Overwatch 2's Arcade modes are great, but good luck playing any of them. The queue times are far longer than any of the other modes in the game, and Blizzard believes this is because too many of them are available at once. So to combat this, some of these different ways to play could actually be combined in future updates.
This comes from Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller, who recently acknowledged that Arcade mode has a huge queuing problem. Speaking after the launch of Season 3, Keller makes it clear that the devs are looking for ways to address this, meaning we can expect some pretty noticeable changes to these various casual modes soon.
"Some of the [Arcade] modes can have very long queue times," says Keller. "This is exacerbated by the fact that we have challenges that require people to play in the arcade and we've moved the most popular game modes from it to the Unranked card." The latter refers to how Mystery Heroes and Deathmatch are now in the Unranked menu, as opposed to Arcade as it was in the first Overwatch.
In the short term, Keller says that we can expect to see fewer Arcade modes available at once. This would make sense, as they are already cycled on a rotation, so they're never all available at the same time. This would force fans to play in other modes while they wait for their favourite to return, hopefully reducing wait times all around.
Another idea is to "roll some game modes together in a rotating queue". This could act much like competitive and quick-play, as they combine game modes such as Control and Push. This would give us less of a say in what we play, but make it much faster to get into a game of some description.
Making Mystery Heroes and Deathmatch always available in the Unranked menu may have been a welcome change to players, but it's clearly reduced the amount of us even looking to play in Arcade mode. It remains to be seen if Blizzard can counter this without sending these two popular modes back into Arcade.