It's no secret that the competitive mode in Sandstorm is dying. There are not enough players queuing for reasonable queue times, which causes the vicious cycle of even less players being willing to queue for competitive, further increasing queue times.

As someone who likes a lot of the game modes but prefers competitive, I can't really justify waiting 10-20 minutes to get into a ranked game. My suggestion is to allow players to queue for ranked while playing casual. That way, players who prefer competitive can queue for it while still being able to enjoy their time in queue with the casual game modes.