I haven’t played Overwatch for a year so I went back to the game and found out about this awful change.
I’m a DPS main (mostly play Hanzo and McCree) and the queue is taking a long time. I’m guessing it’s because DPS is the most popular choice so you’re forced to wait longer or the game is not as active as before.
Was the change controversial?
Its quite popular…
Think about it as everyone is a one trick and every hero has the same amount of one tricks.
You get much more dps players than tank or supports.
Yes, it was controversial, but power has a way of ending discussions, so you can imagine the anti-role-queue crowd has been pretty demoralized.
It was a very bad sign.
Yeah, it was an issue.
They have “Open Queue” versions of Quickplay and Competitive now though. Which soaks up a lot of DPS players.
Also hopefully they can make barrier tanks more interesting to DPS players. Because that’s really the bottleneck.
This:
The tank role is bottlenecking dps and support times.
I think most of the playerbase (around 55-60% if I’m not wrong) likes role queue and prefer that rather than open queue because it’s organized so
It’s not an issue
But it wouldn’t hurt to have both
Literally everyone hated the change and Blizzard are now reverting it. The classic Overwatch competitive is available in Arcade right now. It’s much better than waiting for 10 minutes for poor match.
While Actiblizzion doesn’t release player counts, Twitch showed a 50% drop in Overwatch viewers after 222 was released (twitchtracker .com/games/488552) in September.
They tried 1-3-2 (1 tank, 3 DPS, 2 healers) on the new experimental card not too long ago. They buffed tanks to work better in this new playstyle, and while it still needed some work, it was extremely popular. Why Blizzard didn’t bring it to the normal game, I have no idea.
there was a lot of discussions about it and a lot of people picking sides. it was absolutely a controversial change. a lot of flex-players felt like they lose a big part of their playstyle. also a lot of people were worried about queue times.
these days i think most players have gotten used to role queue and prefer it (or are at least okay with it) over the old system. most people like the more stable games where you dont have several dps and no tank.
the “while you wait”-feature also helps a lot and sometimes make you feel like queues are pretty short even when they are not.
(in case you dont know, you can play things like deathmatch and workshops while in queue).
but there is no denying the long queue times has hurt the game quite a bit.
and the fact that there are characters like mei and sombra who counters the tank role can make it annoying to play that role when you cant switch when countered.
getting dps mains to play barrier tank is not going to be easy. even a lot of tank players dont want to play barrier tank. with most of the non-barrier tanks being kind of unwanted they should really focus on making the barrier-tanks more fun to play, or making the non-barrier tanks more viable/accepted.
but yes, the lack of tanks is without a doubt the bottleneck that increases queue time.
Longer queues for damage, shorter for support and tank, depending on the rank even unexistant for tanks
This won’t happen unless they lock main and off tank to one. Buffing off tanks will cause a problem. That’s why everything is the way it is.
Well, it is actually longer for tanks and supports too. Not by much, obviously. But prior to the update, we were enjoying literally instant queues.
Tell me which OW were you playing then, my friends and I always joked calling Overwatch the queue simulator
I am talking about the lead up to role queue. About a month before it was added. I guess queue times were kind of bad prior to that too. They keep loosening the parameters as we bleed players, you know?
Ah yes, there was hype when it was announced and it had an effect on queue times, it definitely repopulated the game, not saying that before that it was a “dead game LULW”, although kinda was, but it was the harshest time that OW has ever gone through
Sorry to burst your bubble, but literally every single source of evidence out there concerning this topic proves the exact opposite conclusion… 
Lmaooo… Not even close 
Whaaatever you say. It is your anecdotal and subjective opinion at the end of the day, so I wholely respect it.
You realize that September was also the month OWL ended, right??
I wouldn’t say that 2-2-2 caused the long queues, but the constant nerfs to supports and tanks.
Like, why bother even training any of them? Before you are any good with it, it’s nerfed at least 4 times.
I dont know of any valid data that supports the claim of a majority made above