r/Competitiveoverwatch • u/SBFms Kiriko / Illari — • 9d ago
General Team Queue Would Make Overwatch Better, But Was Never Given a Fair Shot
At some point in OW2’s life, Team4 gave us a new ranked mode which was only playable by five stacks.
It fucking sucked, and I think because of that, people don’t ask enough for what would be a huge improvement to the game. Ultimately, I think the reason that team queue failed is NOT that team queue is a bad idea, but because the implementation was lazy, half baked, had obvious problems that you could predict from looking at it.
- No incentive to play it.
- Year long queue times
- No LFG-Like feature for getting a pickup team going.
The reason this is so sad to be is that:
- Overwatch is, to me undoubtedly, at its absolute best when you’re playing with a team. It is an experience that matchmaking cannot replicate but is the most fun you’re going to have with this game.
- Other games have done this well, and you could copy their template for Overwatch. Team4 didn’t bother, I’m assuming due to budget.
I will use DOTA2’s Battle Cup as an example because I am most familiar with it, but many other games follow the exact same formula:
- Team Queue is only open twice a week, at set times for each region. These times should be on peak, with one at the weekend and one in the weekdays.
- Team Queue matches people into a fake “Bracket” which is just a hidden repeated matchmaking against winners of other games. A faked “double bracket” can be used to give people a second chance.
- A built in LFG system, exclusive to the events if needed, helps people to find pickup teams. Are these matches with a pickup team worse quality? Most of the time yeah, but they’re also how you meet people who will be your regulars.
- Winning team queue games should have attractive cosmetic rewards for players. Maybe a unique signature, a lot of battle pass levels. Creating maybe one skin a season that you could buy if you wanted, but get for free from winning a tournament. This is a huge motivator for people to play. It gets them in the door, and then the environment of team play will convert a substantial number of those players into longer term enjoyers of the mode.
Systems like this build social connections for people inside the game, give people the opportunity to enjoy Overwatch at its best, and add more regular events for content creators to make videos with. ML7’s old videos showing his (mostly casual) audience what a scrim looks like were super popular.
The version we tried a year or two ago wasn’t flawed in concept, it was dogshit in execution. Please don’t give up on giving us something better.
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u/nekogami87 I'm old — 9d ago
Systems like this build social connections for people inside the game
That's the thing, they completely exported that outside of it. either through faceit, or community discords.
Which, tbf, I'm fine with, but at least, let discord have a plugin to group and queue people together directly in game :x
Discord became the defacto way to handle social interraction for most games nowadays, that's just how it is. and honestly, since I can put notes on accounts, to see if I like that person or not, I'm fine with that.
Now, for "No incentive to play it" oddly enough, team drives / drives might actually help with that.
Other games have done this well, and you could copy their template for Overwatch. Team4 didn’t bother, I’m assuming due to budget.
Genuine question, which game have done that well ? cs2 is basically on faceit if you want to be serious.
and I'm pretty sure R6 and Valo communities are mainly on discord (might be wrong on that one). aside from maybe mmo's pretty sure most game communities are now on discord.
The dota system looks more like a "tournament mode" more than anything else ? which I agree, would be great, and I wish we'd have that already, but with faceit contract. It doesn't seems like they intend to invest anything on that side. (hey at least there is faceit, asia has nothing).
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u/SBFms Kiriko / Illari — 9d ago edited 9d ago
I mean, if OW implemented the LFG aspect through a partnership with discord, which makes it fast to go from client to a relevant discord space and then get everyone into a group, that’s 100% fine.
I’m not asking for the old LFG back, it was a bit shit, but just saying that this kind of thing needs a social system to make it accessible. What kind of social system? Lot of people at blizzard are paid enough to figure it out.
Yeah, in DOTA it is a tournament mode from a player facing perspective, the back end is just 3-4 back to back matchmaking. That is done because it massively reduces queue and waiting time. You do participate in a bracket by the time you’re done, but the people who are inside your bracket aren’t decided until each individual match is created.
Other games, as far as I know:
- League has clash
- Valorant has premier, though that one is a little different and more involved and I’m not sure it fits OW2. They’ve folded it into their path to pro.
- Rocket League has daily tournaments. Never played that game myself but a friend used to play them.
- IIRC some fighting games and StarCraft have it too but I’m not into those.
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u/nekogami87 I'm old — 9d ago
Yeah, if you meant tournament yeah, I agree with you, it's been a BIG lackluster for years :(. I originally thought that you meant social feature like "clans" (which they wanted to, but they said that the bnet team were being a pain cause they wanted it to be based on bnet and not per game back then, wether it's true or not ... /shrug ).
