Role queue tried to solve the issue of team composition by enforcing players to select their role up front and enforce a 2 - 2 - 2 team composition. The reality is that team compositions are still awful, only in a slightly different form. I’ve been in way too many matches lately where:
DPS players lock one particular character and stick to it for the whole match, while they are not effective at their role or clearly being countered.
Tank players are DPS players in disguise. I’m talking mainly about Tank players who refuse to play a shield tank when needed. Why are they doing this? Because the DPS queue has horrible waiting times and the Tank queue allows them to get in fast to do more or less the same thing (especially when this player locks Roadhog)
Tank players are inexperienced because the only reason they queued it was to get faster queue times.
Don’t get me wrong, in my opinion players are allowed to play whatever they want. I usually make 1 friendly suggestion for them to change and leave it at that. Simply because I know that people are people. As they say in Belgium: With vinegar you won’t catch any flies.
Anyway, the point I’m trying to make is that the situation is the same as before role queue, in fact it’s worse. I’ll tell you why:
Before the role queue system your team could play creatively around one stubborn player by changing the role composition. But right now everyone is locked in their single role and it removed both the flexibility and creativity from the game. The role queue limitation makes me as a player feel more powerless and less impactful in the most frustrating games (for which you now have to averagely wait 9+ minutes when queuing as Support or DPS)
While the phenomenom of a stubborn player who refuses to change always existed (and I believe will always exist). The two issues I mentioned with Tank players are entirely new issues that are directly linked to the role queue system. Tank players have the lowest queue times and as a result a lot of people queue for it while they don’t really want to play Tank.
As someone who likes to play all three roles, I now end up picking Tank way more than I’d like to. While my usual preference is Support > Tank > DPS. Waiting 9+ minutes is simply a waste of time. And no, playing intermediate Skirmish, Deathmatch, Training or a Custom game does not solve this problem for me and for many players. There is nothing at stake in these intermediate games, nothing to win, nothing to lose. They are just plain boring time fillers. Only last night I queued for an intermediate Deathmatch and without any word in the chat everyone just gathered up and rather did some emotes or voice lines than actually playing the Deathmatch.
The most silly thing about the current queue times is that when I play tank and queue up with a friend who plays DPS, we still have to wait over 9+ minutes in average.
As someone who plays Overwatch from the very beginning, I’d say it’s time to revert the role queue expirement. My first few matches in role queue were noticeable better and I was very excited about it. But since a few months, the way people queued has changed and the longer queue times now only cause more frustration while the quality of matches has not improved.
Yeah…because there is a point when shields arnt needed? Trying queing for tank… you’ll find a game in about 20 sec…now que for the DPS and support slot…do you care who the tank is if it means a lower que time? And no…more tanks mean longer tank ques…sadly your wrong here…the que times are super low for tanks because few people que for tank.
Pre 222 in gold and plat… you’d see games lost on select screen, dps trolls. I wonder were you the player who waited until everyone chose a hero or did you insta lock.
.and then report last player if they didn’t pick tank or support?
Been playing since open beta…can safely say roleQ was needed badly…and should have happened much sooner.
Yeah…because there is a point when shields arnt needed?
I never said there aren’t any games when shields aren’t needed. I’m talking about games where having a shield can make the difference and the tank is refusing to change.
And no…more tanks mean longer tank ques…sadly your wrong here…the que times are super low for tanks because few people que for tank.
Nope, what I’m saying is still valid. The time of a queue does not say anything about the players that are actually in that queue, besides that they queued for Tank. Tank is by far the least popular role. The Tank queue would be even faster than it is right now without those two types of Tank players I mentioned. The one’s who either want to play DPS Tank only or the one’s who just want faster queues.
Pre 222 in gold and plat… you’d see games lost on select screen, dps trolls.
Right now I still see games that are lost on the select screen. Nothing has changed, there are still trolls and they will always be there.
I wonder were you the player who waited until everyone chose a hero or did you insta lock.
.and then report last player if they didn’t pick tank or support?
I’m the player that usually waited until everyone has chosen and then hoping to play Support, but usually ended up playing Tank. Rarely played DPS. Anyway, this topic isn’t about me. It’s about having a constructive discussion about the role queue system.
Role Queue affected flex players the most, hardcore DPS-only mains will queue DPS nonetheless or leave the game.
And I keep having to say this all the time but the only reason they introduced RQ was because GOATS was just unkillable and was making pro play boring, affecting viewership of OWL. Do you really think they care about what average player wants? No, because if they did, they would have implemented RQ way back then instead of now, when OWL is a sinking ship. If GOATS was dead in OWL/pro play, they would have continued on without implementing RQ at all.
It’s no longer an experiment. The Beta was the experiment. Blizzard have confirmed Role Queue is not going anywhere. It’s here to stay.
I’ve been here since the start, too, and Role Queue has saved the game for me.
It’s infinitely better than the 4+/solo or no tank/solo or no support comps that came before it.
Match quality is significantly improved over pre-RQ Overwatch.
The only downside is if you have a leaver then Role Queue makes it difficult to compensate for that missing player. This is why backfill needs to be added to Competitive now more than ever.
Below diamond, where pbsr exists, blizzard forced this themselves. If you switch characters in a match you will get less sr because it takes in consideration your stats on both characters, but because you have less playing time on each, because you switched, your stats will be lower than the stats of someone who played one character for the entire game.
Not role q problem, it’s a blizzard problem. They don’t know how to balance the q times.
Not role q issue but matchmaking issue by not placing people in the right sr with peoples off roles.
I do not agree. I did not like having 4+dps. No healer or no tank was not fun. Having 4 mains of a single hero on your team was not “creative”.
I have played overwatch since launch, and I say don’t revert role q. Blizzard just has to put some work into fixing how it works.
It’s utterly unconscionable that Blizzard have a Competitive mode in their game where they allow a team to be at a significant disadvantage due to leavers despite the fact they have the solution already in game in other modes.
Add backfill to Competitive already, please Blizzard.
And while you’re at it make team chat compulsory with no option to leave (since communication is a critical component of teamwork) as well as remove the option to leave game from the Competitive menu.
Ok it might fix the leaver problem, but it would create so many other problems. Like people being back filled into a lost game when they have waited in q for 10 min and losing sr. The average sr per team would also get messed up.
Those things and more I’m sure Blizzard could easily resolve.
Like making backfill an opt in thing to begin with, since not everyone would want to backfill. Perhaps backfillers would not lose any SR if they backfill in towards the end of a match. The average SR per team could also be maintained by adding a backfiller within the SR range of the leaver.
None of this is any cause to dismiss backfill outright. It would absolutely, 100% fix the leaver problem, and that’s one of the most important things the devs need to fix right now.
Ok give people the option of being back filled into games. No one would choose that option. People would not wait in q just to be back filled, EVEN if they don’t lose sr.
You’re assuming that players who opt in for backfill would only be queued for backfill. That makes no sense. There’s no reason the matchmaker couldn’t look at both new games and backfilling into existing ones at the same time for anyone who opted in for backfill.
I’d absolutely opt in to backfill if I could because I’ve had those 5v6, 4v6 & worse matches and it’s beyond frustrating knowing that those situations could easily be avoided by Blizzard implementing a system that already exists in the game.
I’m saying no one would pick the “backfill me into possible matches” option, because they would just not like to be back filled no matter if it is guaranteed or not. Being back filled into qp is already frustrating, imagine how it would be in competitive.