What does the average waiting time mean?

[shinuito]

I can see it was asked before https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... =3&t=21966 and possibly closed/locked if it's related to a bug that might've been fixed like https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... ime#p93525

Initially I thought it might be related to the suggested players, ones you could suggest to join and have it in their favourites, but maybe not.

If it's like https://boardgamearena.com/forum/viewto ... 574#p52138 whereby it's an average of only the queuing times of games that start then it sounds like it's very biased and unreliable as a number.

That is if a handful of games throughout some time period (maybe it resets every so often?) are quick it makes it look like you'll have short waiting times while in actuality you could most likely be waiting with a table open for 20+ minutes until it counts as abandoned when there's supposed to be an "average waiting time of four minutes". It sounds like this won't update the average either of course, and it would take many players with a lot of patience to really update such a number to reflect the actual wait time.

[Grey Lord]

I am affraid that any "average time" related info on BGA have questionable information value. In statistics they have mixed real time and turn base games so final number is meaningless for both types of game. And "estimated waiting time" in arena games have max value 10min (even for games that virtualy never starts in real time mode).
My experience for real time arena games is:
"1m" = game starts in few seconds to few minutes
"2m" = game probably start within 5-10minutes
"3m" = game probably start within 30minutes
"5m" = game may or may not start within 30minutes
"10m" = if game started at all you are really lucky

[shinuito]

Yes I can imagining averaging accept times for both turn based and real time together would make interpretation difficult.

My experience for real time arena games is:
"1m" = game starts in few seconds to few minutes
"2m" = game probably start within 5-10minutes
"3m" = game probably start within 30minutes
"5m" = game may or may not start within 30minutes
"10m" = if game started at all you are really lucky

Thanks, and I suppose that agrees with my experience also, since I’m playing mostly smaller games in terms, some of which don’t have arena or I’m finding it hard to get rating even. So 3-5 would show up frequently, but when I see something above that I can imagine I won’t get a game.