Why Marvel Rivals fans continue to debate adding a role queue
There’s nothing to talk about Marvel Rivals without talking about it Overwatch; the two hero shooters share a lot of the same DNA, and the team at NetEase clearly looked at the wildly popular FPS and made a few notes. Now that Marvel Rivals is a successful game in its own right, attracting its own fan base, some of the old arguments plagued Overwatch are coming back – and many players are hoping that things will turn out differently this time.
Take, for example, the three roles of the game. There are high-damage duelists, team-defending Vanguards, and support strategists. A common, and admittedly exacerbating, problem is loading a game only to have everyone immediately capture Duelists. Vanguards and Strategists simply aren’t as popular, perhaps because it’s harder to pull off a cool quadra kill with their skills.
When you played Overwatch in 2016 this probably sounds very familiar. Players from that era remember seeing their teammates locked up as Hanzo and Widowmaker, forcing them to reluctantly play as a tank or healer. I remember playing Mercy for many games in a row, hoping that in the next game one of my teammates would recognize my desperation and finally let me play Pharah. They never did, because random gamers online are rarely known for their charity.
Overwatch fixed this issue in 2019 with role queue; players went into a game knowing that each team had to have a certain lineup of tanks, healers, or damaged characters. If you played one of the less popular roles, you even got extra rewards. Blizzard has also spent a lot of time on adjustments Overwatch‘s balance to fit into this structure, with characters undergoing balance changes or even complete reworks to ensure they fit into the squad. Of Overwatch 2Blizzard even removed a person from each team, turning the 6v6 game into a 5v5 game instead.
Marvel Rivals does not have a role queuing system nor is it as rigorously balanced as Overwatch. Characters like Jeff the Land Shark may be powerful healers, but they can also develop game-changing abilities, such as pulling the entire enemy team into their maw and spitting them off the edge of the map. This means that while queuing you may encounter a team full of Strategists, or a team with a heavy Vanguard frontline protecting only one or two Duelists.
At this moment, Marvel Rivals makes such flexibility and freedom possible – and it once did Overwatch. One of the factors that led to the addition of a role queue was the GOATS meta, named after the team that popularized the three-tank, three-healer composition. GOATS dominated at a high level Overwatch play for a while, including professional games, and it was not only criticized for being frustrating to play against, but boring to watch.
But Marvel Rivals is not tied to a professional circuit or competitive expectations; it’s a loosely goosey take on the genre where most heroes, in the right hands, are at least a little broken. That’s a big part of why some fans like the game so much; if they wanted to play a high-stakes competitive shooter, they would just play one of the existing esports-heavy games on the market.
Still, the debate over whether a role queue is needed or should be added remains one of the talking points important topics in the Marvel Rivals community, and it has been for months. The Marvel Rivals developers at NetEase told Period Esports they have no plans to add a role queue at this time, and they have a chance to break away from the Overwatch path and push what makes Marvel Rivals so unique. Until we find a way to convince all Duelist fans to refuel or heal every now and then, the debate will likely continue to rage on fan forums and social media.