"All Roles" Queue Should Be Proportionate to Role Wait Times

General Discussion
1

To be clear, I am not talking about Open Queue. I am talking about choosing the “All” role option for Role Queue.

I’ve tried selecting the “All” roles option in Role Queue for a bit this season. Practically every game I get into (I counted >13/15 games), I’m Support. I don’t think this should be the way it works. My expectation was to have some role diversity when selecting this option.

Rather than simply placing you in the next open slot for a game, the system should determine a role for you based on the proportionate wait times for the role, then do a “priority queue” for that role (all behind the scenes) as a perk for selecting All roles.

In practice, it would look like this:

  • Let’s say the queue times for (Tank, Damage, Support) are (3m, 6m, 2m) when you select All roles.
  • A hidden roulette is played where you have a (1/3, 1/6, 1/2) chance of getting the (Tank, Damage, Support) role, and the result is kept hidden from the player until they join the game (if the probabilities don’t add up to 1, normalize). In the example provided, this turns out to be about a (33%, 17%, 50%) chance to get selected for the (Tank, Damage, Support) role.
  • You are queued up for the determined role with the “priority queue” benefit as a perk for selecting All roles.

The way it is now, selecting All roles is essentially equivalent to selecting Support, so now I’m forced to select just the Damage (or Tank) role, even though I don’t mind playing Support here and there.

Thanks for the consideration.

2 Likes
2

Data science at its finest.

4 Likes
3

Not gonna work.

Every player that selects “all” cannot cut the line. A better more fair idea. If the “All” decides you’re dps, you wait the same time as the people dps in the queue.

When you’ve been waiting for 5 minutes, odds are you’ll be a tank or dps.

4

Theres a quite complex algorithm at play, its not as simple as “oh heres an open slot”…

I know it feels that way considering the awful match quality.

Ultimately, it places you in the first adquate match it can based upon your skill rating for a given role.

Why the matchmaking quality is so bad is a discussion for another thread

6

It’s not “All Roles”, though. It’s “flex”, meaning you flex to play what the party it matches you with needs the most, which is 99% of the time support.

I mean it’s stupid, but that’s how it works. You might get tank like 5-10% of the time but usually only DPS if you’re backfill.

7

Actually, what if it was “random, but you get faster queues”? In theory, you might get more people gambling for DPS, but sticking around for whatever other role they get.

In practice, we might get a ton of leavers. This is fixable though, if we have a mechanic where the “random” option is locked out if you queue for it and quit.

1 Like
8

Yeah sorry, I had simplified. I understand that there’s MMR-based matchmaking going on, but without knowing the details, the way it feels like it works is like:

  • Given your MMR for each role, what are the games available with open slots in your per-role MMR windows?
  • Place you in the first available slot. If no games are found within a time period, expand the window size.

Normally I would expect there to be some kind of adjustment based on the players already selected for the lobby (i.e. if there’s a particularly high MMR player on a team in the lobby, the system selectively searches for a good match by getting a lower MMR player to fill the remaining slot), but I’m skeptical that they went there.

I just think it should be done differently, at least to fix the “always Support” problem, but you’re right that I don’t know how it actually works today.

9

You can’t have thousands of people queuing for All and getting tank and dps.

The line never stops getting new people. every second hundreds of people queue for “all”. And every one of those people thinks they should be the ones to get a quick dps or tank match.

10

Not gonna work.

Problem is that roughly 50% of the playerbase is DPS mains.

The best option here is to remove DPS from the role selection all-together. Only put a flex slot in there. Let tanks and supports continue queuing their respective roles, but DPS no longer exists as a prematch role.

This would ensure every DPS players is in the flex queue, and thus the queues can provide equal opportunity for flexers to get DPS.

I’ll see myself out, knowing full well this idea will be wildly despised. :joy:

3 Likes
11

Let’s be honest, it’s not always support. Just the majority of times, but I’ve been placed as Damage and Tank too through that. People are exaggerating as always.

