In this post I would like to go over some of the reasons I believe that competitive classic will be very good for the game.
I will also talk about some of the cons and pros of various implementations of competitive classic.
Why do we need competitive classic? There are a number of reasons. First of all there are many people who do not like the role Q system for many various reasons that have been covered previously.
Competitive classic offers them a place they can go to enjoy the game in the way that they did before role Q was made mandatory for competitive.
Pros:
Q times would be reduced for damage players because the system is not having to find a balance of each role within a play base that largely plays damage.
Freedom. Freedom to play the hero that you wish to play or that you are specialised to play on the map that you want. Currently this is not possible with role Q.
Freedom to run the compositions they want to run for example goats composition or quadruple tank composition and so on.
Role Q would also be benefited by having its damage Q times lowered.
Cons:
Many people have brought up that competitive classic would split the play base. However I believe that there are times when splitting the play base is desirable when it’s otherwise impossible to reconcile the desires of a large part of the play base.
For example when Overwatch first came out there was only the quick play mode. We decided to implement the competitive mode despite the fact that it would split the play base because a significant portion of the play base desired to have a place to play competitively. In this case the isolation of the two groups was desirable because one group of players being forced to play in the casual quick play mode with other casual players caused disagreements due to the very different mentality of playing the game casually versus competitively.
In addition if one were to argue against splitting the play base then one should also logically argue that the arcade modes should be removed and that PvE in OW2 should not be added.
Furthermore there is no way currently that will reduce Q times without negatively impacting the game in other ways for example if you were to go with the 123 composition then you lose the synergistic duos of various tanks.
There is also the issue of balance that is often brought up. This could be addressed in a number of different ways.
They could balance it independently from role lock. Some people argue against this saying that it would take up development time. My response would be that when something would help to make the game much better for a large portion of the play base it’s desirable to implement it even if it costs development resources.
Furthermore I believe that this argument is very open for debate because we’ve already seen very recently that the development team released a specific patch for the console versions of the game. Clearly it is possible for them to do so even if at a less frequent rate.
Finally if one argues that it would take up development resources they should also make the same case against the development team creating the player versus environment mode for the sequel to overwatch. This also takes up development time. It would also be reasonable to assume that a smaller fraction of the play base wants play versus environment.
Now another method of balance they could use would be the option of simply not changing the balance at all from role Q. While this may not be optimal and may lead to certain compositions being quite overpowered it would at least be better than having nothing in the same way that quickly classic existing is better than it not existing.
Finally they may freeze the balance from before role Q was released. We should remember that the state of the game at the point was the culmination of two years of balance if not more. The game was reasonably balanced across ranks except at the very highest level.
Some people have made the case that it would lead to a staleness. I would argue that having the game be stable and in the same balance state has its own advantages. For example you would not suddenly run into huge problems with the balance such as when for example Brigitte was released.
This does have a disadvantage of not having any new heroes since the inception of Sigma.
However you would also see the very height of players being able to play the meta composition at the peak skill level possible which I believe can be very interesting to watch.
Some have made the case that the meta would never shift. I believe this to be incorrect because even without balance changes new discoveries could always be made such as when the clockwork vendetta discovered their composition and that it was quite effective against the currently dominant composition.
Furthermore there are games that have been very successful throughout history such as chess which receive balance changes very very infrequently and also do see shifts in the meta overtime due to new discoveries and theories.
For the reasons I’ve outlined above I believe the pros of implementing the competitive classic mode in any form outweigh the cons of doing so.
If there remains any doubt why not trial it on the Experimental Card?