Overwatch's Upcoming Priority Pass Feature Explained

Last week, Overwatch announced that it is currently testing a new feature known as the Priority Pass. In a post, Principal Game Designer Scott Mercer said that the goal of this feature is to hopefully “equalize the disparate player populations between all three of the game’s roles: tank, support, and damage.” In addition, Mercer went on to say that the Priority Pass also wants to resolve the issue of “long Damage queue times by rewarding players who choose to queue as Flex and play another role for a game or two with passes that will decrease their queue times in the future.”

Talking further about this Priority Pass, what usually happens when players queue in Overwatch is that they can select Tank, Support, or Damage. Typically, Damage remains to be rather popular. Because of this, players that decide to go for Damage experience long queue times between games.

Mercer revealed that Blizzard hopes the Priority Pass will be able to address this question. Players that queue up as Flex players, meaning those who will play Tank, Support, or Damage, get this Priority Pass. When a Flex player eventually wants to take on a Damage role, they can use the Pass in order to lower their queue times. Overall, this means that by choosing Flex, players can help equalize the role populations while at the same time lower the queue time imbalance between roles.

Players are given passes based on whether they win or lose. Playing one Flex game, for example, lets players play multiple games where they can have Priority Passes they can use. A player can save as many as 40 passes at once.

Before you rejoice, there’s bit of a caveat. Priority Passes can’t be used when playing with a group of at least five players. This is because the game usually tries to match large parties with other large parties. This also means the parties should already have a balance of roles, so using a Priority Pass wouldn't have much of an impact on the queue times anyway. As such, players won’t need to waste passes, especially if they won’t have any effect.

What do you think? Is this a good idea? Are you willing to play Flex for a few rounds to rack up Priority passes? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.