A Suggestion For Solving 6v6 Queue Times

General Discussion
1

I made this post before, or I thought I did, but I can’t find the post. So I probably closed or something without posting. Therefore, I’m going to type it again.

Hello OW Devs.

I was watching the inverview with Aaron and Alec and it gave me an idea that I was hoping was worth trying in your future 6 v 6 testing to hopefully get around the queue time bottleneck.

The idea is basically moving Role Selection to being post Match Queue.

How I imagine this working is you queue for a match just like you did Pre-Role Lock.

The queue matches people based on the averaged rank between all thier current ranks in all roles with more weight being given to the highest rank that person holds. (There are a lot of skills you learn that aren’t necessarily reflected in the ranks you hold as you reach higher levels of play like good positioning, engagement timing, ult tracking, skill cooldown tracking, target priority, space taking, making use of taken space, etc. That’s why I think the highest rank of a player should be given more weight in the queue. What the weight split should be, I’m not sure. That’s something that would require testing and iteration.)

When 12 people of about the same average rank are found, the queue “pops” bringing the players to another screen. I imagine this screen having an image or logo for each role with a “#/2” below it with the pound sign being the amount of people who have already chosen that role. Voice and text chat will not be available here to avoid players pressuring eachother into playing a given role.

After the Role Selection, players are then brought to the character selection screen for thier chosen role. Team communications are made active here here for composition and general discussion.

The match plays out as normal with the win or loss being applied to only the Role selected for that match.

This idea isn’t flawless. It definitely has issues, the biggest one being that players might not get to play thier prefered role every match. However, I think the massive benefit to the queue times while maintaining Role Lock in a 6 v 6 game format far outweighs the cons.

So I think this idea is at least worth trying in the upcoming 6 v 6 tests.

Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this suggestion.

Best Regards,
TheEmptySkys

2

I actually believe the queue will be slower because it’ll struggle to find 12 players that are actually playing the game.

On a serious note tho, randomizing what role you get is going to:

  • Reduce players by a lot
  • Increase leavers and toxicity because they don’t get their preferred role

This would maybe work if the players didn’t have a choice, fortunately we do so the “con” would be the death of the game.

3

They won’t have issues with DPS and Supports. Like with OW1, it was purely down to the amount of people willing to queue tank. There just isn’t enough of us to sustain 2 tanks and good queue times.

So it going to come down to 1, will it make them more money and 2, can the playerbase tolerate the longer queues.

4

Just make every role fun to play, that is the solution.

Also, don’t stop releasing content.

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5

The role was fun to play in OW1 though?

6

Why are you contradicting yourself?

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7

I am asking you. Did you think the role was fun to play in OW1?

8

I personally liked it when I could duo with my mate - when he actually bothered to play. Otherwise, I was happy to select all roles queue most of the time, which rarely ever dropped me into the DPS role lol

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9

Agree. I think it was a more fun role in OW1.

Sadly, that still meant it didn’t have enough players to sustain healthy queue times. So it would have to be more than just making it fun to get actual tank players to play the role regularly.

You can incentivise playing that role, but all that does it dramatically drop match quality. So it isn’t much more than a band aid solution.

I think if they truly want to go 6v6 again, the role has to fundamentally change, to something very different. (that being said I don’t sense from their updates and interviews and comments since that they are that interested in it atm).

10

Agreed totally. Just bring back 6v6 and scrap 5v5.

11

6v6 isn’t going to be some magical savior to overwatch. 5v5 would work if things would die.

In Ow1, fights would just draw out to who would get their ults first because you couldn’t kill anything with double shield.
In ow2, fights just draw out forever or until one person makes a dumb mistake.

So if you couldn’t kill anything in ow1 because of tank’s double shield and you still cant kill anything in ow2, maybe tank isn’t the problem.

It’s the supports that are built to keep 5 players alive that now only have to keep 4 alive and if the supports were way too strong in ow1, they’re crazy strong in ow1 with 1 less player to keep track on.

If you nerf the healers no one plays them, keep the healers super- overtuned like they are now the game become stale and boring.

But I guess blizzard is just going to keep trying to fix tanks by buffing and nerfing them not understanding the reason why tank feel so bad is because of supports just removing all progress they make.

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12

It was a shame they didn’t nerf healing output when they increased the global health pools. That would have been the time to do it.

There’s a lot of abilities that now need longer cooldowns. Nade, lamp, suzu and so on. And others like mercy who need a resource meter.

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13

They can keep strong healing as long as their damage is nerfed, Zen and lucio were the original “dps” healers, but their healing is WEAK. Now bap, Illari, moira, brig just deal so much damage on top of some of the best healing output.

If Owcs was open queue the best comp would be 1 tank 1 Widowmaker 3 healers.

14

That could work.

Personally, I’d prefer them to be DPS with healing utility, but your option is probably going to be more popular.

On current patch… I’d expect they’d go Monkey, D.Va, Illari, Bap, and probably Tracer.