Deathmatch while Searching

General Discussion
1

TL;DR: Change Skirmish while Searching to Deathmatch while Searching to let us play Overwatch while waiting to play Overwatch.

Role Queue is coming to Overwatch and I’m slightly worried about the queue times for playing Damage. 10+ minutes to find a game will really start to add up over a session. A couple of games and boom, one hour spent in the menu or doing something else.

But if I really wanted to play Damage, that would be something I’d have to live with. So, one way to alleviate the detachment from the game while trying to play the game would be to kind of update one really forgotten feature of the game: Skirmish while Searching.

Skirmish while Searching is a feature that’s been in the game forever and never gotten updated. The thing about random skirmish is that some people want to deathmatch and some people just want to hang out and say hello, it takes too long to find someone to duel if you want to deathmatch and when search times are short it’s quite a startling feature that makes you think “oh, I should disable that next time I queue up”.

So, it’s kind of crap and barely anyone who’s played for a longer period of time has it turned on anymore. But now, it’s a forgotten feature that would be useful to combat queue time boredom.

When playing Damage it’s more important than any other role to keep your mechanical skill on top and warmed up, so deathmatch is a very popular practice mode. Skirmish was in the game way before deathmatch, and is kind of an imperfect deathmatch system.

Updating Skirmish while Searching to Deathmatch while Searching would hopefully help people who want to play Damage to actually play Damage without just closing the game. For players to actually populate the feature to make it feasible, it would have to be known that it’s actually in the game.

So for the developers:
Update the Skirmish while Searching to Deathmatch while Searching.
Get players to know about it either through a developer update or patch notes (which not a high percentage of players read), reset the option “Deathmatch while Searching” to on (which would annoy a lot of people), or put a “play deathmatch while searching?” prompt on the queue up screen.

For players:
We could start using the Skirmish while Searching feature to shoot each other to not be as bored while searching for games and keep the “afk damage dealers by start of match” to a minimum.

Excuse the rambling nature of this post, I’m just finishing my coffee.
:trophy: As a congratulations for making it this far, you have more than earned your self a trophy :trophy:

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