Overwatch 2 and its predecessor Overwatch have gone through a lot of matchmaking changes over the years. Some of you will share my less fond memories of the 5-10 minute or longer ranked queues before role lock was a thing and everyone and their mother wanted to play DPS, and even after that but 6v6 meant you still had to wait for two tank players instead of one (and tanks/supports were less DPS focused back then, and therefore less players were interested in playing them).

However, for years now, the developers at Team 4 have found a good balance between match quality and wait times, with most queues appearing within a few minutes (at least around the middle tiers, where most players are). Since Season 10, however, things have regressed, and we’re back to long queues (somewhere between seven and ten minutes so far).

I've been playing Overwatch and Overwatch 2 with the same buddy for years. We both live in North America and our rank gap and roles have fluctuated a bit over that time, but we've always been within a full rank or two of each other, and most of the time he's on Tank and I'm on DPS. We normally never wait more than a few minutes to play and the matches are almost always high quality (meaning it's not a stomp, or at least not a well-deserved one), but since the Season 10 update and the 'Wide Match' feature, it's now 10 minutes or more.

Presumably the goal here is to improve match quality at the expense of queue times, but if it's this extreme and affects the ability of relatively closely ranked friends to play with each other, I have to believe changes are coming. The main point here seems to be 'Narrow Group role configurations will always be prioritized over Wide Group configurations'. As far as I can tell, they're prioritized so heavily that anyone in a Wide Group should consider starting a book club.