The reality is that overwatch has been on the downfall ever since they introduced role lock. They have never recovered player numbers since that change and it has introduced many problems to the game, OW2 introduced more problems with 5v5.
Let’s look at the state of competitive right now. Queue times were a big problem since the start of role lock and they remained a problem in OW2. Because of this they decided to hide everyone rank and strip down all barriers of matchmaking so all competitive games are a mix of bronze through top 500 players but ya get fast queues. It’s not a ranked system anymore, they’re just trying to make you believe it is with rank icons.
Seeing as the +extra BP xp is commonly happening for both support and tank now, I think it’s safe to say BOTH tank and support now have a shortage of players. People don’t want to play support cause there’s so much open room for flanks and people don’t want to play tank because they are the most harassed role in the game and blamed for every loss.
What’s the solution?? Here are our options:
Leave everything as is. Short competitive queue times for a mode that’s not actually competitive in any way at all. QP+ under the illusion of a competitive system.
Reintroduce competitive matchmaking under 5v5 and have 20-30 minute dps queue times, 1 minute supports queues, and 1 minute tank queues.
Revert to 6v6 role lock, 10-15 minute dps queues, 3-7 minute support queues, 1 minute tank queues.
Revert to Open Queue 6v6, short queue times for everyone and competitive matchmaking that’s able to get everyone on a team even closer in SR than role lock. (notice how common one sided matches only happened after role lock).
The reality is option 4 is just the best choice for everyone. I get not everyone liked Open Queue, but there’s a reason overwatch was thriving under it and has never been as popular since. Open queue allowed for so much player/team creativity and allowed smart solo queue players to switch to the win condition… it gave us another element of individual impact that was lost with role queue.
It’s really sad to see such a great game continue to fall lower year after year all because the devs can’t see they had it right the first time. Look at your player numbers over the years blizzard. I know it, you know it, it’s right there. Open queue 6v6 would make overwatch thrive again with millions of concurrent players.
option 4 is a bad option because when it arbitrarily puts people together you can end up with 5 people who main support at their SR but play dps or tank (in reality it would only be tanks since nobody plays dps in 6v6 even in OW1) which made matches even worse back then. It was horrible to go in and have 5 support mains and only 1 person who is a proper tank at that SR. Instant loss. Same with everyone who tanks vs supporting (once again nobody played dps).
The best option is [2] because dps can learn to tank or learn to support. Problem solved. They CHOOSE to play a role with such a high queue time that is their choice
It would also help if people didn’t incorrectly believe that things like RQ or 5v5 helped the game. If it helped the game at all then we’d have more people playing and 0 queue time issues because everyone would just mindlessly have agreed that these 2 horrible decisions were the right ones to make. If this were the case, then 95% of the game’s issues wouldn’t be here but they are.
5v5 has this special thing where it ensures heroes can only really be nerfed and never really buffed, not without severe game-breaking consequences as evidenced already by recent attempts.
while I personally vastly prefer 6v6 over 5v5, reverting OW2 to 6v6 would not address many of the more serious issues with this game, such as the game being pay to win
The system could be adjusted to take role mains into account when matchmaking, just more lenient than role lock. Like I said, there’s a reason open queue had millions of concurrent players and role lock has thousands. Most of a players skill in overwatch comes from game sense which transfers across all roles, and people are good with HEROES not ROLES. That’s why open queue just worked a lot better.
I’m a tank main but I play dive tanks at a much higher skill level than low mobility tanks. If you’re to take anyones skill level, chances are they play at a high skill level with a handful of heroes across all roles and nobody plays an entire role at the same skill level.
Your main reason for thinking option 4 is bad is because of situations that result in
so here’s a list of things that happen in role queue that lead to an instant loss
Bad tank
Bad supports
Bad dps
Role lock did not give us any less instant loss situations, it arguably gave us more. Having bad tanks or supports is a massive disadvantage. In open queue you could switch to cover the lack of tanking or supporting or dps, in role lock, there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
Role lock just makes people feel better, it’s an illusion of safety, but it does absolutely nothing to better match quality. A team with 6 dps mains is more winnable than a role lock team with useless tanks.
all those problems you describe to role lock are even worse in open queue
theres a reason ow1 died so fast, open queue is toxic to the max and matchmaking for it is way worse, open queue now is super toxic way worse than role
do you really honestly think that in some universe open queue is way better and more popular yet blizzard is intentionally ignoring it to focus on something way less popular and way less liked to the detriment of the money they make? ive played since beta, open queue has always been vastly worse than role and it will always be way worse because there are way more problems that cant be solved.
I’d be willing to try a 5v5 OQ mode with a one tank role limit, assuming that mode had much better matchmaking than current 5v5 RQ allows. But tanking feels better to me, now that having to try and balance around other tanks existing is not a concern, and I don’t want to go back to multi-tanks both as a tank and as a support.
