Overwatch: Thread of the Game

[Psyren]

On the one hand, Jeff is right: Everything in the game below Diamond is effectively a giant clownfiesta. On the other hand, saying that implies that there's nothing they need to do about the game as its experienced by the vast majority of players. You need a viable composition to make the game work at even its most basic level, and yet until you reach Diamond and above, your matchmaking and team compositions are so random, so utterly disorganized, you may as well be tossing a coin to determine who wins and loses. And that's the game they've designed, and yet have somehow contrived to blame the players for the failings of their design.

It's this 'only the top-tier balance counts' mindset that has pretty much convinced me that the designers have no real intention of ever fixing the gold/platinum experience, and I'm not really willing to slog through however many games I need to escape the 'pray I get enough tanks and healers to not get curbstomped' tier.

We disagree often, but I have to say that I'm with you 100% here, especially the bolded part.

This video sums up the problem with casual/solo-queue Overwatch in my mind:



As for solutions? I can think of a few but none of them would sound good to the players. I would consider for example giving groups that are largely composed of randoms/solo-queuers and getting stomped some kind of buff, whether to respawn time/location, damage/toughness. ult charge or something else. Or maybe you get a "determination" buff the worse your winrate is in solo queue, similar to LFR groups that wipe over and over. But while that kind of thing would be great in a PvE game, it would leave a pretty sour taste in a PvP situation, which Overwatch sadly is.

[Rynjin]

Ok, and when somebody switched off that role, does the game pause until they switch back? The game wants you to dynamically change your composition to counter what the enemy is doing. Theres not really any way to both have that and force people to play with all the roles.

I'm hard pressed to think of a situation where a team would want zero Support or Tank characters. Just lock the support/tank players into only choosing support/tank characters on the select screen until/unless somebody else picks one.

[Psyren]

I'm hard pressed to think of a situation where a team would want zero Support or Tank characters. Just lock the support/tank players into only choosing support/tank characters on the select screen until/unless somebody else picks one.

Won't that just make nobody want to be a tank or support initially, to avoid that restriction? Seems like a recipe for toxicity right from the moment of character select.

[Rynjin]

Won't that just make nobody want to be a tank or support initially, to avoid that restriction? Seems like a recipe for toxicity right from the moment of character select.

How is that different from the current situation?

Either people want to win, or they don't. If your team wants to throw, better to know it at the very start so you can just dip.

[Psyren]

How is that different from the current situation?

Either people want to win, or they don't. If your team wants to throw, better to know it at the very start so you can just dip.

I think it's worse, because now you're taking roles that already have issues with representation in solo queue (tank/healer), and layering on yet another reason to avoid them (the possibility of being locked into them until someone deigns to relieve you of duty.) Not to mention the possibility that someone might pick tank initially and turn out that they're not actually that good at the role, or maybe they pick a tank that is good for one map type but not another (like Winston.)

[Rynjin]

I think it's worse, because now you're taking roles that already have issues with representation in solo queue (tank/healer), and layering on yet another reason to avoid them (the possibility of being locked into them until someone deigns to relieve you of duty.) Not to mention the possibility that someone might pick tank initially and turn out that they're not actually that good at the role, or maybe they pick a tank that is good for one map type but not another (like Winston.)

So you're in a situation where nobody wants to play a tank or healer, to the point that playing one does not feel like a fun experience and more like "taking one for the team" or some kind of chore to complete.

That shifts the problem from a player issue, to a game design issue. Make your tanks and healers more engaging to play, or don't make the game so hard focused on enough people playing them for the game to function. Overwatch is the only shooter I've played with support roles that are required, but apparently nobody wants to play them in competitive play. Never had an issue picking up a Medic in scrims in TF2, plenty of Medic players in the Battlefield games I've played, nobody balks at playing Doc or Finka in Rainbow Six: Siege when it's called for, and so on. So either the issue is that Overwatch attracts a completely different, hyper support-averse community (which seems unlikely), or nobody wants to play support because there's something unsatisfying to most people about the support experience beyond just a desire to play DPS and watch your numbers grow.

As for the second part, well, this only applies in competitive, not casual. The only way to get better at something is to practice. If they're not good at the role, or at judging which character goes to which map, they're never going to learn if people just tell them "stop playing tank and let me take over, idiot".

[The_Jackal]

I'm hard pressed to think of a situation where a team would want zero Support or Tank characters. Just lock the support/tank players into only choosing support/tank characters on the select screen until/unless somebody else picks one.

How about the situation in which nobody in the lobby wants to play one? Because that remains the existential problem with Overwatch: Before GOATS there were 2 DPS slots per team of six, and far more than 2 players who wanted to play in those slots. Now with 3/3 comps being the norm, there's now 0 DPS slots for all the players who want to play in those slots. Now yes, you could arguably introduce the role queue a'la World of Warcraft, but buckle up for those 45 minute queue times for DPS slots. And unlike WoW, there's nothing else to do in Overwatch while you wait.

[Rynjin]

How about the situation in which nobody in the lobby wants to play one? Because that remains the existential problem with Overwatch: Before GOATS there were 2 DPS slots per team of six, and far more than 2 players who wanted to play in those slots. Now with 3/3 comps being the norm, there's now 0 DPS slots for all the players who want to play in those slots. Now yes, you could arguably introduce the role queue a'la World of Warcraft, but buckle up for those 45 minute queue times for DPS slots. And unlike WoW, there's nothing else to do in Overwatch while you wait.

See above.

[Psyren]

Overwatch is the only shooter I've played with support roles that are required, but apparently nobody wants to play them in competitive play.

Wait, are we talking quickplay or competitive? Because I think requiring certain comps or a basic acknowledgement of the meta should be a requirement of a competitive format, and solo-queuing a format that relies on coordinated teams to succeed should be a crapshoot. If you show up to "competitive" alone alongside a bunch of other randoms who showed up alone, and the other team is together on discord calling their plays, your side losing isn't actually an issue in my mind.

That shifts the problem from a player issue, to a game design issue. Make your tanks and healers more engaging to play, or don't make the game so hard focused on enough people playing them for the game to function.

The only way to do that is to make people not need tanks or healers, which in turn means them not really tanking or healing.

