Kinda feel JK missed the point of community concerns with this take. He said it himself, they want to put effort into making each hero feel unique and offer a fresh play style and experience. The game’s current issue is that those fresh play styles are being offered in an unbalanced amount to the damage role, thus directly creating the high queue times we are having. What would fix that is offering more options for different styles of play for the other roles, the more options the more likely it is for someone not playing those roles to find a hero that fits what they want to play. The tank and support roster is being denied the chance to appeal to players in that way, both in number of heroes and how balance is being forced in a direction that makes them frustrating to play most of the time. If they took even one good look at any of the hundreds of post on the forums or the multiple YT videos that talk directly about this him and the rest of the dev team would understand this. The Q&A looks to have been a success but this one response shows the disconnect most have been concerned about.
Devs, genuine warning flag here. Actually read the room before patting yourselves on the back about something you plan to add to the game. You can easily avoid some of the repeated negative receptions you’ve had if you just take a second and look at what people are talking about and what they are concerned over. Echo’s release, like many other things before her, wreaks of the notion that you don’t do that.
Doubtful, look at the CC patch that just happened. Hardly addressed the CC problems the game has, in fact probably made it more necessary to stack them. AND made the heroes changed more clunky to use.
All McCree needed is his fire rate reverted.
All Mei needed is multi freeze gone as it doesn’t serve a purpose in the 222 version of the game(was added as goats counter to try and force her into the meta game)
The recent patch actually was pretty significant for high tier play. It got rid of Mei and McCree’s stun+doubleheadshot combo.
As for the other CC stuff, there’s not much they could do about CC otherwise that didn’t require code changes. But that doesn’t rule it out, just takes longer to implement.
This is where Jeff is absolutely correct. The balance and flow of the game overall is limiting the existing number of options.
Adding more heroes into those roles won’t solve that fundamental issue, because the amount of heroes isn’t the core issue at all. Adding more options without treating them differently than the current ones just adds to a useless and unappealing list of alternatives that hardly anyone wants to touch.
You’ve only convinced me that he was spot on and read the situation correctly. Which I wouldn’t be surprised is the reason why he’s talked openly about support and barrier + cc changes that are coming in the (presumably) near future.
No 2 heroes play the same in OW. DPS has 17 different heroes to choose from, Tanks have 8, Supports have 7. DPS players switching to other roles have half the options to choose from. The other way around players have double that the amount. That’s the problem. Its so much easier to get tanks and supports to swap to DPS because they have plenty of options to choose from. The other way around the options are limited so game play can and does quickly stagnate.
Look at it this way, if you cycle through heroes during a session it would take 17 games before you see the same damage hero again so you get 17 different play experiences. Its only 7 for support and 8 for tank. So on other roles you would have played a hero twice before the DPS player got through their entire roster.
They often have less than half because of how poorly and easily dominated/countered many of the characters are. Especially in the tank role which is even more limited by how dominant the synergy between certain pairings are. Again, existing balance issues. Unless they plan to change the way they balance characters with future releases, I really don’t see how it’s fair to expect a drop of 3 new tank heroes to end up in 3 other tank heroes not being seen as useless.
Balance is just as much a player made problem as it is a dev problem. Too many are reluctant to just play the game and instead force balance into the path of least resistance which results in some heroes being objectively better than others. Look at the current take meta, Rein-Zarya became a thing because of incessant whining about Orisa-Sigma and got those two gutted. Want to know the funny thing about that? Sym was supposed to be the pick against that tank pairing and guess who they targeted for nerfs prior to attacking Orisa-Sigma? OW’s balance problem is that this community DOES NOT look at the big picture when gathering the nerf mob. And because the mob gets so loud the devs are forced into a change that shouldn’t have been needed and all it does is open the door for another potentially worse problem. But no, its always “my hero shouldn’t get countered by this, delete it” meanwhile its a potato brain playing hitscan into a DVa.
The problem is the community - largely DPS mains - they are the largest grioupto voice dissatisfaction and this skews perception especially for Devs.
They want to experience FPS impact mechanics and be rewarded for it, while they want Tanks and Supports to be MMO-MOBA esque and only do one thing in service to their team.
They will complain if a tank doesn’t herd them through chokepoints, babysit them and god forbid - doesn’t die when they look their way. Similar with supports.
Because of this dichotomy Devs can never make interesting tank/support that branches
Out from perception of tank/support to make it fun to play - because the complaints will fall in “ Noo why doesn’t this hero only heal/shield, etc etc” and they’ll be right back in the problems they have now.
Really? McCree’s fire rate buff is allowing him to step on the toes of Soldier 76. His play style was supposed to be about making your shots count, that buff allows him to spam almost as much as Soldier 76 when that is supposed to be Soldier 76’s role. They are in turn buffing parts of S76 that probably shouldn’t be buffed in the long term that’s likely to result in a future DPS meta where he’s the default pick because of past buffs. Which is what McCree’s issue is now, which is what Reaper and Mei’s problem was before him.
I don’t really want to get into any of the personal rants about the community from its various echo chambers perspectives but one thing I’d like to note about all of that, if you’re expecting the entire playerbase to change their attitude rather than expecting the game to change around them I don’t think you’ll ever be satisfied with the game.
Oh I have my fun with OW since I get how to play my heroes and most of the others. Don’t have to be pro to get to that point, you just have to respect the game for what it is. Most people either don’t or choose to ignore that.
This is flawed reasoning. You believe that people pick a hero and that hero informs their role. That is actually backwards. People choose the role they want to play and then find the heroes in that roll that works. There is a difference in mindset for each roll. And OW is not unique in having the difference in player percentages.
You could add 10 support and tanks tomorrow and after things settle down there will still be the same que times.
Don’t misunderstand, we do need more tank and support rolls. Those players do need more choices and variety. But, that wont solve the que time issues.
Tanks and healers do deserve more choices. And we should get more tanks/support as new heroes are added. But, dps players do also deserve to get new things as well. So, while getting less damage heroes is fair, it would NOT be fair to not add any damage heroes.
Here is the thing, most people don’t play that many heroes. I would be surprised if more that 10% of the players regularly played more than 3 heroes. And both tank and support have more than that to choose from. In the end, hero stagnation is not the reason for the population imbalance.
More choices for those rolls would be good. But, it is not going to really effect the number of people playing the roll. It wont effect que times.
Nobody does that. And if you did try, you would have a LOT of bad games.
I don’t agree. I would argue that more games are determined by how good your tanks are than dps. The problem is when tanks are doing a good job it looks like the dps are carrying.
Well for the person just looking for a new play experience what would define a bad game?
Because the issue is those players only playing 2-3 heroes might be interested in trying out a 4th. Except between the roster discrepancy as well as poor balance your options are either choose from a limited pool of heroes and are even more limited because some are just objectively weak or wait in a long line and try from the lion’s share.
Play from a handful of poorly balanced heroes or spend more time waiting to play the game than actually playing it.
