Saying a game which is in the top 0.06% of games by players playing right now isn’t “just good enough”.
It is straight up amazingly good and any company would be over the moon to have something like that in their portfolio.
Again, I don’t get where people see top 0.06% of games by current player online player count and think “that is obviously trash devs at work”
You are really missing the point here.
High budged games needs to make high profit, because if they don’t you get lawbreakers and gundam evolution.
Moreover, these numbers ostensibly represent at most roughly ten percent of just the PC playerbase.
Yes, the overwatch killers in action.
The industry is littered with dead titles like those, who’s player bases dropped to almost nothing.
Overwatch however has stayed in the top 0.06% of games by players online at the current time playing it - so is pretty obviously not those games.
Totally. It isn’t even the primary way people play it, and it is still crushing it there.
Try to guess why they didn’t manage to kill it - because didn’t make any money and OW is next
Because their player numbers tanked and tanked HARD, because the games were not as good, and their devs made worse choices for player retention.
oh? Like the same predictions which had been happening for as long as Overwatch has been around?
You are really underestimating how many players this game has lost, don’t you?
reduced team sizes and loosen matchmaking… surely it is not losing players at all…
The 6v6 to 5v5 was because of mismatch between the number of tank and dps players.
Matchmaking will seem looser because in 5v5 it takes less of a difference in what a team mate is doing to mess up your game.
They get balance updates as all games should, but no other game introduces fundamental changes and reworks to systems as often as ow2 does. So far we got in less than a year:
I legit dont know any game that changes so much in the span of 2 months and there are still no end in sight for devs changing how everything works every season. If they do so many changes is because the game is totally broken at its core concept.
Although I generally agree with you, the truth is that its not that hard to sneak into Steam’s top 100, Gundam Evo was there as well. In reality flop games are few and sound cases, the majority are either just average or good, then outstanding. I can find games In Resident Evil Resistance in 5 minutes at every hour I want to play just like Im doing right now and yet I admit the game is dead pretty dead compared with anything else. However I dont think OW is dead, neither awesome, just good. I would go as far as to claim if the game is at the top 100 is precisely because majority of Battlenet players jumped to Steam and not the oppossite.
Overwatch is staying there.
The devs for Gundam Evo messed up, in ways which the overwatch devs have not.
But it is competing in T100 against games which all of their players are on steam.
I wish that was the case. Gundam Evo devs actually listened more and were twice as communicative than OW’s current devs
Yes. They were very responsive and gave the players what they asked for, regardless of how healthy it was long term for the game.
Where the overwatch devs frequently ignore the player base, and do things which make sense in the long term.
I’m not saying the Gundam Evo devs didn’t listen, or give the players what they asked for, which is why it died.
I’m saying that it died BECAUSE they gave the players what they were asking for, over what was needed for long term health.
Blizzard did the same for a while. But they learnt that it didn’t work.
“Stability” is a better phrase. The idea being that a bigger population stabilizes outlier events. The OP essentially was largely about this.
It enables more diverse or creative plays, as stated, that would be unlikely to succeed in 5v5. Thus, 5v5 is less “stable.” Perturbations from the meta tend to result in getting smashed, more likely. One player being AFK for a bit is more likely to get your team smashed. Literally, anything at all going wrong or being slightly “weird” is more likely to result in a massive fail. Unstable.
I agree that splitting queues is never great, but I think it’s worth it in this case because if 6v6 were popular enough to be that kind of a threat, then 6v6 would also attract back old players, AND maybe even take over. And that’s a good thing. Not allowing it is kind of reminiscent of censorship in a sense. “People might be into this too much, let’s burn the book!” I get it’s different, but there is some shared conceptual space here. Or in other words, “whatchya afraid of?”
Thats not true, the game got huge flaws that they adressed, it died just as soon as it was starting to work properly because Bandai is prone to shut down things that dong give inmediate profit.
Nah, when Kapplan was director they tried many things the community asked in the experimental, some of them stuck and other didnt, there was no problem on that regard. Current devs simply dont care. Well, more than not caring they simply have no clue what to do imo.
I mean, he also didn’t care to balance the roles, once RQ was put in place, leading to 20 minute DPS queues.
That was unsustainable long term (but popular)
Now the current devs ARE balancing the queues, which is better for the long term health of the game, but isn’t so popular.
It’s like the devs who make you eat your vegies, no matter how important it is for the long term health of the game, will not be as popular as the ones which make choices which are fun, but just can’t be run for a long time without large structural issues coming up.
Current devs arent balancing the queues at all, people has been complaining that tanking feels awful since they nerfed the tanks at season 1 or 2 and they just dont care because if tanks are not nerfed then the game is also utterly unplayable. Current devs have not done anything for the queues, f2p and loose matchmaking did. The thing is that 5v5 is just a balancing nightmare longterm and current devs have ingrained in their brains that there is no other solution even when we are all seeing that 5v5 its causing more harm than good.
Yeah I never played OW1. However the arguments for 5v5 are kinda bad all around.
The passion for the game is shown to be lacking by going 5v5. It’s more about shifting meta and shafting tanks than balance. Every nerf and buff is to obfuscate their subtle surreptitious ploy. A long con, the goal of balance is not entertained they really just want to shift meta. And make more changes more often to make it look like they are making attempts, hence HP increase for example(I kinda like more HP though.)
Striving for the unobtainable perfect balance should be before everything else, if you’re passionate about hero identity and overall integrity of the game design.So 6v6. You can’t dump tanks just so other roles have more fun, sometimes. It reminds me of how companies lay off employees at the cost of quality content…
In the end it’s all part of a secret conspiracy to keep competition within the gaming industry. You can’t make a “perfect” game, especially MMO’s because people who spend or can spend lots of money will be more likely to only spend money on that specific game, which will mean they spend less money on other games.
There are millionaires standing around at golf courses and closed door meetings discussing how they’ll work together. They’ll make sure there are annoying, inconvenient, unbalanced, broken and perceived scummy elements of their game so that most will be fatigued by any one game over long periods and play another game instead for awhile. Being exposed to annoying, inconvenient, broken elements to the point of game fatigue makes it so they will be likely to pay to remove some of those elements on another game and eventually the game that they got fatigued from even. They may pay for more games more frequently as well. Solo tanking for the win lol
If they didn’t do anything for the queues, DPS would be back at 20 minutes queues now.
DPS are actually are getting back to the queues, the only thing improving that is the loose matchmaking and that we have more people because of going f2p. I mean people really exaggerattes the queues a lot when the 20 minutes thing only happenned at the top 1% where players where in the hundreds and the matchmaking was not that loose.