This was a comment from another thread that I’m borrowing because it was entirely overlooked, credit to Risky
Here’s the reality on this:
- 5v5 is substantially better for DPS players, because it dramatically lowers their queue times and gives them more carry potential.
- 5v5 is better for support players, because it somewhat lowers their queue times and gives them the opportunity to be more aggressive with their abilities (which is fun!), because there’s one less tank to heal.
So the argument is really just about whether 5v5 is so much worse for tanks that it outweighs it being better for the other two roles. And the massive problem that argument runs into is that we know people did not like tank in 6v6 because we know people didn’t want to play it. In fact, that’s the precise reason the game went to 5v5—so few people wanted to play tank that it was creating intractable problems with queue times. People who say this was just an issue that could’ve been fixed with better balance and/or tank hero reworks are honestly just uninformed regarding how games with the holy trinity (tank, DPS, support) end up working. There’s a lot of games with that role system in place, and it’s very consistently the case that very few people want to play the tank role. It’s just not a role that appeals to as many people as the other roles do. This was not an Overwatch-specific issue, but rather an issue inherent to having a game with these three roles. The vast majority of people simply don’t like playing the tank role in video games.
So 6v6 left us with an inherently intractable issue where role queue was asking for an equal number of players on each role, even though one of the roles would always be massively less popular. That creates an enormous queue-time problem that poses an existential problem for the game (people stop playing a game where they have to wait in 10-15 minute queues). They tried to deal with this with the ticket system, to try to incentivize people to play tank. It didn’t do much. Changing to 5v5 was the only sustainable way to fix the queue-time issue. On top of that, they buffed the tanks to incentivize people to play tank more too, since people like playing powerful stuff. When all combined, this has largely resolved the queue-time issue. That is a massive success! And with queue times being so much more balanced, it suggests that overall people are having more fun on tank now and therefore queuing for it more (even taking into account that obviously there’s half as many spots the fill—the queue time imbalance has decreased even more than we’d expect just from that).
The downside of fixing the queue-time issue this way is that, with only one tank, that tank has more responsibility and is more likely to face counterswaps (since tanks are the most powerful heroes in the game, so they are the most natural heroes to swap to counter, and if there’s only one of them, then all those swaps will go to counter that one player). As an initial matter, queue times being so much more balanced does suggest that this isn’t enough to make tanking less fun for people overall than it was in OW1. The queue time imbalance is so much smaller than before that even with one fewer tank we can reasonably infer that people are more likely to queue tank than they were in OW1. And that makes sense, because tanks are more powerful now, and powerful heroes are fun.
It’s also the case that people who like playing lots of tanks aren’t really harmed by lots of counterswapping, since they’re fine with swapping. The tank players most harmed by it are ones with a very limited tank pool, where being countered has a really dramatically negative effect on their experience as a tank. I myself am one of those people. But that’s a small subset of the player base, and even that set of people still has some mitigation by being able to be more powerful due to the tank buffs for 5v5.
Then there’s the “tank synergy” issue. That’s largely a mirage, to be honest. The reality of 6v6 is that tank synergy was rare, because 6v6 screwed up queue times so much that huge portions of players queuing for tank were actually DPS players wanting a shorter queue who would just lock Hog or maybe Ball and not play with their other tank at all. That was generally actively less fun than solo tanking in 5v5. The only way you could consistently get tank synergy in OW1 was to group up with another tank player and plan to play synergistic tanks together. That worked well and was fun! But you can still do that in OW2! Just group with that same person and play open queue together! Given the functionally limited application of “tank synergy” in 6v6, and the fact that the pretty niche scenario where it consistently occurred can easily be replicated in OW2, I don’t see this as persuasive.
