Could OW work with more than 6 man teams?

So many people want more DPS in a game, and it has worked to some degree for other games. Having something like like 2 tanks, 4 dps, 2 support or higher in games with massive 20+ man raids yet only have 2 tanks.

I kind of think 7 or 8 man teams could work. Thing is if a tank has to deal with 3 or 4 DPS they are going to need some massive buffs. Try tanking in QP when the enemy team has 4 or more DPS and watch yourself die almost instantly. You just can’t deal with that much dmg.

Plus in the end no matter how many DPS slots there are, it will never be enough if the other roles are just un fun to play and have little impact on the game.

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Short awnser: yes

Slightly longer awnser: it would need a massive overhaul

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I think the best half answer would be to bring back the 4th role if they added more players per team. It could be the “defense” catagory again. DPS hero’s with a bit more utility and less dmg. A sort of half way point between DPS and tank/support.

Sort of like Soldier who can provide healing or old Torb that gave out armor. Imo it would work better than these hybrid tank/support.

Maps would need size adjustments, some heroes would need seriously large alters to their kits, some reworks… plus, imagine fourteen players all compact in one area, flinging large projectiles in all directions. Try running that on a Switch and tell me how it goes.

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3-2-2 would fix everything.
The major downside to 3-1-2 is that people will try to tell you what tank to play, even though you might not want to play Orisa or Sigma.

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No, Jeff mentionned it in his post. It would require to rebalance the entire cast, change maps, maybe even change game modes and if you thought the sym meta with double shields + mei was a visual clutter then imagine with just 2 more players, it would be a complete mess.

The Nintendo Switch would probably light on fire. :grimacing:

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give me 4 DPS on enemy team

the succ is awaiting it’s victims

I literally just say this mentioned by Jeff Kaplan in another thread, I’ll post a quote

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Well the Dev’s have said things and back tracked on it before, so I wouldn’t take it as a hard no. That said yeah I really don’t see them investing the time into making it work. Especially not after pushing OW 2 with 6 man teams.

As for the Switch I am never a huge fan of holding a game back for the lowest system that can play it, it’s like saying games on the PS3 or 4 couldn’t do better than the Vita could play.

That said given OW was just released on the switch I highly doubt they would do anything it couldn’t handle. Which is a shame I remember a lot of good games ruined on the PS4 or PC because they were also on the PS3 and the systems Hardware held it back for years.

Besides technical limitations (including server load), balancing (defense would have a significant advantage otherwise), the actual cost, map size would need adjusting, the amount of visual noise would be a mess on top of having to manage everyone’s cool downs.

It’d be an AOE Clusterbomb of visual and auditory stress.

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Map sizes wouldnt have to be increased at all.
There are plenty of custom games that allow 7v7 and even way more players on maps at the same time and the games run fine.

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I believe Jeff mentioned this recently regarding a lot more work. In customs we can do this however we still have workshop exceeding the game limitations i.e. it crashes itself to closure. I’m not sure if this is part of the problem but I’m guessing it has a lot to do with overloading the gaming system, processors and servers.

…then we have the almighty problem of “balance”.

While I don’t doubt all the changes you mentioned would be needed if OW teams increased to 7 or 8, but Jeff didn’t mention any of that in his post.

Basically, he said it would cause a lot of technical problems. OW servers are optimized for 12 people per game. I think if Blizzard increased team sizes, server loads couldn’t meet expectations and causes crashes.

They can’t increase it because of the IT challenges inherent.

Map sizes would need to increased because maps have chokepoints and the increased player count in the match means more damage will be flying around in smaller spaces in a 8v8. All those hitboxes in a small space leaves very little wiggle room.

It would also ruin balancing. Try stopping a Blizzard, Dragonstrike, Barrage and BOB on top of that. It’d be a mess to manage or focus at all.

My bad, I read it so fast thought he mentionned problems in general that more than 6 players would cause then mentionned the technical side of things.

Anyway it’s another con for more than 6 players.

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It’s a reasonable assumption.

The term “optimized” (which he used) generally entails technical graphics difficulties.

It COULD be used in reference to map sizes and what not, but I took it as the meaning of technical difficulties of adding more heroes per match, especially when they are dealing with 4 platforms.

That would be a hard limit (hardware) to overcome over just general balance concerns.

On a map like Petra yes and more players is what it has always needed.

The rest of the game no. Besides balance the maps would get insane and barriers would have to be buffed with that much damage flying around.

Let’s unleash this on PTR and see how it goes

Another idea is that depending on the map you could have 7v7 teams.
On the smaller ones it stays 6v6.
So depending on the map, you could have a 6v6 or a 7v7 game.