Can anything be done about spawn killing?

General Discussion
1

As of now it’s not something we can report (I.E., not an actual condition in any of the report option descriptions, and it’s not in Gameplay Sabotage). What I’m referring to here is the enemy team pushing up to the literal spawn, forcing the opposing team to stay inside and do nothing, because there’s very little that can actually be done about it (except dying if you go out of spawn).

The only two things that can ‘break’ continuous spawn killing is to build Ults very slowly (come out of spawn, shooting a bit, getting back in; rinse and repeat) and coordinate the use of most, if not all the Ults at once to “clear a path” and push the enemy team back. Or, simply ask the other team in general chat to stop it. Obviously, you’re guessing that merely asking them to stop it has the exact opposite effect and even fuels more “rage” on their part (somehow, even though they are just destroying the enemy team by having their face rolling onto the spawn shield).

So, realistically, the only thing to do is to leave the match since it would otherwise be a waste of time to stay. The ‘practical’ thing to do would be to ignore every enemy player who participated in spawn killing. But unfortunately we cannot ignore more than 3 players at once (and even more unfortunately it only lasts for 7 days). By ‘ignore’ I mean Avoid as Teammate (I wouldn’t want to play with people like that, be it enemy team or my own team).

The game has no actual system in place to prevent spawn killing (I.E. no safe zone outside of spawn, etc) and other than ignoring 3 players max (which is nothing) we cannot report them since obviously there’s no way to “prove” it since whoever at Blizzard is looking into reports wouldn’t know how to even verify if it really did happen and who did it outside of maybe watching the whole replay of the match if that’s something they even can do. And even if they could, they probably don’t have the manpower (or even the will) to do just that on a per-report basis (it would just take ages).

So the big question I guess is this: Will something, anything ever be done about spawn killing?

I’m not sure when this started. I took a break from the game for a long time (more than a full year between mid 2017 to late 2018, and only made a regular ‘come back’ starting in mid 2019). But I genuinely do not recall this whole “Let’s keep pushing the enemy team back to their spawn, stay there and let’s kill them as they come out of it” trend in Overwatch. That’s something I haven’t experienced since probably the early years of TF2 and all the way back to Battlefield games. I absolutely don’t remember 2016 to 2017 OW being like that.

Either something happened that I’m not aware of that encourages it, or a new wave of ‘other games’ players came to OW in recent years and applied their trendy spawn killing tactics into OW and it’s now a standard. That’s the only way I can explain why it’s happening (outside of the OW Team apparently just letting it happen to begin with). It’s frustrating.

2

Sometimes you’re the fly, sometimes you’re the windshield. Welcome to the dice roll that is OW Matchmaking.

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3

Matchmaking has nothing to do with this. How can matchmaking know if the players it’s matching together will be fair to the enemy team and behave in a sportsmanship manner? This matter revolves around people’s willingness to have a ‘fair fight’ with the enemy. It has nothing to do with numbers, statistics and player levels.

4

Spawn trapping puts THEM at a disadvantage. You need to punish it.

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5

You can’t allow yourself to be kept in spawn. There is really no excuse for it. If your team can swap characters, you can adapt and overcome.

Like Moreheroes said, this is more to their disadvantage than yours. I always try to keep my team from pushing out too far and into the enemy spawn. It’s suicide if your team has any skill.

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6

The only way to do that as I mentioned is to wait for Ults to build up. Staying inside does nothing more than just ensure you’re not dying. It doesn’t guarantee they are the ones dying. I just experienced such a match some moments ago where the only reason why we managed to come out of spawn is because 2 or 3 guys on the enemy team got tired of doing it and stepped back to the mid part of the level. Then, and only then we came out and managed to breath a bit.

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What? Why should the other team give up their advantage just because your team is so bad that you get spawned camped.

Tbh there are a number of ways to break the spawn camp. And you do know that you can literally stand inside of spawn and shoot at them and they literally have no way to kill you until you step out of spawn right.

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8

Don’t be bad

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9

Well spawn camping and keeping the enemy off the objective is an in game achievement award.

Sooooooo not gonna be something they punish when they reward it in game.

And it’s on you and your teammates to adapt and outplay the enemy.

The enemy is more at risk. One of them die they are on a power play way longer because of respawn+travel time to rejoin the fight.

Your team is by a spawn where you don’t have to travel far and the room instantly heals. You actually have the advantage just push as a team

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10

If it were evenly matched, you wouldn’t have been stomped lmao

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No it’s not. You just have a lot more to learn about the game. You literally have invincibility, free range to shoot out and healing if you decide to dip out and come back in.

Really the only time where an entire team can legitimately be kept in spawn is if the difference in player skill is that high(like high level smurfs playing with lower levels). If the team MMR balance is similar an enemy team cannot keep you in spawn.

Is the share replay ability live with this current patch? It would be great if you could share the replay.

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This is exactly what I was talking about. It’s proving my point more than anything else. Telling people to not be bad has nothing to do with any of this. It’s all about sportsmanship, having a fair fight from the enemy, and giving a fair fight to them in return. But I’m realizing there’s none.

There used to be in the first year or so when the game came out. But yeah I’m seeing it now it’s pretty much gone. It’s all about winning at all costs, fun be damned. It’s true though, there’s realistically not much the OW Team can do about it. The only thing I would like is the ability to Avoid as Teammate as much as I wanted to. That would give me enough individual power to act at least to some extent about it.

It’s indeed part of the game now. Sad, but a true reality. I guess it makes OW less and less distinguished from other generic games over time.

