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Overwatch: How Role Lock affects the game

It is quite obvious that the Role queue positively affected the Overwatch League. Just look at the Blizzcon 2019 at the Overwatch World Tournament and say to me how many GOATs you have noticed here? Right, zero! And that is a true blessing. Right now we are free to watch the beautiful game as it was designed. With the changes of heroes in the mid-game and various interesting things. The balancing questions will be taken into the account in this article, but I will speak about them a bit later. This article was created with one simple purpose – to attract all these players who dropped Overwatch due to the GOATs overwhelming. And not only in casual competitive matches, after all in low-ranks (Gold and Platinum) chances of meeting such a squad were relatively low, but the most important is the Overwatch Professional Scene. The one that is forwarding the game and sponsoring it to develop into much more interesting and competitive game.

Do not forget that this game is all about competition, the better you are playing the better your overall SR rank will be. But not everyone could play with the maximum efficiency. It is extremely hard to fully master Overwatch and if you do not feel confident enough you could always use the services of https://expertboosting.com and get quickly boosted to the desired rank. But with the Role Queue update, I think that this is unnecessary, without GOATs is much more pleasurable to play so you could easily climb and learn the game.

Role Lock in competitive games

But what happens outside the Overwatch League? In common competitive games, role-lock played a positive role. It solves the main question of the game – what is supposed to be a team-based game? It is simple, right now you will not have to yell from the pain when you are seeing 5 DPS heroes in your team. With only a few restrictions you now free to play with the heroes you want to play, and there will not be such situations where you are struggling, because your teammates are forcing you to play the unknown role.

Right now you are free in determining your role and you will not be pressured by other players to switch your class. If you want to deal damage, then just choose the Damage Queue and then play whatever you want. Previously there were a ton of situations where toxic players whining about your role and forcing you to quickly switch it, or these salty guys would throw the game.

How Role Lock will fix the balance

Overwatch is still not an ideal game, there are a lot of other issues that Role Queue cannot fix and imbalanced heroes are one of the weakest sides. Role Queue could help the balancing team to adjust these heroes, after all, it is much easier to balance heroes when you are sure that there will not be 4 supports and 2 tanks in the team composition. And that means that we could expect the great returning of the nerfed champions (they were nerfed in pointless attempts to kill GOAT composition), like Lucio and Mei. With the 2-2-2 lock, we could expect a lot of little adjustments in the nearest time.

Balancing question is always a fragile matter. Not only in Overwatch the balance is suffering, look at popular Moba games like League of Legends or Dota 2. Each of these games also has more than 130 characters in the pool and it is almost impossible to find the perfect balance. Professional players could be extremely flexible and inventing, creating interesting builds that will break something. FPS games are slightly easier to balance but in this sphere, we could see a lot of scandals. Like Fortnite and their questionable decisions:

  1. One-shotting Sword;
  2. Mechs.

Both of these issues were noticed only during the professional tournaments, recently at Fortnite tournament with the prize pool of the $400 000, a lot of Twitch streamers are just raged quit after being slain by the hard-to-kill mechs. Soon after Epic Games quickly nerfed everything, but the mood was spoiled already.

So do not expect that Role Lock will immediately solve every Blizzard’s balance question, but this is the major step in the right way. At least it saved the Overwatch League and now it will attract more newcomers to this awesome game.