This is by no means a new topic but I feel that with the advent of 6v6 open queue and how popular it is (at least from what the streamers are playing) I think it’s worth discussion.
The idea is simple, in your profile you can set what role you would most prefer playing and a second one to flex to. Then an icon can show what your preference is in the hero select. That way you don’t have to spend the first half of the match learning that your tank is a sup who flexes to dps meanwhile you locked dps but could of flexed to tank, make sense?
It’s not like this is a completely new concept to the game either. way back in the day you could set your character preference and people could view what character you wanted to play but with a more general role preference, this system would be a lot less likely to cause harassment.
It would also greatly improve the quality of matches for players as, again, you don’t have to spend half the game finding out who mains what and who should swap to what role. It also would also make climbing more consistent as a team who may be better but just are on the wrong roles could easily lose to a team that is worse but essentially got lucky.
Feel free to tell me your thoughts or just comment so the devs can see this!
as an overwatch 1 openque only player, i can tell you one thing, people that can play atleast 2 heros of every role, will climb, everyone else whos not already t500 (most of them can play way more heros then that) will be stuck.
Either flex your way up and wait for your team to pick and fill, or instalock whatever you can play best. no one in openque will care what you prefer tbh, mayority of the playerbase is below diamond no one will care what you have in your profile/icon to decide what they wanna play.
everyone else who doesnt wanna deal with that will prefer roleque anyways.
i like 6v6 way more then 5v5, havent played 5v5 since 6v6 is available just because tanks can die and give ult charge. overall a better experience imo.
its not just about what skills a player has, its also about enjoyment of the game. Sure someone might be proficient and able to climb playing 2 characters of each role but if they personally don’t like playing a certain role, they wouldn’t have to as often if they can easily see that another player would rather be filling that role. maybe they just filled first playing what they thought would be the least wanted role.
Also, I would care about people’s preferences and I think you’d be hard pressed to find that there are no other players like me.
I main and prefer support role, but if I go open, I wanna play dps. End of story.
I guess why not but its not going to solve one of the oldest issues in oq. One tricking. Sure you can see it from the start now, but its not going to make getting 4 mercy mains feel or play any better.
I would like a system like that, sux when you are in the mood to go support but you get 2 or 3 teammates insta-locking it so you need to go Tank or DPS to help out more. A preferred role to balance things when they make the teams would be nice, but it being open queue you can of course swap things up as needed.
How is that a problem with open queue over role queue?
True that you’ll 1T in both but the consequence is more pronounced in open queue.
Like in the other example, if you have 2 mercy mains in rq, at least they still know the fundamentals of support. But if you need them to play dps or tank and there’s multiple of them in oq, game over.
I want this “role preference” as well during hero select, perhaps next to your icon that everyone can see.
Because I’ve had games where there was a tank player who clearly was the best tank player in the lobby playing DPS/support for some reason. On attack, we didn’t get very far because I was forced to play tank.
On defence, I switched roles with my support and we almost won the game. It certainly went much better than attack.
I think the hardest part in open queue is figuring out who is best at which role in any given lobby.
im guessing lol players enjoy that system since they obviously love their own game a lot, but m.r manages to work fine with oq as yes people will insta lock 5 dps with 1 healer complaining but by the 1st team fight loss many will swap cause people like winning.
unless you play rocket racoon, cause hes the only healer who can heal 5 dps whether theyre frontlining or diving the backline.
This definitely needs to be a feature for OQ! It just makes so much more sense to have this type of info that a player can program into their public profile.
Along with it they could adjust the profiles themselves. Hide what you want but keep certain info displayed like this even if you have private profiles set up.
It’s funny you bring this up because I was just thinking about this just yesterday about how it would be so much easier to communicate at a glance what you’d prefer to play on the hero select screen based on what you chose as preference if they move forward with OQ for 6v6 (without fully locking you into a role). They wouldn’t even have to change much since we already have a UI that lets us select in RQ one, two, or all roles. Maybe it could be a bit more detailed of like preference 1, pref 2, or flex.
From there, maybe, just maybe, the matchmaker could take into account trying to prioritize at least one of each role per team per game which would allow the matchmaker to match similar MMR to the selected roles like how we have currently in RQ. For the (say) Masters and above, if the queue time goes over a threshold of searching and it cannot find enough of those missing role preferred players (maybe after 3-5 mins), it could open the floor to anyone at that MMR range queueing to pull together games more quickly. Hopefully it would create a balance of both worlds with some form of structure? Otherwise, I definitely feel like the matchmaker is queueing wildly random people into games of mismatching MMR to the role they’ve selected.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think queue times have ever been atrocious for lower ranks in RQ, it’s mainly the higher up you go that have astronomical queue times. I dunno, just more suggestions I wanted to throw out, but do agree role preference could be helpful.
I think it works better for m.r. because their oq is balanced to be completely open but with ow 6v6, there can only be 2 tanks max (and if you wanna win 2 sup min) and so it’s a lot harder to coordinate role swaps, especially if you take into account how close or far someone is to ult.
You can win with 2 tanks and 4 supports in this 6v6 oq mode.
In fact it’s a very strong comp. So much sustain, and most supports can dish out the damage required to net kills.
Just an example in one game i had the other day. My team went 2 2 2 and got roled in round 1.
Enemy had 4 supports.
We traded a dps for a third support, and it was a hard fought battle but won in the end.
And it’s easier to tank when you have 3-4 supports. You don’t have to be a full tank main to do well in that comp. So if half your team are support mains, that’s okay. You can adapt and make do.