We’ve suggested various ways to improve RSS queues.
The director of Overwatch talked about their efforts to reduce queue times and the lessons they’ve learned.
https://overwatch.blizzard.com/en-us/news/24104605/director-s-take-opening-up-the-conversation-on-5v5-and-6v6/
Prior to Role Queue, the matchmaker just needed to find 12 players of similar skill levels in order to put matches together. After Role Queue, it needed to find four players of each role to make a match. The total number of players queuing has no effect on this, it’s almost solely governed by the ratio of people queuing for the least popular role. Given the games’ lower relative ratio of players queueing for Tank than other Damage and Support roles, queue times went way up. We’ll go into details on this later.
The team tried to address this imbalance in various ways. We introduced a priority pass system that gave players who played low demand roles (Tank) a shorter queue when they switched to Damage. This had a positive effect for several weeks, but its influence quickly faded. We also introduced systems to reward players for playing Tank, eventually giving them a loot box and a bunch of XP for queuing for that role. None of these were able to put a dent in the demand for playing DPS. Damage queue times drifted a bit lower over time, but much of this was due to the introduction of Open Queue Competitive, and the permanent loss of Damage players unwilling to wait that long for a match.
It might seem obvious, but their most effective method to reduce queue times was changing the format to be closer to the actual ratio of players queuing for each role.
That solution might be possible for Battleground Blitz, but it’s probably not feasible for RSS.
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