Which I'm not opposed to, to be clear - in fact, one of my suggestions above was to make solo-queue players get damage or toughness buffs that essentially equate to having free support. But I'm not certain that would or should really fly in a "competitive" format.

[Rynjin]

Wait, are we talking quickplay or competitive? Because I think requiring certain comps or a basic acknowledgement of the meta should be a requirement of a competitive format, and solo-queuing a format that relies on coordinated teams to succeed should be a crapshoot. If you show up to "competitive" alone alongside a bunch of other randoms who showed up alone, and the other team is together on discord calling their plays, your side losing isn't actually an issue in my mind.

Comp. Not that Overwatch's ranked mode really deserves the moniker, since apparently nobody is there to win or get better at the game. That's what I mean.

I used to solo queue 6's scrims on a site all the time. Everybody was there, everybody claimed their role, and there wasn't any fighting about it. And that's a game subset with a MUCH stricter character select limitation than Overwatch. You didn't queue as Support with one of 6 options, or DPS or tank with one of over a dozen options to choose from, the team composition was, out of 9 playable characters in the game, 1 Demoman, 2 Soldiers, 2 Scouts, and 1 Medic, with the Soldiers and Scouts splitting into VERY defined roles (roamer or pocket), and only the roaming Soldier and spare Scout being allowed to off-class as the situation permitted.

And yet 6 people in a room who had never met the other five could queue in, quickly discuss who would take which position, and get into the game in less than two minutes, with occasional snags primarily caused by someone saying they were willing to take on any role causing snafus as people figured out which role they then WANTED to play more rather than what was needed.

The difference is one of mindset. The people queuing into those scrims wanted to get better at the game, improve their skills at a certain role or on certain maps (Scouts wanted to learn their flanks, Soldiers wanted to improve their rollouts and dives, Medics wanted to improve their rotation speed, etc.), and actually play competitive matches when the new season began.

People playing Overwatch "Competitive" want, what? A shiny gun? So in the end, they're not comp players at all, because their mindset is of a casual player who's going into a ranked gamemode to rack up enough game-dough to buy a skin.

It's not a matter of lack of communication, or even lack of skill. I was Steel rank at my best in TF2 (and didn't even play comp 6's in season, I played Spy/Backup Demoman in Highlander) and queued with some quite nice Plat and Invite 6's players who could give me pointers and help me improve my game (map knowledge and zoning skill with Demo helped a lot with Spy, since ammo-surfing with your cloak is a big deal in HL), and everybody knew how to use the in-game chat or invite someone to their TeamSpeak server during game set-up. It's a matter of mindset.

Edit: Great, you've got me "Back in my day *shakes fist*"-ing about a game whose comp scene died for the literal polar opposite reason of Overwatch's. Harrumph.

[The_Jackal]

See above.

Okay.

Overwatch is the only shooter I've played with support roles that are required, but apparently nobody wants to play them in competitive play. Never had an issue picking up a Medic in scrims in TF2, plenty of Medic players in the Battlefield games I've played, nobody balks at playing Doc or Finka in Rainbow Six: Siege when it's called for, and so on. So either the issue is that Overwatch attracts a completely different, hyper support-averse community (which seems unlikely), or nobody wants to play support because there's something unsatisfying to most people about the support experience beyond just a desire to play DPS and watch your numbers grow.

I don't think either alternative quite reaches the truth. Even in WoW, which I think is a much better model for hard role enforcement on a reluctant player base, there were persistent shortages of tanks and healers in the anonymous queued modes of the game, and the ratio of DPS to supports was much more generous in that game.

As for why healers are unsatisfying, it's very simple: You have a complete lack of carry potential. If you're doing your job properly, all you're doing is enabling your teammate to absorb damage. This isn't to say it isn't valuable, but if your teammate can't close escrow an enemy heroes, you're basically a no-op.

As for tanking, I actually enjoyed tanking in WoW, I was a warrior main, but there's a big difference in how tanks play in Overwatch and how they play in WoW, and I really can't stand tanking in Overwatch. The reason? Helplessness. You're ostensibly the leader of your team, so you're expected to go in first, but if you can't count on your teammates to follow up on your initiation and bring down enemies, you're essentially accomplishing nothing but feeding the enemy team ult charge. Which actually pretty much explains why 3/3 brawl comps are as successful as they are: They have little to no mechanical challenge, and absolutely no strategic challenge. It's a simple formula: Crash the point, keep your team alive, brawl to build ult charge, then win the game with one of your two wombo-combos.

Finally, there's another reason why DPS are more popular than tanks or healers. It's *because* they're more challenging than other heroes. Heroes like Mercy and Brig, and even D.va and Rein have fairly predictable and unchallenging kits. The dopamine rush of achieving an extraordinary success on these characters is therefore fairly uncommon. Yes, you can occasionally bring off a big ultimate on D.va, or land a charge on Reinhardt, but at least for me, doesn't compare to the feeling of two-tapping someone with McCree. There's more of a sense of agency, a sense that your skill and actions are the deciding factor in whether you succeed or fail. Mercy and Brig mains have shown conclusively that virtually any gold player can climb into Diamond on the back of high-skill floor Heroes, you just have to make fewer stupid decisions than people at your SR. But the problem with the current Overwatch game design is that playing a DPS Hero at all is the stupid decision.

People playing Overwatch "Competitive" want, what? A shiny gun? So in the end, they're not comp players at all, because their mindset is of a casual player who's going into a ranked gamemode to rack up enough game-dough to buy a skin.

Exactly. The problem is, without the marbles in the bottom of the Overwatch competitive fishbowl, would anyone queue for it at all? TF2's competitive mode was a paid option, available only to invested players. Maybe that's what Overwatch should have done, copying yet one more feature. At least then the people who opted in would have at least had something on the line, namely their time and money. But I somehow doubt it would have changed the metagame, made brawl comps any less dull or pervasive, of fundamentally repaired Overwatch's Jekyll and Hyde design philosophy.

[Rynjin]

Okay.



I don't think either alternative quite reaches the truth. Even in WoW, which I think is a much better model for hard role enforcement on a reluctant player base, there were persistent shortages of tanks and healers in the anonymous queued modes of the game, and the ratio of DPS to supports was much more generous in that game.

