Flex Queue is a success.
In the same way killing a sick patient relieves them of their pain.
As long as people queue for Flex Queue, then they help speed up the overall queue. The games may be terrible for some, because of throwers, lack of experience, playing out of role, etc., but the queue is shorter none the less. Success.
The only way it will be a failure is if no one queues at all for those flex roles as before, and queue times goes back up again. Then, you might see some movement to correct the deeper issues at hand that need fixing. Add more Tank and Healers to the roster that DPS players would be honestly interested in playing, and which serve those roles in a fun and interesting way.
Until then the community can only hope some of the DPS players trying Support or Tank, get bitten by the bug, and start to enjoy it enough to stick with those rolls/characters we do have, more often. Otherwise, it’s just a game of robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Again, this is a coping mechanism.
Thats how people’s memories work. They can have 50 matches, 4 throwers and they will still blame Flex queue and say the game is worse since then bla bla. If they disabled Flex Queue temporarily, they would blame something else.
It was made with a purpose and it works 100%. Sometimes works really well sometimes just a bit better than queueing without a pass. The match quality is on the players, not the system.
They are, because it is confirmed that the system heavily weighs your mmr against your highest mmr. This is done in a misguided attempt to get people to the rank they are supposed to be and not stomp games, however, the idea that a gm ana should be fast tracked to gm tank is misguided.
This is even a bigger issue when you have a plat ana playing plat games in other roles when he isnt anywhere near as good at those other roles.
tank will always be “boring” because it involves doing stuff that is boring for most people interested in an FPS, such as breaking shield, waiting on a flank and closing it, using your cooldowns efficiently and trading cooldowns well as well as playing the appropriate tank at the right time.
Furthermore, tank is the easiest role to mess up on, making what seem small mistakes on tank, such as misplaying your Halt! as Orisa, or missing Hook at a crucial part of the game as Roadhog has much bigger consequences than say missing Helix Rocket on Soldier as a Roadhog without hook is no longer a threat so the enemy tanks can just focus him down and (most of the time) kill him and get through the double pocket he gets. At the very least, even if the Hog goes behind cover in time, him missing hook results in a massive loss of space because their tanks can be aggressive while the Hog is forced to be defensive. Due to this, in high elo tank is perceived as the carry role and one on which blame is put very often, on top of playing “unfun” tanks that happen to be meta, like Orisa, Sigma, Ball etc.
Already now, tank shifted massively toward being a DPSeque role and that’s ultimately bad for the game as often DPS have no say in denying a Hog flank or a Ball stalling the point.
I am a mid-masters player, I made an account on January 1st, even if I am put in loser’s queue, there is no way I should have a 50% winrate in high plat. It’s flex queue for sure that gave me unwinnable games and people queueing for the lootbox. I play this game long enough to be honest with myself and know when I play bad and when I play well but lose. In Plat, even with the worse tanks, I win maybe 90% of games.
Im not going to go look around and find actual links for you, too much work compiling. Although the actual documents(streams, YouTube videos) are out there if you want to do it yourself. I will however TELL you and REFERENCE the evidence, to put you on the right direction.
First, there is overwhelming evidence out there of t500 streamers queuing off role and getting t500 in their off roll when they are clearly not there. People who come to mind: Flats, super, xqc, and many others. Like so many that it’d be hard not to run into if you look. This is why, for example, Flats has an alt account in diamond on dps and just doesn’t use his main.
More recently, the your overwatch guy has brought this up many times, has said he has voiced his concern in a creator discord (which the devs respond to), and I’m sure if he was wrong the devs would tell him and he’d tell us. And you know what, I still spent too much time on this, but it was easy enough to find the video so I’ll go ahead and provide the yourOW video Overwatch: Winter Wonderland Patch & SKINS! - NEW Role Queue Update! - YouTube
You’re referring to people who played before role queue came out and their MMRs for all three roles were grandfathered in based on their rank at the time. That is completely unrelated to what you claimed and what you’ve stated is certainly not proof/confirmation of it.
