They did not know how to balance double barrier, first of all.
Then they introduced forced role queue, which is where things went haywire.
Tank queues were too high because nobody liked playing tank due to their linear design. The same still applies here. It is why all tanks have now been designed as a “Big DPS”.
Now we have the opposite issue. Tank queues have been fixed, but now support queues are now suffering. We’ve now gone back to the initial issue of queue times as Blizzard have failed to adapt Supports the same way they did with Tanks.
DPS will always be the most played role as it is the most versatile. Whatever your playstyle is, DPS will have it.
I will always blame the launch of Brigitte for the state OW1 turned into. A ton of issues started to arise once she was released and it took them over a year to figure out how to fix it. She is the reason why GOATS was still extreme, and she singlehandedly forced role queue to negate the issue of having no DPS roles at all. They had to do this to save OWL, as teams were literally getting boo’d because they would mirror GOATS, as it had no counter.
TLDR; OWL ruined the premise of OW1. What a shock.
Queue times were good in early years because there was no role queue yet. You just needed 12 people of similar skill. Role queue made it so you needed 4 people of each role of similar skill, and tank players were nowhere near 1/3 of the population. There were people who’d play tank if needed in open queue, but there were far fewer who’d sign up specifically to play tank.
OWL kept us relevant through the OW2 development troubles. They also helped balance the game by highlighting problematic team comps and strategies. It wasn’t even OWL that started GOATS. That team comp is named for the Contenders (minor league) team that made it popular. It was already showing up in high-rank matches. The community would have found it without OWL’s help.
I think double shield was some of it, but also tank duos in general. When a duo was meta, it was pretty much always significantly better than any other tank combo. Sure we can say balance changes can fix that, but there was like 6 years of that, and balance patches never really added diversity in the meta with tanks.
I also believe that was a major reason. Queue times were an issue for non tanks, especially dps. Tanks were the strongest role, but also the least popular leading to long queues.
Correct, as that was open queue. Role queue added longer queues. But both had their pros and cons. We got faster queues, but solo tanking and/or solo supporting was common as people picked 3-4 dps.
Imo role queue, vs open queue, 5v5, vs 6v6 is pretty much all preference of which issues would you rather have, as they all had pretty big problems.
They balance team was bad but I don’t think they could’ve NEVER have solved it and HAD to do 5v5.
I’m a tank main, tanks are more linear in 5v5, not 6v6, I disagree with this.
This isn’t why people don’t like playing tank.
What would you like to see them do?
Yes, but also healing was too high but they didn’t want to nerf supports because of how popular the role is and how much support players complained about nerfs.
I just can’t agree with this at all, what failed OW1 was the devs.
What they had to do was choose skill.
Choose skilled play over brain dead play. Brigitte was brain dead and bad for the game, but they wanted to cater to low skill players, which is always bad.
If they chose skill > brain dead OW1 would’ve been saved.
5v5 forces tanks to play a lot differently. You either go guns blazing and risk losing your only frontline for some kills, or you sit back and defend your team.
You never had this issue with 6v6 because you always had a backup tank.
I’m not a game designer, and I do not have access to the data that Blizzard have, so I cannot give a definitive answer - I can just comment on what I see.
The issue with Supports from my perspective is the shift in how the other roles are played.
Juno and Illari, for example, play a lot similarly to modern DPS heroes, and thus those skills between the two roles are interchangable.
However the older heroes, with the exception of Ana, suffer from holding a sustainable impact BECAUSE their kit was most optimal for 6v6.
5v5 required some nerfs to healing in general, yet they did not alter the kits to accomodate for that.
Look at Mercy, she has gone relatively untouched and is now considered one of the worst heroes in the game.
Blizzard have never balanced around the casual audience. They have only ever taken samples from the top 1% of the playerbase. That’s how we got into this stuation.
They started making heroes that went against what was initially designed.
5 v 5 was introduced so they could introduce an e-shop to sell garbage. Sacrificed the years of balance and hard work so they could sell e-hats.
I played mid plat my entire OW1 play time. GOATS was never played in that elo. Very rarely. These myths that every game was 5 dps, or double shield, or GOATS, happened EVERY game is entirely untrue. Sure they happened, but in maybe 1 out of every 20 of my games.
Its alot different, so many cheaters in this game is ludacris. Even in QP its atleast 40 percent. I never encountered cheaters in CS GO in high level ranked and clan matches, but this heap of a game too many. Even with Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard they cant deal with cheaters when now they have tons of money to fix issues.
I am sorry to burst your lil fantasy but Brig was added to the game to be Tracer’s counter. Not for the sake of low ranks.
Brig has always been bad in low ranks where the DPS that counter her are actually playable lmao
Brig spent years being the least picked and worst support for 99% of the playerbase, while being played mostly in pro-play and top ranks where the DPS role has been ‘‘Tracer and some hitscans’’ for years.
Remember when Brig came out? It was like how Bayonetta was upon release in Smash Brothers. She was literally unkillable by every definition of the word. I remember 2nd point of Gibraltor, the hanger area, we had her walled off with Mei freezing her, Winston zapping her, and DVA holding M1 on her, she not only survived long enough until the wall fell, but once her Rein came and helped they cleaned up a 2 v 3 with 0 issues. It was insane to see.
I don’t think that’s a brig issue. I mean brig is mostly fine now I’m ow2. The dev team was incompetent plain and simple. They couldn’t or didn’t know how to balance her