I thought I wouldn’t do this, but since several people thought the post was valuable, I will paste it as a thread starter. I don’t expect much feedback or agreement, that boat sailed two years ago, but - who knows. If someone finds this reading interesting, let’s just say I’m glad if that happens to be the case.
I was mainly prompted to write such a long response and recap because I, regardless of how much leeway or faith I give, this comment in particular seemed impossible to me and I elaborated as to why:
I am sorry if I come off as aggressive, but… how so?
Somewhere around november 2015, with the massive influx of broader audience through large number of invites, this problem became very apparent and the concern was raised among testers who understood that the game structured in such way has to have either limitations regarding player choice or less reliance on team composition, rock/paper/scissors and similar philosophies. Many threads were made and, while you were active on the forum back then, you ignored pretty much all of them, while replying to banal threads about symmetra’s teleport gui qol.
Your team, as well as the testers, approached the game as intended before that large influx. That was clearly evident from how the game was designed (heroes as tools, more similar to personified Quake weapons than anything else, with the complete liberty of switching, combined with overbearing notion of holy trinity and rock/paper/scissors being present). As people started pouring in, many of them abused the fact you can simply ignore all tacit agreements and simply pick a hero/role you like the most constantly, regardless of anything else.
At that point, that is exactly how that behavior was seen - as an abuse of the system. It was so clear what was going on than I don’t know how to approach to this post you have written now. For two and a half years this issue persisted in the same amount and vigor.
Your team then decided to defend this behavior vehemently, refusing to correct it through rigid systems. Your reasoning was mostly referring to the spirit of the game. But, if something objectively doesn’t work as it’s contradictory by design, then shouldn’t priorities change? One of staples of your spirit of the game was hero stacking, for example, which you removed because it was impossible to balance properly. Why was this an exception?
And, if you already decided to be so adamant about it, why didn’t you at least softly directed the atmosphere towards the intended play? Instead, every little piece of marketing, mechanics and score evaluation encouraged antisocial behavior. I am not saying all of this was planned, but the game had a major problem and it would have been logical to try to tame it, at least through suggestion. But, you decided to muse with memes of choosing hanzo on Hanamura defense due to roleplay and such. An epic animated duel between Tracer and Widowmaker and even more epic duel between the Shimada bros were released at the peak of the game’s hype. Four of the most overbearingly popular heroes. Should we wonder why no one picked Zarya, then?
You released character popularity in the beta. Mercy was the most popular healer (and maybe even the most popular character even, I don’t remember). You took that for granted, instead realizing that what remained of your testers who played the game as intended and a fairly small percentage of newcomers who desperately wanted to “team build” simply were cornered into picking her.
I think I played something like, 34 minutes on Tracer, my favorite hero and something like 300 hours on Lucio back then, Lucio being the only character in the game I disliked. And I am not a people pleaser.
How was all that not indicative?
You had a concept that even on paper seemed iffy. The game has contradicting elements in its design.
-absolute liberty in hero picking
-lack of draft/order of picking
-no role slots
-rock/paper/scissors
-team-dependence
-rpg-like system of many abilities, limiting player input in certain situations (so, no 1v6 quake style carries)
-zero responsibility when it comes to hero picks
-heroes are tools, not avatars
-one queues as a player, not as a preselected character
-composition-dependent
-specialized characters
And some other things as well.
Wasn’t it evident that these can work, but not all at the same time? You have WoW as an example. team-dependency, composition-dependency, rock/paper/scissors etc. But, that is offset by role slots and by the fact that you queue as a character, not as a player. So, even if rogues are ten times as numerous as tanks, there’s no overabundance of rogues in dungeons (if we take dungeons as a core element of mechanics), because a rogue will simply queue for 30 minutes. Not ideal, but that’s a necessary trade off.
Some other MMORPGs don’t need this rigidity, because they don’t tick these specific boxes. Many eastern MMO games don’t have role slots. So, three rogues and two archers can end up in a random dungeon. But, in that case, roles aren’t that much specialized and those rogues are able to heal themselves to an extent or something like that.
Some other games, MOBA games for example, have you queue as a player and not as a character, like in OW. But, there’s no switching. So, there’s less of a “not my job, someone will switch eventually” philosophy. There’s also a draft system. There’s a clear order of selection. And although this is only a soft measure, as players can go into a match as five dps’s, it’s a good example how even a soft indication works. Because, what is the percentage of matches with awful team compositions in MOBA games in general, compared to Overwatch? Yes, exactly. Even though a draft doesn’t literally force players into picking that support if they are the last pick, they do it because they understand this system will put them as the first pick in some of the following games, so they could go for a high priority pick, or simply for something they want and then let others compromise.
Overwatch ticks all of these boxes. How is that not at least appearing suspicious, even on paper? If there’s a complete liberty with hero selection, compositions shouldn’t be so important. If compositions being important is the core aspect, then put some rigidity into hero selection process. If both are core aspects, don’t make extreme hero archetypes (a melee hero with low mobility and a flying hero), so that people can overcome having teams consisting of most popular heroes. If all this is “the spirit of the game”, you still can do soft steering.
