I don’t want role queue. I want the game to encourage team play by making it so grouping up and communicating gives you an advantage and solo play, if you are not a team player, will hinder your ability to be ranked high.
You do this not by enabling solo q people to have better comps… comps really only matter once you start getting to high diamond or maybe masters. Heck, even GM games a “good” comp doesn’t always win as long as the team works together.
This is my solution, like someone else also mentioned. Get rid of group priority in matchmaking.
Yes, it will suck for solo q people. But LFG is here now to help form groups to make it easier.
I would be ok with a secret back end side to the matchmaker that will use your placement games and then your play history to soft sort people. Balance out the teams based on what the people naturally play in comp to get the rank that they are… and if they go against their mains, they will suffer a penalty in having a bad comp.
But the best part is, that its invisible to the player… so that like what will hppen in an unenforced role selection, the team will get triggered if you queue for Tank, then go DPS.
If you are a flex person, the game will throw you into one of the flex roles. If you main a role (over 50% playtime in a role) then you will be pigeonholed into that. Want to get out of it? Play LFG, form a group and get your playtime changed.
Here is the problems with role queue, which everyone who claims that it will “save” comp keeps overlooking.
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Roles won’t be enforced. There is no way Bliz will start off RQ with enforced comps. It will prob be handled like Mei’s snowball offensive’s yeti mode. Thus, it will effectively make RQ pointless, because they’ll just play whatever without penalty.
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Queue times will vary based on role. Obviously everyone loves to play DPS. There are just simply more of those heroes then any other. So after a couple weeks, everyone will discover it will be faster to queue as Tank or Support… then just swap to their dps main. Queue times matter!! No one likes waiting 10min for a game, otherwise they would use LFG.
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Player will get too specialized - Need someone to flex? Oh too bad, no one will know how to because they will never have been forced to flex off their main on their climb. No one will feel compelled to flex because, “I picked healer, I shouldn’t have to swap because my person gets countered and the team doesn’t have the players to counter the enemy” The hero mecanics of a lot of heroes span different roles on purpose. Someone that is good on zarya, can pick up Symm or Moira…
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Troll field day. Trolls will of course select one of the most important roles, then use it to completely tank a team by hero selection. Since everyone is specialized and will get used to only playing one kind of character and won’t be able to try to pick up the slack of someone going off script.
Don’t believe me? go into LFG and unlock roles and wait until you get a troll that comes in. When things get bad, they will swap without asking the team… it will completely tank your game. It will be even more pronounced then most people realize if it happens in solo q then when it happens now, because there is just as much of a possibility that the enemy has the same problem or people on roles they don’t have experience on.
- Death of the flex player. More in line with #3, but the flex player that likes to play different roles on different maps or modes. These players will have to start and specialize, because they will have to queue for their role before they know what map they are on.
Sure, you could have the matchmaker go and put 1 tank 1 healer 1 dps and 3flex together each time… but that doesn’t solve the big problem in team comps that RQ is suppose to solve. You’ll still end up with 4dps in some games.
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Not all characters inside a role are equal. You don’t necessarily want a game where you are running a Road, Zarya, torb, Symm, lucio, zen… do you? But thats what the RQ matchmaker is gonna give you. RQ isn’t going to magically give you that barrier tank along with a Moira/ana every game.
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Which leads to even more one-tricking. One tricking in the RQ system will be even WORSE then it is now. Why? Because the OTP will be rewards even more often they are now because they’ll actually be more likely to have teams that will enable them. Also, the skill differences needed between heroes is drastic!! A person that is good at mercy, isn’t gonna be likely to play Ana go help deal with the pharmercy that the Junk and Reaper you got paired with can’t deal with by going widow.
And these are just the problems with an unenforced role queue. Enforcing a RQ (which we arn’t talking about here) leads to meta and balance problems… along with empowering trolls and one tricks even stronger to ruin games.
No thank you. I would rather solo q against a 6 stack then deal with the problema associated with a role queue.
It may sound wonderful if everyone played nice and it was a perfect world… but if it was, we wouldn’t be asking for a RQ in the first place.