It’s unlikely. RQ itself was final solution to Goats comp, which exposed rather obvious flaw - stacking up of any role creates unbalanced comps. Worst(for Blizzard) part was their inability to force meta shift in this case, as early attempts to make Goats invalid(Reaper buff, tank armor nerf) ended up in failure.
It was a definite solution to GOATS comps but also completely unnecessary. All the devs had to do was fix the roster and encourage players to play other roles without force
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It was doomed to fail, as roles are different - even queue times do not push that many DPS to choose other roles.
Protecting teammates or assisting them indirectly is boring for majority. Which is why OW2 will abandon classic “tank” concept in favor of brawler, with supports also possibly going through similar redesign to take them away from “carer” of the team.
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even world of warcraft which has only 1 tank 1 heals 3 DPS for dungeons still have long queue times if your dps. no one likes those roles heh. just the way it is
And having RQ itself was nearly unavoidable, as game design encourages stacking up roles.
2-2-2 is what you call “balanced” comp. It has no downsides, but no advantages either. Which quickly led to players shifting it in various directions, either towards increased sustain or towards increased damage.
I would take what you consider chaos anytime, because at least the matchmaking and the game was planned for that chaos. Can’t say the same to 2-2-2 even this day.
While the current QP Classic doesn’t work as supposed to work because the same 2-2-2 implementation.
The game had meaning, had purpose and worked on the chaos you quote. Because even on chaos there’s order.
Characters had more purpose than has now, even the game fitted better back them. Was way harder to folks learn about the game for sure and 2-2-2 helped a lot on that particular part.
At same time 2-2-2 was and still is the weakiest formation til date. While it’s more “stable” they didn’t changed the game enough to suit it well.
2-2-2 introduced less impactful learning curve, folks got more specialized on their own heroes/roles. That’s is positive if the game was built around it, which wasn’t.
Matchmaker doesn’t care about your main or your one trick. Heroes were conceptualized and built with another mindset. Roles were parameter/guide not enforced.
That’s why sombra, mei, zen, roadhog exists. Same goes for doom, bastion, torb, symmetra and soldier.
Those heroes doesn’t have purpose or proper fit on the game, 2-2-2 didn’t treated those unique characters by adapting them to the idea. Even more they don’t even knew what the idea was, because was done with the purpose of make OWL pleasant to watch.
Queue times, heroes placed where doesn’t belong, heroes don’t fitting well in any role, 32 characters but half to a third of them are really “usable” on most cases.
2-2-2 was a great concept for several reasons, but if you don’t plan it well you’re just messing with stuff you don’t know and even after 3 years later the system are still broken.
Like I said before, at least on 1-2-2 they’re trying to fix stuff that they should had done prior to implement 2-2-2. Maps, heroes and roles should had been addressed prior to 2-2-2 be a thing, they just slapped on their wrists and expected that things would work out, they were lazy to make functions work to the point they oversimplified roles and even didn’t actually “identified” what each role should do.
Just as exercise:
Go on playoverwatch.com read about the game, specially about roles. If you know at least half of the heroes you will know at least 1 that doesn’t fit at all their description of roles. I give you a hint, sombra it’s one of them with disabling abilities and healing abilities being suited to support.
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2-2-2 Saved the game. Those number drops are from OWL moving to YT and Xqc getting suspended and quitting OW alongside with other content creators to move onto better things. Without 2-2-2 those numbers would’ve been drastically lower and pretty much non-existent as the open queue format was already causing massive issues everyone was super tired of
Also what ruined the 2-2-2 role queue release a lot was Sigma’s release in a state that made him the best hero ever to exist in the history of OW and he single-handedly created and environment that was more frustrating for everyone than GOATS or any of the other comps ever were. Players would’ve preferred playing the double Genji+sym+double Zen+Tracer horrible meta from first seasons where half the team just merely existed barely doing anything while the 3 DPS players would be insanely broken and 3v6 the opponents. Even that garbage was more fun than the first iteration of double shields or Sigma to begin with. And it took them insanely long to even remotely balance him and he’s still the best tank in the game
In short: Balance devs are pretty much the one’s responsible for majority of the issues in the game and players quitting and them not understanding this and having big announcements about replacing the team entirely is quite absurd. If I were an investor this is something I’d demand and if it wasn’t something that’d happen, I’d pull out just for that alone
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That’s hysterical. The facts remain RQ killed the numbers.
