Team games---LoL, DotA, Overwatch---have been twisted and distorted by their respective companies to try to fit the wishes of their playerbase, who generally play these games solo. Thus team games steadily become less and less team-oriented, or more team-oriented, at the cost of ham-handed algorithmic authoritarianism (e.g. role queues).
But if stuff like this takes off, maybe companies will be more true to their vision and less pliable.
At least in the case of Overwatch, role queue feels more like an attempt to assure a minimum level of viability for each team and less like an authoritarian approach to controlling how the game is played.
Basically this - it reduces variance in the games you play, along with increasing MMR accuracy. There’s some unfortunate side effects (it’s a long wait to solo queue as DPS, some strategy options are reduced), but overall I’m happy with the results.
Sure, it reduces a certain kind of variance for the solo queue experience. It increases it other kinds, though. Removing player choice decreases flexibility and ability to react to changing conditions. So your team is guaranteed to fit a certain design---but it might very well be that that design is ill-fitted to conditions. It's Waterfall for video games. There were other, cleaner ways to work toward the same goal, that didn't violate the core design and cripple player freedom.
I'm a Lisp guy, so you can probably guess my opinions on whether it's "worth it" or not to aim for The Right Thing. And one thing I've found in my career is that the teams and individuals that make the best use of Lisp are fairly disciplined about it---they care a lot about functional purity, documentation, interopability, etc.
In other words, they're still operating under restrictions, but they're self-imposed rather than incidental. This foundation of order lets them do crazier things on top of it.
Reducing variance in one's play is the equivalent of writing code without side-effects---it's the fundamental principle of playing nicely with others in its respective ___domain.
Just as this is best achieved by developer education and discipline in the programming sphere, there needs to be a player ethic of reducing variance (which is why I'm glad to hear about Dallas). And without that, the problem will persist, showing its face in one form or another.
MMR accuracy is probably true, but sheesh, only in a Goodheart's Law kind of way. If it was inaccurate before, that suggests a problem with the statistic, not the game! In a complex game like OW, MMR was always going to be most accurate when applied to teams rather than individuals.
In Overwatch, role queue is such a departure from the original vision of the game that it's hard to argue with a straight face that it's anything other than a ham-fisted attempt at short term solutions to long term problems.
The message a role queue sends is, "Ignore the problems around you and focus on only providing one part of the team's solution" instead of, "Do whatever you can to help the team win." You can't pick up someone else's slack, you can't play unique/innovative styles, you can't adapt to new strategies; it cuts off a huge creative aspect the game used to have.
I'm curious. Did you have the same reaction when Overwatch removed the ability to play duplicate characters on the same team? If I remember correctly, that change happened between seasons 1 and 2.
To apply your reasoning above, removing that ability was a "short term" (rules based) solution to a "long term" problem (balancing the hero roster to make duplicate heroes work in a competitive environment)
Yes it was similar, though it was a much more reasonable move. They were two different decisions, with two different sets of consequences, and I don't think generalizing them as the same is accurate.
With a role queue, you are now unable to solve certain categories of problems your team may have. No one character in Overwatch can exclusively solve a category of problems, so being unable to swap to a specific character isn't nearly as prohibitive.
Team games---LoL, DotA, Overwatch---have been twisted and distorted by their respective companies to try to fit the wishes of their playerbase, who generally play these games solo. Thus team games steadily become less and less team-oriented, or more team-oriented, at the cost of ham-handed algorithmic authoritarianism (e.g. role queues).
But if stuff like this takes off, maybe companies will be more true to their vision and less pliable.