As for why healers are unsatisfying, it's very simple: You have a complete lack of carry potential. If you're doing your job properly, all you're doing is enabling your teammate to absorb damage. This isn't to say it isn't valuable, but if your teammate can't close escrow an enemy heroes, you're basically a no-op.

As for tanking, I actually enjoyed tanking in WoW, I was a warrior main, but there's a big difference in how tanks play in Overwatch and how they play in WoW, and I really can't stand tanking in Overwatch. The reason? Helplessness. You're ostensibly the leader of your team, so you're expected to go in first, but if you can't count on your teammates to follow up on your initiation and bring down enemies, you're essentially accomplishing nothing but feeding the enemy team ult charge. Which actually pretty much explains why 3/3 brawl comps are as successful as they are: They have little to no mechanical challenge, and absolutely no strategic challenge. It's a simple formula: Crash the point, keep your team alive, brawl to build ult charge, then win the game with one of your two wombo-combos.

Finally, there's another reason why DPS are more popular than tanks or healers. It's *because* they're more challenging than other heroes. Heroes like Mercy and Brig, and even D.va and Rein have fairly predictable and unchallenging kits. The dopamine rush of achieving an extraordinary success on these characters is therefore fairly uncommon. Yes, you can occasionally bring off a big ultimate on D.va, or land a charge on Reinhardt, but at least for me, doesn't compare to the feeling of two-tapping someone with McCree. There's more of a sense of agency, a sense that your skill and actions are the deciding factor in whether you succeed or fail. Mercy and Brig mains have shown conclusively that virtually any gold player can climb into Diamond on the back of high-skill floor Heroes, you just have to make fewer stupid decisions than people at your SR. But the problem with the current Overwatch game design is that playing a DPS Hero at all is the stupid decision.

I feel like this kind of agrees with what I said, just in different words. Tanks feel helpless and supports have no way to demonstrably track how much they're helping. They're more challenging to play, but also don't get to be the "big damn hero" more than once in a blue moon. There's no common sense of accomplishment to be had in either case, sinc e if you do your job right you basically deny enemies their chance to do something cool rather than do it yourself.

I.e. they're unsatisfying to play.

Exactly. The problem is, without the marbles in the bottom of the Overwatch competitive fishbowl, would anyone queue for it at all? TF2's competitive mode was a paid option, available only to invested players. Maybe that's what Overwatch should have done, copying yet one more feature. At least then the people who opted in would have at least had something on the line, namely their time and money. But I somehow doubt it would have changed the metagame, made brawl comps any less dull or pervasive, of fundamentally repaired Overwatch's Jekyll and Hyde design philosophy.

I actually stopped playing TF2 before they added the paid competitive matchmaking; all matchmaking was done using 3rd party sites which then migrated to community servers run by those sites, or were organized between comp teams on a private server (with plug-ins for important UI changes and class and item limits for the chosen format) to do practice matches. My Highlander (9v9, one of each class) team had enough people (a "main" team and a group of backups) that we could play HL practice matches against each other. By all accounts "Competitive" mode is a huge failure by friends I know who still play, and has pretty much the same issues as Overwatch; people are there to watch their rank go up because it makes their e-peen bigger, and nothing more.

Edit: Also, technically, Overwatch does have "paid competitive". Remember that TF2 is a free to play game by default, where Overwatch has a $60 buy-in.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Comp. Not that Overwatch's ranked mode really deserves the moniker, since apparently nobody is there to win or get better at the game. That's what I mean.

I used to solo queue 6's scrims on a site all the time. Everybody was there, everybody claimed their role, and there wasn't any fighting about it. And that's a game subset with a MUCH stricter character select limitation than Overwatch. You didn't queue as Support with one of 6 options, or DPS or tank with one of over a dozen options to choose from, the team composition was, out of 9 playable characters in the game, 1 Demoman, 2 Soldiers, 2 Scouts, and 1 Medic, with the Soldiers and Scouts splitting into VERY defined roles (roamer or pocket), and only the roaming Soldier and spare Scout being allowed to off-class as the situation permitted.

And yet 6 people in a room who had never met the other five could queue in, quickly discuss who would take which position, and get into the game in less than two minutes, with occasional snags primarily caused by someone saying they were willing to take on any role causing snafus as people figured out which role they then WANTED to play more rather than what was needed.

The difference is one of mindset. The people queuing into those scrims wanted to get better at the game, improve their skills at a certain role or on certain maps (Scouts wanted to learn their flanks, Soldiers wanted to improve their rollouts and dives, Medics wanted to improve their rotation speed, etc.), and actually play competitive matches when the new season began.

People playing Overwatch "Competitive" want, what? A shiny gun? So in the end, they're not comp players at all, because their mindset is of a casual player who's going into a ranked gamemode to rack up enough game-dough to buy a skin.

It's not a matter of lack of communication, or even lack of skill. I was Steel rank at my best in TF2 (and didn't even play comp 6's in season, I played Spy/Backup Demoman in Highlander) and queued with some quite nice Plat and Invite 6's players who could give me pointers and help me improve my game (map knowledge and zoning skill with Demo helped a lot with Spy, since ammo-surfing with your cloak is a big deal in HL), and everybody knew how to use the in-game chat or invite someone to their TeamSpeak server during game set-up. It's a matter of mindset.

Edit: Great, you've got me "Back in my day *shakes fist*"-ing about a game whose comp scene died for the literal polar opposite reason of Overwatch's. Harrumph.

I don't think it's about the gun, I think it's about proving themselves by achieving a rank. If they could just get past these horrible teammates who are holding them back, they'd be Master like they deserve. And that might sound like self-improvement on the surface ("I'm Bronze now, but I'm going to hit <insert higher rank here>!"), it's really just pride and a lack of willingness to learn, i.e., "I'm a Diamond player stuck in Bronze and I can't carry my team."

For them, the reward is that rank-up, that badge which proves that they're actually good at the game, that sweet hit of approval as SR jumps up after wins. They figure that if you put in the time, you get the reward.

But your conclusion still holds, for sure. That's not being competitive, that's being a casual with aspirations.

[The_Jackal]

I feel like this kind of agrees with what I said, just in different words.

