???
The problems role queue solved:
- Killed goats and the possibility of future hard metas that invalidate a whole role.
- Killed 4+ dps compositions happening in wood ELOs in QP and comp.
- One-tricks only need to compete with 1 other person instead of 5 other people for their hero.
The problems directly caused by role queue:
- Ridiculously long queue times
- Players who specialized in one role in classic OQ comp were placed in that same rank on all roles in RoleQueue. Causing players like high masters mercy mains to place in high masters for their dps role despite having the dps skill of a gold player. This disrupted Role Queue comp for many months until those players fell to their appropriate rank, ruining games.
- Greatly widened the SR difference allowed between players in the same comp game. Previously, the difference in SR was within 250 sr. Now gaps of 1000 sr are common.
- New players with only a few heroes under their belt became matched in the same games as veteran players. Prior to role queue long time players with a plat border would be placed in games of fellow veteran players with plat and gold borders, and maybe with a few silver borders. Any bronze portraits who made it into the game did so by grouping up with a high level player. Now anyone can appear in a game with anyone for the sake of queue times despite the vast difference in player experience.
- Both reasons above botched match quality and created more lopsided games.
- Team comp variety got nuked. Turns out forced 2-2-2 enforces players to play the most optimal comps if they want to win. Causing the most meta tank and support synergies in 2-2-2 to dominate that could have been dealt with using more chaotic compositions otherwise. Formerly, Orisa and Ball could excel as solo tanks, and triple tanking enabled two off tank players to play the heroes they want without sacrificing team damage or sustain.
- Players playing tank or support went from being able to play 30 heroes to just 7-8 heroes for the entire duration of a game. With zero means of swapping roles with another teammate, even between rounds.
- Players being hard countered became unable to swap off to a more useful hero in another role. Like a tank player getting farmed by tank busters but is locked into the role as an ult battery for the other team.
- Players became locked into a role prior to seeing the map they will be playing on.
- Players became locked into a role prior to seeing their own team, or the players on the other team.
- Fill players became extinct, and flexing became unfun and punishing due to the many reasons out of their control listed above. Why take a chance queuing for a role for a whole match that could make you miserable?
- With locked roles the game became more teammate dependent. It always was to an extent but role queue turned that dial up to 11. You can no longer take over a role another teammate is doing suboptimally, or even just swap off your role when a second tank/dps/support isn’t even necessary for the team.
- The game more actively filters players. Brand new players don’t want to be placed in games with veteran sweats and vice versa. Players don’t like stomps or toxic chat, but putting new players with veteran players will result in exactly that. No one likes teammate diff and losing because of it despite your own performance. So they quit. Bad matchmaking is why this game can’t retain a playerbase anymore, and the matchmaker gets worse because there are not enough players of the same skill queuing. It’s an endless feedback loop.
Secondary problems caused by role queue:
- Mandatory subroles. “Can we get a main healer?” “Can we get a barrier?” “Can we get a hitscan?”
- “Tank diff” “support diff” “dps diff”
- It exacerbates the smurf problem. Smurfs have always existed but when the game became more team dependent AND match making quality nosedived players took match quality into their own hands and smurfed to control the quality of their matches. Blizzard has no intention killing smurfing either because game sales are what is making money lately not lootbox sales.
- A flex pass system that bribes players to play other roles they don’t actually want to play, and the quality of their performance in their game often reflects that, affecting other teammates. These players don’t even need to win the match to be rewarded with priority passes.
- Forced crossplay with console players on PC in non-competitive modes, but the console players in those lobbies lose their aim assist negatively affecting their performance in those games. Crossplay was overdue, but enforcing it for PC players just to merge the dwindling playerbase to off set the unsustainable matchmaker is scummy.
- The game was already awfully unbalanced but the balance team jumped through hoops nerfing and powercreeping heroes in hilarious attempts to better suit them for the 2-2-2 format.
I can’t wrap my head around the players who defend role queue when plenty of BETTER ideas existed that could have solved the original three problems. 2-2-2 was never sustainable and no amount of new content could have saved it. Millions of classic and new players have been filtered by this matchmaker and it shows. If the devs just did their job and made more tanks and supports who were actually balanced then more players would have been playing them and pros wouldn’t be exploiting them.