Now, some of you who are reading might say “they did soft steering, they repeatedly said that it’s not an ideal way of playing etc”. That’s not what I meant, that doesn’t qualify as anything. I mean something like rewards system or scoreboard or medals or cards or whatever, which would steer the approach of players. But the big thing here is that your team, Jeff, decided on a system that basically encourages antisocial and egotistic approach even more. Should I even remind people of “I have gold damage” phrase that appears in the chat box every single game? Or personalized medal system? Or the lack of scoreboard? Anything would have been better.
You even encouraged this approach through esports. You marketed the notion of pro players “maining” and “onetricking”, without doing any effort towards inherently differentiating it through the fact that pro players play in what are basically constant premades with predetermined roles, as opposed to most of the player base, which is in solo or duo queue. “xyz is my idol, I’ll be the best tracer!” exclaims the kid while proceeding to instalock Tracer in every match.
Do you remember early cbt, when people played every hero? Granted, that was also due to the novelty factor, but still. I remember matches back then. Hero selection pops up, people don’t pick, they wait for each other, then the first guy picks Reinhardt? Why? Well, for the same reason if there are six people in a room and there’s a cake in front of them, they will all pause and the first one to go ahead and take a piece, will take the smallest piece of cake.
Everyone played every hero, because there was this inherent understanding that heroes are tools to be applied to certain situations and certain matchups etc.
I remember a guy in cbt, posting a screenshot of a player with like 100 hours on Mccree and that was their only hero and asked “what is this”. It was kinda bitterly funny, as he phrased it like that, it was so alien to him that he was like “what do I call this phenomenon”. The answers were like “lol wtf” and “I’ve seen a guy like that, but with Junkrat” etc. How innocent that seems now, eh?
This notion diminished so much and to such an absurd extent, that I literally saw a person saying how they are a FLEX player. Which actually meant “flex dps” - which again, actually meant “Tracer 95% of time and a bit of Genji if someone has a faster SSD”. I am not making this up. They weren’t even playing it up for laughs or as some kind of cynical setup, they were like “yeah, I flex to Genji sometimes”.
You have duo-queuing dps players, who instalock two dps characters in what is predominantly a 2-2-2 type of game. When you tell them how they are basically a single unit and they sealed off what’s usually the max number of slots for the most popular role in the game, they blankly state how 2-2-2 is fine and how they don’t see the issue, since 2-2-2 could still be built. Because, yeah, we all know people are dying to play healers, or even that roles are even roughly equally desired.
Hell, I am logged in on an alt account and I don’t even play that much since it became evident what direction you are going to decide on. This is highly indicative of absolute silliness of the whole system regarding the game in every aspect. I wouldn’t be surprised if majority of your player base has alt accounts. I doubt that’s because everyone likes to smurf, so, people are basically offsetting inherent issues by having more accounts. How is that a good system? I mean, financially that’s great for Blizzard, but will it pay off? For OW? For players? People are so used to this that they aren’t even aware of it anymore and regard it as a self-explanatory notion. “Oh yeah, let me hop onto my Tracer account and we’ll queue together, dude”.
All this because you guys wanted to have your cake and eat it too. You wanted to make a game for everyone. But, by “everyone” you didn’t mean people who flock to different play styles, but literally for everyone. Hey, sociopaths, welcome to our team-based multiplayer game with great liberties and you won’t be even chastised, what could go wrong?
Instead of going for the cheesy, but not untrue notion of “if you build it, they will come”, or in this case, if you build it properly, it will pay off in the long run. There are legendary multiplayer games that stood the test of time and they all had solid foundation and sense of fairness, sometimes even ruthless fairness (quake?), but fairness and an impeccable structure. These games perhaps weren’t quick to mesmerize, but were basically very slow snowballs.
You literally can’t make a “game for everyone”, not because I am being cynical, but because that’s a contradictory statement by itself. Because two guys will not budge on two opposing mechanics or things and that’s it, there goes your game for everyone. So, why not make a game that’s SOLID when it comes to its foundations and let “them come”?
I am sorry, but I am having troubles with believing in this naivety you are describing, due to everything I wrote above. Because, regular people, players, who aren’t experts at game design, saw, using logic, that something isn’t adding up, two and a half years ago and voiced that.
You saw that even better than them, you had numbers, you had statistics, you had surveys.
You said that there’s no bad and good direction in this sense. This will sound a bit cliched and simplified, but - are you joking?
You said you adapted to what the player base was doing. How so? Because, for that to be true, OW would have to be a glorious experience for a team with five dps’s selected. Because, that’s what players are doing.
Also, players will do what they can. Always. So, if a game breaking bug appears and players start to abuse it, will you “adapt to it”? No, you will patch it.
This comes off as a bit insincere.
I will stop here because I could go for hours and there’s no need for that because basically everything’s here. I am basically stunned by the part about naivety as I can’t, in the light of all this that happened and all this that I wrote here, not see it as “did my best to ignore” rather than “was being naive”.
