Loving ow2 right now. Bunch of my friends back in it, and having some 5 stack fun.
But, there’s an elephant in the room.
Role queue times. Just seen a Reddit screen shot. Support <2 minutes, tank 18 minutes, dps 19 minutes.
That indicates that support isn’t so popular right now. (surprised pikachu face).
This was plat 4 BTW, where you’d be hoping for more team work and less death match.
It’s actually worse than ow1, where only dps had high queue times.
I don’t envy the devs trying to solve this issue.
Albeit it was 100% predictable due to supports having the lowest carry potential in a game that’s more about individual carries.
How would you guys go about it? I’d suggest making supports plain overpowered in various ways. Keep on doing that incrementally until their popularity catches up, then balance from there going forward.
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This game is in it for the long haul, they have a lot of time to come up with a solution. I think they’ll do something about it once the more urgent work is done. Maybe in the short term bring back priority passes?
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nothing to save. game plays better than ever
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I do think a lot of the support complaints are specifically about Mercy. She can’t really do anything about dive, and she’s a popular one-trick character. She needs something specifically for her survivability. I was thinking instead of her super jump being awkwardly bound to crouch in GA, just let her do a super jump any time by pressing crouch + jump. Like Baptiste but without the charge time.
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This isn’t a solution per se but a role fill option for role queue within open queue might help a little. Maybe even a battle pass xp bonus to incentivize its use.
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I can only say why I personally don’t play support much anymore, when it used to be my favorite role.
I only play support when I specifically want to play Ana or Zen. When I play DPS, I rarely have a specific hero in mind. I already know that, no matter what, there are enough DPS heroes I enjoy that I will have fun no matter what I end up playing. Even when I’m “forced” into a certain kind of hero as DPS by my team composition, there are still multiple options for me to fulfill the needed function.
Support just doesn’t offer that variety. I enjoy 2 support heroes a lot, a couple more from time to time, and I never touch 3 of them. There’s simply not enough variety in the role.
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On my end, I use to love playing support because I actually liked being a heal-bot and just focusing on healing my team.
Now there’s literally one less teammate to heal, so the game just feels less fun than OW1 was.
So now I just play dps and flank the other healers non-stop because that is more fun.
Or I just play a different game.
Just speaking for myself as a former support main.
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where do you people getting these long *ss queue time ? i’m playing on SEA server, supposed to be the most deserted wasteland but somehow i got games in 30 secs but you guys have to be in queue for 20minutes ?
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I enjoy Support personally but I mostly play Moira and Brig and they both work well in this format I think. Used to play Mercy but I’m reluctant to play her now.
I was thinking it might help to make the flex pool a guaranteed even split of each role. After a support game you get a DPS game and a tank game, with reduced queue times. Like another take on priority passes. But the passes gave you 3-4 passes per game on average, this only gives you 2.
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Well you have to bring in region, time and maybe also rank into it and I assure you OW1 was worse.
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oh no 2 mins waiting!
I’ll wait 10 mins if the games are balanced. ow1 had fast unbalanced queues. Feels like league of legends with their 30 sec horrible match maker.
Give me balanced matches and i’m fine waiting 2 mins.
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Those queue times you stated must be a complete outlier, because I haven’t had a queue longer than 5 minutes on DPS in diamond 3. (They’re usually about 30secs to 3mins)
That being said though, if they wanted to improve queue times, there could be a “preferred role” system. Whereby you queue for every role, and prioritise one as your favourite, 2nd fav and last. If the game doesn’t give you your top role, then you are guaranteed to get it the next game. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think league of legends has a system like that, or at least I seem to remember my brother saying that years ago.
A system like that would make it take much longer to rank up on one role though, since you’d have to keep playing games on other roles too.
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If only the forums, reddit, and content creators had identified this issue and pointed it out to the dev team repeatedly for the past year, then we wouldn’t be in this pickle! 
Seriously, new support heroes will help, but the support bottleneck problem is going to continue to grow. A philosophical design shift, similar to what happened with tanks, may be needed to adjust supports for 5v5. Band aids have been slapped on some to keep them limping along, but no long term solution has been proposed.
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Hearing the community maybe
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Hate to say this, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they swap to 4v4 and just drop a support.
That’s how they tried to solve their lack of tank players problem.
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its kind of funny since a lot of people are probably playing moira. everyone is screaming for nerfs on the forums so i guess they want more queue time lol
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Well, I’ve decided that, for now at least, I’ll just be playing my 3 daily games to get my 9k battle pass credits (3 is generally enough).
Even the wins feel bad tbh. Since people don’t want to group up or let you support them, you’re at the mercy of which dps pops off best.
The game is now in a state where supports best carry by fragging out. Except your offensive kit is, understandably, neutered vs a dps character’s kit.
It’s 10x easier to get massive multi kills with dps than support. And that’s the way you have to carry in ow2.
Hence support feels donkey to play.
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It was for console + middle east servers in monday morning
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How bad are comp queue times? Most of the big afternoon streamers are in a group in QP right now. Apparently they can get games as a QP group quicker.
And they generally seem to enjoy playing together.
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Imagine getting paid sixfig socal salaries to solve 1 set of equations from queueing theory. If that’s the going rate for being bad at your job, count me in.
You can prempt certain queueing regimes and incentivize load-balance. Sadly, any fixed channel servicing will always suffer a supply/demand mismatch. Especially with selfish users who flipflop their choices on a whim. The only thing that provably always works best-possible real-time is no role locks at the queueing stage.
We’ve been explaining this to them for years. Handcuffs don’t work. Want cuffs? Pull over to the side and LFG to cherry-pick your teammates and all other conditions and enjoy wait times on the side of the road while you let all the others pass who would gladly take quantity > quality.
The easy solutions to the curse of RQ still apply. It’s not a balance problem from the bottom-up, it’s a compositional problem (meta diversity without cheese) from the top-down.
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Semi-open with softmin/max on roles: 131 is allowed, 122 is allowed, 221 is allowed, etc. and you give out the old message “too many tanks” “too many healers” “not enough xyz”. those who pick last are forced to fill. tired of picking last? they zone you in early next time and you have your chance to pick first. swapping off a hero keeps that role available from you, so you have to work it out with a teammate first if you’re going to swap roles.
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1211 - utility channel that has all the hybrids. rework the hybrids into more off-role slots so they round-out the comps like support sym or offtank mei.
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