Unfortunately, as someone pointed out, Role Limits face the issue of matchmaking imbalance—if I’m a borderline Diamond DPS, but barely scrape into Plat in Tank, and I load into a game intending to play DPS only to find those slots have been filled, that’s going to cause an issue
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That would only address queue times….not the “matchmaking” overall
The two go hand in hand. If you have a bad candidate pool (due to role imbalance, for example), the matchmaker takes longer to find quality matches, so you either need to drop match quality or accept long queues. Conversely, if you have a better candidate pool (more players, or more balance between roles), the matchmaker doesn’t need as much time to generate good matches, so you’re not forced to choose quality or speed
There are some other issues that what GreyFalcon’s talking about wouldn’t solve, but it would go a long way. That being said, it’s much easier to talk about than implement where Blizzard’s involved
You can’t if you go by MMORPG or Open Queue standards.
But you can if you go by “Buff until popular enough” and less of “MMO Healers” and more of “FPS Combat Medics”.
Essentially “Do the same thing they did to make Tanks popular, but less”.
I did, because I am not one of those scrub individuals who plays the “Overwatch is special” cards. People in general will always gravitate to the same things. It doesn’t matter if it is a First Person Shoot, MOBA, MMO, or single player game.
Know how many people use the Holy Moonlight Sword in the Soul’s brand games.
How about how many people play the META character in Smash.
What about Flavor of the Month tanking in MMO’s.
People by and large are predictable in most aspects of life. Saying that the MMO proportion of players is an almost exact mirror to what we see in Overwatch isn’t some huge stretch of the imagination. Its natural.
I would go so far as to say, with your breakdown of “35% Tank, 50% DPS, 15% Support.” most of the players who will increase the support percentage, if they made the role more fun and engaging will come from the 35% that tank right now. Guess how I know this…ya, its how it works in all the other games I mentioned.
You mean like they did in Heroes of the Storm…oh wait, they buffed damage dealers every patch until tanking and healing/support wasn’t a thing anymore.
Blizzard is as Blizzard does.
I’m sure making it so whoever has the fastest hard drive gets to have fun is going to retain players.
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In League of Legends they had a lack of Support players. Know how they solved that? They cut the item cost in half for Supports, which basically hard buffed the Support Role for the majority of the match duration.
And again, in Overwatch 2, Tank is really popular. Partially because of the half as many needed. But a huge part was the buffs.
I mean, name another class based shooter with Supports and Role Queue.
Basically. If Tanks+DPS is 85% of the existing playerbase, then almost all the additional Support players need to come from existing Tank+DPS players, if they want to get anywhere close to 40%.
There’s no concrete way to go about it…I mean we could’ve aid the same before with 222……”just get the player base to split up that way”
It’s an ideal situation…not really rooted in reality….
Regardless it wouldn’t “solve” things….people have fundamental misunderstandings of what the matchmaker should and shouldn’t be able to do……a LOT is attributed to it that it actually has very little to do with
I don’t know what that feels like, because I don’t play League of Legends. In Smite if you started halving the cost of items, the Support role would just stack damage and run rough shot over the early game.
We don’t actually know how popular tanks are in role queue because there is only the need for 2 of them in each match.
Paladins would be the closest I can come up with. But, and this is a large but, they do not need role queue because you select a single character and play then the entire match. Most games will have a support in them, its the tank role that people have an issue playing.
That doesn’t really counter my idea that people are people. In games that have things people like, most people will gravitate towards that thing, and that that thing in this case is dealing the damages. Its just the nature of the world we live in.
I have been around long enough to know that the people who play career DPS characters in video games will not be switching to support. The entire mentality is different. Tanks and Supports think one way and DPS the other.
Its kind of why every game is the way it is and you have to incentivize people to play the roles that are not the path of least resistance.
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Well even if it is just Tank players switching over to Support.
We need less Tank players anyways.
Heck, that could indicate that maybe Supports should get more “offtank lite” capabilities.
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I don’t want to go through another Bridgette complaint riot again. Not sure if it would be worth that.
Well the problem with Brig was Composition Durability got to be too strong.
But they can adjust that by
- Less In-Combat heals from main healers (offset by everybody getting a regen passive, and maybe increased healing rates when out of combat)
- Less Tank Health (And other survival nerfs)
- Less Tank Healing Received from Supports
- More Support Firepower
Heck they could even just knock all the DPS down by -25hp.
It’s certainly a problem, but it’s a very fixable problem.
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It would be very hard to make dps players go support.
You would need to revamp the whole game. Like make healing not that crucial or effective in battles, change supports to utility tricksters light-dps and shake the whole game upside down.
Its an exciting idea but the momentum to do such drastic changes would be in the transition to this “sequel” but the best they could think was to remove one tank from each team. It shows their commitment and energy to attempt some hardcore changes to the franchise.
Spoilers: that energy is completely absent.
