Ok I can understand the need for role lock in competitive but in quick play its an absolutely terrible idea. If its meant to simulate competitive it should have queue not lock that way you select what you want before the game even starts. Although this would give dps mains a atrocious queue time. And this is due to the fact that loading times can basically decide what you’re going to play for an entire game.
I’ll be honest I basically only play on quick play and it was meant to be a more for fun thing to mess around in. Where the 6 dps meta ruled supreme and people were there just to play who they wanted, and obviously this lead to some disastrous games that were awful but it didn’t matter because you would just move onto the next and forget about it. It only affected you as much as you let it.
Though now people can be locked into roles that they wouldn’t want to play and may very well suck at. I’m personally a tank main because I couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, but with this I could be locked into playing has a dps for the entirety of the game completely throwing it because I’m no good at it. When that is blown up to the big picture and there’s tons of people playing terribly because of they don’t know any better it will just make the game more prone to toxic behavior. This also limits role changes after the game starts as well preventing people from swapping roles. The only way people can change roles is if one of the tank or support players left the game, and If people do leave the back fillers can only select the leavers role they don’t even get a chance to get their favorite hero. Stuff like this is just encouraging people to just leave games whenever they don’t get their role not encouraging them to learn new roles.
This also just simply limits creativity. I’ve experienced games where the closest thing to a healer was soldier 76 or games where everyone going healer and such which although commonly did not always lead to an instant lose and sometimes actually won.
Has the saying goes. It’s quick play. But it seems like its just being used has a pointless version of comp. Which is exactly what it isn’t. The role queue was a solution to the goats meta which is rarely even used in a quick play game. Sure it resolves the games where no one plays tanks or healers but that was part of the experience of quick play. Role lock is a solution to a non existent problem that only creates more problems in quick play.
Personally I would rather deal with games with 5 dps and I’m the only tank than deal with the variety of other problems that emerge from role lock. Quick play is meant to be a no big deal way of playing you don’t have to care how you’re preforming you shouldn’t care how your teammates are performing. Its meant to be a lets have fun and just do what we have fun doing not this.
The best solution I could say for this is to either remove role lock or add a permanent game mode in arcade that is classic quick play or make no limits a permanent game mode in the arcade.
Tl;dr- This is was a terrible idea fundamentally (for quick play). The solution to resolving this is either to remove it or add a permanent arcade game mode of no limits or classic quick play.