“20 types of Overwatch friends” or why I solo queue. Fun read. Disclaimer: long post

fakakta-2425 · May 14, 2019, 9:11am

I compiled a list for fun. It stereotypes people and is intentionally cynical, which makes it even more fun I think. Enjoy.

The Ghost – They are online maybe once a week for one game. You may tell others that you saw the Ghost online, but no one will believe you. Even despite SR decay, these dudes log in rarely, their name briefly flashing at the bottom of your screen before they disappear into oblivion again. Either because they have a life (unlikely) or plenty of other games to play (more likely) you won’t really get to play with them.
The Smurf – The Smurf is a mythical creature that is neither good nor bad, neither here nor there. They exist somewhere in an alternate universe and visit only the chosen Golds and Plats. They played tank once upon a time when you met them in the solo queue as they were trying to prevent some 5 DPS games from being instantly lost, and you thought they did really well in “filling”, which is why you thought you would friend them. Turns out they are a Masters tank who can’t aim and decided to learn to play DPS in ranked. More often than not they will leave you in a 5 DPS situation (exact same thing you were trying to avoid in the first place by friending them) and make you lose SR because they just wanted to “relax in ranked” and “not play seriously”.
The French/Russian/some other random nationality dude – These are players who are insanely skilled, so much so, that you played well with them even with broken comms or when they were speaking a foreign language in VC with their friends. You will get to play with them a few times and you will get some no fuss quick wins. You will be like the “Language of love” song by Ylvis (Google at your own peril). But you see, they have only one goal in life and that is to populate the LFG with “FR/RU/other only” groups and play in foreign 6 stacks. So, you never get to play with them anyway.
The Celebrity aka “waiting for my other friend” – They are so socially connected and popular within the Overwatch ranks that adding you was an act of charity on their part. Every time you ask them if they want to play, the answer will be “Sorry, waiting for some friends”. It’s not really personal, they would just rather play with people they know than give you a chance. Maybe you will get some new friends through them, who knows, but you will only ever play with a Celebrity once.
The Heretic – The Heretics only play QP and Arcade. They have not been enlightened yet as to the religion of Competitive Overwatch which requires daily prayer and physical sacrifice. They have some knowledge of the game but have some very bad habits so they only ever got to Silver in ranked and you can’t really play comp with them. They added you because you carried in some random QP game once and message you “Oh wow, we rolled them, we are so good, let’s play more QP”. You can’t bring yourself to tell them that you thought the whole team sucked, including them, as that would be rude and totally unreligious. You usually play maybe 1 game of QP a week with them when you’re having unholy thoughts but you snap out of it fast when you see your team running in circles all around the objective like they’re actually trying to avoid it. You sometimes chat with the poor heretic, but when you do you have to hold onto your cross and decorate your room with garlic else the Devil will pay you a visit and trick you into wasting your time in QP and thinking it’s a worthwhile activity. All you can do really is to pray for the Heretics’ troubled souls.
The Prodigy – The Prodigy is an Overwatch genius and you admire them from afar. They are either a super twitchy aimbot Widow or a crazy strategist who picks Torb, Symmetra and Bastion and actually knows how to play them. You felt like they were boosting you in the brief time that you played with them. They will climb so fast you won’t even have time to blink in between them skipping ranks. Yesterday they were mid Plat, now they are on the Diamond-Masters border, and so it continues until the SR system doesn’t let you play with them anymore. Maybe they were a Smurf all along? No one knows. And it doesn’t matter as you won’t get to play with them much.
The Basketcase – The most inconsistent type of players in your friend list. You open their profile, and as you look through their seasons you suffer a mini heart attack and develop a twitch in your right eye. They are a different rank every season and yoyo up and down like a madman. They explain they go on massive losing streaks and keep playing when they’re triggered but the amount of SR losses you see makes you think it is either a shared account or an account that gets deranked periodically and on purpose. They may seem stable for a while but before you know it they are down 500 SR again. You check their profile sometimes out of curiosity but don’t dare play with them. After a few seasons of this fun exercise you end up unfriending them.
