Dear blizzard, please stop changing the entire game

General Discussion
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to fix a handful of heroes

you forced us into 5v5 because of a few shield tanks creating an unfun meta

if you want to nerf sustain, do it outright and target the specific heroes that are causing problems

increasing the health pools of every hero is going to change how the entire game plays and further alienate your playerbase, id much rather you nerf healing across the board instead of whatever this alleged patch is doing

if the patch is fake, carry on and forget this post exists (except the 5v5 part, please bring back 6v6 ty) :slightly_smiling_face:

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5v5 happened because of queue times. The Devs have outright told us this multiple times yet you guys always seem to ignore it.

No one, from literally the start of Overwatch 1, queued for tank. Even in GM I would have tons of games where no one would want to tank and then we’d have 5 DPS and me on Mercy, or if we were lucky maybe a singular Hog or Dva or something.

This is not an Overwatch specific issue. In pretty much any game that has the holy trinity role system (tanks, healers, damage), tanks are ALWAYS the least popular role with the other roles have much longer queues, especially DPS. Not many people want to play the punching bag for everyone else. They want to go be the ones making plays while the other guy is soaking up all the damage and CC. It’s just human psychology.

The goal of 5v5 from the get go was to help reduce queue times for everyone else by eliminating the need for the matchmaker to find 2 entire players, 2 tanks at that, the hardest role to fill. And it has succeeded in that regard.

The issue is the balance has been handled poorly since the first beta and supports got overbuffed because people weren’t used to the new pace of the game (which was how the first few years of OW1 played, but supports were too used to the slowed down last few years of OW1). And then as a result the Devs kept buffing tanks every patch and everything has gotten out of control with damage and healing both feeling too high.

This upcoming patch that raises everyones health and increases bullet/projectile sizes makes the game more consistent across the board. Damage will land more often, but bigger HP pools and the new DPS passive applying a healing debuff will make it so you don’t feel like you go from full HP to 10 HP to full HP every few seconds in combat.

5v5 removed a tank from the team. That’s about 600 HP and multiple defense tools outright gone. No second shield, no Winston bubble AND defense matrix on your team, no Rein shield AND Zarya bubbles anymore, etc. This patch seems to be trying to address that by distributing that health/defensiveness back to the whole team through the HP changes.

It also gives them more room to play with balance tuning knobs. When the baseline HP for heroes is 200, any HP increase has a drastic effect on their balance. The Devs have said multiple times that +25 and -25 HP increases to squishes has the biggest effect on their winrates.

Raising everyone up to 250 HP means in the future they can make these little HP changes to individual heroes without it being such a drastic balance change. If Kiriko and Mercy are too survivable next patch, for example, they could nerf them down to 225 HP. 250 to 225 will feel less drastic than 200 to 175 does currently because it will effect less damage breakpoints.

The new DPS passive healing debuff is also a nice new tuning knob that could honestly get applied to all roles in the future as it allows the Devs to ensure healing in combat isn’t too high while not flat nerfing healing so that it’s miserable to heal up people (mainly tanks) outside of combat. The role wide self regen also helps the latter part.

Everyone has been complaining that the Devs didn’t “rework the game/heroes enough for 5v5” and now that they’re trying to do that, y’all are complaining without us even having tested it yet.

:roll_eyes:

If when it goes live it’s bad and feels horrible we can criticize it. Then we wait and see if they make adjustments from our feedback. Hopefully it can get to a decent place relatively quickly. I think people will find that they enjoy the slower pace of the game and damage/healing being made more consistent and less burst-y and feast or famine. I think the pace of teamfights will feel a lot more like OW1.

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Source? That’s odd because 5v5 did absolutely nothing to queue times, widening matchmaking rank thresholds did.

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im fully aware queue times were a major factor in their decision

however, i refuse to acknowledge it as being the sole reason they forced us into 5v5

not to mention, they could have reworked all of the tanks and addressed the issues with the role without permanently changing the format of the game, they essentially solved a problem with another problem

yes i want them to rework heroes that dont fit in 5v5, that means giving them new/revamped kits

that does not mean i want them to go crazy and increase the health pools of every hero…

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They literally ran the original 1-3-2 experiment in OW1 to look at how it effected queue times by only having one tank per team in role queue. Players gave negative feedback on how it felt (3 DPS per team was far too much damage) but Jeff said in the following blog post that their data showed it had a HIGHLY positive effect on queue times. (No I’m not going to go dig through 3 years of blog posts to find it for you). They then went quiet for a while about it and then revealed 5v5 at Blizzcon.

They have spoken about 5v5’s goal to help with queue times multiple times. They’ve spoken about queue times in general multiple times. They don’t want us sitting in queues. It’s also why they giga buffed supports at the start of OW2 because no one was queueing for them and they were worried they had just shifted the queue time problem from tanks being the bottle neck to supports being the bottle neck.

