Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan revealed a new system headed to the game that will hopefully help to cut down on queue times in his latest developer update.
The big Overwatch news this week is of course Symmetra’s Restoration Challenge, which will reward players with a brand new skin for the hero if they get nine wins between Nov. 17 and 30.
After filling us in on the latest story and event, Jeff revealed a brand new role queue feature that will hopefully cut down on wait times by basically offering players a way to get ahead in line.
Called the Priority Pass, Jeff explained that by going in role queue as a Flex player you’ll earn a pass that grants you a shorter wait time for a certain role.
“If we’re being honest and direct with each other, that’s probably the Damage (DPS) role,” Kaplan laughed. “When you enter the Flex queue, you are in essence queuing for every role available — Tank, Support, Damage — and the game will put you into the role that is currently most needed to speed up queue times for everyone.”
As an extra incentive, players who win matches while in the Flex role will receive extra Priority Passes. You’ll still get them if you lose too, just not as many. Players will be limited to a maximum of 40 passes at any given time as well.
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“This [40] is a number that might change, we might tune this differently,” Jeff added. “The goal of the system is to speed up queue times for everybody, and the way this is done is by highly encouraging the behavior that people queue for as many roles as possible, that’s the way to make the queue move as fast as possible.”
We don’t know exactly when this update will be going live, but Jeff did say it would be headed to the PTR “soon” before coming to the main game, so we’d keep an eye out for it sometime in the next few weeks.
Long queue times have been the bane of Role Queue’s existence since the system was introduced to Overwatch. Whether or not Priority Pass will end up cutting down on DPS waits remains to be seen, but at this point, DPS players are probably willing to give anything a try.