I dunno.
I mostly do Alurts and the queue times seem pretty average to me. I did 10 Hi-Pans after my last post and it was early morning which generally has the lowest population during my awake hours. That seemed above average to me. I did a ton of Hi-Pan's over the weekend.
The slowest CO queues are faster than most if the CoH queues I remember.
*shrug* There has been 1 real dip in queue times since I started playing but I can't remember when it was or the reason behind it. I think it was ~ the time of the Unleashed/dex/crit/devices nerf which was (one of?) the first thing(s) Cryptic North did and was another thing that hurt their popularity with me. Whether anyone agrees with what they did or not - they could have started out with something more.... fun.
People didn't use the CoH queues in CoH though, they usually just formed directly before finally queuing. It wasn't a good idea to do so with content in CoH generally, as iTrials were very difficult(alot harder than the fire and ice rampage and required a good deal more strategy) and there were simply way to many task forces to choose from. The queue was honestly only added to help coordinate attempts to enter the iTrials from anywhere, rather than needlessly complicate things. Lastly iTrials required 16-24 people, compared to only 10 for rampages require or 5 for everything else.
I also agree with you about the dodge/crit nerfs. It was to me the beginning of the end for CO, as it was a major victory for the nerf-heads who wanted to make the game into a holy trinity grindfest. Rather than deal with the underlying problem of enemy damage being to low and difficulty not really scaling enough they chose to simply nerf the player and only dodge users specifically. And by nerfing dodging to uselessness. I mean if one isn't melee, dodge is useless in CO these days. It, combined with the new justice gear, simply made the game about doing nothing but stacking as much defense and offense and not caring about any other stat.
It gave the nerf-heads that level of confidence though to cause far more damage, and indeed they managed to get the prize of all with all the vehicle nerfs. Then course the price hikes, honestly I feel they were a result of the above 2 major nerfs.
