“New player” here, never played OW1. Tried out 6v6 on every role, yet I fail to see the hype around that game mode.
Let’s go over why I think so:
Total result: (5v5) 13 - 0 (6v6)
Note: whilst 5v5 wins this, it doesn’t mean I find tank in 5v5 fun to play. I don’t mind playing tank in lower ranks because it’s not as stressful.
However, I don’t find myself wanting to climb my tank rank beyond gold to match my other ranks (plat/diamond) just because of less stress, toxicity, counterpicking and dps/supports making the game feel absolutely miserable with their abilities in higher ranks. That is a tank design problem though and 6v6 does NOT fix that.
Also, I do think 6v6 should stay as some sort of extra game mode for those who really enjoy it.
General:
game pace: 6v6 is way too slow, too many people, nothing really dies, 5v5 wins this
interaction with enemies: with only one tank, it’s easier to access the backline and dps in 5v5, meaning, you interact with more enemies than just the tanks/shields, 5v5 wins
getting through chokes: only one tank makes it more likely for dps to get a pick and you don’t find yourself in the awkward situtation where neither tank wants to push through a choke, so 5v5 wins this. Also, one less tank to contest flanks makes it easier for ANYONE on your team to help getting through the choke, not just your other tank.
getting an ult off: especially tank ults suffer from being easily interrupted and the tanks I like to play (Dva, Zarya, Sig, JQ) just felt as if I never coult ult without having to worry about even more cooldowns than in 5v5. Tanks have so much cc that can just mess up your ult.
crowd control: The heroes that were played the most were heroes with a lot of cc or burst damage, just because it was needed to shut down two tanks. Absolutely not fun to play into or to play as. 5v5 wins this.
getting healed: it took FOREVER to get healed in 6v6. The supports I was playing with should have been around plat / diamond, so perfectly capable of healing, however it took way too long, which increased the wait times between engages and ruined any advantage you had gotten until then. 5v5 clearly wins this.
Tank:
tank synergy: I never felt any synergy with my second tank, each of us was just going for the enemy backline and leaving our team alone. There’s no fun pushing into two tanks at all, so no one really bothered with it. Can’t give either side points here, since 5v5 doesn’t have this.
hero pool: My hero pool on tank is fairly limited and since tank is not my main role, I don’t think I would play tank if 6v6 would to become the only game mode and required a large tank hero pool. Most tanks I play just feel awfully squishy and you blow up even faster, especially when you have a ball and have to push into both enemy tanks in main. 5v5 wins this because 2 tanks are enough to consistently climb in 5v5 and you’re not as squishy.
counterpicking: I still got counterpicked as much as in 5v5 and in 6v6 it’s even more likely to get counterpicked by more people. Playing Dva into Zarya isn’t really a problem, playing Dva into Zarya and Winston is not fun at all and if the other tanks in my hero pool didn’t really work against it either, it just was worse than in 5v5. 5v5 wins this.
impact: even with how bad tank feels in 5v5 after you hit a certain rank and become a punching bag, 6v6 is worse. You don’t have any impact and it feels like nothing you do can change the outcome of the game. 5v5 clearly wins again.
DPS:
impact: I often felt as if I didn’t need to do anything for my team to win or that I couldn’t really do anything. Shooting shields was boring, shooting the diving tanks over and over was just as boring in 6v6 and getting to the backline to fight them seemed impossible. There barely was any interaction with the enemy dps or supports. 5v5 wins this because one tank can’t contest both dps at the same time, giving them an opening.
