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Jeff Kaplan: Role Queue in Overwatch "was needed"

The game director spoke about the new matchmaking system that came in this year, and the positive effect it's had.

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Back in summer Blizzard revealed a new matchmaking system for Overwatch called Role Queue, seeing players queue up for a role out of support, damage, and tank before matchmaking, being locked in that role so there are two of each in a team, and now game director Jeff Kaplan has talked at length about the feature with VG247.

"I feel like the feature was needed. Overall it was positive," he explained. "Where I think we can do better is at the highest levels of play - that's where we see the biggest issues. At the highest levels of play - Grandmaster, Master - and in particular in smaller regions during off hours. It's a very tough problem for us to solve."

"If you think about it, our options are to connect you with the worst ping to somewhere else, which players get very unhappy when their ping is high. If you've noticed, your ping in Overwatch is usually pretty consistent because we always try to match you to the closest data centre. We took that as a priority. The other option is to put you in a lower match, maybe Grandmasters with Master and Diamond players, but we know that's not received very well from our players. Obviously, if you click the tank or support button, it greatly speeds up how role queue works."

While Blizzard is working to improve the technology behind matchmaking, Kaplan adds that he's happy with the impact it's had on the community.

"People aren't arguing about whether or not to have Tanks this match, etcetera," he said. "This is anecdotal, it's not based on science, but I've learned a lot about myself as a player through role queue. It's taught me to look at the game differently and made me change some of my hero choices. My main concern with it and the team's main concern with it are long queue times for DPS at super high skill levels in impacted regions.

"I thought my hierarchy was I'm a great Tank, really good Support, and terrible DPS. When the stats came in and showed me, I was a medium Tank, a good DPS, much better than I thought I was - to be fair, I was playing Symmetra because I thought she was wildly overpowered, even now in her nerfed state - and I was terrible at Support. I thought I was good at Support and my wife used to always harass me. She used to tell me, 'You're really bad at Support, don't play it', and I'd be like, 'But the guys at work think I'm awesome and they love when I play Ana', and I'm terrible. I placed two skill ratings lower on Support than what I did on damage, so I switched from Ana to Mercy and I just started chain playing Mercy and I just got up to where my Tank is with Support. I learned a lot."

Do you like Role Queue?

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