It’s been just under a year since Blizzard implemented role queue, the 2-2-2 role lock that saw players being able to choose their specific role, whether it be tank, damage, or support. Once a player locks in a role for a match they are not able to play or switch to heroes outside of their selected role. With it, it brought longer queue times for damage and supports players with tanks still having short queue times. But now in an attempt to lower overall queue times and appeal to a different audience, open queue has been re-added to Overwatch competitive, after it has had time in the arcade mode. With the beginning of Season 23 on Thursday the 2nd of June, players have been able to choose between role and open queue, with both types having a different skill rating (sr) entirely. Even so, how is this going to affect Overwatch competitive moving forward?

In general, I think it will help queue times since the players that are going to be the most willing to play it, are damage players. The lower queue times will appeal to them and thus mean the ratio of damage players to support and tanks in role queue will lessen providing lower overall queue times for damage players.

Another positive aspect of open queue is for six stacks, especially where they can go in and play compositions that due to role queue they are unable to play. These compositions will mainly be GOATS/3-3 as well as the three/four damage dealers with one tank and one/two supports. I for one will be excited to go back to playing these compositions for fun, especially GOATS. GOATS is something I wish would come back as a composition alongside the ones we have now since I enjoyed the intricacies of the GOATS meta, the problem with it was the fact that it was meta for way too long.

The biggest issue that will prop up for players is the worry of getting into a game with potentially six damage players meaning no one will want to play tank and support. Players will be less willing to flex off-role in open queue since for most of them that sr will not be as important as their role queue sr. They will play the heroes that they want to play in this case. This will just make the problems players had of open queue a year ago even worse.

Furthermore, I do not think that at the GM to top 500 level, players will play open queue a lot since, for most of them, they will want to practice what they are going to be playing in tournaments it would be a waste for them to spend time in open queue. There might be times when they just want to relax and have shorter queue times with games they do not really care about so they will play open queue but I do think that will be quite rare.

The game not being balanced according to open queue and rather based on role queue means that playing open queue might create some issues regarding overall balance with some heroes being a lot stronger in open queue compared to others. This is, of course, something that makes a lot of sense since all the tournaments will be played under role lock and there is no reason to balance the game around open queue.

I think overall, open queue being added to the game is only going to make the game better. Yes, there are negatives to open queue, but none of them will affect Overwatch in a major sense. The only impact it might have is some players will think based on open queue that certain heroes will be as strong in role queue but that may not be the case. Otherwise having an extra game mode for players to play will help the game grow. Open queue is a nice middle ground between quick play and role queue where players play it for the enjoyment factor while still having a sense of the competitive nature of role queue.