Support:
impact: half the roster felt awful to play and you were left to healbot, especially if your other support was Zen, Mercy, Brig, Illari or Lucio (especially Mercy). Not only that, but any offensive capabilities were often simply migitated by too many migitation abilities that you barely got any value out of it. If the enemy wasn’t running dive, it was just so boring to sit there and heal. 5v5 clearly wins this.
getting dove: that didn’t happen at all and it was boring. I WANT the enemy Genji and Tracer to get to my backline so I can fight them because it’s FUN, I DON’T want the enemy tanks constantly in my backline because they are annoying to deal with and there’s not enough cc to deal with two of them. 5v5 wins this.
keeping the entire team alive: I felt like I couldn’t really bother healing my dps at all, they felt cosmetic and my tanks took too much damage to spend any time on healing them. 5v5 means one less tank and it’s easier and safer to just go in with that tank and not need to heal as much, giving more time to take care of the dps.
but does strategy sell? the market is catered to braindead monkeys like myself who just want to pew pew and be rewarded with a kill.
we braindead apes also like to spend money, so 5v5 may stay, even evolve to 0-3-2 finally. 5v5 was made for 3 DPS and 2 Supports, tanks need to be scrapped already, NPC role for NPC-type people.
Lucky for you it will probably stay 5v5 no point putting in all that work to down grade back to what most of us paid for when were not gonna play it anyways. 6v6 would have worked a yr ago or even 6 months ago but now with rivals out most og ow payers are gone.
it really shows you never played ow1.
i understand why some of your points are wrong, its because you play 6v6 mostly still unbalanced, with many players who never played ow1 and its qp.
some of your points are objectively wrong but as i said this is because you cannot experience 6v6 as it should be played.
I have been plying 6v6 since it came out exclusively, I queued for a 5v5 by accident yesterday, it was the capture 3 points mode. we went to the first point, one person died, the fight was over and we moved to the next, and it was like that for the next points.
5v5 is lame. you cant fight if one person dies. tanks are extremely difficult to kill even if they mess up
Does it really make sense to “score” it when you’re just only listing the things you found better in 5v5?
Like, I have no problem with you liking 5v5 more, but I just think it’s disingenuous to frame it like 5v5 is better at every aspect of the game when you’re clearly just providing a list of the things you like more about 5v5.
I’ve been reading it a bunch of these posts relating to why people prefer 5v5 and what it comes down to from what I’ve seen it’s a lack of understanding on all fronts.
Effectively what I’ve seen this boil down to is people who don’t understand how to play the game enjoy 5v5 more because they get to shoot things and things die because people don’t know how to use their abilities or play correctly but when people do understand how to play the game. Generally plat and above the game becomes absolutely miserable because the game is so easy to deny people kills that it becomes a slug to get through and is extremely unfun. Because nothing dies and you’re actively punished for trying to do anything.
To where as in 6v6 from what I’ve seen from people who don’t understand the game they simply just heal bot on support and don’t try and do anything proactive they don’t try and defend themselves so they get easily killed by DPS characters tanks never work together so they never have any synergy at all. DPS basically just stay in the front line and don’t try and flank or anything and just shoot at the tank constantly and never kill anything.
To wear generally when you do understand how the game is played you’re rewarded for being proactive and working together with your teammate so what I think this really boils down to.
Is how much you generally understand the game and at a baseline what you value the most.
So going off of this I think the best way 5v5 could be improved for people who enjoy 5v5 is to simply just remove the tank character altogether and just add another DPS or support and that mode would almost be perfect for these types of players. Because if you weren’t using what the game gave you in these in-depth synergies you might as well just reduce it to an FPS that people enjoy shooting.
Then you can simply add 6v6 as a separate game mode for the people who enjoy it and both parties are happy.
I struggled to understand / describe why 5v5 can be better and this helps me. I also watched SVB podcasts about 5v5 and 6v6 to get a better understanding. I’m really in the middle now and don’t mind any mode.
This is the key here. No one (or at least most people) wants to play 3D chess and this has never worked in most ranks (aka below Master) even in OW1. The game was always crazy slow in low ranks, because you always had one or two shields. The reason why Rein was and kind of is still in 5v5 so pupular, is because of the fat shield that blocks stuff. Pair that with another tank like Sigma, Orisa or Dva who can keep up the defense after the shield breaks and you have 20+ minute matches even in QP and people dont want that, because matcher are decided much earlier than that and it just drags on.
Casual players and most players prefer fast games that are quick and intensive, over a long drawn out tactical game where you mainly have to wait and then catch the enemy in a moment when they used cooldown B after coodown F instead of C and now are open to cooldown A, because F would be needed for R.