The Zombie – Cue the crickets and the tumbleweeds. These accounts might as well have a little cobweb icon next to them or even better a little tombstone that shows the following text when you scroll over: “Here lies the tenth account of the streamer xxUndertaker360NoScopeKillEverythingxx who turned rogue and deranked to bronze then went back to Masters to entertain his 3 viewers. He has since ascended to the heavens of Fortnite and increased his viewer count to 4. His other 9 Overwatch RIP accounts are well cared for by his grieving widow, Miss Pocket Mercy. He will be missed by us all here at Overwatch, and most of all by his friends who played with him once before his account turned into a Zombie”.
The Jack of None Trades – Your favourite one trick. You will attempt to pocket heal this Genji or Widow enthusiast exclusively for a few games, lose those games, and it won’t be long before you start feeling really stupid and useless staring at his butt all game and listening to his unfounded declarations of superiority to the rest of the team. You will try to negotiate with him and explain that the rest of the team needs healing too, and kindly point out some of the situations in which either one of you should have switched to avoid a loss. He will say, “Nah, I am the best, we are just getting stupid teammates that I can’t carry” and insist that you continue to pocket him. Oh, also this special one trick friend of yours always plays something easily counterable and never one tricks something useful and universal like an actual Reinhardt. He will keep going 1v6 and thinking that he is skilled enough to win despite having a 5 DPS team comp. So you will keep losing games. Then you will have a lightbulb moment, realise that preferential healing only works if your friend is actually good and switches sometimes, and quit being the sidekick lemming to the Jack of None Trades.
The good boi – A wholesome, kind person who cracks jokes, makes light of every stupid situation and doesn’t have an ounce of toxicity in his body. At the start of your friendship he will always be up to play and comes with a fresh and positive mindset to every game. As a good boi though, he believes in the best of people and plays in a very relaxed way thinking that his team has his back. He shotcalls, but no one listens. He tries to switch to something he’s not good at just to fill, but it doesn’t work. Despite his and yours best efforts you lose games. You see him getting demoralized more and more over time and deciding not to try that hard anymore. He starts playing competitive like QP and not caring about his SR, then he drops rank and loses interest, and moves on to other games before finally turning into a Ghost. With his chill personality, you know he would be better suited to playing something like Farming Simulator anyway.
The 6 Stack Pepehands – You won from the LFG lottery once and played in an epic 6 stack, won 10 games in a row and added everyone from the 6 stack afterwards. Everyone agreed you would all play together again. You can’t get everyone online at the same time, so you play with one or two dudes from the previously glorious 6 stack. Turns out they are unremarkable individually, which is not surprising, as Overwatch is after all a team game and you can’t pull off Goats, Bunker comp or any other highly coordinated team comp with 4 other randoms. Those dudes just play well when in a good team and completely average when not in the team. But isn’t that true for the most of us? So, without the rest of the team, you lose a few and part ways. :Pepehands:
The Discord “friend” – Congratulations, you finally added someone from Discord after talking to one too many potential suitors wasting their time on the Discord LFG channels. It took you a lot of effort to get to this point. You checked the servers over a few days and wrote to some of the people posting, some didn’t reply back, some were either the wrong rank, couldn’t play when you could, or had different goals to yours, or weren’t looking for your role. You tried not to be too picky, and finally you added someone. Well, guess what, by the time you added them that someone had moved on to playing League of Legends or had gone offline. Maybe they add you in Overwatch a few days later but you never see them online. You eventually learn that Discord is in fact a premium meeting place for the most eligible of Ghosts, Smurfs, Jack of None trades and Basketcases who can sit down, have a virtual drink, get pretend drunk and talk overlapping gibberish.
The Amnesia – “Who Are You?” they ask as you invite them to play. You elaborate that you added them because they were good, or had a funny name, or complimented you on your skill, or whatever the reason was, you don’t even remember that well yourself anymore. Well, the Amnesias don’t want anything to do with you, or with anyone, and are generally grumpy and unapproachable because they have been doing a 1 month detox to align their chakras and have been eating nothing but sugary water for a while, the side effects of which we all know include grogginess and memory loss.
