Global warming is to blame!!
How do you know Jeff left because he disliked 5v5?
We need official statements, rather than assumptions or guessing
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I am not convinced they were trying any other team comps after 1-3-2 was universally hated, especially for the tank role alone.
It just doesn’t make any sense to jump on 1-2-2 right after that.
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.
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I mean, Jeff said they were trying other iterations after 1-3-2. And we know they were because we saw all of that footage at Blizzconline 2021.
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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.
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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.
8 tanks, 17 dps
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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.
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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.
I will say it yet again, 5v5 was just an easy and lazy way to fix the DPS’s long queue time.
Because they can’t figure it out how to make other role enjoyable to play.
Here’s a post by one Mr. Jeff “Jeff” Kaplan talking about his 132 experimental. Not Aaron’s experimental, not Bobby’s experimental, Jeff’s experimental.
For good measure, here’s an article where Jeff talks a bit about the 132 experimental.
The article’s got the ice cream analogy in there:
Is one of your goals to get more people to play tank?
Kaplan: Not necessarily. This is how I’ve been thinking about it: imagine we’re an ice cream store, and we have three flavors of ice cream. We have chocolate, vanilla and strawberry, and you have to line up for all three flavors separately. So, imagine the vanilla line is way, way longer than the chocolate or the strawberry line. I feel like it’s the wrong philosophy to ask, “What can we do to convince the vanilla people to like strawberry more?” It makes more sense to say, “We need more vanilla ice cream!”
That’s a great analogy.
Heiberg [scrolling through his phone]: Actually, the most popular flavor—it looks like it might be chocolate after all. Depends on the source.
Kaplan: Well, we know it’s not strawberry. Strawberry is the tank.
Although they (very understandably) backed down from 132, 122 follows through with this logic; by only needing two tanks for every four DPS, Jeff tried to provide more vanilla ice cream for folks instead of convincing them that strawberry was great.
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Which was the wrong decision. Adding only new Tank & Support heroes, as well as significantly reducing CC (they still need to reduce CC further) would have solved queue times, which is very evident when we look at how Support queue times are longer than DPS currently because people don’t like solo tanking or even playing DPS as much.
I find myself hating to play DPS in 5v5 because you get hit-markers less often and are way too vulnerable to enemy fire without a 2nd tank. Instead of a DPS queue time problem, we now have a Support queue time problem. The only way to balance the queue times is 2-2-2, but like I said, adding only new Tanks & Supports, as well as reducing CC majorly across the board.
I just want the game to be fun, and 5v5 is not it.
I respect that you don’t enjoy 5v5 but from what I can tell, it seems more likely to have been Jeff’s decision than Bobby’s, in an attempt to save the game from the tank shortage sinking the entire game. 222 6v6 failed and 132 6v6 was a nightmare to get right.
As far as hero variety goes: the roster size of supports and tanks are similar and yet tank has usually been the problem child. (There were times when that wasn’t so much the case; for example, the first two or three seasons of OW2 had a support shortage, or following the release of Sigma.) Variety is a factor for sure, but is it really enough to explain why tanks are so much less popular than supports? Jeff talked about how there were roughly two supports for every one tank, and how in pre-RQ solo tank was the norm, if you even got a tank at all.
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I think the correct word would be shouldn’t rather than doesn’t. Milking the cash cow and micromanagement go hand in hand.
He might have had some influence in a sense of for example saying “Change the game so we can call it ow2” after the PvE was cancelled so of course he didn’t created 5v5 directly but there was some influence probably
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Oh, much more than probably; it’s a resounding yes. Even if we didn’t have employee testimonials, mentioned above, we can assume that Kotick’s management decisions had profound influence on the development decisions of many of the company’s individual products. He might not have known or put any significance that Valorant is played in a 5v5 format, but he surely knew that it’s raking cash in hand over fist and that F2P monetization models are very lucrative.
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I don’t see the logic in Jeffs head if there is very long line for just vanilla (dps) and no lines for strawberry (tank) and chocolate (supports). Promoting something where it is a big line of people waiting leads to a even bigger line whilst 2 other deserts are pull from the shelves or discounted which in this case means tanks and supports roles are deleted or you get great rewards for queueing for those roles.
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The logic is that they knew they couldn’t make tanks popular enough, so they cut down on the number of tanks needed to get a match started instead. They’ve cut down the number of tanks needed to one tank for every two DPS and two supports, and there still aren’t enough tanks to go around; going back to needing one tank for every one DPS and one support seems pretty unrealistic to me.
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Now bob has left, there’s no excuses for mistakes in Overwatch 2 anymore… SInce they used this as excuse to took bad decisions…