Overwatch Is Adding Role Queue To Improve Team Balance
Overwatch players who prefer a certain character or role are about to be very happy campers. Blizzard is officially adding Role Queue to the game, and will force its use in both competitive play and quickplay.
Role Queue, which is live now on the Overwatch PTR (thanks Game Informer), will change matchmaking drastically when it launches for the wider community later this summer. No longer will you be dumped into a player select screen, watching characters be chosen around you before you realize that your team has no tanks. Instead, you'll choose your preferred role at the start. Do you want to be a healer? Choose that, and you'll automatically be placed on a team that requires healers. Then you can choose your character — let's just randomly pick Mercy here — and heal to your heart's content.
You'll no longer have to concern yourself with the characters everyone else is choosing. You can just play your game. Thank goodness.
When Role Queue arrives, team composition will be split into three different groups: Tanks, Damage, and Healers. Each team will be comprised of two characters from each group, ensuring that every team has a similar makeup. As you might imagine, this spells the official end of the GOATS meta that became popular in Overwatch League play, and that might have been the intended target of the change. Role Queue, however, will wind up benefiting everyone who's ever cursed their team for leaving certain roles unfilled.
Another positive side effect? You'll actually be able to try out different roles now, guaranteed, to determine which you're actually best at. Role Queue will bring about three new ratings; one for tanks, one for damage, and one for healers. So after playing some matches in each role, you'll actually get a sense of which role you're strongest in, which you're okay at, and which you should shy away from.
As stated earlier, you can try Role Queue now over on the Overwatch PTR to see what it's like. It'll be there for a while undergoing some testing, as Blizzard looks to improve matchmaking and figure out how it'll balance characters going forward. Role Queue will launch officially for all players on Sept. 1.