I saw in your recent interview about role queue you talked about the calculations in regard to additional waiting time
I think in my mind I imagine a future where there are multiple competitive queues to join, I think it could be really great to give the player an estimated queue time for each based on current players/queues/games in progress etc.
I think this would work really well, since it’s what the players want but also you want to give the players as much information regarding their choice as possible
Personally I think it should lock 2-2-2, and have the player set to preferences prior to queuing. Not a hard set explicit role queue, but say something like, “My first choice right now is DPS, but I’d rather play a round as Tank than not play, and I guess I can pay Support if I have to”
Maybe add one veto option where you can specifically say “I would love to play support, I’ll play Tank if I have to, don’t ever put me on DPS.”
That would let people remove a role they really don’t want to play, but would keep the queue times for damage players sane.
Lock people into their role at the start of the match and swap roles around, if needed, when playing the mirror match.
Allow a “swap role” feature on hero select where someone can offer it request to swap to a different role.
Maybe even allow role swap mid match by allowing a player to request a role swap while they’re respawning, then if someone accepts swapping with them, they will both be locked to the other’s role next time they die or go to hero select. (I know this would not be simple to implement, especially not in a user friendly way, and could potentially be advised if additional restrictions are not put into place, but could be worth fleshing out a proof of concept it something?)
Sorry this is off topic but I don’t know where else to go and every time I suggest something, it gets buried really fast.
For this year’s Chinese New Year, we didn’t get the Pig spray like we did for the dog and rooster. Is there a reason for this? And can you add it? Thanks.
Yes, the entirety of Overwatch has been developed by the live ops producer, and continues to be. He does everything by himself, the others are unnecessary, they just sit around doing crayon drawings. /s
The bottom line is, there is no best solution Jeff. If there was, it would’ve been easy and implemented in some other game ages ago. You’re taking an eternity to make a decision and roll with it, meanwhile your game is quickly becoming a memory.
I will say this though, I bet if you check your data, the players who primarily play tank or healer basically always default to tank or healer. I bet if you introduced a system that ran a flow chart of dumping tanks and healers into games first (at least one of each), matchmaking would go a lot smoother for most people. Sure, you’d still have many games where x6 DPS players are stuck together, but the total population would be happier on average.
Depends how it’s implemented. I could imagine a system where it swaps people’s roles in the match, or has the DPS player run Tank for a match, but saves a spot for them in another game while both are ending and swaps them over to the available DPS slot.
Right now I guess sure people can play any role whenever they want, and that’s good, but it’s often to the detriment of the rest of the team’s experience, which is bad.
With this, without locked roles, could come loads of boosting strats? For example if a master dps and a master support play together. They also have a low sr rating for each other’s roles too (e.g. master support = gold dps) and switching roles causes these two players to play at a master level against gold players. This has been seen in other games too, such as League of Legends.
How about making a player selecting a pool of heroes before they queue. For example you select 2 DPS, 2 Healers, and 2 Tanks as your characters. Your first 2 will be your priority role, i.e. your role queue, and the other two will be the characters you can swap in the fight. Once the match starts the systems insta-locks the first character you pick. So you have a 2/2/2 from the get go but you can swap between the other heroes.
I am thinking more of a hero queue than a role queue, because realistically, that’s what more players are. For example I am support main but if you ever put me on Brig or Mercy, I might as well throw.
Since we know that DPS is by far the most popular role, why not have the matchmaker match 2/2/2 teams until tanks and healers are depleted from the queue, then match up 6dps teams to take care of the overflow.
This will maintain short queue times while keeping the playing field mostly fair for everyone.
That makes perfect sense. The game is all about switching to counter the enemy team.
There are many games where people will not switch to what hero is needed and I, who happens to play Support and Tank more often then not, might switch to a DPS that is needed or if I am support, will switch to Tank. And more often then not, there is at least one other cooperative person on the team and will switch to fill that hole I created.
I like the idea of Role Queue but I do not really like having to limit the person. When I use Looking for Groups, I actually like when roles are not enforced because it lets us all be flexible and we can select people who want to play a particular role.
I think the Looking for Group is kind of in the right spot. However, sometimes it is difficult because you as a solo player will be put in a group of 5 other random people. Then the matchmaker will matchmake you with another group of 6, however they could be a fully coordinated team who have played with each other countless times.
Not sure how you would go about distinguishing a group of friends to a group of randoms. But I think that is the only issue with the Looking for Group Feature.
I thank you for all the work you have done. You will most likely not read this as I know you are a busy person but I thank you again.
Man it makes me happy to start seeing these “If we did X” posts about role queue. T minus 6 months to feature added? Seems to be that way when other things get talked about in this way
How would multiple types of competitive effect queue times. For example, if you had the current comp queue, a role based queue, and a six-stack only queue?
![:smiley:](https://d74zh8edaijub.cloudfront.net/en/overwatch/images/emoji/twitter/smiley.png?v=6" ":smiley:")