Overwatch: Boop!

[The_Jackal]

Those numbers seem a bit skewed towards smallish sample sizes, though. Most of those top 20 Roadhog players have fewer than 100 games with Roadhog in the sampling time. By comparison, of the top 20 Winston players, only two have fewer than 100 games with him in the current sampling period.

I suspect that the "something" these players know is which situations Roadhog is and isn't viable in, and that the situations where he isn't good significantly outnumber the situations where he is viable.

If there was really a special sauce to playing Roadhog with a consistently high winrate, this list would have more members with numbers that suggest they are maining Roadhog, like Winston's numbers have.

Also, it's possible that nearly any character which rewards good aiming and positioning and isn't nerfed to six feet under can do reasonably well in the hands of someone who has aimbot-like precision and thousands of hours of experience developing gamesense.

So how much of this is the dive meta being the predominant form of play, and how much is the non-viability of Roadhog? I do agree, he needs help, I'm just not sure how much help he really needs. I like the idea of giving him a longer clip for more sustain has potential, and maybe some passive damage reduction, even something small like 10-15%, to take the edge off his 'ult battery' downsides maybe in order. If that doesn't do it, then maybe pulling down his hook cooldown back to 7 or even 6 seconds may also help. I just don't think a return to the old 'Hook == Death' is the move.

That would force many (including myself) to only do quickplay..... that would be so cruel.

But the trade off with that is if there's more players who actually care about winning into quick play, it wouldn't be such a dumpster-fire. What I'd really like to see is 3-fold: 1) solo queue competitive is gone. 2) all extrinsic in-game rewards (skins, gold guns, sprays) removed from comp, to keep only those who care about their ladder ranking in competitive. 3) An arranged-team only competitive queue, with good tools to allow players to find teams, advertise their preferred roles, make friends, and actually put onus on *finding* and *keeping* friends to play with. Because what ultimately is toxic about the current competitive game is the expectation that you're going to trust 4-5 strangers you've been piled into a room with, and come up with a working composition and strategy in 30 seconds.

Ultimately, I don't think the SR system is healthy, because the design of a proper MMR doesn't translate to team games, unless the TEAM has the MMR, and a proper MMR system isn't a "ladder". A ladder implies that you should be climbing it, or something is wrong. That's not what should be happening. You should settle at an MMR that reflects your level of skill, and only climb when you actually improve as a player, and far too many players have unrealistic notions about their own level of skill. That's just human nature. In the immortal words of Garrison Keillor, "All the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above-average".

I'm with Psyren: I've got no truck with elitism, I only want the games to be interesting. I'm willing to swap into a role to help my team, but I don't want to be stuck playing #@$&*! Lucio or Reinhardt every game. I don't drop games, I agree that's not a good solution, but yes, if I'm getting farmed by Genji as the solo healer, or I'm running into a wall with Winston because nobody follows my initiation, guess what? I'm swapping off to Sombra or Widow to screw around. I think the current paradigm where the performance metrics favor playing one-tricks, and in particular, off-meta one-tricks, is what's making the competitive scene as toxic as it's become, but at the end of the day, there's always going to be more players wanting to play Hanzo and Widow than there are teams who need that player, which is why I think competitive is always going to be a bit of a garbage-fire, so long as there's an anonymous queue.

I get far too many people in my Quickplay games just being idiots who all pick DPS with me being the only Support or Tank.... Banning me from playing competitive just because my friends don't play overwatch would leave me stuck with a very annoying group of players.

My point is that if you're in an arranged team format, where they give us matchmaking tools to find players, and develop comraderie, you're going to be able to build relationships and trust, and you're going to get a chance to swap off support/tank roles with your other players. Also, you do have friends who play Overwatch. You've got us. The battletag list is in the top post.