When this topic first came up I sat on the sidelines to form an opinion; my first thoughts were, why not just use lfg? After the last few weeks however I’ve seen dpswatch manifest in the vast majority of my games (Xbox quickplay).
I’ve always held the idea of forced 2-2-2 as a bad one but, I like the idea of 2-2-2 as an option. We could get quick, good games when we queue as support or tanks but would have to wait longer for the majority of the roster as dps. If you want to play dpswatch for quick games that’s fine, just like COD, some people enjoy that.
Optional 2-2-2 would allow team oriented dps to play in a low sodium environment in time with shorter wait times as the majority of COD dps will stick to the current state and lessen the dps pool in optional 2-2-2.
looking for group kind of serves the same function as roll queue for the people who want it, the problem is its slower than normal queue, if it was changed so that groups could match against none grouped teams it would be much faster
an option to automatically form temporary leaderless groups with people who wanted the same kind of group as you would also help since finding groups can be a right pain
my preferred alternative to role queue would be to enable selecting some preferred heroes when queuing, this could also be worked into a upgraded looking for group system
i started a thread about it the other day Let people pick a set of preferred heros when they queue up but no one seemed interested, maybe if i’d used a more click bate title?
There are a lot of reasons why I believe a 2-2-2 will be good for the game. The biggest issue it has is queue times, which can likely be partially solved through incentives to play whichever role need more people queuing.
Role Queue - The biggest benefit for regular players is that we can be matched based on the role we are about to play, which should lead to more balanced matches because you won’t get people filling into roles they are uncomfortable on.
Balance - The game will probably fall into a bunker meta as soon as a 2-2-2 lock is put into place, but it isn’t like balancing is going to stop at that point. The devs will be able to make some more reasonable assumptions about how what each role is going to bring and compete against so the game can be more balanced to try to allow for multiple play styles to be viable. A big part of why tank busters can’t be buffed enough to deal with goats is that if they could deal with goats, they would very likely dominate a solo/duo tank without three supports so hard it would be throwing to play a tank against that hero.
Variety - A role lock does reduce the number of absolute team compositions, but the goal is to increase the number of practical compositions. 2-2-2 can encompass all the major playstyles from dive, double sniper, bunker, deathball ect. What it does is limit how far a specific synergy can be stacked (like Tank/Support synergy). When a certain synergy gets stacked the only option tends towards mirroring or one specific hard counter.
Prevent runaway metas - GOATS broke the game, and the meta is out of Blizzard’s control. They already went nuclear on it with the blanket tank nerfs and buffing a bunch of dps to be tank busters and yet at the professional level GOATS still prevails. The problem with GOATS is that it isn’t one or two heroes that are overpowered, and is getting to the point that outside of GOATS some of the heroes even feel weak to play, it is a problem of synergy, which again limiting this type of synergy stacking should help prevent.
2-2-2 as an option does not solve the issues because then heroes still need to be balanced without the role stacking assumptions. The reason a lock would be needed is because 2-2-2 is not inherently the strongest composition so by locking yourself into a 2-2-2, you are giving the other team an advantage. They could say stack damage in a 1-4-1 style comp and overwhelm your tanks and healers, but then your team would not be able to adjust with more sustain.
It provides additional structure to the game that should help with a lot of the issues the game is facing right now. It will come with some growing pains and it is not a panacea that is going to solve all of Overwatche’s issues. It should however increase the consistency of matches and improve balance over the long term.
Basically, people like me wants role q/222 in ranked cause its been needing it for the past 10+ seasons.
Atm you can basically just say F it & lose the game at the start of the match.
And ‘‘just use lfg lol 4head’’ Nah thx. Also its useless to even have it atm cause all I see is derank to bronze/looking for egirl, etc groups & higher you go, you cant even use it cause the new rule set for s16 lets you only solo/duo.
Plus people doesnt wanna use 15+ mins to find a group/people in their group & see whos not gonna throw & such. And another 10+ mins to find game.
When theyre gonna put it in ranked its gonna get soooo much better.
(And imo tank-support-flex could good fix instead of having 222 with dmg only)
I don’t remember who said it but didn’t some dev say they can’t do it because queue times for dps would be like over 20+ min? That’s a little too much.
It was Jeff, and it was with the caveat of player behavior not changing at all. The long queue time plus incentives to play other roles could significantly reduce that if they are able to get a decent percentage of the dps players to play tank/support even part time.
222 matchmakered against 6AnyHero.
With 4 votes to unlock roles for the 222.
Pick Damage\Tank\Heal you go into 222 queue.
Pick Flex you go into 6AnyHero queue.
Pick both you go into both queues.
Additionally,
Account Merging instead of role based SR.
2 Healer max per team for OWL, but maybe Ladder too.
Do keep in mind that for a game to start in forced 2-2-2 you need to find 4 tanks, 4 supports, and 4 DPS at the relevant SR/MMR.
That is going to take longer for everyone than the current method unless you see a major surge in players because it’s easier to find 12 players than it is to find 4 tanks, 4 supports, and 4 DPS.
Additionally, it is highly likely that you have a gap between the number of people that are want to play support and those that want to tank. QP is 32.34 % Support vs 22.78% tank. Comp is 35.23% support vs 31.79% tank.
So, the result will likely be tanks have a somewhat longer wait, support have a significantly longer wait, and DPS have a massively longer wait.
You also have the wrinkle of players grouping up. It’s likely the matchmaker will be so starved for tanks that it will move them to the front automatically and drag their group with them. This in turn will slow the queue down for other players outside of those getting brought into that match.
For example, let’s say a tank is group with a dps and a support. Normally, the matchmaker would put the tank with three other tanks, four other dps, and four other supports but, in this case it will put them with just three other dps and three other supports which slows down the DPS and support line for solo players.
You’ll also have the issue that you are splitting people up which will mean you are drawing from a smaller pool which will raise queue times.
Thank you all for your insight to this topic, lots of valid points have been brought up.
Do you think a ratio queue would solve most of these problems? Solo queue gets only solo’s, duos get duos, trips get trips, quads and quints get quads and quints with solo queue’s that don’t participate in solo queue only option. Your continued participation in this thread is appreciated.
I don’t know if we have enough distribution and population data to tell if that’d work or not for sure. Keep in mind every cut reduces the number of players that matchmaker has driving up queue times.
The survey’s I’m aware of about group size tend to be on the smaller side like this one and reach a more limited segment.
For example this one below asked on multiple subreddits but did not gain significant traction on any of the major ones so the response came primarily from the people that read new who tend to be more hardcore.
My guess for starters would be that the quints would have major issues finding solo’s willing to go with them as lots of players would opt out which would stick those that didn’t with large groups frequently which would make many of them sick of doing it.
