If you have played Marvel Rivals, you will be aware of the Vanguard shortage and the smaller shortage of Strategist players in comparison to the huge number of Duellists. Players are often forced to fill roles or play characters that they simply don’t want to play, and they’re getting sick of it.
The addition of Role Queue would ensure that players will only ever play their assigned role that they select before the match. Which completely fixes the problem … right?
Why is Role Queue Good For Marvel Rivals?
Players can ensure their role selection, no more anxiety while you’re sitting in queue hoping that you get to play your favourite role. For a lot of players, this comfort is a HUGE motivational factor for wanting to jump in a ranked queue.
You shouldn’t have to be a triple role prodigy to climb, not everyone wants to master all the different playstyles. More often than not, your team is missing a tank and there are currently 5 Duellists preselected. At least one of your DPS players probably has a few Vanguard picks up their sleeve, but why should they be forced to play a character that provides less enjoyment to them?
Or maybe your Duellists have the self awareness to know that they suck at playing tanks … it’s incredibly frustrating when you fill a role and lose the game regardless. You hardly enjoyed yourself, and you hardly held on to your rank.
Would Role Queue Remove Toxicity?
In theory, ensuring roles would equate to higher player satisfaction and would drive more gamers to queue up again. Players that got tired of the constant fighting in voice chats and left Marvel Rivals as a result, might be enticed to return. While toxicity is never going to be completely eliminated from a competitive hero shooter, steps can be taken to stop it. Purging these arguments, ‘whoever is playing bad should be bullied into playing vanguard’, will definitely bring a lot more enjoyment and satisfaction to the player’s experience.
Higher-elo ranked matches are often derailed by similar conflict. From my experience, games are frequently lost simply due to the fact that one team has multiple players filling roles whereas the other team is perfectly curated, essentially diminishing each match to the toss of a coin.
For those games where players simply refuse to lock Vanguard or Strategist, there would be no ranked points lost with role queue as the situation simply wouldn’t exist. Role queue enables more accurate individual skill ratings as players aren’t losing points for games where they’ve had to fill a role. Believe it or not, players don’t usually possess the same level of skill across all three roles. Seperating roles allows for a more realistic picture of a player’s skill level per role.
Marvel Rivals Might Be Easier To Balance
From a balancing perspective, it must be challenging to maintain fairness on the battlefield with so many dynamic moving parts. With so many possible team compositions, such as 3 Duellists, 3 Vanguards, 3 Strategists, assessing how a balance patch might perform in the actual arena is a lot more complex. For 2/2/2 team compositions, more consistency and control is present, making outcomes easier to predict any potential changes. The same concept could be applied to teamups, allowing for a much smoother development process.
Why Would Role Queue Be a Bad Idea?
The first major con that most players will recognise is longer queue times. Duellist queues will definitely take a huge hit while they wait to be matched with an illusive tank player. Overwatch definitely suffered from longer queue times and there’s an argument that it actually pushed players away from the game as you could cook an entire 3 course meal before queues popped in high-elo lobbies.
Lots of players might say, ‘well I would rather wait for longer to find a more balanced and fair game’. But would they? If you’re waiting double the time, let’s say 10 minutes, and a loss streak ensues, the negative feelings will be amplified due to the longer wait times. You’re simply investing more time, for seemingly less rewards. Who wants to sit in queue for an eternity just to lose? Many players would likely leave the game as they simply don’t have the time or don’t want to sit in a long queue, regardless of if they win or lose.
Big System Changes Might Be Required
Damage might have to be reduced across the board. As far as Strategists are concerned, role queue will more than likely force two main healers, like Luna Snow and Invisible Woman, as every game is going to have two tanks. These two tanks could have insanely high health pools, like Groot and Peni, meaning that two Strategists with high healing per second will be required to keep them alive. But even with the lowest health pool tanks, there is a huge healing burden to carry, especially when you factor in two Duellists.
The high healing pressure will likely render offensive Strategists, like Mantis, Ultron and Adam Warlock, somewhat unplayable as they simply lack the prerequisite healing capabilities, and that doesn’t look great for the future of Rivals. I personally enjoy playing Strategists that can inflict decent damage, but role queue is likely to put a nail in their coffin unless there are universal damage or healing changes.
Furthermore, the 2/2/2 team composition would also eliminate triple Strategist team compositions, which most players would cheer at! Triple Strategist comps have notoriously plagued rivals as Duellist players have moaned for eons about how ‘nothing dies’. While triple Strategist comps have received nerfs, skilled players can still utilise their value easily. Nevertheless, teamfights do get pretty boring during long stalemates with no eliminations.
However, it does feel friendly to have some kind of defensive protocol against full dive teams, like Black Panther, Spiderman and Venom, who are all jumping on a poor Luna Snow. Triple Strategist compositions would usually help her out with the additional healing in the backline and crowd control.
Removing triple Duellist or triple Vanguard comps from the game wouldn’t be as problematic in my eyes but it still detracts from the unique and chaotic feel of Rivals. The gaming experience should be different in each lobby with unpredictableness that leads to high levels of replayability, role queue threatens that environment.
Could Rivals Offer Incentives To Lessen The Burden?
Without a doubt, there would need to be methods of shortening the queue times and incentivising players to queue up on certain roles that are under subscribed, like Vanguard and Strategist. Rivals could reward players with chrono tokens, battlepass currency or chrono shields which shield a player from a loss in competitive play. If the situation worsens, unstable molecules for extra customization options, costume coins or even small amounts of units would also act as effective incentives. On the flip side, if a player is toxic, trolls or goes AFK, they could be penalised by being marked as low priority in the queue system.
Verdict – To Role Queue or Not To Role Queue?
Role queue is a very popular suggestion among Rivals players. In theory, it’s an amazing idea that would solve a lot of problems, improve ranked integrity and player satisfaction. However, most players don’t understand the gravity of the side effects.
Role queue is likely to dramatically increase queue times. If there are 100,000 players online, they are wittled down again and again by regions, game modes and ranks until we’re left with only 1,000 players online in diamond on one server. Of those 1,000, there is most definitely not an even split between Vanguard, Duellist and Strategist players. Endless amounts of Duellist players will endure crazy queue times.
But, Duellist players might also be influenced to learn other roles, which would be amazing for the game! If role queue was to be added, I think Rivals should test it initially as an additional mode and assess it’s popularity. But let’s not repeat the errors of Overwatch, and I’m very happy that Rivals seems to want to do things differently. I do believe role queue would be an amazing change for Marvel Rivals, but the rollout would have to be near perfect in order to not lose players.
What do you think?