Also it’s outlandish to pretend that the matchmaker only having to find 10 players of similar skill level, and only 2 tanks, is not easier/faster than the matchmaker having to find 12 players of a similar skill level, and 4 tanks. When nobody queues tank.

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Well too bad I guess because they’re doing it in a week anyways lol

Fingers crossed it’s not a horrific disaster on launch

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ill check it out and have fun with it, i stopped taking this game seriously a long time ago

i just wish blizzard would stop making sweeping changes when the community offers them simple and concise solutions to the problems they have created

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No one, from the start of role queue you mean.

Before role queue I was a tank main. Tank was by far the most fun role for me.

Then they released Brig. Brig destroyed. Like, absolutely vaporized the fun of playing tank for me. Before Role queue. Before Goats became massive and intrusive. Something about tank became miserable. That was Brig. 2016 to early 2018 was so fun for tank.

I stopped maining tank, before role queue. Tank was incredibly fun to play before the problem heroes were introduced.

Brig, and then Bap. Heroes designed not so much to make plays, not to make better plays than the enemy, but to shut down your plays. 5 second stun on Brig, causing Chain CC on all tanks. Lamp, a cooldown, that countered every tank ult except Winston and Hog.

Yeah those heroes ruined tank. Not role queue. Not the tank role itself.

Of course this is my opinion. But if I have this opinion, I’m sure many others share the same sentiment. Or perhaps they don’t even realize why tank became so unfun for them.

Yes tank was the least played role from the start of role queue. IMO, because Brig and Bap were already in the game. Brig and Bap would easily stop your big plays, stop tank ultimate’s. Stop tanks from having fun.

I would love to look through an alternate universe where we see Role queue implemented without heroes like Release Brig, or Baptiste/immorts. What would the queues have been like I wonder…

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No. I very clearly was describing scenarios pre role queue. Everyone who played OW1 from launch can remember how often you would get solo tank or even no tank games, or players forced onto tank who had 0 interest or experience in the role.

Why do you think they ADDED role queue in the first place? LOL. Because teams never had tanks on them until GOATS when everyone had 3 :rofl: First few years of the game no one wanted to play it and then they were suddenly unbalanced when stacked.

Hardly anyone willingly would pick tank in open queue.

I personally had fun as Mercy zipping around healing 5 DPS but I know it wasn’t that fun for the other supports in this game.

That’s awesome! But you were a minority. :person_shrugging:

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No. Teams had anything and everything. From multiple tanks to no tanks. And funny thing is, it was still possible to win with 5 DPS, and fun to play.

They added role queue to remove GOATS. Not to force 2 tanks from 0.

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if im remembering correctly, i think it was a mix of both of these that killed the role

from the start tank was a role defined by the bullet sponge playstyle (basically stand in the frontline and block damage, rinse and repeat), they had very little agency to do much on their own except for certain playmaking ults

then brig and bap got added to the game and made even their playmaking abilities null and void

sigma being added to the game was the nail in the coffin, now you had a double barrier meta that was being enabled by baptiste’s overpowered cooldowns and healing output

from there it really was a design issue and i believe that if the underperforming tanks received reworks and the double barrier meta was dealt with we could have kept 6v6 with no issues

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Correct.

Tank was already the least popular and played role. (As it is in all games with the trinity role system).

They added heroes who made it even more unfun.

But you can’t put all the blame on Brig and Bap considering you could remove them entirely and tank still would have been the least popular role by far

I mean they could have theoretically reworked all the tanks to be fun, impactful, and playmakers without somehow being too good when paired with another certain tank but that’s pretty hard to do

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I don’t think they can really go back to 6v6 at this point.
Like, Mauga, Queen, and Ram were all developed with solo-tanking in mind, similarly Weaver, Illari, and Kiri were likely developed with only having one big healthpool to manage in mind.

A universal squishy health update with ideally future tuning for damage, healing, mitigation ect to follow is probably the best option they have to deal with burst and the “He’s 1, he’s 1! Oh, he’s full. No wait, he’s 1!” thing we have going without just blanket nerfing like 60-80% of the roster.
Nerfs feel bad, that’s like psychologically a thing, so not nerfing but going around nerfing to accomplish what you would with a nerf is likely going to be received more positively. That’s probably the goal here.

I’m not saying this patch will be a winner, I’m apprehensive, but if 6v6 is off the table (and since it’s been like 2 years and they haven’t even ran an Arcade 6v6 standard ruleset, I’m saying that it’s probably off the table) they need to move forward in a way that makes the game feel better. Will this? No idea, but sitting on their hands will bleed the game dry.

Right now the game has a lot of unfun that can only be fixed with massive nerf wave(s) or re-writing the rules. I just hope that if it crashes and is total doodoo they’re willing to un-patch, throw out a balance update to liven things up a tad and cook the big overhaul a bit longer.
I want this to be fun and kinda a return to the OW of ~17, but all we’ve heard was Wanted’s disdain and nada from a Tank, Support main, or someone DPS player who mains not Cass, and that is a lil concerning. Obv they’re still under NDA, but I’d almost have expected one to say something vague. Like “X mains will be eating/starving in s9”, “S9 is gonna feel great/awful” ect.

