Role queue SAVED the game

General Discussion
1

Y’all have no idea how close this game was to dying before role lock came along.

Pre-role queue:

Most matches put you between a rock and a hard place of either playing a role you didn’t want and having a chance at winning, or play what you want and resign yourself to a 5-6 DPS team that will get steamrolled. The meta may have been GOATS at the time, but that didn’t make tanking or healing any more appealing on ladder or in quick play.

Most players were unwilling to flex anymore, because they were sick of never getting to play what they wanted.

Support and tank mains were quitting the role left and right, because they were sick of solo-tanking and solo-healing - it was stressful af, and severely limited their hero pools to a stale handful of heroes that could even attempt the task.

Match setup was a fustercluck of arguing over “who gets stuck babysitting”, since even the tank and healer mains didn’t want to tank or heal anymore.

You’d get lots of games that were a complete waste of time, because it was not uncommon to get a horrible team comp that lost the match at hero select. Try winning a match with 5 dps and 1 off-tank, I dare you.

In the dark days leading up to role lock, the quality of matches in Overwatch were rapidly degenerating from “frustrating” to “why the hell would anyone play this trash game”.

With role queue garunteeing that no one would ever be stuck solo-tanking or solo-healing again, the game recovered a notable amount of it’s remaining tank and healer mains from the dark side of “screw babysitting, I’m playing dps”.

I’m not trying to claim that everything is fine.

But if 2-2-2 hadn’t come along, Overwatch would be a dead game right now.

Asking for it to be removed is like asking someone with a serious heart condition to remove their pacemaker.

131 Likes
2

No.

I liked role queue when it first came out but now I’m more annoyed by it.

Know why? Because I get people who have absolutely no clue how to play characters. In the past I could switch to take care of widowmaker, pharah or any other character that was pissing me off. Now? I can’t switch. I have to rely on people who seem to be drooling on their keyboards.

43 Likes
3

That’s not role queue’s fault, it’s Blizzard’s fault for not providing any in-game explanation to how Overwatch is supposed to be played.

27 Likes
4

pretty sure the only thing that saved it was the fact that you got a lootbox for just completing the match and not winning it, and then it dropped a bit when people found out event boxes don’t count.

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5

Hate it, never use it.

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6

People don’t want their precious tanks or supports nerfed, but the days before role queue exemplified how much more powerful they were when stacked and played correctly.

Goats was an actual abomination to game design.

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7

If a system is open to exploitation it’s flawed.

Before role queue, anyone could ruin a game swapping his role midgame. A bad swap happened more often than a helpful one. The previous system didn’t reward creativity, it rewarded selfish and disruptive gameplay.

Role queue solved this problem. It took them very long to implement it. If they somehow fixed the waiting times, the role queue would have nearly nothing negative.

27 Likes
8

This was the concern of things, due to the uniqueness of this game’s shooting mechanics on individual heroes and other mechanics, it’s not possible for people to play double digit heroes on the highest lvl they can.

The team used to be able to cover this but now the match is way way more decided in the beginning partically because of the hero pool, and partically due to the inability to swap between roles, furthering the helplessness and diminishing the value of individual player even less. AND we also have longer queue time adding on that.

2 Likes
9

I never liked it because I was a flex player and I already knew it was gonna be bad. Because at the end of the day teammates that don’t know how to play or both to cooperate still makes it feel bad reguard less of 2-2-2 or not. We all know we got 2-2-2 cuz GOATS couldn’t be taken down.

3 Likes
10

it “saved” it…and instantly “killed” the game for many as well…im actually curious as to the ratio…but we’ll never know

11 Likes
11

I mean, it’s the sole reason I made it to Platinum. It’s also increased the quality of fair matches on average for me. I’d have to agree, at least, from my personal experiences.

5 Likes
12

Yep, I was flexing as well before role queue except on this account, where I was strictly one tricking torb.

1 Like
13

It just delayed the decline by a bit

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14

The game would be relatively in the same spot for me and people would be complaining about something else. This is like a pseudo dead game post tbh.

1 Like
15

“I didn’t like the game back then so I’m going to assume no one did”
Not a super solid argument going on over there…

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16

Role queue is what brought me back to OW and I’m so happy they introduced it. It can’t cure stupidity, but it stops almost every single person only picking dps.

7 Likes
17

In my personal experience it has made bronze worse. Something that was suppose to make things better made thing 1000 times worse. That’s why I say they need to remove bronze all together,

18

I barely play Overwatch now because the game really depends on your tanks being good and playing Orisa/Sigma or have to be very coordinated to use Dive.

2 Likes
19

Next step is bans, then this! Guild/Clan/Syndicate system

20

This is a typical mentality where no one blames themselves and it’s always someone else’s fault…
I also remember pre role lock and not a SINGLE dps would ever go you can’t heal and swap to a 3rd 4th and 5/6th healer.
It was always more dps because that role caters to the single player mentality.
So the people left on tank and heals after people finger pointed at the dps resulting in one less tank, then one less healer then a guess screw it let’s play call of duty.
Tanks and healers rely more heavily on teamwork than dps does to do their jobs, also not saying dps is easy because it’s my worst of the three roles due to the mechanics it requires.

In saying all of this though…2-2-2 did bring some issues with it as well that I wasn’t exactly thrilled about but there was more positive in my opinion than negative so it was at least an improvement.

15 Likes