It isn’t really surprising. Healing is one of the least popular roles in any type of game. They need to add more incentive like keeping it at +500 XP for every single game you queue as support.
In which care, you should expect the queue times to start bad and stay stable.
Except in this case, queues are getting worse and worse.
So it isn’t JUST that supports are least popular. You are taking the least popular role, and then pushing people out of it.
If each role lost 10% of it’s players, you would expect the ratio of wait times between roles to remain the same. But the ratios are increasing, so we are losing support players at a higher rate than other roles.
It isn’t base popularity which is the problem.
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Been having a pretty similar experience.
Most sessions I lose more than I win and it’s very stomp-y. Last time I played I kept track of my wins/losses and came away with 17 losses to 4 wins. I was flexing so at least 75% of these were support. But the games I won on were 2 tank, 1 dps, and 1 support.
Really makes me not want to keep going support.
Blizzard: tank and dps roles locked behind battlepass
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Honestly if they tuned kiriko to actually have more consistency (rather than slow af projectile heals and slow af projectile damage) I’d play her more
They are refusing to adjust obvious broken meta heroes like Soujourn, Genji, Sombra and removed important anti-dive skills as in Brigitte stun and Mccree stun. Meanwhile supports are on a low powerlevel and in general the least fun role out of the 3.
This will be another blizzard won’t balance quick enough so we will take a few months for some adjustments. And then the game is already dead, people moved on. Its also rather obvious they keep Genji on this power level to sell skins which just further proves many points. Im also done playing support and only queue DPS. If nothing changes soon im done with the game already. Glad I haven’t spend a dime on anything in OW2 so far. What an absolute failure.
The best thing is how they argue with winrates and don’t see the big picture. Who cares about winrates if the support role gets obliterated on both sides thus making support players quit as they have no fun? Can you see that in your winrates? They are so clueless its mindboggeling. They probably just play 1-2 quick matches after work with coworkers. “The game is balanced I dont see a problem here”. CLUE-LESS
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no they wont make supports strong anymore to actually prefend deaths. the whole purpose of supports is to heal a bit and the team that does the most damage fast wins the teamfight. 5v5 made it worse… once anyone dies there is almost no recovery… also as support you cannot run away, they hunt you down and you keep staggering.
I’m inclined to believe they don’t play the game, at all. Based on their numerous obviously problematic decisions
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I don’t want to quit support. But my brain can’t handle this role anymore. It’s just fending off dive constantly. The only viable heroes for me right now are Moira/Brig and I’d rather go punch sand than play either (no offense to their mains, they are great heroes but not for me)
If they’re seriously going to make us wait for any meaningful changes then the devs are going to wait just as long for their queue times to get better.
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I’ve been saying this for literal years, but the only way to get support queue anywhere near as popular as dps or tank queue is to make the role less like babysitting.
Teams shouldn’t be totally propped up by supports and their healing. It creates irritation on both sides: the tanks and dps not getting ‘enough’ healing get irritated and vent at supports, the supports get irritated because people are flaming them and the responsibility lies solely on them to keep people alive.
Make it so that healing is a small perk of the support class, not their primary objective.
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I’ve played every day since OW2’s release (mostly QP, not in the mood for comp toxicity). I always pick All Roles and in the VAST majority of games in the last week or so, i’ve been given support. I’d guess i get about 20 support games for a single tank or DPS game (guesses are usually tainted by personal feeling, so i dunno).
That should give you an idea of the ratio of players in each role. That ratio correlates to queue times.
Just saying, but if you’d need to spend a singular $20 on something, spend it n HELLDIVERS. No better bang for your buck.
sushi is a nasty troll, no need to respond to him 
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yes, i’ve been saying this as well. split the tank into main tank and offtank. then we could have 6v6 back, without double shield, as shield tanks would all be main tanks. games could however pop with 2 offtanks on both teams if not enough main tanks were in queue at a given time.
Change “open queue” to “dps only” queue. But balance only for role queue. Then all those players that want this game to be more like cod have a game mode. Also, nerf tanks damage so they aren’t just fat dps. Also, reward overwatch coins in some capacity for queuing “all”.
I wanted to post an update because I did my placements for support and DPS just to see how it’d go.
Support was maybe one of the most frustrating things I’ve ever done in my life. I’d rather break all the bones in my body while contracting Covid and getting a root canal than do that again.
Having been high plat/diamond, I honestly wondered if all of my teammates had never played OW before. My win ratio by the end of placements was something like 40%.
We had a KOTH match where we only had one kill the entire round. One. One friggin kill. That means our Hog didn’t hook wombo anyone. Our DPS couldn’t even trip over themselves and accidentally blast one of the biotic debuffed targets. I don’t think I’ve ever had a match like that in 6 years of OW.
It didn’t matter if I out healed everyone in the game while putting up damage numbers on par with the DPS and had a low death count. It didn’t matter who I played or if I could deal with flankers while doing backflips and keeping teammates up. It didn’t matter.
I mean, my god.
