I am among the top 100 players in the world in my game mode. Why do I usually wait longer in the matchmaking lobby than my friend JoeDoe who is an average skill player?
This has an easy explanation: There are simply not enough players of your calibre available at any time! Remember that Xbox Live is a worldwide service, so there are perhaps only 1000 players that would be a perfect match for you. Living in 24 different time zones. The only alternative is to match you with players who are much less skilled and sacrifice match quality for waiting time. And this would ruin both their and your experience on Xbox Live. You see: being a top player has its price! For example, on the right hand side you see a plot of the distribution of the mean skill levels μ for a popular Xbox Live game. As you can see, there are very few players of skill level 40 and above and 5 and below so the chance that an arbitrary other player online at the moment is a good match is much smaller. This results in the longer waiting time.
