Anyone else feel like role queue will kill OW?

My mains are McCree, Ana, Hog. But I’ll fill main tank, or off heals as well. I play probably any one of half the dps roster depending on the situation. I play all the off tanks and about half the healers.

Normally I just react to what the enemy is playing if we are really struggling. Bunker comp? I can sombra. Hog Winston I can reaper. Hog not shutting down Doom? Bro can you dps I wanna hog. Literally did that 15min ago and got an easy win out of it. I can think of a couple dozen other reactions I have to comps.

Idk to me it’s just like… swapping heroes to react to your team or the enemy team is a really fundamental part of the game. It feels weird that regular players could end up in 2-2-2. The reasoning for 2-2-2 in OWL was 'hey we can’t actually figure out how to make 3-3 balanced despite a couple dozen nerfs. I guess we’re forced to 2-2-2 since tank support meta is too strong". Introducing it to ladder will just be to force two tanks. But we’re in a meta of the game that needs two tanks less than I’ve ever seen. Overall we will sacrifice a ton of potential adaptation and creativity to guarantee a main tank. Considering I get a good comp 80% of the time or more it feels like a bad trade.

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A lot of people will have to learn other heroes.

Especially flex players who play all roles.

I kinda like switching to hamster when i’m in a bad spot as dps, I won’t be able to do that anymore and that’s sad.

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Everyone thought that Hero Lock will kill OW yet here we are.

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I dunno but when role queue hits live I’ll go from playing D.va/Zarya as much as possible while flexing into Orisa/Rein/Winston/Pharah/Hanzo/76/Zenyatta/Brigitte/Mercy into a Hanzo OTP flexing into Pharah on her strong maps because it makes the most sense. Why? Because while tanks are the bottle neck of the team and healers keep everyone alive the real issues in games come up when the DPS players are bots or worse than the opponents’ corresponding DPS. In other words it will be much more beneficial for me to guarantee success on that front for my winrate especially since it gives me more flexibility if for some reason we happen to need a specific DPS in our comp

And you still can, particularly if you play DPS, what you are talking about is constantly including changing roles and then we have issues because it keeps jarring the balance of the game.

The reality is, most players refuse to flex or even change to needed characters. I can’t count the times of being in games where a Pharah appeared… and we have a Mei, a Hanzo and a Hog, etc and no one wants to switch off to a hitscan to try to counter.

The “itz da creativitiez” argument is a theoretical one; the reality is we get comps of Shimadamaker, Sniperwatch, even silliness of all support comps, etc. then a few variations of some poor sod talked into running Mercy to pocket a friend half the match, namely Pharah, Reaper, and the odd Brig.

I seriously doubt you truly get a “good comp” 80% of the time unless you are the one flexing to fill it out.

The simple mathematical reality is its far, far easier to balance for the set of possible 2/2/2 pairings than it is for every possible six stack out of a roster projected to grow to 50+ characters. The problem is now too many combinations synergize so well certain characters in turn never see the light of day, that is really, really bad for the game.

The game has to evolve - it simply cannot remain as it is, and 2/2/2 is fundamental to that. People railed against hero stacking back in the day, and few would want a return to games of 6 genjis vs. 6 torbs…

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Sorry, but having the freedom to flex to whatever is not worth the headache of having a trillion dps players on your team in over half your games. I’m so sick of going into queue and always having to pray the matchmaker won’t screw me over. Those kind of games always feel like you’ve been robbed of time and sr. Gimme that role lock if that’s what it takes to fix it.

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I don’t think it is going to kill it, but it’s not going to improve the game as most people think. And imo it severely hinders the core of OW: swapping and playing other heroes. I.e: I’m a tank-main but I also play Mei, if my Mei could help my team more than the current dps we could never swap roles.

You have enough alternatives to swap in every role to something signicantly different now. That is enough.

2/2/2 role queue won’t solve all problems, no one says it will, but it will no question make it easier to balance and in turn mean you won’t need to swap as much, and more characters become viable. The “I wantz to changez characterz” is for most players not an option; the want to git gud and the best way to do that is to main a small number of characters. As one top 500 guy said, he would never have made top 500 flexing… you can’t ignore this problem either. 2/2/2 allows us to reach a middle ground here that works with the reality of what people more often want to do.

DPS swap potential: 18 characters
Support: 7 characters
Tank: 7 characters

Plenty of variability to swap characters in a role.

As Jeff K. pointed out, even he naively thought people were more open to flexing, and the numbers clearly show they for the most part, aren’t.

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Ah… Another these ‘‘x’’ things that will ‘‘kill’’ ow threads.

