I would prefer to have separate solo queue ranks and Team ranks. HOTS has this, and I think it’s appropriate. You would have semi-permanent teams that you can join (maybe you can be part of a couple teams) and the team itself would gain or lose SR instead of it affecting solo queue SR. There would be several benefits to the solo queue side:
- No more 6 stack derankers
- No more reason to derank to “play with friends”
- No more duo queue boosting (for free or money)
It would make LFG for competitive invalid, so that’s a negative.
On the team rank side:
- Your Solo Queue SR wouldn’t matter
- You could be on a team with anyone you wanted
- The team would do placements and gain or lose SR based on how they performed as a team
- You could queue as 2, 3, 4, or 6 stacks (no solo queue means no 5-stacks)
You could still enforce 2-2-2, but maybe have a tag in/out mechanism where two players in spawn could trade roles? Not sure on that one, haven’t thought about it much.
I wrote this in a reply to another post, but figured it deserved its own topic.
Edit: I think the best strategy for Team Queue would be to start with it being 6-stack only. If you started with 6-stack Team Queue, you wouldn’t have to ban groups from the regular competitive mode right away. Next step might be to prevent 6-stacks from queueing in Competitive, and keep working it down to see what the impact is gradually.
I think there might not be enough players on at the same time to make this work without having your q date and time emailed to you.
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Anybody remember when they made mandatory groups of 3 in order to play comp 3v3? I sat in a queue for 1.5 hours while watching TV before it was finally time for bed and still didn’t find a game. And that’s just 3 people not 6.
While I don’t think this is a bad idea, I also don’t think it’s something they can dedicate the time to right now logistically.
I would love to have something akin to this implemented, but I think it would divide the playerbase even further and completely ruin queue times. The queue times at both extremes (Bronze and GM) would be incredibly high due to people joining groups with friends that average lower SRs.
Sadly, we don’t have a good enough idea of how many people are playing Overwatch, and specifically how many are playing competitive, since Blizzard likes to keep their numbers under lock-and-key. I would asssume that the majority of the playerbase exists in Arcade, considering how often Jeff says things like Mystery Heroes are by far their most popular gamemodes, but as to whether or not it’s a plurality or majority is yet to be discovered.
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This is probably true. Probably earliest middle of next year, though the good news is that this would not impact OWL, so we wouldn’t have to time it with that.
Yes, I’m sure this will be the main reason not to do it. Though, I wonder if it could be a PC only feature, and only in regions with sufficient population? Not sure. I’m pretty lucky right now to be in the most populous region and rank, so queue times are really short for me.
I wonder if they could introduce it as 6-stack only so that you don’t have to wait for anything except for an opposing team instead of mixing and matching group sizes… Plus, the way I envision it is that your team would have a single MMR / SR, instead of trying to figure out some average value across all the individual ratings…
Plus, they could allow MMR / SR to move significantly faster for full stack groups since you don’t have to protect against a random person on your team causing you to lose or win unfairly. If you win, it’s because your team worked better together than the other team, and vice versa…
Talking through it, I like limiting it to full stack… It keeps things simpler.
I agree this is a HUGE problem for solo q’ers.
Right now the easy simple solution for Blizz is to not show who is grouped so now you never know how many players on the enemy team are a stack. As far as we know you could be in a team of all solo players, maybe some mics maybe some dont, all playing against an organized 6 stack.
Now more than ever (now that we cant switch roles to counter) a stack is needed to rank up. Solo queuing is at a bid disadvantage and nobody really seems to care.
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I honestly wish groups didn’t get forced to play groups. Learning to play as a team in a 6 stack would help so many people in solo queue. Almost all top 500 vods show mechanically gifted people playing strats that a normal player would get destroyed doing. Solo players that are not that mechanically gifted copy these strats and make it harder to win as a team.
Honestly, especially pre-role-queue, I hated being on a team that wasn’t all solo queue. 6 solo vs 6 solo were the most consistently fair and evenly matched games. After Role Queue, it’s much harder to know who’s in a stack. Often, the voice chat banter makes it pretty obvious that some people are grouped.
It’s also obvious when I get someone that is 1 rank above and 1 rank below in the same game that they’re grouped up…
The 1 rank up person almost never carries hard enough to overcome the 1 rank below player.
If they don’t implement Team Queue, then I’d like to see the maximum grouping SR range shrunk down to 500, just like LFG Comp search. (+250/-250) In fact, it’d be nice if it was literally +/- 250 of the group leader, so someone has to start the group in the middle, and can bring in a higher and a lower…
1000 SR range is far too much for grouping with / against solo queue people.
Three two stacks against a six stack would still be ridiculous.
Yes, the current system tries not to create this type of match. I’ve edited my post to add that I currently think Team Queue being 6-stack only would be a viable option. It would simplify things quite a bit by not having to compensate for multiple groups on the same team, etc. When your team wins, the team gains SR… Maybe they wouldn’t even need MMR for Team Queue, just match on SR.