✅ Good Tanking = Express DPS Queue

General Discussion
1

Realized the issue with a lack of Tanks in queue is:

  • If you want to queue Tank and something else, you almost always get Tank.

If it was closer to 50/50, then people would queue Tank more.

So that got me to thinking:

Express Damage Queue:

  • Queue Damage and Tank
  • You have a 50/50 chance of being put into an express DPS queue
  • To qualify,
    1. Either your Tank SR must be higher than your Damage SR.
    2. Or your Damage SR is only 1SR-to-100SR higher than your Tank SR

Not only would you get a lot more Tanks, but it would encourage high ranking DPS to get good at Tanking.

Since low queue time, is the valuable commodity that high rank DPS crave.

So if people respond to incentives. Use an incentive they actually care about.

2 Likes
2

Sometimes, some suggestions are so bad I wish I could still downvote like in the old forum.

20 Likes
3

And why would you think this is bad?

Way I see it, you need more Tanks.
And you really need more Tanks at Diamond and above.

If someone is a Diamond-to-GM DPS main, who doesn’t know the first thing about Tanking.

You can bet the first thing they are gonna do after this incentive comes out is to grind themselves up the ladder on their Tank account.

4

I think dps mains would rather wait in a long queue instead of putting in hours grinding/learning tank.

6 Likes
5

For average ranks, this is probably true. But for Diamond and above, the wait times to get into DPS games end up being longer than it takes to play a Tank game.

And certain geographic regions and times have really bad queue times as well.

6

And what would you call “good tanking”? Lots of damage blocked? Lots of damage done? Lots of killing blows? A winning game?

7

Good tanking in this context is maintaining an SR that is near, or higher than your DPS SR.

A Masters DPS on their Gold Tank, wouldn’t qualify.

However that Masters DPS player would suddenly have a very strong incentive to “git good” at Tank.
And not just play Tank, but rank up to near or above their DPS skill level.

8

Quality > Quantity when it comes to ideas.

Let’s pretend that I’m a Grand Master DPS player (It’s totally ridiculous but, let’s pretend). If I want a faster DPS queue time and I’m willing to Tank 1/2 of the time I just find a similar minded player and take turns.

This doesn’t require any new fancy feature to be added and adding it would probably make DPS queue times worse not better.

It’s likely some of the GM Tank players would play DPS more if it wasn’t for the queue times. Well, you’ve literally implemented a function that will reduce their queue times for DPSing.

9

You’re kinda ignoring the part where you’d have that Grandmasters DPS queuing for a Grandmasters tier Tank half the time. Where otherwise they wouldn’t queue for Tank at all.

And like you said, Quality is the issue.

You can’t increase the supply of Grandmaster Tank players, unless you give them an incentive they care about.

And increasing the supply of Gold tanks, with lootboxes, doesn’t cut it for GM players queue times.

10

Horrible idea. All the DPS that didn’t get tank will just go agro roadhog / zarya and refuse to play like a tank.

11

Wouldn’t they just derank on their Tank?

If they derank below their DPS skill tier, then they don’t qualify for this anymore.

12

Blizzard likes to freeze ranks, so not really. It would just stop them from climbing while ruining everyone else’s rank.

13

They like to maintain MMR, but if your winrate sucks, you’re gonna lose SR.

14

wich seems ridiculous, you dont get to be a high rank in DPS by getting good at tanking, role queue nowadays demands you to speciallize.

15

And a lot of DPS can’t do that.

But a good amount can.

And if anything, maybe they expand that skill tier gap from 100SR, up to 200SR at GM.

16

I don’t think these sorts of things are even possible due to the massive disparity in Tank/Support to Damage. If the other queues are almost instant and there’s a 50/50 express queue, anyone that only queued for Damage will be in a perpetual state of queue…

Perhaps the math would work better if you could give roles priority and some sort of credit thing builds up in the background when you get a role that wasn’t assigned that gives some unspecificied priority in the background.

I think improving the skirmish would go a long way to smoothing things over. Actually have a “game” going that people jump in an out of.

17

  1. This gives tank mains an advantage in queueing for dps when they feel like it. Meaning dps mains are waiting even longer.

  2. If someone hates playing a role, creating incentives to play that role will only serve to make them feel like they are punished for playing what they like. Not a good look.

  3. The amount of terrible tanks who truly do not care about the role but rather just the “express ticket” playing it would give would not be healthy.

1 Like
18

I figure even if it’s not 50/50, they could still make it significantly faster than standard DPS queue.

19
  1. VIP treatment for Tank mains so they continue to play Tank regularly.
  2. I think the idea of this system is that DPS would indirectly benefit from it, because of the increased supply of Tanks.
  3. It wouldn’t be an express ticket if they play horribly and derank their Tank role. They’d get disqualified.
20

They already have the incentive of a fast queue. They need nothing more for it.

Not if tanks are jumping ahead of them and also lengthening the queue for them at the same time.

So spend an inordinate amount of time playing tank to improve so that EVENTUALLY you MIGHT be able to earn express? Doubt anyone would find it an incentive to commit hours to a role they don’t like.

The point is to save time right? How does making someone play CONSTANT TANK to improve save them time? Its a time sink. Not a saver at this point. Which makes it useless of the purpose it was suppose to serve.

2 Likes