Fair to say, I don't think we were ever too far apart in our assessments in any case.

I actually stopped playing TF2 before they added the paid competitive matchmaking; all matchmaking was done using 3rd party sites which then migrated to community servers run by those sites, or were organized between comp teams on a private server (with plug-ins for important UI changes and class and item limits for the chosen format) to do practice matches. My Highlander (9v9, one of each class) team had enough people (a "main" team and a group of backups) that we could play HL practice matches against each other. By all accounts "Competitive" mode is a huge failure by friends I know who still play, and has pretty much the same issues as Overwatch; people are there to watch their rank go up because it makes their e-peen bigger, and nothing more.

Yeah, I get that, and I agree that competitive communities are best when they're opt-in, instead of including every kind of player by default. But I put it to you that you don't actually need a competitive mode to make the game actually competitive, rather, by removing the stakes from quick play, the existence of a separate competitive queue actually undermines our natural desire to win, and replaces it with a 'screw it, I'm here to practice/have fun' mindset. I'm firmly of the opinion that they could have done better by doing nothing: Just one queue, with an assortment of all the cool (or less cool, hello Lucio-ball) game-modes they've come up with. That way there's a bigger queue of players to draw on to make lobbies, and without engaging people's 'e-peen' as you put it, the hidden MMR system would work better, as there would be no reason to tank or smurf or get carries. Modern Warfare 2 had no kind of competitive ladder, just a cosmetic reward system with gear unlocks, plus a reset with more cosmetics to keep true basement-dwellers like myself engaged. It worked a treat! I did the prestige rank reset something like 9 times, just because I liked the core gameplay, and I liked earning the cool badges and stuff, plus the low level weapon unlocks were as good as, or better than, the weapons you got later. They had weapon-specific (which for Ovewratch would have been character-specific) achievements to get weapon skins and the like, and in all it provided great engagement, and in hindsight, was far less toxic than Overwatch is.

Edit: Also, technically, Overwatch does have "paid competitive". Remember that TF2 is a free to play game by default, where Overwatch has a $60 buy-in.

In Blizzard's defense, the game launched with a $40.00 price tag for the non-collector's edition (all the extra $20 gave you was some custom skins), and right now you can get a copy for like $20. That's less than The Orange Box's launch price of $50.00 on PC, though admittedly it's hard to compare a bundle to a stand-alone game. And given that game developers need to eat and pay rent, I quite prefer non-F2P games, but that has the potential to be a whole other argument.

[The_Jackal]

I don't think it's about the gun, I think it's about proving themselves by achieving a rank. If they could just get past these horrible teammates who are holding them back, they'd be Master like they deserve. And that might sound like self-improvement on the surface ("I'm Bronze now, but I'm going to hit <insert higher rank here>!"), it's really just pride and a lack of willingness to learn, i.e., "I'm a Diamond player stuck in Bronze and I can't carry my team."

For them, the reward is that rank-up, that badge which proves that they're actually good at the game, that sweet hit of approval as SR jumps up after wins. They figure that if you put in the time, you get the reward.

But your conclusion still holds, for sure. That's not being competitive, that's being a casual with aspirations.

Oh, it's definitely about the gold gun for me. That's not to say I play competitive only to throw and get my purple points, I'm not a monster, but I'm under no illusion that I have the time or inclination to grind my way to Diamond. And I suspect that's the case for the majority of players who dip their toe in comp, and you're really unlikely to get out of gold without some concerted effort, again due to the 'lose in the lobby' factor we've already described. That's not to say there isn't a cohort of delusional players who think they're GM material, I'm told that's what half the players in Platinum are like, but that's just the thing: They had to work hard to get to platinum, and find themselves stalled, and at least some of the time, they're right: They get torpedoed by stupid teammates. The only solution: Queue again, hope you get better luck, or the guys on the other side get worse luck, and do your best not to screw up too bad.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

See, the math on that just doesn't add up. If you're good enough to belong in another league, the odds of them having five potatoes and a hotshot are lower than the odds of your team having five potatoes and a hotshot, because there's a 100% chance that you're the hotshot. So, on average, your team will be better by merit of your presence. Play enough, and you climb.

There's two things that lead to the perception that you're stuck in your rank because of bad luck.

1: memory bias. We're far more likely to remember disastrous occurrences than we are to remember favorable ones. You're far more likely to remember the Genji who fed ult charge and did no damage than you are to remember the Rein who consistently pushed the team and knew exactly when to play aggro.
2: the law of averages requires time to balance out, and the amount of SR you gain/lose from a match win/loss means that you need a heap of games played in a season to translate your winrate into rank-up.

I saw some good quick math on /r/OverwatchUniversity the other week that made an incredibly salient point: with a whopping 60% winrate, you'll have to play 100 games to get 500 SR. 100 games to rank up, and that's with a 60% winrate. It's a lot. This is also the main reason why climbing takes so much effort: SR gain is very low. That said, having low SR gain means that rankings are a lot less volatile, which can be good for a high-playerbase game. However, I wouldn't be surprised to find that this is also intentionally done to give players a reason to grind the game repeatedly.

In all games of this type, I've found that being in a separate competitive league, with tournaments, scrims, and regular season play, is a much better competitive experience. You get to focus more on self-improvement and less on playing the number grind. I haven't seen a game yet that fixes this.

[Keltest]

See, the math on that just doesn't add up. If you're good enough to belong in another league, the odds of them having five potatoes and a hotshot are lower than the odds of your team having five potatoes and a hotshot, because there's a 100% chance that you're the hotshot. So, on average, your team will be better by merit of your presence. Play enough, and you climb.

There's two things that lead to the perception that you're stuck in your rank because of bad luck.

1: memory bias. We're far more likely to remember disastrous occurrences than we are to remember favorable ones. You're far more likely to remember the Genji who fed ult charge and did no damage than you are to remember the Rein who consistently pushed the team and knew exactly when to play aggro.
2: the law of averages requires time to balance out, and the amount of SR you gain/lose from a match win/loss means that you need a heap of games played in a season to translate your winrate into rank-up.

