You know and love the Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest. Write the worst possible opening sentence to a novel.
Check out the Lyttle Lytton: 200-characters-and-under-subdivision:
http://adamcadre.ac/lyttle.html
Featuring such gems as:
Jennifer stood there, quietly ovulating.
As the fireman entered the burning building, he felt a warm rush blow over him—like when you open the oven door and get that jet of warm air.
Cool video on the rope memory used for the Apollo missions.
Overwatch is adding role queue and role lock, with independent per-role MMRs.
Oh. That seems nice actually.
Slightly tempted to try it.
I would never use such a feature unless I was forced to, as I can play any role based on need. But if this keeps the salty babies who only know how to play Widow or Tracer from ruining my games, awesome. 
The role lock I think is a bad idea, and it may affect how much I play in the long run. I really enjoy the flexibility of choosing to risk a triple-tank or other weird strategy. Also, a good team might want to swap tanks, and swap WHICH PLAYER plays the tank vs the DPS. This makes that impossible, I can’t swap from Zarya to Pharah to let our Pharah go Reinhardt…
I do see the problem they’re trying to solve though. People are dumb and mean and are incapable of communicating enough to chose roles effectively…
The ranking changes are fascinating, and I have to think on them quite a bit before I can voice an opinion.
They should force he role lock only at low ranks or unranked. If you rank up near pro tier, use whatever comp you want.
I wish we were doing that new panel idea on competitive vs casual. Lot of fodder here.
These changes are almost entirely aimed at poor players with poor social skills… It’s really solving for the “I am incapable of talking to other humans for 40 seconds to come to a reasonable compromise”
League of Legends implemented role locking at the same time as they introduced “ranked dynamic queue”. You should have seen that shitstorm. They eventually split dynamic queue from solo queue. Overwatch is still dynamic queue right?
A big loss when League added role selection was that people that had more role diversity in theory could leverage that to make groups work that wouldn’t otherwise… which is cool… but also you just can’t prevent people from being toxic. People also heavily gamed when it was ideal to leave a game before it started.
And all of that said, the other trade off is almost always time. Longer queue times. Never been a big deal to me, personally, but I’ve also never played that high of a tier.
Counter-viewpoint: Role lock ranked queue fixed a huge annoying issue of people arguing about which role was called first and players self-sabotaging ranked games because they didn’t get what they wanted. Also the secondary effects of queue dodges around off-meta picks is frankly fine at lower tiers because the team probably won’t understand/execute off-meta comps/lane picks well and/or the player attempting it in low silver is probably bad and emulating a streamer and has no idea what they are doing.
That’s just another way to look at the sliding scale to my point about the advantages of being able to play fill. They changed it from fill means I can win more games and get people on their strongest roles to fill means I get into games more quickly. It’s not quite zero-sum, but it’s some kind of trade-off.
With Overwatch we’re also adding that your rank is split per role. Did they eventually do that in league? The last time I played league was literally just after they added Dynamic Queue and got rid of solo queue and I was finding that less fun.
There was positional based ranking in league from 2018 to 2019 but they just wrapped it up citing lower player satisfaction and a tendency for players to play less seriously in off-role ranked matches due to the positional ranking (also there were some bugs that let people get into high diamond and grandmaster ranks who should not have). Honestly the ranked queue times in NA with the role-lock have been pretty fine over the last 2 seasons, its been a real non-issue at this point.
Astronauts sound like the biggest jock assholes in any engineering space. Reminds of the anecdote about how they had to relable the condoms that allowed urination in the space suits from “small, medium, large” to “large, extra large, gigantic”
All pilots in general are like this. Huge egos. I would imagine that astronauts, pretty much the elite of the elite, are even more so.
It seems less the astronauts and more NASA and MIT brass thinking too highly of their training methods and the abilities of the astronauts than the astronauts themselves. Not saying that the astronauts weren’t big swinging dicks themselves, people who become fighter pilots and test pilots aren’t the most humble bunch by and large.
Generally I agree.
All you have to do is read The Right Stuff to know that pilots think they’re the shit.
Great book, by the way.