For DPS placements I went 7-2 and probably could’ve won at least one of those by simply by playing better. It was a million times easier to control the flow. In most cases simply understanding target priority instead of shooting tanks all day is all it took to win matches.
So in closing, I don’t know why anyone would ever want to play a role where the entire duration is babysitting others and being 100% at their mercy when it comes to winning matches. Maybe that’s why she’s called Mercy.
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Yeah, I’ve been getting this a lot. Anti-heal is one of the most powerful abilities in the game, but I rarely get teammates who will even shoot someone who’s purple, let alone kill them.
I had a Hog lose every single 1v1 against the enemy Hog, despite both of them getting hit with my nade every single time they hooked each other. I don’t even know how that’s possible.
I had the exact same experience.
DPS is my worst role, easily, and I played a hero I’m not even that good at for all my placements. I placed higher in DPS than either of the other roles.
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You don’t “have” to buy crest or gems in diablo immortal either
They’re not exactly subtle about it either, and instead act like the terms “live service” and “engagement model” are good things, and not thinly veiled attempts to push you to the extremely overpriced shop. This is why Kiriko is in the battlepass, sunk cost fallacy and all that.
“these two things are bad, but at least this thing is less bad” is not a great way of going about things. These type of games quite often take 10 steps forward just to take 2 steps back so they can say “oh, we listened guys, now buy our stuff!”. Never mind they just got away with moving the goal posts forward again, they walked it back a tiny bit, it’s a victory, right?
Since when was time spent free? Never mind free, you have pre existing skins doubling and even tripling in price of in game currency which now is real money only for those who haven’t played before, and will be for the rest of us as well once the legacy credits are sucked dry.
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First, the game is 2 weeks (ish) old as I write this, and the queue imbalance, at least when I see it, is slowly getting worse. I checked role queue in competitive here in EU 2 days ago when I could last play, and it was around 10/9/2. All/Flex remains pretty much exclusively a 2nd support queue. I get tank perhaps 10% of the time when I queue All for dailies rather than Support.
Short term: I think the solution is to try to solve 2 issues in one go. The battle pass is unrewarding for a lot of people. So, let’s say that free players can start earning access to the locked levels of the battle pass for each X (3, whatever) games of All they queue. Players who bought the battle pass instead earn some small number of premium currency. Maybe free players that earn the entire battle pass this way can start earning premium currency as well. Heck, if these incentives aren’t enough, bump up the currency awards, and start throwing them at free players too. This way, people are more incentivized to alleviate the immediate, growing problem. This isn’t a good long term solution, at least not in my opinion. But we need something to help now, in 2 weeks, and in a month, not in a year.
Medium term: The balance team, I’m sure, will hammer and polish and pray the numbers into some semblance of balance, given time. I have some amount of faith in that. It won’t happen quickly, but it will happen. There’s also a considerable danger that Blizzard will kneejerk react and either release an oppressive support, or buff up one or more existing ones to be oppressive, even though the power of support heroes isn’t, at least to me, the central issue. It’s part of the issue, but at least personally, as a support player, relative power of supports is something I worry about if it’s satisfying to play support at all, in general.
Long term: There probably needs to be some philosophical re-thinks of where the game is going. Adding CC back to Supports might be a way to go. Something needs to happen - I’m not a game designer, I won’t claim to know what it is. But incentives and balancing of numbers can only go so far. There needs to be some kind of shift towards not only examining what Supports find satisfying in the game, but moving towards it. I think it’s a huge mistake for people to make statements about how it should be more like DPS, or how X hero’s change ruined everything, or how Mercy is no-skill or whatever. All of that is irrelevant at best, and actively harmful to the real objective of getting supports to queue up and play the game with them at worst. Which would, in turn, reduce their queue time.
The tank/damage/healer (support) trifecta isn’t new, and it not being new really calls into question how the OW2 team could think that expecting 40% of the playerbase to play support is reasonable. Percentages of people playing these 3 roles are usually fairly static, over the long term (It seems to look like 20%/60%/20%, give or take 10% here and there). Releasing a new hero/class might show up as a blip on the charts when seen over the course of months and years. It doesn’t really influence who wants to play a role or not. As OW1 showed us, this unwillingness to play a role that people don’t like goes far enough that a lot of people were willing to sit in 30 minute queues rather than play a role they don’t like.
Given that the hero releases, as far as I know, are scheduled to be a tank, and then a support in April 2023 and another support in October 2023, I’m not hopeful that this problem will pass without a sh!tshow period in the middle. We’re 6 months off the next support blip (hero), and the last round of balance changes I saw rumored, as expected, can at best be described as treating the symptoms. Nerfing Sombra, Genji, and some others.
It will take time to make actual changes based on philosophical rethinks, if such is even decided. I wonder what the game and its queues will look like by the time anything like that is implemented. I want to be hopeful, but I ain’t.
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Ehem
htt ps://www.gamesradar.com/overwatch-2-players-are-stuck-in-queue-because-nobody-wants-to-play-support-and-the-battle-pass-is-making-it-worse/
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