I saw some good quick math on /r/OverwatchUniversity the other week that made an incredibly salient point: with a whopping 60% winrate, you'll have to play 100 games to get 500 SR. 100 games to rank up, and that's with a 60% winrate. It's a lot. This is also the main reason why climbing takes so much effort: SR gain is very low. That said, having low SR gain means that rankings are a lot less volatile, which can be good for a high-playerbase game. However, I wouldn't be surprised to find that this is also intentionally done to give players a reason to grind the game repeatedly.

In all games of this type, I've found that being in a separate competitive league, with tournaments, scrims, and regular season play, is a much better competitive experience. You get to focus more on self-improvement and less on playing the number grind. I haven't seen a game yet that fixes this.

At least for me, its not about winning versus losing, its about being able to enjoy the game. When I end up on a team of five potatoes, I cant enjoy the game. Even if we end up lucking into a win with Genji/Widow/Hanzo/Zen/Doomfist/Reaper versus Rein/Orisa/literally anything else, its a painful experience and I don't want to do it again. At that point, im not playing with five other people, im playing against eleven. Its one thing when everybody is bad and only marginally competent at the counterstrategy, and another thing entirely when people are actively choosing to play characters that even under ideal circumstances are not capable of effectively fighting the enemy.

Earlier today I played a game where they had a Reinhardt, A D.va, a phara, and a Widowmaker. I was Orisa, and we also had a widow. She would stand in front of my barriers and get shot every. single. time. We even pointed out that hey, there was a barrier half a foot behind her, and she still did it. Whats the solution to players actively choosing to sabotage the game?

[The_Jackal]

See, the math on that just doesn't add up. If you're good enough to belong in another league, the odds of them having five potatoes and a hotshot are lower than the odds of your team having five potatoes and a hotshot, because there's a 100% chance that you're the hotshot. So, on average, your team will be better by merit of your presence. Play enough, and you climb.

That's not the point. Of course in the long run your skill differential will shine through, if you're really measurably better than your competition. The problem is "over how long a time-scale", and "given what balance choices the developers make"?

<snipping psych 101 stuff>

Again, I'm not arguing the psychology of loss aversion and everyone's prepossesion that they're above-average. I agree with all of those things, which is why I've maintained the mere existence of a ranking system is (among) what makes Overwatch as toxic as it is. But you're overlooking the trees for the forest. The atomic experience of every individual game is, "I can do very little to influence the outcome of a game", and that's objectively true, for reasons that fundamentally are informed by the design of the game. Even in a game where every Hero is equal in power and impact, with no counters or metagame, in a 12-player game, you're only 8.33% of the game. And we all know that there are mechanics which can make your carrying literally impossible in Overwatch. One feeder/thrower on your team can sabotage an entire match, and there's nothing you can do about it. Yes, you have an equal chance of the feeder or thrower being on the other team, but it still doesn't vacate the fundamental problem that the match outcomes are far more a matter of chance than player skill. That's why the Overwatch team won't implement pure win/loss rates as a method of ranking players below Diamond. They know that one player's input can't rise above the random background noise of idiots behaving like idiots.

I saw some good quick math on /r/OverwatchUniversity the other week that made an incredibly salient point: with a whopping 60% winrate, you'll have to play 100 games to get 500 SR. 100 games to rank up, and that's with a 60% winrate. It's a lot. This is also the main reason why climbing takes so much effort: SR gain is very low. That said, having low SR gain means that rankings are a lot less volatile, which can be good for a high-playerbase game. However, I wouldn't be surprised to find that this is also intentionally done to give players a reason to grind the game repeatedly.

It's also because of the noise problems I already alluded to: There are so many externalities in the Overwatch game, they can't really get a reliable measurement of your skill in a handful of matches.

In all games of this type, I've found that being in a separate competitive league, with tournaments, scrims, and regular season play, is a much better competitive experience. You get to focus more on self-improvement and less on playing the number grind. I haven't seen a game yet that fixes this.

I think we're in full and harmonious agreement here: The built-in ladder is a giant liability, and only encourages people trying to game a formula instead of doing what they should be doing: Playing to win and having fun, hopefully in equal measure.

At least for me, its not about winning versus losing, its about being able to enjoy the game. When I end up on a team of five potatoes, I cant enjoy the game. Even if we end up lucking into a win with Genji/Widow/Hanzo/Zen/Doomfist/Reaper versus Rein/Orisa/literally anything else, its a painful experience and I don't want to do it again. At that point, im not playing with five other people, im playing against eleven. Its one thing when everybody is bad and only marginally competent at the counterstrategy, and another thing entirely when people are actively choosing to play characters that even under ideal circumstances are not capable of effectively fighting the enemy.

Earlier today I played a game where they had a Reinhardt, A D.va, a phara, and a Widowmaker. I was Orisa, and we also had a widow. She would stand in front of my barriers and get shot every. single. time. We even pointed out that hey, there was a barrier half a foot behind her, and she still did it. Whats the solution to players actively choosing to sabotage the game?

Precisely. Now this is where someone will cough up the 'someone that stupid will also be on the other team', and while that's true, there's an implicit prisoner's dilemma in how a regular player, who's just trying to help their team win, can exploit those players. You're on Orisa, right? Your teammate is doing stupid stuff which can get them killed, and so is yours. But Orisa doesn't have any 'punish' ability to exploit the stupidity of that other Widow. If you swapped to, say, a Genji to go punish the dumb Widow on the other side, you'd get the kill, but now your team doesn't have a tank, and is suddenly steamrolled. So you're stuck trying to just not commit more screwups than the rest of your team, and praying they reciprocate in kind. This is not a formula for a satisfying experience, competitive or otherwise.

[Velaryon]

On the one hand, Jeff is right: Everything in the game below Diamond is effectively a giant clownfiesta. On the other hand, saying that implies that there's nothing they need to do about the game as its experienced by the vast majority of players. You need a viable composition to make the game work at even its most basic level, and yet until you reach Diamond and above, your matchmaking and team compositions are so random, so utterly disorganized, you may as well be tossing a coin to determine who wins and loses. And that's the game they've designed, and yet have somehow contrived to blame the players for the failings of their design.

It's this 'only the top-tier balance counts' mindset that has pretty much convinced me that the designers have no real intention of ever fixing the gold/platinum experience, and I'm not really willing to slog through however many games I need to escape the 'pray I get enough tanks and healers to not get curbstomped' tier.

