Bobby Kotick is likely the one to blame for OW2 being 5v5. He knew they weren’t going to deliver on the PvE at all on OW2’s launch, and so he looked at Overwatch’s competitors that are 5v5 and made the devs develop the game around being 5v5, when in reality 2-2-2 is the best format for the type of game Overwatch is.
5:50 to 7:30 in the Blizzconline 2021 presentation shows the early inklings of 5v5 even though they did not announce it during that Blizzcon, just that Tanks would be more aggressive. Jeff Kaplan left Blizzard just 2 months after Blizzconline 2021, which shows Jeff’s dislike of 5v5, showing that it was likely Bobby Kotick who forced 5v5 on the devs.
5v5 is not sustainable. People get burnt out way too quick from not having a tank buddy, the constant counter-swapping, the lack of dynamic game-play, how easily you get picked off at the beginning of a fight, having to run back from spawn so frequently, etc.
2-2-2 has to become the primary format, and it needs to happen soon. The reduction of CC and lots of new Tank and Support heroes being added solve the queue time problems we experienced at end of OW1.
Edit: Some Overwatch Blizzard employee’s have said that Bobby made the team work on various projects, only for them to be scrapped later. This alone proves that Bobby Kotick had direct influence on changes for Overwatch, so he is a culprit for the change to 5v5.
Even if 5v5 was a decision by the Overwatch Team specifically to reduce queue times, they didn’t realize how much damage 5v5 would do to the game, and that they could have fixed queue times by starting to do regular updates like they did, but mainly by significantly reducing CC and adding many new Tank & Support heroes, which I do say they have done a pretty good job at doing.
Times when long waiting time was major annoyance. After some experience witn 5v5 many of us would agree to wait longer and have fun games than what we have right now…
Highly unlikely. A CEO of a multi-billion company like ABK doesn’t micromanage like this. I doubt that he would know any specifics of any of these games.
I think the biggest problem with this theory is two-fold:
Kaplan said that internally they had already moved away from 1-3-2 when the first experimental card was announced in early 2020. The reason he said that internal experiment failed was that 3 dps was too much.
All the footage from Blizzconline was 5v5 and had been collected for months and months prior.
So they were already moving to 1 tank builds internally sometime in mid 2019 at the latest. And had already moved on from 1-3-2 by the time we first heard about it in early 2020. The most reasonable supposition is that 5v5 (1-2-2) came about as an iteration on the internal 1-3-2 playtests sometime around a year before Kaplan left and that he was fully on board with that direction.
5v5 is stupid even from financial point of view because you are basically offering less than before.
They probably don’t even know what the game is like let alone going in details like that.
I disagree. It feels like last minute change for the sake of change becuase they had nothing else with the pve being canceled. Majority of the heroes barely got any changes to even fit the 5v5.
How can you say Bobby didn’t micro-manage when Overwatch Blizzard employee’s have come out saying that Bobby had them working on projects for Overwatch that would just end up getting scrapped later? This alone proves that Bobby was influencing Overwatch changes.
Yeah, but regardless of how it feels, we know it wasn’t a last minute change. OW2 didn’t launch until Oct 2022 and they had already moved to 5v5 sometime in 2020. That’s 2 years before the launch of OW2 at least.
There is an unbelievably high chance that it was Bobby’s decision to go 5v5; like 90%+ chance.
I just recalled that Overwatch employee’s came out to tell about how Bobby would make them work on random projects, only for them to get scrapped later. This shows that Bobby had a direct hand in the development of Overwatch.
I saw some of the tweets on the subject and read one of the articles, but don’t remember seeing much in the way of specifics about Kotic’s interference. I may, of course, be wrong on the subject, but my experience in the large corporate structures suggests that likely not.
There are different kinds of projects. I highly doubt that Kotic knew much about the specifics of Overwatch beyond what was reported to him in boardroom presentations. When he suggested that this product could use a boost with a certain demographic, that resulted in a project.
It is likely that he may have suggested that moving into OW2, the product could use better user retention – although it doesn’t necessitate the CEO of the corporation to tell a team working on a live service game, dependent on user retention, that it needs to boost user retention – which resulted in Team 4 looking at the ridiculously long queue times for the majority of the playerbase and coming up with 5v5 as one of the vectors of attack. What I emphatically doubt happening is Kotic actually saying something to the effect of, “yeah, and get rid of that 6v6 nonsense; 5v5 works much better”.
Single-Tank Overwatch 2 was Jeff Kaplan’s plan from at least early 2020 when he first discussed 1-3-2. At the time, he was quite clear that it was his idea and it was clearly in response to demand for Tanks bottlenecking the overall queue times since the introduction of Role Queue.
Throughout 2020 Jeff discussed changing the format of the game on a couple of occasions, each time stressing that not enough people liked playing Tank. Each time, this was interpreted by the community as “Overwatch 2 will probably be 1-3-2”.
The move to 1-2-2 almost certainly happened because they couldn’t make 1-3-2 work. Not because of any pressure on Jeff to remove a Tank. That was his idea. 2-2-2 was simply not going to happen, though - it had way too much of an impact on queue times.
There is a lot that can be blamed on Bobby - Skin prices, heroes in the Battle Pass, waste of Team 4 development time and the “Frat boy” office culture are notable examples. 5v5 came from Team 4 and Jeff Kaplan. The extended content drought came from Team 4 and Jeff Kaplan.
The problems in the tank queue were due to a lack of options to choose and there was not much difference in players between the tank role and the support role.
Tank queue times were an issue from the day they introduced 2-2-2 which also happened to be the day Sigma was added to the game. Even when there was an OP new Tank, it was still the least-played role. It had been in the years leading up to that, too. Even during the GOATS meta Tank was still the least played role in the game, as a whole.
Adding more Tanks is good, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that people don’t like to play Tank.
Again, this was something Kaplan explained multiple times over the years. It’s why he originally pushed for 1-3-2 in the first place.
Which is addressed by removing/reducing CC (especially stuns), since Tanks were often the ones taking most of the CC. Blizzard has done a fairly ok job at reducing CC so far in OW2. I still see Tank players not liking to play against Ana, for example.
As far as hero roster goes, having Echo (another DPS when we already had so many) be the last new hero we got in OW1 also certainly hurt queue times.