DPS players say Overwatch’s role queue made climbing ‘unreasonable’

Role queue was a long-awaited and demanded feature in Overwatch, but it’s created problems for DPS players trying to climb due to long queue times. 

As Dexerto has previously reported, the wait times to find a match in Overwatch as a DPS hero have become incredibly long. While most players wanting to play DPS wait around 10 minutes, it can take over an hour to find a match in the highest SR range.

Reddit user CynicTheCritic made a discover after a night of queueing in the damage category on October 7. With four matches played and queue times of 7, 10, 9 and 12 minutes, he determined that in the two hours spent playing competitive, one-third of his time was spent waiting to get a game.

“As someone who traditionally plays DPS when I can, I’ve realized that unless you have hours and hours on end to spare, climbing in Competitive is no longer an option,” he wrote in a post titled ‘I did the math: Role Queue makes it so that no reasonable DPS can climb in Comp’.

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According to Cynic, if a good DPS player can maintain a 65% winrate and earn 22 SR per victory, when queue times and match length is factored in, the average player would only gain 8 to 12 SR per hour. 

Role queue was widely demanded, but was it worth it?

He then dropped an extremely concerning statistic: “It would take at minimum 41.6667 hours simply to get from plat to diamond, given you never drop under a 65% winrate and by happenstance get quick matches AND no 12 minute queues.”

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Additionally, if the player gets longer queues and matches, “this value gets as high as 62.5 hours to get from plat to diamond.” 

Considering that 65% can be an incredibly difficult winrate to maintain, Cynic’s numbers are even worse for players averaging below that. 

Blizzard has briefly addressed the issue of long queue times back in an August 26 forum post by developer Scott Mercer where he said the team was “working on some matchmaker adjustments for future updates”. 

Overwatch players are frustrated over long DPS queue times

However, so far there hasn’t been any follow-up to this announcement and DPS players are growing more and more impatient.

With Blizzcon looming in November, it will be interesting to see what the company has up its sleeve and if any big changes to the game, or a rumored sequel, are announced.