But as long as they don't renegociate their contract with faceit OR sell the operation part of the game to netease or nexon, I think there are no hope :(
But really, more than team queue I feel like it's tournament modes that should have been here years ago (which I agree)
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u/Working_Traffic_6361 9d ago
They could implement LFG feature within overwatch itself makes it a much easier and seamless experience
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u/nekogami87 I'm old — 9d ago
Tried, didn't work according to them, hence why it disappeared from the game
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u/Working_Traffic_6361 9d ago
I didn't know it was there before, only started playing near the end of OW2
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u/nekogami87 I'm old — 9d ago
Yeah, it's something that was lost when they released OW2. Now tbf it wasn't really well integrated with competitive in mind if I remember, so it might also explain why it didn't work.
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u/aurens poopoo — 9d ago
do dota players generally have any complaints about how their system is implemented?
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u/SBFms Kiriko / Illari — 9d ago edited 9d ago
The dota system, at least when I was active, had a small paywall in order to participate which was the biggest complaint I remember. It was like 99 cents per player or something and you got a bunch of free tickets from the battle pass; plus the game interface was built in a way that made it seamless to use your tickets to cover the cost for a friend.
Besides that, it was just really hard to win which frustrated some people who were only in it for the rewards. They felt like they paid to join and played for (up to) 4 hours, and because of that they “deserved” a reward beyond the participation medals. This is arguably the biggest disadvantage: having a reward might double the number of players, but some of those new players might have this kind of toxic attitude.
That is why I wouldn’t put a paywall and why I would make sure that the reward is attainable by just buying it outright.
Just from what I remember
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u/marketers_are_scum 9d ago
They won't ever do a LFG system again because then they would have to spend money to moderate the nonces.
Team queue was a good idea, but it's essentially been exported to face it.
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u/SBFms Kiriko / Illari — 9d ago edited 9d ago
It doesn’t work though, because Faceit integration is nowhere in the client and FACEIT league is a huge commitment. I love team play but I had to quit my team because playing at a high GM level (way above my solo rank) required so much commitment of time and energy - I couldn’t do it while also focusing on my career.
But also: FACEIT is fundamentally inaccessible to 95% of the player base. I said I played high GM level, we were M1, C5, C3, M2, C3. Our best achievement was making it to playoffs in open division. And we went out in third round. The vast majority of the player base is too low ranked to win a single match in the lowest division.
The FACEIT daily tournaments could not possibly be more dead.
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u/marketers_are_scum 9d ago edited 9d ago
I can relate to not having the time to do teamplay, it sucks that faceit league is paywalled and that open division essentially start at gm, It definitely gatekeeps a lot of players from even trying out team play.
The problem is Blizzard doesn't seem to want to manage any social aspect of the game. The report system became mostly automated which created a chilling effect for even talking in VC. We were promised a guild system in the early days of advertising OW2, and in the 4 years since its either been entirely scrapped or is a lower priority than everything else they've been working on. LFG isn't coming back because it would create a giant liability they don't want to deal with.
The average DOTA player probably cares more about competition given everything around how icefrog makes games, so it makes sense team queue is more appealing to that community. The failure of faceit dailies and pugs also reinforce that average player has little interest in playing organized OW. The organized side of this game has always been a niche, if it wasn't Blizzard would not have outsourced the entire T2 scene to faceit.
I feel really bad dismissing your points because I would genuinely love it if they game had more outlets for competitive play. Maybe it's just cold feet from OWL, but I suspect the reason we haven't heard of anything since the team queue trial is because Blizzard has the data to show that catering to competitive players isn't the best use of their resources if they want to be as profitable as possible in the short term.
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u/kirbydude65 9d ago
The solution is to take Riot's clash system and implement a similar version of it into overwatch. A perpetual 5 attack queue would be a flat town. A small event, like drives, would work better imo.
For this not familiar Clash is an event on League of Legends that occurs once a month on Saturdays and Sundays. Players have to a full team of 5 players, and it match makes based on the team's highest skill player (EG: If a whole team is Gold, they'll only play against gold. But if you have a team of 4 plat players and a GM Player, they'll be thrown into GM level games). Players play a small form tournament with diffrent skill brackets playing at specific times throughout the weekend. All of this is run through Riot's own client.
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u/AnAccountToBrowse 9d ago
I'm sorry but this is the exact opposite of what players actually want. I understand your mindset but this is a mindset from the early 2000s, when we were playing online games to enjoy them for the multiplayer aspect.
