Guangyun “Guangguang” Chen, creative director behind Marvel Rivals, says that while many players have requested a role queue system, a matchmaking option to help create balanced teams, there are currently no plans to implement one in the free-to-play character shooter.
The free-to-play third-person hero shooter launched earlier this month and has quickly become one of the biggest games of the year, already hitting over 20 million players. And some of these players are tired of being tossed into matches where their entire team is duelists, forcing them to play healer or tank to help balance the lineup.
One solution to this problem is a role queue. Found in games like Overwatch 2, a role queue lets players pick a role, like tank, and then find a match that needs that specific role. In Overwatch 2‘s case, this means every match has a tank, two attackers, and two healers. This should lead to more balanced teams, but the devs behind Rivals don’t seem interested in adding this system to the shooter.
Speaking to Dot Esports, Chen said that the studio is “not considering a role queue” at the moment.
“The team’s goal is to offer a wider variety of team composition through team-up skills and their own designs, to let people play their Marvel superheroes rather than limiting players to choosing a role.”
Chen further explained that data from matches shows that Rivals currently doesn’t need a role queue system.
“We want people to have a Marvel experience where they’re free to select what they want. [Since the beta test earlier this year], things have been rational and within expectations. In our Competitive play recently, there is a lot of different compositions emerging from players and we’d like to continue to monitor these fun compositions and how they impact our game.”
While some might be upset that Chen and developer NetEase aren’t rushing to balance the game or add a role queue system, I’m happy to see an online multiplayer game studio step back and let things be chaotic and messy for a bit before jumping in to sand things down and make everything more fair and balanced.
One of the reasons I enjoy Rivals is because everyone feels powerful and matches rarely play out the same way as nearly every character seems viable with the right comp or strategy. And while a role queue might be nice in ranked mode, I hope if it is ever added, it doesn’t signal a shift to balancing all the fun out of Marvel Rivals.
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