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…