The Twin – Oh, if only you had one more of yourself to queue with, the ladder would surely be a better place. You think you are consistent and you play valuable picks, so another one of you is a good thing, right? One fine day you meet someone who plays the same heroes that you do and is approximately the same rank that you are. Maybe they could fulfil your role while you flex to something else. You queue and the inevitable happens. People are selecting random heroes, everyone is toxic and the only way you see things going better is selecting your main and trying to carry. Well, your friend has selected your main and is in a complete state of panic, shrivelled up in a corner and not contesting. You switch to a hero you are decent on, but still nothing can carry like your main can. And so you learn a valuable lesson that day – opposites attract when it comes to Overwatch friends, and more importantly, if that dude is really your twin, then you really aren’t that good.
The Ping King – Bow down to the King! This King is not really a King though, because they can’t afford a simple LAN cable. They complain about their sister’s Netflix habits when there’s people playing just fine from remote locations that don’t even have dedicated servers. They are the King of one thing, and that is First World problems. They don’t usually have a potato PC, just bad internet and bad judgement. You give them tips on how to fix their connection and waste some time trying to knock some sense into them – “if your net is bad, don’t play competitive”, you say, because you’re not just losing SR yourself, you’re also causing some innocent peasants to lose SR. But Kings don’t care about peasants, as history books tell us. And so the Ping King sticks to the medieval ways and continues to rule over his kingdom in the complete absence of decent internet.
The “New Money” – Crip walking through your friend list, New Moneys flaunt their new blingy Diamond SR icon and have a new and bigger ego to match their materialistic possessions. They just barely hit Diamond and have dipped in and out a few times but they have already acquired chains, gold teeth and low hanging jeans to match their new status. New Money refuses to play with anyone below Diamond that they were playing with just yesterday, because they are better than that. When prompted to play they will direct your attention to their shiny new status and state that you can no longer play with them because you will ruin their style with your raggedy old Plat clothes and cramped style.
The Player next door – Sometimes you are able to convince (or bribe, or beg, or brainwash) a real-life buddy to join in on your Overwatch adventures. They tend to come from more casual and straightforward games, usually other mainstream FPS titles, and have been happily grazing on the peaceful green pastures of non-competitive gaming. You may suck at the game yourself but you try to coach them and help them understand that there is more to it than just shooting things. After a lengthy and not very useful tutorial on your part you commence the SR-losing ceremony. Your friend seems to have no transferrable shooter skills and is failing at the simplest of tasks. You sacrifice more and more SR to the shaman chiefs of the land of Elohellia in an effort to appease the Matchmaking Gods and try and teach your friend some basic positioning, but alas the only thing you can do is accept the failure and play QP with them forever. Don’t know why you thought that you were good enough to drag your friend out of Gold.
The Mathematician - “You know what, I would rather solo queue” – says the Mathematician after a slightly unpleasant competitive game where you duo queued. This manic numbers man has mastered the Overwatch statistics game and his accurate forecasting skills have led him to the conclusion that any type of grouping together results in approximately 9000 percent harder games. Even a duo queue is sometimes too much for his weary heart. People of numbers are not people of words, and so he tells you through his actions that he was only looking for a short-term rental of your friends list space where he could do his calculations uninterrupted.
The Kinder Surprise – He may look nice and cheerful on the outside but there’s more going on under the surface. Kinder seemed decent and has been playing OK, but due to his age or due to him being a man-child he has not yet gained control of his more primal urges. As we all know, a gamer’s most primal urge that is even more primal than physical survival urges is to be toxic. So more recently Kinder has surprised you by being incredibly toxic, saying losses are never his fault, and spending so much energy on typing bullcrap over team chat that he completely throws the game. You could try giving him some time to grow out of it but we all know it’s unlikely. Unfriend and/or spray the critter with Report-Away-Spray.
The Hardstuck – This dude has been Plat since season 1. This is a skill in itself though and should be admired because at least he is consistent and has been around the block, lived through all the metas and managed to be perfectly average through all of them. He is, after all, the workhorse and the backbone of this game. When the stars align just right, Pluto is retrograde and it is a full moon, the Hardstuck might be able to get a whiff of Diamond. But more often they dip into Gold. Playing with them you feel like there is a glimpse of brilliance sometimes and they might actually climb, but then you are proved wrong when they charge off the map or do something extremely noobie. Most of your friend list is probably comprised of some perfectly average Hardstucks. And that’s fine because they are probably the only reliable people to play with out there.