Among Us needs to steal this polarizing Overwatch feature
This could let fans play as the Imposter more regularly.
The social deduction game Among Us turns friends into enemies by pitting them against each other aboard a spaceship. Each game begins with players being assigned the role of a "Crewmate" who needs to complete a list of tasks or the "Imposter" whose goal it is to murder the entire crew.
Playing as the Imposter is the most challenging but thrilling of the two roles since you need to kill everyone else while avoiding suspicion. There's nothing like the rush of framing someone in a lobby for your dirty work, but the odds of being assigned the Imposter role are low compared to your chances of becoming a Crewmate.
But one polarizing feature from Overwatch could fix this and make Among Us even more fun for those addicted to being the bad guy.
A role queue system could help player be the Imposter more often and help players start games quicker.
Developer InnerSloth should add a role queue system like in Blizzard's shooter that lets players choose if they want to be an Imposter or Crewmate and automatically populates lobbies. As it stands, Among Us fans either need to join or create public lobbies or play a private match with their groups of friends. Getting as many as nine more people to all log on at the same time can be challenging and public lobbies have notoriously finicky connection.
A role queue could make it easier for players who just want to play a brief Among Us session to join a lobby quickly. Plus, it'll allow players to be guaranteed to be Imposter the next game they play, which is currently impossible.
Among Us randomly selects players' roles, meaning there's no special trick that players can use to influence their chances of being the Imposter, unless they tweak some game settings in their own lobby. Even then they'd need to recruit their buddies to join or wait for others to join, which might be difficult if they're playing a funky rule-set.
Role queue games could immediately start once the game has found enough players to fill a lobby.
The addition of a role queue will ensure players get to play as the murderer the next game they get placed and quickly being playing a public match, two improvements to the current state of Among Us. There could be one issue, however: queue times for Imposters would be much lengthier than Crewmates.
Overwatch has a similar issue with its role queue, specifically with players who want to play damage-dealing characters instead of tank or support characters. Entering the queue for a DPS character, particularly in Competitive mode, means you'll probably wind up waiting at least a few minutes to get sorted into a match. But at least there's a 100 percent guarantee that you can play as the type of character you want.
Since every game of Among Us needs to have fewer Imposters than Crewmates at the start and most players prefer being the Imposter, the Imposter role queue will naturally be more saturated.
But Among Us recently hit three million players across all platforms, so while would-be Imposters will most likely need to wait a few minutes, there are so many active players that wait times might not be as frustrating as in Overwatch.
Among Us is available for PC, iOS, and Android.