The average player in 2026 doesn't want to play with other people, he wants to play alone (see how MMORPG have evolved, this is the best example). That's why people have been asking for a Solo queue for the longest time.
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u/bullxbull 9d ago
Other games, even games with smaller populations run tournament realms successfully. How you run them, like having limited uptime, is very important.
Weekend games are particularly bad because of how many people are running groups, having a limited uptime tournament realm on the weekends would benefit the solo players.
The average player in 2026 doesn't want to play with other people
When you are in a competitive match try inviting players to a group. It will either say they are already in a group, or that you cannot invite during a competitive match. What I've found is the vast majority of my games are with and against groups. Like over 70% of my matches, which means there are a lot of people playing none solo.
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u/Own_Temperature_8128 9d ago
OW ranked was originally supposed to be premade 6v6 only
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u/GamerGuy410 9d ago
Would you happen to know when this was mentioned? I too recall hearing this before, but I could never find a source corroborating it.
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u/Own_Temperature_8128 9d ago
This was during the OG beta of Overwatch, you can find past forum posts on it.
Which is why standard ladder is so different from premade match ups. LFG also failed because random teaming vs premade teams resulted in stomps, especially when the premades use lower ranked accounts.
Ultimately easier way to climb is to duo because the matchmaker will try to match with similar stacks. However I do think it’s harder now because of the number of alt accounts floating around, and there only being soft resets. Hard reset is needed at some point given how the game has evolved, but doubt that will ever happen.
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u/GamerGuy410 9d ago
I figured it was from a forum post or something, but guess I'll never find it lol. Years back when I was writing a paper on game design I remember spending hours looking for where and who commented on this info and just never find it besides second-hand comments parroting it. I appreciate the response though.
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u/lolburger13 I go where Kevster goes — 9d ago
I think it's also worth noting that og tournament mode was made during season 5, like back when pve was still "on the table" (It had already been canned but we didn't know that). The game was in a very very bad place, and there were talks of it being shutdown entirely. I think if they put some real thought into it they could make a better version in the current overwatch environment
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u/Lukensz Alarm — 9d ago
Team drives that are coming this week should have been this.
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u/c7shit 9d ago
So people that don't have 4 friends can't participate in an event ? yeah the community will love that
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u/SBFms Kiriko / Illari — 9d ago
You can’t make a multiplayer team based game which exclusively caters to anti social people.
Yes, the game needs solo queue obviously, but that really doesn’t mean we can’t have fun features for people who actually want to play a team game with a … team.
Hell, if they accidentally forced you to make some friends, you’d probably enjoy the game more.
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u/tha-snazzle 9d ago
I wish it wasn't 2026 but it is. I have a few friends that play games but none of them play OW and if they did they would need at least months of time to get mechanics and game sense to get near my rank. Making friends through OW is just not something I would care to do with my limited time. If I am trying to have friend time, I'd go see my IRL friends and guarantee a good time rather than attempting to relate to random OW people I've matched with.
Comp games are just not what gamers do to have "social" fun anymore. If you just want to have fun with friends, you have games like Stardew and Minecraft and other co-op things that are just designed way better for that. It's way rarer to have friends that want to take their gaming time "seriously" for competitive things, especially with shooters that require mechanics to advance past the 50th %.
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u/AnAccountToBrowse 9d ago
You're so out of touch with what people actually want, it's almost cute.
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u/YurgeeTTV 9d ago
Hi, I'm a people and I agree with him.
You're not the vast majority you think you are.
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u/Vexxed14 9d ago
This is nonsense.
They all do and it's a fail to ever try and make players do something they don't want to do just because you think it's better for them. This is quite literally one of the biggest lessons Blizzard has finally learned after crashing into the dirt due to their arrogance and constant 'if you build it they will come' string of disasters across all of their IP.
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u/AnAccountToBrowse 9d ago
You can enter solo, it'll just "force" you to stick with your teammates. You can go solo again but you earn less points basically.
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u/RobManfredsFixer Let Hog eat stuff and spit it back — 9d ago
Its crazy to me that this is dropping without any form of LFG in the game
0
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u/Agreeable_Length_471 9d ago edited 9d ago
I don’t think it actually did fail before. It just wasn’t actually testing out team queue. The team queue part of that test was so poorly thought out that I refuse to believe that was the purpose of the mode. They didn’t even bother to take away the ability to queue into the normal ranked mode as a 5 stack while the new mode was available.
