The idea that we can reduce q times by creating more dps slots is an illusion.
Just bear with me:
Imagine you have 12000 people wanting to play the game, that’s enough people for 1000 matches. And for some reason only 500 matches can be played at the same time and 2000 matches can be played per hour. That means that on average everyone will have 2 matches per hour: they will play 15 minutes and then wait for 15 minutes. And these numbers can’t be improved w/o increasing amount of matches which are played at the same time with given amount of players. Nothing what happends inside the matches matters. You can introduce six roles, or make it no roll lock at all - dosn’t matter unless you increase amount of matches playable at the same time. Concluding: For Average Q times all matters is how many matches can be played at the same time.
Now, if we have lets say 1000 active tank players at a given moment, we can have only 1000/4 = 250 matches at this moment. There is simply no way we can create more matches. I.e. average Q times are defined by minority, i.e. amount of tank players.
There are two types of tank players: main tank and off tank.
If you are an off tank player playing tank in 1-3-2 won’t be for you. It will be a completely different job from what you would like to do.
Just that will half the amount of people who want to Q for tank. I.e when we switch from 2-2-2 to 1-3-2 we switch from 1000 active tank players to 500 active tank players. What does that mean? The same 500/2 = 250 matches at a given moment! No improvement!
But! Will the game feel the same for the people who want to play main tanks? Definitely not. Will it be more fun and comfortable for main tanks? Most probably not. Before role Q people who love to play main tanks always hated playing their role when there is no second tank. So from 500 tank players we go even lower to 200-400 players - i.e. even less matches per hour and longer Q times for dps and healers!
The last problem can be partially fixed by reworking all tanks [notice - all tanks will need a rework, not only offtanks!!], but I don’t believe we can rework main tanks in a way that solo main-tanking is more comfortable than it is now with two tanks. Concluding: 1-3-2 simply can’t make Q times faster. In the best case it will keep them the same.
why does it matter for you how many slots you have in each game? If the amount of games a dps play per hour would be the same. A dps would need to wait in q exactly the same amount of time if not longer.
What you showed is that in the 3/2/1 case, if half tank players stop playing tank there’ll be the same number of games.
Right now there are 4 dps slots per games. But in 3/2/1 that’d be 6. Meaning that there’d be 50% more space for dps players in this same amount of lobbies.
The only possibility that’d make queue times the same for dps players is if half of
current tank players is half current dps players. Which is already proven not to be the case, or queue times’d be the same fir dps and tank.
The result’d be a bit less than 33% more games for dps players. And that’s only if half tank players go to dps. In the case all tanks keep tanking that’d be +200% games (statistically)
kenpled, but those 50+% current tank players, who would stop playing tanks won’t just disappear, they will go play dps and occupy that free slot. I.e. amount of slots will be increased but the amount of people who claim these slots will increase as well.
For average q times it doesn’t matter how many slots you have for each role. Nothing what happends inside the matches matters. You can introduce six roles, or make it no roll lock at all. All it matters how many matches can be played at the same time.
Seriously, this whole solo tank queue idea has a lot of consequences because of barriers!
There are people who like to play off tanks, and Jeff Kaplan is clearly admitting that it’s disadvantageous to have an off tank as a solo tank (because they don’t have a barrier).
They would have to rework them (because they don’t have a team mitigation ability enough - if it was a barrier it would be enough) to be less dependent on a second tank to improve their viability. Why wouldn’t they do it now that we have 222? Why leave dependent tank options just to people to complain when they are used as duos?
Anyways, we don’t know how much of the playstyle will change and if people would still be interested to play these off tanks reworked.
It’s hard to tell and will bring so many changes.
Yeah but from the current queue times you can guess that tanks players are a lot fewer, at the very least 5 times less.
So if there are 1000 tank players, and half become dps, it means there are at the very least 5000 dps players + 500 tanks that become dps. In this scenario that’s +10% more dps for -33% dps queue time, and that’s a pretty pesimistic scenario imo.
And that’s not a conclusion, it’s an assumption.
And you can’t assume half of the tank players would leave, if 1,3,2 is introduced. Jeff even mentioned that since release of overwatch most of the matches had only one tank! And it wasn’t unfun all the time?!
I am mainly a tank and support mainif the game goes to a solo tank or support comp i am going to stop playing that role and i know many other players of those roles feel the same, solo tank/support = 0 fun
You are not a tank main i can tell i played tank since launch, pre role que. Most of my games i was a solo tank or heal after 2 season of very unfun matches i said that it and every match i end up solo tank/heals i would switch to DPS so if this game goes to solo tank i am done playing tank and i know many many other tanks will do the same
The core problem is 1 of any role is going to get focused down particularly tanks and supports… that is not fun and not good for play - don’t care what it does for the DPS queue time.