Haven't had a chance to watch the video yet, but I agree with your assessment. The dev team's myopic focus on the professional scene and top tiers is the single biggest reason why the game is... not dying perhaps, but definitely declining.

I haven't exactly seen anybody make suggestions as to what Blizzard can or should do about this.

Challenge accepted.

1. Balance the game around the middle of the player skill bell curve, not one extreme as they've been doing. If that means de-emphasizing the e-sport scene or even abandoning it entirely, then so be it.
(Full disclosure, I would not miss the e-sport scene at all if it died off).

2. Require a team to fill all roles in competitive matches, and limit switching to characters within the same role.

3. Allow Hanzo OR Widow, not both, in all modes except No Limits.

This won't 100% solve the problem, but it would be several huge steps in the right direction.

Short of outright removing Hanzo and Widowmaker from the game, what can blizzard do to force people to realize that in a team game, teamwork matters?

I would sign this petition.

[Rynjin]

The Hanzo/Widow problem is another funny dilemma that seems unique to Overwatch. Not "people love to play snipers"; that's universal to every shooter even (and especially) when a player sucks at it.

But sniper classes in competitive games tend to be super high-impact off-picks.

By far the most common off-class in TF2 6's is the spare Socut trading to Sniper...temporarily. You swap classes on a death, try to get a quick pick on their Medic or Demo, and then ****ing suicide yourself (by throwing yourself into the fray) before the other team picks a Sniper to counter you, because then the game turns into a 5v5. Neither Sniper can get anything done because they spend the whole round counter-sniping each other.

Snipers play an important role in team-based shooters since they punish support players who are out of position.

Hanzo and Widow themselves aren't an issue, it's people not knowing when to swap off, basically.

[Keltest]

I would sign this petition.

I mean, I would too, but that seems up there with "acts of god" in terms of things one should reasonably expect to see.

Beyond that, I don't think "force people to play according to blizzard's prescripted team comp." is a good solution or one they want to do.

[The_Jackal]

Haven't had a chance to watch the video yet, but I agree with your assessment. The dev team's myopic focus on the professional scene and top tiers is the single biggest reason why the game is... not dying perhaps, but definitely declining.

I think it's fair to say that it's underperforming for its pedigree and its age. Consider that World of Warcraft is approaching the 14th anniversary, and outperforms Overwatch in both average viewers and hours watched. Overwatch still tops it for peak viewers, but let's assume that's for the massively hyped League events, which I would argue does not actually directly pertain to the popularity of the game.

Challenge accepted.

1. Balance the game around the middle of the player skill bell curve, not one extreme as they've been doing. If that means de-emphasizing the e-sport scene or even abandoning it entirely, then so be it.
(Full disclosure, I would not miss the e-sport scene at all if it died off).

I fully agree with your opinion of the irrelevance of e-Sports, but I would put this bullet point slightly differently: "Balance Heroes around their relative difficulty, not their absolute power". In short, the top of the metagame *should* be ruled by mechanically difficult heroes like Widow, Genji, or McCree. After all, if you can play an easy Hero and get the same results as a difficult Hero, why would you ever pick the difficult one? This philosophy will also allow skill Heroes to be competitive at the Gold/Plat boundary which defines the median player.

2. Require a team to fill all roles in competitive matches, and limit switching to characters within the same role.

Yeah, I'm not on board with this. The fundamental underlying assumption under this rule is: most players are wrong for playing the Hero they want to play. I'd much rather see a meta where Widow and Hanzo aren't throw picks for an average player.

3. Allow Hanzo OR Widow, not both, in all modes except No Limits.

See above. The design problem is that popular Heroes are not viable, not that they're too popular.

I would sign this petition.

You can't petition the players, or more accurately, you can, it won't accomplish anything. Ultimately, you can design a game for players who don't exist, or you can design the game for the players you have.

The Hanzo/Widow problem is another funny dilemma that seems unique to Overwatch. Not "people love to play snipers"; that's universal to every shooter even (and especially) when a player sucks at it.

Why is 'Make the sniper's rewards commensurate with their difficulty' not on the table? Plenty of shooters have supported one-shot snipes with no problem. In Modern Warfare 2, you could one-shot any player with a head or torso shot with the M82 Barrett. No windup, just aim, fire, dead, and nobody pissed and moaned about it, you just had to learn to use cover and avoid feeding into the open. Widowmaker's headshot-only with half-second charge time is positively stately by comparison.

[Velaryon]

with your opinion of the irrelevance of e-Sports, but I would put this bullet point slightly differently: "Balance Heroes around their relative difficulty, not their absolute power". In short, the top of the metagame *should* be ruled by mechanically difficult heroes like Widow, Genji, or McCree. After all, if you can play an easy Hero and get the same results as a difficult Hero, why would you ever pick the difficult one? This philosophy will also allow skill Heroes to be competitive at the Gold/Plat boundary which defines the median player.

This verges closer than I care to go toward rehashing our previous disagreements about what constitutes skill in this game, so I'm not going to engage. Agree to disagree.

Yeah, I'm not on board with this. The fundamental underlying assumption under this rule is: most players are wrong for playing the Hero they want to play. I'd much rather see a meta where Widow and Hanzo aren't throw picks for an average player.

The problem here is having two mutually exclusive goals: 1. having a variety of different roles that are integral to gameplay, and 2. the idea that anyone should be able to play any hero at any time. If the support and tank roles aren't important, then why have them at all? And if they are important, then one-tricking regardless of what your team comp needs is incompatible with playing to win. And if you're not playing to win, you're throwing.

See above. The design problem is that popular Heroes are not viable, not that they're too popular.

To make them both viable in such a way that having both on the same team is not throwing would require completely redesigning one of them.

You can't petition the players, or more accurately, you can, it won't accomplish anything. Ultimately, you can design a game for players who don't exist, or you can design the game for the players you have.

Evidently I should have used blue text. I do not expect Blizzard to remove characters, nor do I want them to do so. While I would miss neither Hanzo nor Widowmaker in terms of gameplay or lore, I do not want to establish a precedent that could lead to characters I DO like getting taken out.

