Imagine, for a moment, a world in which Overwatch allowed you to select a role—tank, support, DPS, etc—and hop into a match expressly for the purpose of playing that role. No more squabbling over who does what. Peace. Quiet. Serenity. People have asked, but Blizzard hasn’t delivered. Here’s why.
During an interview with Jeff Kaplan at Blizzard HQ earlier this week, I asked the Overwatch director why the game doesn’t have role-based match queuing, even though it sure seems like it’d solve a lot of headaches. Kaplan replied that his team’s discussed it at length, but they don’t think Overwatch is ready for something like that yet.
“There’s two versions the community has proposed, and neither is fully satisfactory to me,” said Kaplan. “One is the honor system version where I queue up as a tank, but actually I want to play McCree, and the game lets me do that since Overwatch is very much about fluidly responding to the enemy team’s composition. The other version is that it locks you in. I think that also hurts the spirit of the game.”
He added that he thinks those ideas are good “starting points,” but they’re flanked by minefields. He pointed to the pitfalls of a similar feature in World of Warcraft: the group finder, which lets people queue up for dungeons, raids, and PVP matches according to a number of factors that include players’ roles.
“The issue I have with it right now, which we would run into if we’re not careful, is that tanks and healers get matched just like that,” Kaplan said. “It takes a second and you’re in a dungeon. But if you say you’re DPS, it takes like 30 minutes. I don’t think that’s what people are expecting right now. So I want to be careful.”