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I don’t know of any aspect(s) of role-less queue mode that could reasonably be described as “chaos”
I dont of any aspect(s) of 222 that could reasonably be called “superior”
on the other hand, 222 does offer excessive wait times, no flex, huge amount of dev hours spent on bandaiding issues that could have gone into new content, and many other severe problems
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If you played and recall the game back at launch tanks were indeed brawlers and supports were dps-lite with support capabilities, plus mercy. There were a handful of problematic heroes in the beginning that eluded attention during the chaos of when the game was new. Fast forward six years and we got 11 over tuned new heroes and a few awful reworks, all of which powercrept the game significantly. RoleQ was never needed to get players to play tank and support because anyone with a brain knew tanks and supports were meant to secure eliminations on enemies too. You know what would have gotten more players playing support and tank? Adding more fun tanks and supports to the roster. And do you know what would have prevented comps like GOATS from happening? Adding actually balanced tanks and supports to the roster.
Unfortunately the devs added more barrier bot and heal bot heroes that contribute too much value effectively creating mandatory sub-roles. And guess what, MANDATORY SUBROLES are indeed a huge downside even to 2-2-2. Ana and all the supports after her were horribly unbalanced, and barriers with a million HP always trivialized the game so adding more tanks that revolve around barriers would naturally ruin things further.
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Role queue was bad. So was hero limits.
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It’s the fault of the devs for announcing they would be balancing for role lock.
Ah yes the consistent matchmaking of role lock that puts 3-4 different ranks on the same team. The so much better match quality where you get 2 garbage tanks or supports so your team just takes the loss cause there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Role lock did absolutely nothing to improve match quality, you just feel like it did cause seeing 2-2-2 comforts you.
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There are so many balancing problems that it is hard to even begin.
Sigma with his mobile shield that allows him to shoot at the same time (unlike another shield bearer who has to make an interesting choice - damage or shield). Baptiste and his lamp. The raid boss known as Brigitte. The frustration of insta-killers like Doomfist. The change to Roadhog to give him mobility WHILE using breather (before it was a serious risk for him to use it as he would become immobile).
Notice that what all of these have in common, is that they are post-release. Both the new characters, as well as changes that made other characters crazily frustrating to play against.
If the devs instead of developing 2-2-2 had instead pulled Brigitte and Sigma completely (only to be reintroduced completely reworked, to the level where they are new characters - if at all).
The devs f-ed up on so many levels that it staggers the mind to think about it. A simple thing to admit a mistake and rectifying it (by pulling certain heroes) could have done so, so much. Alone pulling Brigitte would have saved us from GOATS.
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Really?
Man you’re not thinking hard enough then
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NODDERS! I used to love Overwatch. But I took almost a year off from the game when role queue came out and I absolutely hate having to wait like 10-15 minutes to play dps and not be allowed to switch roles mid-game
I used to be a flex player, I would switch to whatever my team needed mid-round (tank, healer, whatever). but then the game said “NO, you have to pick one role and one role only per game” So now I only play DPS…
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Role Queue killed the game, you are 100% right. Anyone disagreeing is in a disillusioned world. It limited fun and creativity. The arguments are always the same whiny ones too. “5 DPS in a game” nope. Sorry, it wasn’t 5 DPS every game, maybe once every 90 games you’d encounter that. Everyone defaulted to 222 naturally or ended up doing 132 or 141. The game was fun in those compositions too.
It was rare to have games that were 5 DPS only, stop lying to yourselves lol.
Role Queue dumbed the game down and 5v5 is going to be doubling down on that, I hope you guys enjoy watching the game continue to die.
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The 2-2-0-2 or 2-0-2-2 or 2-1-1-2 were “natural order” to achieve. But without enforcing it. The problem became highlighted because they enforced it without preparing the game to “suit” the change. If they balanced the game to achieve 2-2-2 even on “open role” would be the “most usable” formation.
