Role Queue thoughts and yes, they aren't good

[DDW-21810]

After the role queue now being live for abit, here are the experiences i made and observed.
Firstly it should be noted that i can only speak to the EU server, i know the experience might be a different one for NA and/or Asia/OCE.
Secondly the ranks i cover are silver to diamond (below i don’t know and higher the problems aren’t as bad, even tho they aren’t non-existent either).
Thirdly it should be noted that it is about the Solo queue experience.

So lets start…
Role Queue, a guaranteed 2-2-2 , would sound good in theory, if the underlying problem they tried to solve wasn’t a problem mainly if not solely caused by Player behaviour and Role Queue actually makes the impact of this / similar behaviour alot worse.
So far in 2-2-2 the queue times for DPS are as expected abhorrently high, which leads many dps players to queue as different role and play like a dps in the support / tank role.
Which from my observation and experience led to an enormous increase in people on Tank / Support not doing what their role is supposed to do (or god forbid switch to counter something), but simply kill-chasing.
I have never in my many hours Overwatch have seen so many games where teams didn’t have a shield on defense and/or a -main- healer.
When you play the main tank and have to switch after 2 mins because you simply got no healing, and you go road, pump 3 times and see gold healing was under 900… just fun times.(and yes that actually happened)
I’ve had it many times in the past that a genji player switched roles with a healer when genji wasn’t working, ( yes there are genji players who switch off…)
Which now is impossible and the player is forced to either stick with genji or play a hero he doesn’t want to / can’t play. (i use genji as an example here but it goes for all heroes with unique playstyles) (There should be an option to switch if the 2 people agree to switch roles, or at least an option to switch within a group - as long as 2-2-2 is maintained)
Another pretty bad situation is that now you cannot see if people are in a group. I’ve had about 10+ games so far where either myself and/or others were wondering about the lack of healing and finally asked…
and the main healer was grouped every time with a tank/dps.Which neither the second healer or anyone else knew beforehand , or we probably would have maybe expected pocket healing instead of good team play and adjusted our hero choices accordingly.
Overall from what i’ve seen so far Role Queue didn’t fix anything besides people complaining about “more than 2 dps” (which was as said before a behaviour problem , not a game problem) and introduced a bunch of new problems and limitations that negatively impact the game play and fun.
The worst of it all , if someone on your team leaves, you cannot switch to maybe adjust to win with 5 or even 4 (yes, I’ve had games where we won with 4/5 or lost against) … a leaver now means you lost pretty much 99% of the time.
They keep trying to “fix” bad player behaviour in game by meaningless methods… Endorsements didn’t work so well to fix disruptive play behaviour ,(the people who care about their endorsement level tend to be the people who already played for the team before, and the “ego” players just don’t care about the endorsements and you endorse the healers mostly anyways) but at least they didn’t impact the game play like the enforced role-lock now does.

For me and from the discussions i had with other players, role queue is an abysmal failure that should be removed asap. Yes there are some who so far think it gives them a better experience, but most had to admit that they now see alot more dps-like behaviour from tanks and support roles that impact the games negatively.

The truly better way would be way more avoid slots.I would way rather wait 10 minutes in a queue longer and be more sure i don’t get paired with people who don’t play for the team , than get a quicker matchmaking but also a higher chance to get the same people again because the avoid list is full. (3 slots might be sufficient for people who play 5 hours a week, but when you play alot, you really see alot of people you would rather never see again. (also it would be nice if blizzard wouldn’t remove people from your block list - idk if it has a size limit or an age limit, but if i block someone i want them blocked forever)

In the “Role Queue update” post the dev speaks about “so much positive feedback”, maybe i visit the wrong places , or people send blizzard praising e-mails, but 80% of reactions , be it by streamers on stream , on reddit , or even here in the forum seems to be more or less negativ.

