Just wondering if Blizzard knows that this is the only way we’ll ever get a varied meta and proper balance in Overwatch. The game is obviously falling off a cliff, at least experiment with the idea on a separate ranked queue with role select. I guarantee it will be more populated than the regular queue, and bring a ton of people back to the game. Nearly everyone I have talked to that used to play Overwatch sings the same tune.
So sad to see Overwatch in the state it’s currently in. No one has anything good to say about it anymore… and people really thought this game was going to be a saving grace IP for Blizzards future.
I used to think about Overwatch 5 years down the road and wondering how much better it will be… and now I can’t even imagine it making it to 5 years without becoming irrelevant. The only publicity this game gets anymore is from the politics/controversy surrounding the lore… it’s just stupidly sad.
Do something Blizzard, seriously… anything is better than the current state of Overwatch. The game isn’t fun to play anymore and the Overwatch League isn’t even entertaining to watch anymore.
Unpopular opinion but I personally don’t feel the game needs 2-2-2.
In the competitive matches I’ve played, only a handful of times have I seen people say “Let’s Go GOATs” or “Let’s Bunker” for example. Typically its already either 2-2-2 or there will be like, 3 DPS and then either 2 Tanks 1 Heal or the other way round which for the most part, works kinda well.
Not to mention the queue times that DPS players would be stuck with would also be unenjoyable. While many may be pleased initially with a role queue feature, I’m not sure as many people would still be happy after a few weeks with potentially substantially longer queues.
As for OWL though, I’d be open to a 2-2-2 lock for that purely cause its always there you see the “meta” being run. While I don’t see GOATs much/at all in my matches, its essentially been every match this Season for OWL. Plus it would then allow the insanely skilled DPS players to shine on heroes like Widowmaker, Tracer and Genji again rather than Zarya, Brigitte and occasionally Sombra.
Winstons Lab has the most common Triple DPS comp taking up about 2% of the overall playtime (44 mins). The next most popular triple DPS teamcomp takes up 5 minutes.
The three most popular iterations of GOATS (Classic, Winston GOATS, Sombra GOATS) take up about 67% of the playtime (13 hours, 11 mins).
Edit: Found the tool that gives a more accurate breakdown.
The most popular comps in S2 OWL are (in format of DPS - Tank - Healer):
2-2-2 helps the devs balance the game better, when they have well-defined roles in every single match. For this reason, I bet the devs will embrace the community request and bring 222 ASAP before this hype dies.
IMO, it will have the same end as LFG, where the launch will be praised as the solution to fix Overwatch forever, soon the be source of complaints that all it does is increase queue times.
So, yeah. I agree with you. I think 222 will hurt the game more than help.
I would love if they implement a ban-protect-protect-ban phase before each map in OWL. The pick/ban phase would be terrible in comp, but for professional play, that would add a lot of versatility and pre-match strategy going on.
But if they ever implement it, expect people crying that we need pick/ban on comp, and it will also be a terrible system because people will ban out of spite and protect whatever they want to play.
The pros aren’t there to put on a show for us, they’re there to win at any cost. If they’ve practised Zen Goats for 50 hours a week for months, they do not want any hero in that meta banned. That goes for BOTH teams.
That’s why when they tried hero bans, all they did was ban the heroes that countered the meta.
And then you have teams like Chengdu Hunters, that at the start didn’t had a well-developed goats team, and they could ban Reinhardt or Zarya, and force every team to have a plan B for those situations.
Sure, they could ban Wrecking Ball in return, which would make the match even more chaotic, which in general is good for the audience because it makes the match more unpredictable.
IMO, a ban phase for OWL/Contenders only would do wonders for the spectators.
I mean not only that, it will make games much fairer.
Right now most games are pretty much a wash between supposedly “evenly” matched teams because one, or both team will often have people flexing to necessary roles that they can’t play very well.
If you can only play Reinhardt to a Diamond level, you’re going to struggle in Masters level games if you’re forced to flex to him.
Role Queue would ensure that games are far closer to being evenly matched than they currently are.
Personally I would go so far as to say that they don’t even need protects. Being able to break up broken synergies like Lucio in Deathball would go a long way to lowering the overall power of the game.
If professional teams can’t come up with multiple strategies to deal with bans without a protect system, then they need to fire their coaching/analytical staff.
This logic assumes that every team prefers the current meta, which is never true. For example, in Stage 1 when teams lived or died based on how good their Tracers were, the Outlaws would have loved to ban Tracer, because they couldn’t field a strong Tracer player.
Meanwhile, teams with strong DPS rosters (NYXL comes to mind here) would be more than happy to ban out GOATS to let their strong DPS shine.
The protect is necessary for deeper strategy. Something like:
Team A ban.
Team B protect. Team B have to fight at least the first teamfight with the protected hero in their team.
Team A protect. Ditto.
Team B ban.
Bonus point if they made the draft part of the pre-match spectacle instead of solving this off-camera and just giving us a list at the end.
Yes, balance is one big plus for role queue. But for me, I think it’s a good thing that we can swap cross-role inside the match. Not allowing full roster swap changes OW too much, and it might eventually leads that we change even the swap mechanic, making us select a hero to queue and stay as that hero to the end.
I know, slippery slope fallacy. Still something I fear that might happen if they change this core feature of the game.
I guess I’m just used to LoL, but a protect system just seems needlessly complicated and overall unnecessary.
So long as bans effect both sides, I don’t really see the need for a protect. If they wanted to prevent one team from having an information advantage, they could do it simultaneously.
This would not be a problem if people had the disposition to play around non 2-2-2 comps.
Role queue won’t fix this. A lot of people in ladder don’t main a role, they main a hero. If your Hog main is forced to flex into Reinhardt it will be the exact same issue.
Not really. With queue times increasing for everybody (even tanks, unless they make the system more lenient), the likelihood of the matchmaker hitting the point at which it stops prioritizing match quality will be hit more frequently. This already happens extremely frequently in less populated servers like SA (you get games with all ranks up to Diamond playing at the same time surprisingly often). How SR is distributed within roles will basically define who wins before the match even starts (e.g. Team A has gold DPS, silver tanks, plat supports, and Team B has plat DPS, gold tanks, and silver supports).
They built a community. Learn how to comprehend words, I specifically noted overwatch started at a crazy high peak within the first few months due to amazing marketing and word of mouth.
Forcing 2/2/2 won’t do this. All it will do is force another meta to crystalize around some 2/2/2 composition, and we’ll be seeing THAT in mirror compositions in pro play.