The new devs feel grumpy and tired of working on this title, there was some excitement about it from the devs in 2016-2018 but now it is non existent and it feels like there is only a skeleton crew left and thus, no workforce to attempt big changes.
Maybe the new devs sees OW as a lightning in a bottle event that cant be replicated. Once the honeymoon was over the design issues piled up and the old devs had no idea how to fix them and these new devs just dont even want to bother with it: just make silly events, throw some new 20$ skins on the cash shop and call it a day.
how , i main support and hardly die as it is during matches , how are u meant to improve the role ?
yes supports are a main target if you can get to them i like playing support , i dont dies anywhere near as much as others on team , i get to keep tanks / dps alive so they can do their jobs / and pop off ults and utlity skills at times to save team mates from enemy ults / skills , plus i get to dps as well in between all this , what is there to improve ?
and if as a support you reply that you are dying lots and support survivability needs changing then all i can say is get better game awareness
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…nah, I find about 1 game out of 10 to seem a bit one-sided, most are fairly normal tbh… 
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Good response
Pointless. Popularity of the role is not directly correlated to the power of the role at all. We saw that on OW1.
Ratio of players has nothing to do with MM issues, because MM looks at the SR/MMR and not the number of players available. You can have an insane amount of Supports in X rank and almost nothing on others etc.
MM problems are happening because Blizzard/Devs try to solve a human/player issue, which is preference and perceived balance and “fun”.
But that is it… we need more support players in queue, but they can’t get them. People in general do not like to play support, since this role is not flashy like damage or tank. There are people that like to support and are ok with this, myself included, but it was always a problem in games.
For example in any given MMO queues for instances for supports were always almost instant, but dps took several minute (to the extremes sometimes that they were like 20 minutes). Same thing is happening here now. We all told blizzard that going 1-2-2 won’t solve queue time issues, it will just move the problem from tanks being bottleneck to support being the one. They don’t like to be proven wrong, hence they loosen up match maker since they don’t want to have 10 minutes queues again for damage players.
I agree, that there is a problem with MM, but the only logical solution to it is to get more players to actually queue up as support. But I have no idea how we could achieve it. Buffing supports won’t solve the issue unless we buff them to busted levels, but that is a no go since it creates other issues.
And how we ensure it does not happen in that system that you proposed? If some one is diamond ond damage but silver on tank and is forced on tank it makes the same issue that we have now.
League has actually role queue that people do respect for the most part. It is pretty rare for some one to throw a fit that they got forced to flex to support, since they will pick some damage oriented and have at it.
For the most part you will get one of the two roles you queue up in league.
We talked about it already. It creates other issues. And I don’t think it is good idea to move issue somewhere else.
Because they refuse to adjust supports that need it badly, and give us meaningless buffs like extra 5 glock ammo that is basically spit in the face of support players. If some one is spitting in your face you tend to leave that venue. That is why so many do quit imo.
Yup… That is the case since the beginning of queues for instances. And even before that, when people had to organize their parties for themselves… I remember to this day when back in 2005-2010 I could log in to a game, and get 3 or 4 party invites even before i fully loaded 
Support was always less popular, because they don’t do damage and are not flashy for the most part. And most people do not enjoy being in a shadow of others and doing their job, knowing that no one bats an eye as long as you do it. But the moment you stop every one dies.
We will be left out with busted supports, most damage players will loose their minds… And after nerfing those supports people stop queuing it and the issue comes back.
Overbuffing something is never a solution.
They did more than that…
You queue up for two roles in league, and MM has an option to ignore it and put you in a role that it needs to create a game. But if you played flex or support in last few games this is disabled and you are guaranteed one of your roles.
Oh and didn’t ‘cut in half’ the item costs…
cost for mythic items for adc/apc/tanks is around 2800-3400
cost formythic items for supports is 2500
it has to do more with removing wards from store, and giving supports an item that produces them for free. And limiting to only one pink ward on map per player. It shifted a focus of vision control from supports only to the whole team responsibility, and freed up gold for supports to actually buy items instead of just buying wards.
Yeah, role limits didn’t work so well when it happened back in QP for a week or so as a bug. You’d get loops of people joining, seeing that the two DPS slots were filled, and then leaving, to the degree that games would start with unfilled teams. It was fixed fairly quickly IIRC because people didn’t like it.
So just stick the role limit on tanks and tanks alone. People will be more likely to settle for playing DPS instead. The downside is that this opens the door to 1/4/0, 0/5/0, 0/4/1 etc. comps that are largely unloved. But if they put this up on experimental and stuck much tighter matchmaking in there, I’d still give it a whirl.
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Can you imagine? If they do a 1 Tank +4 DPS with regeneration out of combat? People would lose their minds if they erase a role and all of a sudden … game works better
Sure it would be basically a Destiny2 look alike or the classic meme "OW2 is CoD 2.0 now bruh" but as an experiment to see people exploding with rage , would be funny.
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