And no. It will not kill it.
It will make ranked even more better with seperate sr for roles which basically means that theres mmr reset too which is great.
Also after it comes it will be bit more easier to balance heroes just like devs themselvs have said.
222 is one of the features which been asked for so long (even pros have wanted this feature) so its just matter of the time when it will come.

But right now ranked is just a mess & will go worse when its end/start of the new seasons. Role q is just 1 step foward when it comes to ranked.

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The system will still allow for swapping just within your role, heroes can still be countered and with the Variety of gameplay between them will still be able to be creative with comps

It will however stop teams from running the “creative “ torb/sym/bastion comps… 2 pennies

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The problem with lock is that people will go lets say as a tank, having in mind and skill to play one tank, but team not gona need it at all, and we still are locked from plaing good comp.

I for once if i have problem tanking im willing to change role a lot, and it helped my team win many times. If role que would ever be added, it need something that allow you to anyway swap role with your teammates.

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90% of the real fear underneath is excessive queue times, which even Jeff indicated they understood is unacceptable, and some form of priority parallel queuing is necessary. Even with that though, if you strictly insist on being a DPS player, be prepared to wait longer on some level.

The part I am curious about now since the latest leaks point to it coming into OWL in Q4 is when will the ladder get it and interestingly, will it be in QP too. I actually hope it does make it into QP because if they balance around 2/2/2, then again in QP we will have really off games due to balance changes.

But again, you might do this, you might flex, but lets be honest, 70% or more of the playerbase hits a character and refuses to swap. You can’t ignore this.

The part you are forgetting is this: if 2/2/2 is implemented, and if Blizz can in turn more easily balance for the possible set of 2/2/2 stacks, then you won’t need to flex as much and the bulk of the players who want to play a main can do so and at the same time characters which currently are too niche or overshadowed by 3-character synergies come back into play. More than a fair trade off.

Let me say it this way
Im plaing reinhardt, i have terrible skill with winston and dva
Team wants to play dive. (thats an example)
Its better for me to go support that suicide as monkey in front of other team.

It will not make me play what i want in those scenarios, and the same goes to any hero. Just because you wona play genji, it not means it gona work out because of 2 2 2, dps heroes are a lot differend from each other, and most people not gona anyway play what is needed in that class.

Sometimes its better to swap your main and give it to someone else too, i saw that as an good alternative from time to time.

I think it could save it. If they also deal with Smurfing in low ranks.

The new player experience isn’t a good one right now.

Being able retain new players is important for long term survival.

I am not saying your example is wrong, but what I am saying is that the first premise is a problem: “Team wants to run dive”… this is not fixed, they may want to run dive, but guess what? They now have to consider the fact their main tank is a Rein player and not do that. That’s how that works. Or, you take the opportunity to learn more dive in QP and be a better tanker over all.

Now… there is one possibility here as well that’s often not discussed… role swapping… its entirely possible that during a match two players can agree to swap roles… so maybe you go support since you don’t do “dive tanks” and let another player swap roles to go dive tank. I suspect they may allow for this.

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It’s a terrible idea and will lead to players quitting.

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Not interested into boring heroes sorry :stuck_out_tongue: (my opinion)

And if whole team is set for one meta, and one tank player is not… you dont know how this would end? I know because i refused once to play dive… with bunch of russians on my team… it was not great game…

If you read my first post in this topic you see that i laredy said about this something…

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Role queue itself probably won’t do anything bad. Now LOCKED role queue will do a lot of damage. Forcing 2-2-2 will end in the same comp being played every game and the meta slaves are going to be even worse.

If it was possible to queue for a specific role, the game puts two of each in one team but those people are more than free to switch roles once in game that will be way better. Almost like a soft version of LFG without grouping up and the pressure of playing against experienced six stacks as a group of randoms.

And also bring back some players and retain more new players. I seriously doubt the impact is going to be any worse than the several hundred thousand players that were lost due to the inclusion of Moira-Brig-WB low skill and CC we had over the last year or so.

There is utterly no point if the breakdown of roles in a team is not 2/2/2…

The prediction of “one meta” is so easily refuted on several grounds. First, the more you can build a 6-stack openly the easier it is to create “one meta to rule them all”… 2/2/2 stacks ironically don’t work as well for this because the restrictions make them more map dependent. We will likely see during the period of re-balancing for 2/2/2, probably about 6 months, a handful of metas per map. Second, it removes the problem now of 3 or more characters synergies destroying opportunities for certain characters - the door opens up for more characters to be viable in more cases actually.

It is utterly useless to queue for 2/2/2 then allow people to arbitrarily change roles unless you mean trade roles to still have 2/2/2…