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There are two solutions:

  1. Reach the point somehow and conquer it (dva, ball, sombra, lucio, whatever)
  2. Use e.g. Bastion and annihilate them, then conquer the point
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Get a Rein/Orisa (Or Rein/Sigma). Get a Bastion. Get a Bap. Rein puts up his shield, Bastion turrets down, Bap throws down his field when Reins shield breaks. Throw a couple other characters into the mix. (Ana with nade, Doomfist, McCree stun, etc)

You really only need to kill around two of the enemy to get them staggered and feeding. Focus on one or two enemies - coordinate with your team on who to target.

Punish those fools. Find a way out of that spawn.

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There’s so many heros who handle spawn camping so well and often it’s the fault of the team getting spawn camped for not taking advantage of the enemies over aggression.

Hog/WB/Zarya are good spawn camping tanks (others too pending enemy comp)

With dps it’s always high burst heros like Hanzo, JR, Bastion, or the sneaky back capper Sombra.

For supports a single Ana sleep dart/nade seals the deal. Then you can go with Lucio/Moira for elusiveness.

I’m that guy that wont join spawn camping, not because I think its immoral or anything but because I know how easy it is to punish that in such uncoordinated teams.

I’m the one who protects against back caps and does everything I can to ensure we at least have half a fight available to us if and when they die and essentially give up the point for free.

What are you talking about? Spawn camping has existed in OW since it’s release (and any other game that ever existed that had a spawn room mechanic)

You can’t tell me you haven’t seen those old games where a team had like 2-3 Bastions with 2 Reins and a couple of Mercys just camp outside the enemy spawn

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16

You can’t be truly spawn camped in this game, you just get people camping outside the spawn doors. It’s a totally different issue than true spawn camping in game that allow a player to be killed before they even can look around or fight back.

Spawn camping tends to happen being the other team just refuses to mix up their comp, group up and get out of spawn.
I don’t know how that can be fixed.

even that horrible Spawn camp that happened to poor Washington a few weeks ago in OWL was directly them refusing to mix up their comp and focus on just getting out of spawn.

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I’m being 100% genuine here when I’m saying that I absolutely do not recall the game being this much focused on pushing to the spawn when I used to play it religiously back in 2016.

It remained pretty much stable in terms of overall teams behaving well toward each others, outside of the obvious chat-based rage cases (that part has been there forever, it’s nothing new). But generally-speaking when I used to play it back then both teams were physically content with pretty much staying on or near the point and not pushing ahead that much, especially up to the spawn itself. At the time, at least in my experience, it was a lot less focused on relentless aggressive, offensive tactics than it currently is.

I don’t play Comp, maybe it comes from there? But what I can say is that in Arcade and in QP (and in Experimental too now) I have - as an estimation - around 6 to 7 games out of 10 where there’s going to be a case of spawn killing the way I’m describing it.

There’s basically two types, one of which is happening because the game mode itself and/or the map layout allows it. The other just shouldn’t happen.

An example of a case where the map itself or the game mode itself can provoke it for obvious reasons would be Escort, where - of course - the Payload at the end is pretty much at the enemy’s spawn, and “spawn killing” at that point is simply a byproduct of the very game mode and the map itself being played. That can sometimes be frustrating but is more understandable. In cases like that even I wouldn’t really feel like I’d want to report any of it.

However, in a case where the mode is something like Control on a map like Ilios or Nepal; there should be no reason for the enemy to leave the point alone and physically move all the way to the spawn literally camping there. Of course, doing that is an “advantage”, like… No Sh That’s only if you’re thinking in ‘practical’ terms. But it also hides a vicious willingness on the part of the enemy team’s players doing it to just have their fun out of this situation in complete disregard of any form of sportsmanship, honor and what have you that could be described as ‘fair’. Why not giving the enemy team their window of opportunity? You captured the point, you got the upper hand already, the score from the very game mode’s goal is ticking in your favor as it is. Isn’t this game supposed to not just be about individual kills?

Anyway, it’s cases that belong to the second example I’m referring to. Where it has nothing to do with being an ‘advantage’ and more to do with “let’s screw up the enemy team’s day in complete disrespect to them for some reason”.

But anyway, main points have been said. I get it. It’s a question of having to deal with it. It’s just something relatively new to me in this game. It must have been building up over the period of time when I stopped playing. It wasn’t this much of an occurrence back then. I might have been simply lucky to play the game pretty much 4 to 5 hours a day for a solid 6 or 7 months back in 2016 and absolutely never experienced anything like what’s going on nowadays. But yeah the game and its players base indeed changed a lot in those nearly 4 years.

I’ll ‘adapt’ and endure it (not with a smile, but I’ll try).

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18

You’ve got the right attitude. I might catch a lot of flak for this, but there are far more smurfs playing the game now that there was back in 2016. This may be why you are experiencing this more than in the past.

It has always existed - work with your team and communicate on what to do together - and you’ll find a way to overcome the situation.

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19

I don’t really understand why you’re making it sound like a sportsmanship issue, though. It’s just taking a fight in a forward position, which isn’t that weird.

The only place it maybe kind of becomes unsportsmanlike is when a team stays in that position indefinitely, since that basically implies, “We’re so much better than you that we can do really dumb stuff, and you’ll never take advantage of it.” The quirk, of course, is that they have to be right about that for it to work to their benefit, other than a few specific spawn locations that are poorly designed (namely Havana A).

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Sounds like you are just getting rolled. Spawn Camping isn’t a matter of sportsmanship. If the other team is unable to get out of a spawn camp then they shouldn’t win. Its just another strategy that usually doesn’t happen because its hard to spawn camp. Don’t just leave the game, make swaps and try to get out of the spawn.

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