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Roleq was a bad idea , Brigitte was a bad idea, nerfing mercy and ignoring playerbase was bad idea.

All that led to player loss.

Tanks are the least played role in all gaming history in all games

It was dumb to make rq in the first place.

The issue is not the mistakes but instead of reverting they are doubling down repeatedly

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Okay then I’ll have to assume you’re making this up.

And now it’s back to tank bottle neck so why aren’t they giga buffing tanks? They only buffed supports because they cry VERY loud. If they would have just left them alone they would have adapted and the role would gain more players. I found it funny that there were brand new players coming on these forums in season 1 saying they found support the most fun and didn’t understand the complaints. Kinda just goes to show how supports have a certain expectation of hand holding.

Should be easy for you to find a single source then shouldn’t it?

It’s outlandish to pretend to know exactly how the matchmaker works and that there’s any fact behind your statement. What we do know is that OW2 Season 1 had the same exact queue problems as OW1, just with the roles shifted around. 20 minute tank queues, 7-15 minute dps queues, 1 minute support queues. Then in season 2 it was 1>1>1 and golds were showing up in GM games and bronze in diamond games. It’s quite obvious the only thing that sped up matchmaking is widening skill gaps.

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And yet it has no adverse effect on queue times. Their plan(prolly all along) was to just broaden the matchmaker, hence why they removed visible ranks🤷‍♂️ it was wonky in 6v6 but I sure did not have a player 1000 SR below me in games.

The queue times after release were close to 10 min until their little “optimization”.

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And yet we went back to the same queue times cause they keep making tank awful to play as a whole

I wonder what my 800 hours for tank are for then :thinking:

Or people already forgot about how nobody queied for tank and yet we had GOATS meta :thinking:

It “succeeded” cause they threw match making out of the window with how wide it groups ranks just to make a quick match (and even then supp queues are high)

And even then it wont solve the fundamental issues of 5v5 of leaving the lone tank the reponsability of 2 people, wont solve counterwatch rock ,paper, scissors meta, and wont solve people calling “tAnK dIfF” even if they themselves are 2-10

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/yawn

“When we rolled our Role Queue with 2 damage, 2 support, and 2 tank players per team, we ended up with a lot more damage players in queue than tanks and supports. This created longer queue times, and one of the things we considered was, what if we tried to make the team composition closer to the actual ratio of players by role? If that did work out, people would be waiting less, playing more. So, it behooved us to actually try it.”

“We’ll be looking at two things. One: player feedback and gut feelings. That’s super valuable to us. And second is the effect on queue times. The goal here is not to change the meta—it’s to reduce queue times.”

Let’s repeat that last line:

“The goal here is not to change the meta—it’s to reduce queue times.”

:slight_smile:

Also, the whole Dev Update where he talks about the reason behind one tank experiment being faster queue times:

h ttps://youtu.be/cXtJeSH8V5A

And then the follow up article after the experiment ended where he says he wants to try to implement something like it in Overwatch 2 since it’s so drastic he thinks it will work better as an OW2 change:

"Weirdly, I think there’s so much good about the 3-2-1 experiment, but I don’t feel comfortable pushing it live in 2020. What Overwatch 2 becomes for us is another great opportunity, it’s a moment where people expect and are hoping for radical change. This is what a sequel is all about, ‘you’re not just gonna give us the same game, right’? So as developers, I think we can all be excited about the opportunity that Overwatch 2 brings for ‘okay, it’s time. We’ve been playing the same game for many years now. It’s time to move on to the next thing’.""

source: h ttps://www.pcgamesn.com/overwatch/year-four-battle-pass

And finally, talking about how their data showed it had a positive improvement on all queue times:

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There are no specific heroes causing the issue of infinite sustain. It’s systemic to the game’s core design. You can play Overwatch without Tanks, you can play Overwatch without Damage and it works relatively fine. Not great, but well enough. You can’t play Overwatch without healers, because the entire combat system collapses under its own weight. Health pools are minuscule relative to damage, especially on non-Tank heroes. Sustain sources outside of Supports are so minor they may as well not exist.

Overwatch is balanced around constant, excessive healing. To make any significant structural changes, that has to be addressed first. I’m almost positive that the Damage anti-heal passive came first, and all other changes came after in order to support it.

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How would widening the MMR range affect queue times between roles?

I can see it if we were playing Open Queue, because obviously more people in the pool → less time for that pool to have enough people in it. In Role Queue however, if you widen the pool for support, DPS and tank by 3x, the ratio of support, DPS and tank stays the exact same. So if a DPS had to queue for 10 minutes before (pretty much standard in OW1 iirc), they would still have to queue for 10 minutes after widening the range, because despite there being 3x as many tanks, there are also 3x as many DPS waiting to get in.

With that in mind it seems 5v5 did indeed fix queue issues.