Another very good - more technical in detail - post about why the role queue is not very good was writen by Jonesy - HERE

[AngelRoar-2857]

I just want to say before I start, everything I’m saying right now is for Diamond and Master /!\

Which from my observation and experience led to an enormous increase in people on Tank / Support not doing what their role is supposed to do (or god forbid switch to counter something), but simply kill-chasing.

That is very true and I would add, that’s also why we’ve seen an increase in Moira and Zen players though these two characters aren’t really in a good spot right now. They take those picks because of the DPS potential they have.

I don’t even count how many times I’ve had gold healing as Ana or Mercy when we had a Moira in our team. I can’t go full off-heal because my team wouldn’t get nearly enough heal but having 2 main healers (even though Mercy is more an inbetween) is never really that good except for Ana/Bapt comps.

I have never in my many hours Overwatch have seen so many games where teams didn’t have a shield on defense and/or a -main- healer.

Also very true. We all knew that there aren’t many main tanks and before you could just go 3 DPS and the issue would be avoided. Now that you HAVE to have 2 tanks, if neither of your tanks can play a main tank, they’ll either go 2 off and you’ll have a very hard time playing or one of them will make the sacrifice and it’ll still be very hard to play because they won’t know what they’re doing - and I’m not shaming those people for it it’s just the reality. I’ve found that to be less of a problem with healers because most people can play Moira for example but I really hate have Mercy/Zen if we don’t dive because there is just NO HEALING and that’s a pain.

I’ve had it many times in the past that a genji player switched roles with a healer when genji wasn’t working, ( yes there are genji players who switch off…)

I also agree with that. I’ve never had too much problem with people doing poorly and nobody doing anything in the team. Usually they’d switch or exchange a role or the whole team would accomodate to that bad player. Now it’s just mostly impossible to do.

Another pretty bad situation is that now you cannot see if people are in a group. I’ve had about 10+ games so far where either myself and/or others were wondering about the lack of healing and finally asked…

That too. No being able to see who is in group is much more of a pain that I’d have thought. But reality is, I’ve had games against 4 or 5 stacks and not even a duo in my game (after asking of course).

The worst of it all , if someone on your team leaves, you cannot switch to maybe adjust to win with 5 or even 4 (yes, I’ve had games where we won with 4/5 or lost against) … a leaver now means you lost pretty much 99% of the time.

I’d say that depends on who leaves. If one of the DPS leaves it’s still pretty much winnable (depending on how the games going of course) but if you lose your main tank and you off can’t fill that role or lose the main heal then yeah that’s pretty much a waste of time.

Endorsements didn’t work so well to fix disruptive play behaviour

Uhm I’d say it did not work at all. I didn’t see a single change since this was introduced in the game.

(There should be an option to switch if the 2 people agree to switch roles, or at least an option to switch within a group - as long as 2-2-2 is maintained)

That however I strongly disagree with.

This is the best way to queue for tank or healer and threaten to throw if one of the dps doesn’t change. That would really be a bad idea and I can’t see any way of that working even just decently.

The truly better way would be way more avoid slots

i don’t see how that could work.

Also something that you haven’t talked about is how this change encourages soloQ more than duo or groupQ.

What I mean by that is, whether it is me or my friends playing, if we group up and even if we play Tank and Heal it will take MUCH MORE time to find a game than if we’re alone.

If we soloQ it’ll take less than 2 minutes to find a game as Tank or Healer but if we group up Tank/heal it will take about 6/7 minutes to find a game.

If we duoQ DPS (yes we do that sometimes just to have fun don’t judge as main healer and main tank it is our way to relieve frustration x) ) then we wait for about 18 minutes to get thrown into a game that’s about 400 SR less than we are. Idk why, but in a week we’ve only had 1 game that was at our SR, and we played about 30 games as duo dps. SO YEAH fun times.

And when we tried to play trio (1 tank 1 heal 1 dps) well it also took us about 15 minutes to find a game and most of the time it’s also a very not balanced game.

So yeah the matchmaking seems to be having a lot of trouble finding games if you are in a group and that’s kinda bad in a teambased game.