[Keltest]

As far as it goes, I don't think anybody is expecting them to make it so you can pick literally anybody you want and still have an equal chance of victory. But I do think that the snipers have a bit too niche of a job, considering how many ways there are to make them fairly impotent.

Frankly, I think the dynamic with barriers needs serious adjusting. Snipers are supposed to be the counter to slow and steady pushes with heavy meat presence, but the two characters who most support that, rein and orisa, both have barriers that make sniping largely futile. On top of that, Brig also has a shield, and she can really be unpleasant for anybody who tries to get past the big barriers. Brig can only shield herself, but if youre backing one or both of the other barrier tanks, its enough to be able to eat a couple shots to position yourself.

I don't necessarily want to see a return to the all flankers meta, but giving the snipers some method of still being able to contribute through a barrier might help solve them being a complete trap pick in the low leagues.

[The_Jackal]

This verges closer than I care to go toward rehashing our previous disagreements about what constitutes skill in this game, so I'm not going to engage. Agree to disagree.

Fair enough.

The problem here is having two mutually exclusive goals: 1. having a variety of different roles that are integral to gameplay, and 2. the idea that anyone should be able to play any hero at any time.

Yeah, I can agree with that.

If the support and tank roles aren't important, then why have them at all?

An excellent question.

And if they are important, then one-tricking regardless of what your team comp needs is incompatible with playing to win. And if you're not playing to win, you're throwing.

I agree entirely. So let's have the discussion: Why have support and tank roles at all. What is the merit of relegating players in your game to being, on a fundamental level, an uncontrolled survival ability for other players? Well, the simple answer is that if you made a character that boasted Reinhardt's barrier, Zarya's bubble, Brig's armor pack, and Zen's discord orb, and D.va's matrix, all under the control of a single player, they would be a) unplayable complicated or b) unstoppable, if not all of the above. That in an of itself makes sense. The trouble comes when you consider that the top-tier of play effectively is about coordinating all of these abilities in a manner that makes you, collectively, unstoppable. What's wrong with that, you ask? Well, how interesting is a game where nobody can die? The big problem with these brawl comps is that nothing interesting is happening until someone's ultimate meter fills up.

To make them both viable in such a way that having both on the same team is not throwing would require completely redesigning one of them.

Correct. But if the design flaws in your game are so fundamentally bad, you may have no alternative but to make huge changes or resign your game to staying terrible.

Evidently I should have used blue text. I do not expect Blizzard to remove characters, nor do I want them to do so. While I would miss neither Hanzo nor Widowmaker in terms of gameplay or lore, I do not want to establish a precedent that could lead to characters I DO like getting taken out.

I would assent to the notion that it is a bad precedent to set, except that there is, currently, little difference between being removed from the game entirely and being a de-facto throw pick. What's more, I think with some changes in Overwatch's fundamental design assumptions, the game could be made good, removing the need to just straight out delete fools.

What changes those assumptions would be are fairly simple: Design heroes that are synergistic, without making them utterly dependent on each other. It's really a difference in degree, rather than kind. Tone down the healing, barriers and bubbles, and give each Hero a set of skills that gives them a prayer of winning a footsie battle. Fighting games manage to huge rosters with different abilities and maneuvers, such that they're all reasonably capable of dueling with each other directly. Ultimately, you need to accept that inside every 12-Hero matchup is a lot of 2-Hero matchups, and simply throwing your hands in the air and saying, Tracer hard-counters Reinhardt is just rotten design. Otherwise, you may as well the game with the legend, "Don't buy this game unless you have 5 friends at your beck and call".

As far as it goes, I don't think anybody is expecting them to make it so you can pick literally anybody you want and still have an equal chance of victory. But I do think that the snipers have a bit too niche of a job, considering how many ways there are to make them fairly impotent.

Frankly, I think the dynamic with barriers needs serious adjusting. Snipers are supposed to be the counter to slow and steady pushes with heavy meat presence, but the two characters who most support that, rein and orisa, both have barriers that make sniping largely futile. On top of that, Brig also has a shield, and she can really be unpleasant for anybody who tries to get past the big barriers. Brig can only shield herself, but if youre backing one or both of the other barrier tanks, its enough to be able to eat a couple shots to position yourself.

I don't necessarily want to see a return to the all flankers meta, but giving the snipers some method of still being able to contribute through a barrier might help solve them being a complete trap pick in the low leagues.

The whole reason Dive meta existed in the first place is because going through barriers is way more effective than breaking them, and absurdly, instead of buffing the close-up counters that should have existed in the game to neutralize Dive, like McCree or Reaper, they added Brig. This is the 'being killed instantly is not fun' logic brought to its specious conclusion: Being shot in the head or flash fanned in a second is unfun, but somehow being frozen and headshotted by Mei, or stunned and pummeled by Brig, or just facemelted with Moira's auto-targeting junk is somehow less unfun.

And for what it's worth, Widow and Hanzo are mediocre picks all the way to GM. They boast below median win rates in every SR bracket, from Bronze to Grandmaster. Widow's popularity keeps her pick rate high, but if your objective is to win games and climb, pick Reinhardt, Zenyatta, Zarya, and Genji. And the reason they're there isn't their basic kit, it's their game-winning ultimate abilities. There's lots of map-dependent Heroes, of course, who have niche pick rates and absurd win rates, like Junkrat on Anubis, or Mei on Hanamura. And the fact that these cheeses still work all the way in GM shows just how poorly designed and balanced the maps and Hero pool are in this game. If there's a counter to wall cheese on Hanamura 1, then how is Mei, by all accounts a weak Hero overall, still boasting a 56.5% win rate in GM? And if you really like losing, play McCree, fully the worst Hero to play in GM, and below the runner-up, Pharah, by over two full percentage points.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

Like, Battlerite did the whole "give every character a full toolkit" thing, and I had a good time with Battlerite, but 3v3 Battlerite was already pretty chaotic. 6v6, I can't even begin to imagine from a competitive standpoint.

[The_Jackal]

Like, Battlerite did the whole "give every character a full toolkit" thing, and I had a good time with Battlerite, but 3v3 Battlerite was already pretty chaotic. 6v6, I can't even begin to imagine from a competitive standpoint.

