Competitive Open Queue is now live alongside Season 23 of Blizzard Entertainment’s hit team-based shooter,Overwatch. After months of change and anticipation, players now have the option of selecting either Role Queue or Open Queue when entering the game’s Competitive menu.
Blizzard recently announced the start of Season 23 through an official tweet, which linked fans to a blog post providing details on the re-introduction of Competitive Open Queue. As per Blizzard’s post, what is now Competitive Role Queue and Open Queue “started with a simple experiment.” And given therecent launch of Experimental Mode, this should come as no surprise.
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After seeing Quick Play Classic’s successful performance in the Arcade, developers wanted to test the possibility of offering an “open queue alternative to Competitive.” Hence the Competitive Open Queue recently featured in Arcade mode.
Developers were shocked not only by the mode’s popularity, but also by the discovery of unexpected benefits. In short, it seems that the Open Queue system does a great job of attracting damage-per-second (DPS) players (as opposed to Tank/Support players,) which in turn alleviates the often extraordinary queue times faced by Competitive DPS players in Role Queue. Fortunately, the redirecting of players into two different modes has had an overall positive impact onawful queue times. And less tangibly speaking, the inclusion of Competitive Open Queue simply allows the game to cater to a greater variety of play-styles.
Although a “Competitive” version of the game’s original open system has been regularly available in the Arcade since theintroduction of Role Queue, the only consistent ranked option has been Role Queue itself. For those unfamiliar, Role Queue forces players to queue up for a match with a particular role (Tank/DPS/Support) in mind, and then restricts teams to a 2 Tank/2 DPS/2 Support composition. Which is to say, regardless of play-style,Overwatchplayers can at least look forward to the toss-up. And if anything, it seems as if this new dual queuing system will make wait times better for everyone.
This also begs the question: how could this affect (or be affected by) the much-awaitedOverwatch 2?Change can definitely be great, but especially with the upcoming release ofOverwatch 2,some fans are wary of significant changes. As it stands, players who recently took the time toadjust to Hero Poolshave been thrown back into an unrestricted character selection system. Structural changes to the game are fine, especially when they help manage the meta, but the major changes can get tiring when players still end up waiting an upwards of 10 minutes to play a match that could result in a sudden cancel.
Overwatchis available now on PC, PS4, Switch, and Xbox One.