The game by itself was balanced by the “instability” of it and the freedom that generated by it. When you lock, limit or restrict if you don’t change the prior concepts of freedom you get the mess we currently have.
The 2-2-2 wasn’t exactly a bad idea, because the game fluctuated to that direction or at least was the “balance” of it, the fact of folks swaping between 3 tanks or 3 supports or 3 dps during the match reinforces that, 2-2-2 was stable but wasn’t the best suited for all scenarios.
An even better 2-2-2 would be by randomly select players to suit certain roles on the lobby on the first time, if that player doesn’t want it or just are underperforming he could communicate with his team about swapping role with someone else. Would be way better than current system already. Wouldn’t solve all problems but queue times wouldn’t be a thing. If they wanted to enforce it.
A simply “you got sorted to tank” you want to keep your choice or not? On assembly phase. That already would increase by a lot the quality of life of most folks, same could be said about underperforming players in certain role being able to swap if needed.
I can go even further, reinforcing that because they’re doing map reworks, hero reworks and role reworks to accomodate 1-2-2 which should be done when they even “conceptualized” 2-2-2. If they done that, 2-2-2 would be most common formation even if they didn’t created RQ.
It’s a team-oriented game based on objectives, if you can’t perform well on certain role and you think you should give up on that role you need the option to do so. Some matches you can’t do a thing others can in your place.
Open roles enabled that, even if most of the time had 3 on certain function. The entrophy of the mode eventually were aligned to fit or suit certain equilibrium towards 3 heroes on a particular role, one in one and 2 in another. The average always had some kind of equilibrium between the 4 roles(because we had 2 kinds of damage role). There was some oddball formations or overperforming builds but overall the game was often shifting with 3 players in a certain role, swapping between roles through the match.
It’s how the concept of overwatch was, but sometime along the road they just messed it up and ignored the core concept of it.
RQ, again, was great on concept for learning curve and stuff like that, but the execution was poorly done to the point of failing to fit the matchmaking, failling to attract players to play other roles, failling to correct their label system and diferentiate each role, failling to put heroes were they should be and even failling to give any proper balance or glimpse of it. Just made the character list being more inflated with half or more of them being undesireable to play most of the time.
RQ had potential to proper balance the game, to make each role desireable to play, to enable reworks to show the true potential of all heroes and make each hero being great on their own niche, creating individuality and space for each unique hero they conceptualized instead of transforming some heroes on generic ones and make them jack-all-trades.
not at all
I have had years to consider these things
I stand by what I said
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Imo Open Q balance has been a complete train wreck anyways.
But maybe it would have made more sense to ask for separate Open Q balance instead of whining about Role Q.
You would have my full support for that proposal.
I have 3000 hours on this game and never had more than 2 different ranks in one Role Q competitive lobby, so I call bs on this being an actual issue.
When it comes to QP you are of course getting people from all ranks mixed together, but that’s mostly due to no SR range limitation for groups and happens not only in Role Q but also in Open Q.
2 “garbage” teammates will end up in a loss in Open Q just as much as in Role Q, so I don’t really get your point here.
It is indeed comforting to know that all my teammates actually made it to their rank by playing the role they Q’d up for and weren’t pressured to fill for a role they don’t enjoy to play and/or heavily under-perform with.
Separate Role SR/MMR is a blessing for matchmaking quality.
Brig was a colossal f up, it really blows my mind how that hero was handled. Obviously beyond broken at launch and instead of axing the hero with nerfs they nerfed armor globally and reworked torb which still didn’t do much. Nerfed brig in small increments for over a year to finally get her to an acceptable place…still poses problems in high ranks just goes to show how awful her core design is. This is why I want hero bans. No not stupid blizzard picked hero pools, community picked hero bans before every match. It lets the community have a say in balance and put pressure on blizzard to fix certain heroes. If we had bans with brig launch she would have had a 99% ban rate and blizzard would be forced to get the hero under control or accept that the community has essentially deleted her from the game.
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