Not even mentioning queue times as soon as 6v6 would be the main mode… do you think most current tank players would like to play a weak version and be dependent on another person to do anything? We already had a thread about this that was filled with 6v6 defender post, who could not understand the problem.
Do you really think better balance would make 6v6 better? Because as far as we know, 5v5 is quite balanced currently and works, while most people still cry about it no matter what they change. 6v6 would be the same thing.
Cool post and all but even in the abhorred balance state that 6v6 is in, and despite the fact that S9 is STILL for some reason inside of 6v6 when it legit shouldve been the first thing removed for the patch, 6v6 has been the most fun Ive had with Overwatch 2 since it released.
Its wild how infinitely better the mode is, its not even close, its not even a competition.
Im glad that ROLES are back, Im glad that not everyone is the mindless shoot at the bad men role, and tanks actually have to peel for their team on dives, or be their space, and that healers have to focus on healing more than being just another DPS. 5v5 mixed with S9 combined into making the game 5 dps vs 5 dps, and tank design in 5v5 is so beyond degenerate mutant filth that I cant stand how these players are legitimately not even playing the same game as everyone else.
And you say that 6v6 is slower, but the other common complaint 5v5ers think they have for 6v6 is “theres too much going on” so really which is it? Is the game not moving fast enough for you, or is there too much to keep up with? In my eyes Ive never been so engaged and free of downtime as I have been with 6v6. I havent had to be this aware of everything in YEARS.
In my eyes only lobies say 6v6 is slower, if only because not everyone is 500% movement speed jumping across the entire map 3 times in a second in a grand display of zoomer shooter BS.
Im less likely to blow up and less likely to blow someone up. Fights arent 3 seconds worth of cooldown dumping and theres an actual game to be played further than “just shoot the bad men.” but ive never felt like the game is progressing any slower, I still have PLENTY to always be doing.
Speak for yourself. As a casual player i love playing 6v6 and i always queue for tank. It’s really dynamic, tense and the experience with new tanks which has the power to counter enemy comp without constant counterswapping.
Okay so we kinda lost any ability to talk about the topic when we claimed to be a new player who never played OW1. The current version of 6v6 isn’t balanced enough but is still better than anything 5v5 has ever been.
Like you had 6 years to fork over $20 for a full game but didn’t want to? I mean that’s partly the problem with the game all in itself…
Some hard-core 5v5 fans are still living in the clouds and forgetting 2 things:
Overwatch classic mode
Marvel Rivals
Let’s start from the beginning. Back during development of OW2, devs thought that bringing a new format will kill 2 birds with 1 stone which means getting rid of stale metas and getting new players from popular fps games. It only work for the small time because Rock-paper-scissors meta was quickly established and toxicity towards the tank players doubled. The stale meta was proven to exist even in this format when Mauga wasn’t nerfed and left like that for some time which has shown what was true cause of stale metas.
After the death of PVE - the main reason why problems of OW1 were never fixed, OW2 received a bad impact that the game would ever be great and that has carried on all the way until Overwatch classic. That mode has bring a lot of old players and a lot of new ones and one of the reasons for it was not being balanced but being all over the place.
Marvel Rivals received a lot of players and it wasn’t just because of 6v6 but also the game being new and some of the players getting a feeling of Overwatch 1 once again. This is because Rivals aimed for the market where OW1 was and OW2 aimed for fps market along with all the other tactical shooters. This means that Marvel Rivals has still potential to rise whilst OW2 will still have the same player numbers no matter what new hero or map comes in.
With 6v6 test present devs are trying to get back as much players as possible but right now the attention is stealing the Rivals so it’s possible that this test will be scapegoated for all the problems and wasted time but at the same time 5v5 will continue to sunk the game further as all the other veteran players will migrate to Rivals when in reality everything could have been different.
In this situation we have gotten because Blizzard was constantly changing the path for this pressured by constant battle between 2 sides: Mr Kaplan and Kotick without ever realizing that one day another game will be made on there starting foundation.
Even though the future for this game is unknown i still love this game and the 6v6 test right now but we have to ask was all of this really worth it ?