12

Bc it’s not…you don’t get “all” roles, you’re saying you don’t care what role you’re playing.

Support players apparently felt spat on and didnt return in the same numbers dps did or tank players have. I dont blame them. level 55 for the first new character since baptiste in their class OR buy the battle pass. 5v5 is fine, but like. lol.

So there are more games that need a support slotted in. So you’re saying yo don’t care what role, you’re gonna get what’s needed.

13

Thats a secondary factor…

I belive how overwatches matchmaking builds matches is based upon the average skill rating of all players on a team to build the match…instead of the skill rating of the individual players…

So for example (using 6v6 format for math simplicity) … a team of 6 players of an approximate 5k skill rating versus a team of 3 zero skill rating players and 3 10k rating players.

The average skill rating of both teams woukd be 5k … so its a “balanced” match…

This is just theory though… and the example is just that, i don think the max skill rating differences in matches is that large

14

I was selecting only “All” roles for comp. I ended up getting placed for Support (more than 14 games; I ain’t that good) before I won even a second game on any other role (and I think I might have played non Support 2-3 times). Yeah it’s not literally always Support, but it’s pretty close imo.

15

90% support yes… no one wants to play support.

Ive gotten damage a few times. I got tank literally once…

1 Like
16

Yeah, it is a complex topic. Ultimately, it is a bunch of tradeoffs, and while I don’t know how Blizzard made theirs, I use a constraint solver for mine.

But no matter how you build it, ultimately it is solving the same problem, and if you have roles (like overwatch does) and vastly different amounts of people in those roles, you are going to have problems, as the matchmaker will start trading match quality for “make everyone get a game in a reasonable time” - which ultimately means pick the people who have been waiting a really long time, over the ones which would be the better match.

The fill queue is them trying to partially solve this, since you are giving the matchmaker more options to make better matches.

I think as the people in each queue gets further and further apart, it will become more and more of a problem Blizzard will have to solve - because with free to play, it becomes a financial problem, since it is harder to get new players if the match quality is bad, and the queue times are too long - and they are the ones which spend the money.

Soooo

I think in the short term they will do a LOT to make support more attractive to play. In the longer term, they may partially, or completely remove peoples ability to pick which role the get.

But yeah, matchmaking is a hell of a topic.

Also, there is only so much the matchmaker can do, when the game is set up like a drinking game, the winning team typically the advantage in the next fight, be it ult charge, or the ability to pick where they want the fight to be.

Add to that matchmaking isn’t EVER going to make people happy at the best of times…

17

I get that this may be the thought behind “All” roles, but I wonder if it works in practice. Would be interesting to see the numbers of players that actually use All roles, and in particular what % of those players are Support mains.

I suspect that most of the players that do All roles are Support mains that don’t mind playing Tank or Damage here and there. However, this would be the wrong audience to target with this option, as we already don’t have enough Supports. Rather, they should target the players that are more “eh, whatever role, I’ll ride with it” or “I don’t mind playing Support even for half my games, but definitely not 90% of my games – I want the diversity of experience!” The current system does not cater well to these players because you’re nearly guaranteed to be Support when selecting All roles. It also means that these players will now manually DE-select the Support role if they want to experience this diversity (because it’s the only way to get it).

Just my theory, but I think the “proportionate to wait times” way is better for the game.

18

There is an easier solution; buff support so that it’s fun to play. Queue times fixed, easy.

1 Like
19

I vaguely agree, but if you buff them in a way that makes the game “less fun” for tanks or supports, you kind of just shift the problem around a bit.

It would be tough to isolate changes that make everyone happy.

20

Ultimately, I think we should consider the “All” role option from the user perspective. Is it to:
A) Join a game as fast as I can
B) Have a diversity of role experience

It seems like it’s (A) for now, but this is an unnecessary option as the wait times are visible and you can just select Support for this. I’m thinking if we instead shift this to (B), it’ll actually get more Supports into the player pool, because it’s a more desirable and differentiated option than essentially just picking Support for those players that want a mix.

21

the likely result of a massive support exodus