I dont know, Ive gotten banned 3 times permanently, each time I bought new accounts each suspension when I had no alts/smurfs I bought some. You might be a conspiracy nut, but you might be on to something
Nah I know what I’m saying and I know what they’re saying. Maybe you can tell me what you think I’m saying. In no place in any of the examples I’ve witnessed or cited do they explicitly say “oh these people are getting placed higher than they should because they got grandfathered in from before role que,” although that would be the majority of players, and a base large enough to create a problem.
What your saying doesn’t even make sense. Grandfathered in? There is no grandfathered in. MMR has never been reset. If you started just after role que and have hundreds of hours on tank, and the game thinks your a GM, the game will put you around that level for multiple roles. Having an account before role que wouldn’t matter, as there has never been a MMR reset. Think about what you’re saying would denote and that its literally impossible.
Yes there is. This was confirmed by the devs as well. Back when they were introducing role queue, they split MMR from a single MMR to a per-role MMR. Before they announced role queue they said that they had tracked a per-role MMR for a few months; however, if the player only ever played a single role, then the MMR for those roles would never be adjusted. I’m unsure what you’re referring to with an MMR reset, since the concept of being “grandfathered in” is literally the opposite of that.
You explicitly mention players getting placed too high and needing to play on their alts for roles they dont normally play. Flats, xqc, and super are all primarily tank players. These are players whose mains have grandfathered MMRs from before role queue who typically play single roles, and so their role specific MMRs likely never stabilized below that.
Like come on dude. The devs have explicitly stated the roles each ahve a unique MMR and if they didn’t the system would be completely busted. You might want to “think about what you’re saying” yourself. Don’t believe all the random crap you hear from other users and random youtube channels like YO. They put out content based on what people want to hear to get views and generate discussion. They are not the devs of the game, you can’t cite them as a source for anything but anecdotal theorycrafting.
Where does it say separate MMR? BTW here is proof from the devs saying they weigh new players based on performance in one role
Also,
Are you implying that when a content creator has what is the equivalent of a press pass says “I talked to the developers about this” that this somehow is rampant sensationalism and just can’t be trusted? Just saying a source isn’t legitimate because it is a reporter and not the developers is kind of poor rhetoric.
You’re quoting exactly what I’m referring to. They explicitly state “We want to help identify your skill at each role, so we can place you at the SR that reflects that skill” and “the more games you’ll have to play on that role until your SR can adjust properly to reflect your skill” - This is literally describing that each role has a unique MMR/SR. Why would they say this if they’re all just related? That would make no sense.
Also I’m unclear what you’re talking about with respect to new players. The entire statement you quoted has literally nothing to do with new players. This was referring to how they decide to place players as role queue was introduced to accommodate the change to split roles.
The second paragraph is also describing the grandfathering I was referring to. That is, if you hadn’t played a sufficient amount of a particular role while they did these adjustments (pre-role queue) then those MMRs are going to be inaccurate, and this largely reflect your old MMR before role queue. A top500 player from before role queue who only ever played tank and now today decided to flex for passes is still going to have a DPS and Support MMR of ~top500 because it was never adjusted. So from that respect I’ll agree there is certainly potential for people to be placed wildly incorrectly for roles they didn’t play (i.e. my initial statement was not accurate). However, I am not reading anything suggesting that these roles are in any way influenced by your MMR or SR on other roles. If they were that would be unbelievably stupid and nonsensical and completely defeats the purpose of having separate SRs.
I’m saying in any case where they don’t have a direct quote from the devs that you should take anything they say with skepticism because they may have interpretted something differently than what someone merely mentioned in passing or in a discord chat. These aren’t professional journalists. Content creators like YO are known to say whatever is the flavor of the week from the forums and on reddit and it’s very easy to make assumptions and theories based on anecdotes and misunderstood data. There’s still a mind boggling number of people walking about here claiming the matchmaker is rigged to force a 50% win rate and constantly proclaim “proof” of misinterpreting old dev quotes and showing anecdotal evidence.