Right, but that's a MOBA. The MOBA/FPS comparison doesn't wash, even though I know Overwatch was designed with trying to integrate MOBA concepts into a first-person 3d title. The problem is it does not work, due to the differences in how the interface informs how the game is played. A tank in League of Legends is not profoundly larger or easier to hit than a mage or slayer. Winston is well over 3 times as large as Tracer or Widow, and double the size of McCree or Soldier. The shape of your silhouette has enormous gameplay implications in a FPS game. Also, MOBAs also have very important PVE elements which are entirely absent in Overwatch. There's no constant stream of Omnics you can kill to gain power as the game goes on. So I really think there's not very much we can take from the MOBA design space without completely re-evaluating them in the FPS context.

When I talk about giving players a 'full toolkit' I don't mean that every Hero should have a Zarya bubble and a D.va matrix. Rather, I think gross matchup disparites like those between Tracer and Reinhardt, or Winston and Genji, are, in and of themselves, design flaws, and papering over those design flaws with 'just swap' ultimately turns the game into a giant rock-paper-scissors exercise at best. Even assuming both teams were to choose a viable comp, and there was, say, 5 or 6 viable comps to choose from, you'd still wind up in a situation in which one team bests the other due to matchup disparity, and in order to address that disparity, the losing team needs to swap off to other heroes, and abandon a bunch of ultimate charge, therefore putting themselves further behind, and delaying the retake of the game's objective.

[CarpeGuitarrem]

The thing is, from where I see it, there's two ways to fix disparities.

1: give everyone a well-rounded toolkit that has universal answers to the powerful abilities each character gets (the Battlerite approach, also the approach taken by fighting games, especially ArcSys titles)
2: pare down the unique abilities, so that the "universal answers" can be managed through the normal gameplay of a twitch shooter (the TF2 approach)

And if #1 is too overwhelming in a 6v6, for me, #2 is too underwhelming. For me, the asymmetry and the unique abilities are what make the game, not the twitch gunplay. Without the dynamically different playstyles for each character, what's even the point?

[Velaryon]

I agree entirely. So let's have the discussion: Why have support and tank roles at all. What is the merit of relegating players in your game to being, on a fundamental level, an uncontrolled survival ability for other players? Well, the simple answer is that if you made a character that boasted Reinhardt's barrier, Zarya's bubble, Brig's armor pack, and Zen's discord orb, and D.va's matrix, all under the control of a single player, they would be a) unplayable complicated or b) unstoppable, if not all of the above. That in an of itself makes sense. The trouble comes when you consider that the top-tier of play effectively is about coordinating all of these abilities in a manner that makes you, collectively, unstoppable. What's wrong with that, you ask? Well, how interesting is a game where nobody can die? The big problem with these brawl comps is that nothing interesting is happening until someone's ultimate meter fills up.

Having never played Team Fortress 2, I don't know if they had tanks or healers as I know them from Overwatch. But either way, given Blizzard's pedigree it's obvious that the roles take some influence from World of Warcraft (which I've also never played but am much more familiar with thanks to having a ton of friends who have). I do think there's something to be said for having a wider variety of abilities and roles than a standard FPS, but it's clear that there's a lot of room for improvement with that concept. If we didn't have any characters with healing or defensive abilities, then I for one would have gotten bored a lot faster. The game is definitely over-saturated with them, though.

I think characters who can provide defensive assistance to allies and still fight on their own are better designed - Orisa and Moira are much more fun for me to play than Reinhardt or Mercy. I would rather see the game designers continue in that direction, because that at least may make the non-DPS roles more palatable to play for people like yourself who play those roles only out of necessity.

I would assent to the notion that it is a bad precedent to set, except that there is, currently, little difference between being removed from the game entirely and being a de-facto throw pick. What's more, I think with some changes in Overwatch's fundamental design assumptions, the game could be made good, removing the need to just straight out delete fools.

The problem here is that Overwatch has basically split into two separate games at this point, and the developers only care about one of them. To go back to Jeff's comment in that video you linked on the last page, the "meta" is really only present in Diamond+ to any significant degree. Jeff's smug dismissal of lower tiers aside, that's still a true statement. Everything you're saying about brawl, dive, etc. is not really reflective of my experience as a gold/platinum player (at least, I'm pretty sure that's where I would be if I actually played competitive - that's where I landed when I completed my placement matches out of morbid curiosity).

I think some changes to the game's design philosophy could start to close that gap. You may be on to something with the suggestion that characters should have synergy together without being utterly dependent, but to fully explore that would require massive overhauls to a number of characters - the kind that would make what they've done to Symmetra look like a minor tweak. If barriers are reduced in effectiveness, Reinhardt would need to either be completely reworked into something barely recognizable, or dropped entirely because it's such an integral part of what he does. I don't know if that's even possible though, let alone whether it's the direction I want them to take.

[Psyren]

I fully agree with your opinion of the irrelevance of e-Sports, but I would put this bullet point slightly differently: "Balance Heroes around their relative difficulty, not their absolute power". In short, the top of the metagame *should* be ruled by mechanically difficult heroes like Widow, Genji, or McCree. After all, if you can play an easy Hero and get the same results as a difficult Hero, why would you ever pick the difficult one? This philosophy will also allow skill Heroes to be competitive at the Gold/Plat boundary which defines the median player.



Yeah, I'm not on board with this. The fundamental underlying assumption under this rule is: most players are wrong for playing the Hero they want to play. I'd much rather see a meta where Widow and Hanzo aren't throw picks for an average player.



See above. The design problem is that popular Heroes are not viable, not that they're too popular.



You can't petition the players, or more accurately, you can, it won't accomplish anything. Ultimately, you can design a game for players who don't exist, or you can design the game for the players you have.

I agree with basically all of this. Difficult to play heroes should translate into a higher ceiling, assuming they're used to their potential.

My personal philosophy is that, rather than nerf a strong but mechanically complex hero, they should buff or point players to their simpler-to-play counter. That will help the middle end of skill, while the top end will then have a minigame of avoiding or countering that counter with the help of their team. Genji is easily countered by Winston for example, but he's also somewhat more mobile and has much better range than Winston, so he can still get picks on the enemy team if they aren't under that Winston's watchful eye. And while Genji is difficult, Winston is fairly easy to pick up and play.