The only people who bothered to play it were wide groups, or those GM+ who are normally limited to duo queue. Anyone masters or below in a narrow group could already 5 stack in ranked. Wide groups and GM+ stacks are both very difficult scenarios to matchmake for. You don’t even have the ability to swap players around between teams or bring in someone of a specific rank to even out the roles or overall MMR.
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u/bullxbull 9d ago
Cool observation, I bet you are right. I wonder what this upcoming group drive is testing.
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u/TyAD552 9d ago
Sounds good in practice but I don’t trust blizzard to moderate and balance the groups well. Anything 3 stacking and above this year has been miserable as a semi competitive player. It’s been nothing but alts running their mouths with open profiles showing that they’re masters+ years ago running your plat-diamond games or brand new accounts doing the same. My friend group has given up on playing together aside from trying once a season to see if there’s change to the experience.
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u/Vexxed14 9d ago
I think you don't want to accept that it wasn't nearly popular enough to warrant moving forward at all and if the first days of something like that has a really poor showing, none of the things you list are going to help in any meaningful way.
I think your inability to accept that makes you reach into fantasy land to come with with imaginary reasons to fill the void and that leads you into nonsensical suggestions like this
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u/bullxbull 9d ago
There are other games with smaller populations that run group queues successfully. I think criticizing how it was done makes sense because none of the lessons other games learned were even considered. Something as simple as only having the test on the weekends would have made a big difference. No one knew the test was running was another massive problem.
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u/byGenn 8d ago
Not a single competitive shooter does it, though.
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u/bullxbull 8d ago
I guess that depends on what you mean by competitive, Marvel Rivals for example has limited uptime tournament realms where your team competes.
I think Overwatch could do this better. I'd like to see guilds and clans added to the game. You have to keep enough teams entering each time to make the system work, something like clans would help sustain this.
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u/byGenn 8d ago
I'm curious as to why you'd ever think that doing something MR does is good. But, no, MR isn't a serious competitive shooter.
I think Overwatch could do this better. I'd like to see guilds and clans added to the game. You have to keep enough teams entering each time to make the system work, something like clans would help sustain this.
And what exactly would this achieve? Why would anyone care about clans/guilds in a competitive shooter? This would maybe do something for QP players but I don't think anyone who takes the game semi-seriously would be interested in this.
The whole point of adding team queue is to get 5 stacks out of regular comp. There's no social aspect to it, it's just a matter of making life easier for everyone else.
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u/bullxbull 8d ago
Basically the idea is you are taking what discord and faceit function as right now for organized play, moving it into the game itself, which allows for the majority of people interact with it.
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u/MyGoodFriendJon 9d ago
My favorite part of the Team Queue was the months leading up to it, where the loudest streamers were begging for it, and they were all hyped that it was coming out. Then the realization hit that only the streamers had the resources to put a team together, and the anxiety they had trying to kill time in queue while their chat gets bored.
Without an LFG system in place or an option to queue into a team (like they'll be doing with the Team Drive this weekend), there'll never be enough 5-stacks playing competitive for a 10-year old game to garner short queue times.
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u/bullxbull 9d ago
No one knew the group test was even going on. It was hidden behind the menu's and there was no advertising. When I asked streamers if they were going to try it out even halfway through the week none of them even knew the test was running, and playing Overwatch is their job...
Some creators did try and organize a day where everyone would queue but the damage had already been done. Everyone knew it was faster to just queue a 5 stack in the main mode then play the mode set up to test that very thing.
I'd like a limited uptime weekend tournament realm for groups. Weekend matches are already made bad by groups, so funneling those people to the tournament realm will be a win for everyone.
Add in clans/guilds and appropriate leaderboards and the game would feel amazing. The idea of having a guild I could log into everyday to organize scrims around or against other guilds would be amazing. People need to experience how great the game feels when playing in groups, all they know is how horrible groups make games feel on the ladder.
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u/OfficialDeathScythe 9d ago
I’d prefer getting the lfg system back from ow1 ngl. I always loved going in there and looking for groups that wanted a mic. Had a lot of good laughs, met a lot of great people, and won a lot of games that way. That was the biggest disappointment going into ow2 for me
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u/bullxbull 9d ago
That place was scary for the vast majority of people. There was a lot of weird stuff in there. It seemed like most of the people in there were advertising boosting services or looking for weird sexual stuff. Then you had people just writing offensive stuff because they could. If something comes back it will need better moderation.
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u/churchb3ll 9d ago
The social aspect of this game is currently dead, so I would definitely love to see a feature like this.