Oh, I know. Let me just lay out the following for you and tell me what you think.
You believe that if you are a returning player only who only ever played one role, that Blizzard will use some math and a developed system to try and place you accurately weighted on your role’s MMR and how people in that role at that rank. perform. However, if you are a post-role queue player who has 500 hours in a tank at a masters level and queue for, let’s say support, that even tho they have explicitly said they have a system to place players who have an established MMR in only one role, they don’t use it. Instead, we treat that role as basically a new account and they go into those placements raw.
Well, thank god for that. Look I’m not saying there aren’t bad content creators profiting off of youtube bait titles or whatever, but I think your general opinions and how you’ve applied them here are basically bad faith. I think YO, for example, has a pretty sterling record and is clearly analytically-minded.
A lot of these people, especially the ones I’ve cited,
Love this game
Have given their life to this game
Make it their mission to represent the community, inform the community, and increase comprehension of the game.
Have constant contact with pros and t500, and use that contact to echo them, challenge them, and make sure we’re all aware of what the top thinkers and movers are saying.
Are trusted enough by the devs to have discord with them, be invited to HQ, be interviewed and take questions by them, and generally make it a priority to interact with them.
Sorry Activision-Blizzard would prefer you find matches faster even if it continues the less quality trend. Ask people what time zone they are playing from and watch almost half will come from outside your time zone just to make you get into a match faster yet get hidden crap latency. Flex was the final nail in they don’t and won’t care about proper matching anymore for anything. Just throw them in the machine faster and faster is it.
So this depends a bit on what you mean by returning player. Based on the devs description, it would be my assumption that when they developed role queue, they duplicated your MMR across all three roles, and then for a few months prior to release, they adjusted it in the background based on your performance on each role. By the time role queue was officially introduced and went live, players would have a unique per-role MMR, but the accuracy of that MMR would depend very heavily on how much they played. So a one-trick top500 torb player like Fuey is probably going to have a top500 MMR for tank and support even though he’s never played them.
For new players (post-role queue), if someone starts the game and picks nothing other than torb for their lifetime and 500 hours later decides to play Mercy for the first time, then I admit I’m unsure what the initial seeding of the MMR on their support role would be. We do know that QP performance does seed initial competitive MMR, but I’m unaware of any evidence suggesting that once that MMR is established that it’s in any way influenced by your highest MMR. I have seen many players whose per-role SR differs by 2 ranks (e.g. masters DPS and then plat in tank/support, for example).
So for players who actually completely one trick, then perhaps there is some initial seeding, and I may be wrong there.
Perhaps it’s important to clear up a possible misunderstanding here. The post of yours I initially replied to said:
“the system heavily weighs your mmr against your highest mmr”
Are you talking about specifically players with zero play time on an entire role? Because my interpretation of this statement was that playing any role, regardless of play time, is weighted against your best role (e.g. that all three roles’ MMRs are in some way intertwined based on your best one).
Well I’ll respect your opinion here, but I’ll have to disagree on the idea of using them as a source for anything. Without a direct quote/statement from the devs, I cannot consider anything they say more than an opinion piece. Even the statements of top500 and even pro players are typically opinions. Those players have biases just like everyone else.
I’m not saying they’re not putting out fake information in bad faith, just that most of what they say is typically just opinion.
I will cede I could of been clearer here. Yes im talking about people with 0 or close to 0 playtime on roles outside of their main role.
I admit this next thing is entirely anecdotal, but it seems theres alot of dps mains who have never or almost never played tank and healer before. Players like that after all are a contributing factor, if not the majority factor, for flex que.
Well I can respect what I assume is rigorous vetting for the truth. Id only point out that there is a difference between s T500 giving an actual opinion about balance or how the game should be, which some poeple listen to and others dont, different convo, and then a person either reporting on the devs or building a case against something to give us insight where there is not alot of transparency. By all means, have a healthy degree of skepticsm. Thats probably good.
