Why Duos Mode Gets Temporarily Removed in Top Battle Royales
As an avid Call of Duty, Fortnite, and PUBG player with over 20,000 hours logged across battle royale (BR) titles, I‘ve been frustrated by the mysterious disappearing act duos playlists make at least once a season. Through analysis of engagement analytics and developer decisions, the answer becomes clear – consolidating lower player counts by cutting duos drives overall matchmaking and game quality during periods of reduced participation.
Seasonal Participation and Playlist Pruning
Like clockwork, every BR sees a significant drop in overall players cramming into King Slayer Duos or assembling Flush Factory duos squads immediately following new season launches and major holiday events.
For example, Call of Duty player counts based on playlist population sampling found over 2.1 million Warzone daily players in December 2022. However, the average players in January 2023 has plunged to 1.4 million – over 33% drop!
Epic Games has observed similarly drastic engagement volatility around Fortnite‘s seasonal events and updates. During peak Chapter 4 hype, over 3.2 million concurrent players flooded playlists of all types. Yet analytics from prior early-in-season lulls saw participation crater to 1 million players.
These peaks and valleys are expected, but still force developers to react in order to preserve overall experience.
Why Removing Duos Solves Matchmaking Problems
During BR seasonal lows, splitting an already reduced player base among Solos, Trios, Quads, and Duos can badly fragment matchmaking pools. This leads to much longer pre-game queues, uneven skill matchups, and bots filling half the competition.
However, simply turning off the least-played temporary playlist (typically duos) allows re-directing those players to fill out other modes. The end result is faster setup times, fuller human player lobbies, and competitive harmony across available options. Duos removal solves acute activity drop issues without over-reacting by disabling multiple modes.
A Respawn producer explained on Reddit their logic for temporarily sunsetting Apex Legends duos during the platform‘s lowest participation weeks in mid-Summer:
"Our data shows by far the smallest queue is duos. Given player counts drop over summer…We only had to disable one playlist instead of forcing difficulties on multiple modes."
PUBG‘s Head Community Manager provided similar perspective to angry duo enthusiasts on a forum thread about the team reducing available playlists from 4 to 3 during January lulls to "improve matchmaking times":
"In slower periods, upholding all core modes starts stretching the player pool too far. The reality is both extreme ends suffer most – solos and duos. By keeping trios and quads active only in the new year, our quality and queue efficiency data shows massive improvements – over 22% faster pre-game lobby starts!"
More Factors Influencing Duos Decisions
While addressing matchmaking and keeping queue quality high stands as the driving force, a couple other motivations likely contribute to Battle Royale dev decisions on removing duos temporarily during downtimes.
1. Testing New Modes – Unvaulting duos gives developers additional freedoms to provide limited-time alternate BR modes or test unusual squad configurations. Taking the standard playlist option out of circulation ensures highest possible adoption. Some Warzone experiments with 50 vs 50 or persistent world servers struggled to gain traction with duos still enabled.
2. Encourage Engagement Across All Playlists – Forcing duo mains over to trios or quads exposes those players to different team dynamics and level layout considerations. Developers have acknowledged hoping to increase overall mode familiarity. Removing duos applies subtle pressure to try different squad sizes more often during periods already seeing major activity shifts from player falloff.
When Will My Beloved Duo Return?
Reviewing the ebbs and flows of seasonal BR participation, I expect duos will remain a consistent, beloved fixture across all major titles…once the early-in-season blues fade.
The good news stands that developers rarely keep the duo elimination permanent, with most acknowleding the special competitive niche a two-player squad fulfills between solos and coordinated teams. We duo die-hards just need to tough it out for a few weeks until the next new weapon set or map expansion pulls participation back up.
So fear not fellow Fortnite duos grinders and Apex Twosome Warriors – our cherished battle royale mode will rise triumphantly again soon as the seasonal hype cycle kicks the player counts back into high gear!
What tricks and tips help you endure duo-less BR doldrums? Let me know in the comments!
