to 1200 (that takes 110 seconds). A party's window grows twice as fast (the cap comes after 55 seconds). After 10 minutes of waiting you accept any opponent. A match needs the narrowest window in the group to fit the whole spread, so the time that counts is the wait of the player who joined last: two players 800 points apart meet after about 70 seconds (35 for a party), plus the two or three seconds the matchmaker takes between looks. The service reports your current window and expected wait with the queue status, and the page shows the expected wait.

New accounts wait ten minutes before they can queue. Leaving a found match without playing pauses queueing for a short time (the page shows a note), so that a match is not wasted on the others.

Parties

A party is two to four friends who queue together.

• Make a party on the queue page, then invite players by their full name, Name#Tag. An invited player sees the invitation on the same page and presses Join.
• The leader queues for everyone. The button then reads Queue my party. A member cannot queue alone, and a party cannot be bigger than a team of the chosen mode.
• A party plays on one team. The rest of the teams are filled with other players, as evenly as their ratings allow.
• Rating. A party is matched at the average rating of its members plus 25 for each extra member, because friends coordinate better than strangers.
• A member who drops out (leaves the party or the queue) turns the others into single players who keep their place.

A party and its invitations are forgotten after fifteen minutes without activity.

The rating

Your skill rating is a Glicko-2 rating per mode. It appears on the leaderboard after five placement games; the ± next to it shows how sure the rating is and narrows as you play. A win raises it, a loss or leaving lowers it.

Rules that keep it fair

• A game shorter than 120 seconds does not change ratings, unless somebody left (quitting is a loss, so it cannot be a way to dodge one).
• The same two players on opposite sides change each other's rating at most five times in 24 hours, so a rating cannot be farmed from a friend. Five is enough for two friends to finish their placement games.
• A lobby game on a server is ranked only when the server's owner turned that on and every seat is a W4 ID. Games from the queue are always ranked.
• Moderators can void a result; the rating change is then reversed.

Ranked lobbies

A server's own lobby is open to anyone who joins. When its owner started it with --ranked-lobby (see Host a server), the game counts for the rating if all the seats are W4 IDs.