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.
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.
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”.
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
Or people already forgot about how nobody queied for tank and yet we had GOATS meta
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
“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.”
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 the3-2-1experiment, 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:
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.
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.
I don’t agree with your comment, but I do think it’s really well thought through and you have a lot of good reasoning.
But the reason I disagree is that OW1 went through phases. Early Overwatch was very fast paced. It was actually a lot like early Overwatch 2 except more chaotic. It was later that it slowed way down. I personally didn’t like the slower pace that Overwatch took later. I do enjoy the current gameplay. So I’m concerned because I see history repeating itself and I didn’t like it the first go around.
That’s because the tank roster is very low in number, we also had a bunch of cc back then as well.
Now, there is Doomfist being a tank, and the addition of Junkerqueen, Ram, Mauga, and rework Orisa making the tank roster more diverse than having only 3 viable tanks with 3 effing shields in the front.
Tanks can be fun if they know how to design it, not a shield bot.
Personally, I believe they hit the jackpot with Junkerqueen tank design.
People take the “leak” at face value for whatever reason
The patch is one big mess and addresses nothing and causes more problem than it fix
I would be not surprised if that was just an internal testing to see how certain parameters affect the game
Wake me up when they finish the story mode, I want to play with the heroes with all that toxic competitive 24/7 player base they even called Monsters Hunter a competitive game.
“It’s about having the best gear and being the best.”
Dude never did answer my question on what to do afterwards and rather will he use is so called best ever status to help other players.
Maybe if the playerbase didn’t start screaming “ANTI-FUN!” when any non-barrier tank (except maybe Zarya, depending on how much we consider her bubbles “barriers”) was meta…
devs seem like the kind of people given the choice between having 80% of the playerbase happy and 20% unhappy would rather have 100% unhappy in order to be ‘‘fair’’.
