What’s the best time of day to play Overwatch Competitive?

With the introduction of role queue in Overwatch, there’s a lot of people who want to jump into the Competitive mode to see how they fare at the three different roles. Role queue majorly shifts how the game works and finds games for you to play. Damage players now see long queue times while Tanks and Support get almost instant queues. It might be time to start thinking about when you log on to play Competitive.

For most people, there isn’t a bad time to log into Competitive and play. Queue times for people below Diamond Skill Rating should be short and innocuous. There’s a ton of people playing in all of the ranks below Diamond, so the matchmaking system should have almost no problem finding matches. If you’re a damage player, you’ll need to get used to long queue times with no loot box or currency reward — that’s the nature of the game.

That changes a bit when you queue with a group or if you do rank higher than your average player. You’d see this problem surface if you watch any streamers. They are often in the highest brackets of players and therefore see long queue times which can be even longer if they play at odd hours of the day. It’s so bad for Damage players that they have to play Minecraft or watch YouTube videos for 20 minutes in between games. Grouping up can do a similar thing because the game needs to average out your SR and find games that will give everyone a challenge. That often means finding enemy groups to go against as well — anything more than one person in an average rank taxes the matchmaker.

In terms of queue times, you’ll probably find the best results in the evenings or on the weekends. But again, it won’t matter as much for people in the middle ranks. For quality of games, you should play during the week, even though you may wait slightly longer per game. Weekend games can be kind of rough. I’ve had my fair share of weekend games in Platinum rank that are filled with a lot of people that don’t seem that interested in trying to win.

The best rule of thumb is to not overthink it though. Trust the game’s matchmaker to give you fair game and trust that it’ll all work out in the long run. Remember to enjoy the game before you start trying to maximize your SR gains based on your time of day. It’ll only lead to frustration.