You’re about to get rewarded for playing nice with Overwatch‘s role queue. A new Priority Pass system will reward you for taking on flex roles by letting you bank faster access to the roles you want to play. Despite how much this sounds like a theme park express pass, don’t worry – you won’t be paying for Priority Passes.
You can earn Priority Passes by entering a flex queue, which will funnel you out into whatever role is needed most. You will get passes for a loss, but you’ll earn more for a win, which should help prevent people from idling or throwing to earn them. You can bank up to 40 passes, though director Jeff Kaplan says that number “might change” depending on how tuning goes.
If you want to play a role that has a longer queue time – and as Kaplan says, “if we’re being honest and direct with each other, that’s probably the damage role” – you can spend a Priority Pass to get through the queue faster. You’ll be able to see estimated queue times both with and without the pass, so you can see if you’d like to spend one.
The hope is that this system will make queueing faster for everyone, with more players moving into flex queues for Priority Passes so everyone gets into a full game faster. Priority Passes will go live on the PTR soon, but don’t expect them to stay there long – it’ll mostly be there for bug testing, as feedback on the design won’t be especially valuable until it hits live servers with actual players.
Check out the video above for more info, or just to see Jeff in some cool sunglasses. Either way, it’s a winning time. (Someday he’ll tell us about the Overwatch 2 release date… someday.)