I get what you are saying. however, I feel a bigger dive and look into the Tank role is needed. A better understanding of why less people pick it and what the current Tank players see what is missing or frustrating.
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I agree.
Just the devs a few years ago, neglected the game for a new game that never was, and was in fact smoke and mirrors.
It will take time to fix, and now more than ever, will take time to fix.
Community support and in time, 6v6 again.
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my personal case study which I will repeat even thought I already said it in here:
I used to play lots of tank, and now I hardly ever play it for one reason.
I do not like feeling the “team captain” pressure.
I don’t want teammates mad that I am not a perfect tank.
I love flank tank, but I am not a front lines defend the team kind of tank player.
I only play dva and winston now, when I used to love roadhog to chain people from the sidelines. Without the other tank I find I am pressured, annoyed, and overly feel negative towards how I feel forced to play a specific dynamic instead of my own playstyle.
Every other class in the game has a secondary, which lets you play your own choice of flanker, long range, cqc, dive, you name it- with any character, regardless of if they are intended for that playstyle.
Tank is the only class where you are expected to sit in front of your team the entire match and be the leading force. I don’t want that pressure for the ENTIRE game, its draining and less fun than getting a 5 kill as hanzo from a cool angle.
It’s so restricting and boring to me. Easily the least dynamic role currently.
I always welcomed a good Ball player.
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welp im terrible at ball 
Didn’t know Aaron had such massive balls. Nothing but respect for addressing the issue and actually dedicating himself and the team to the goal of transparency. Absolutely love that he brought up the point that 6v6 had higher highs and could have REALLY low lows. This shrinking of the floor and ceiling along with Q times are why I enjoy 5v5 more
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s13 will probably be a roleq/openq hybrid mode
s14 will probably be the actual 6v6 test (which is in December at Christmas time)
s15 will be another update to a 6v6 test
s16 will be the final 6v6 test
seasons 17-18 are probably the long balance changes for when 6v6 perma returns
6v6 wouldn’t be back perma until april or the latest august of next year.
I am happy that they’re doing a 6v6 test, and highly do expect 6v6 to return.
they dumbed down the game for the average joe, the people who enjoyed ow1 actually are bored af in ow2 because it’s autopilot and the skill ceiling is that of an infant… none.
can tell you only played into double shield lol ^O^
OW1 wasn’t slow in the slightest.
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Never commented on Battle net forums to my knowledge (Edit, I have once previously), but the sight of bringing back 6v6 possibly drove me to log in and make a post.
All I can say PLEASE consider officially supporting 6v6 and possibly even making it the dominant mode. I have played OW since the Beta (Generally around Plat Rank at my most active–Played the first Beta & 2020s OW 2 Beta), and would get 5 of my friends Easily to consistently start playing competitive again. I think Overwatch has had a good track record of ideas and decisions recently generally, so I hope the momentum can keep coming & continue to shake things up again. Just voicing my support here.
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Call me a Blizzard shill if you like but I thought that article was an outstanding piece of communication and I’m impressed Team 4 is willing to explore the 6v6 space despite the challenges this entails. I’ll always prefer 5v5 because I play at a rank where I experience the downsides of tank synergies far more often than the upsides but it would be nice for the 6v6 lovers to be able to happily do their own thing.
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OW1 had longer matches across the board.
There is no debate here.
Ties were almost unheard of then.
Nice attempt to gaslight me Aaron but my matches often default to 222, not 5 dps or even 6 dps. Lots of gaslight-y paragraphs in here as well. Almost all the issues mentioned were hero kit issues that could have been nerfed, removed, or reworked.
The engine was upgraded it should be able to handle any ‘tests’. I don’t believe the gaslighting here either.
There are not enough people who enjoy 5v5 to consider keeping it or ‘disrupting’ their gameplay after disrupting the majority when they moved to 5v5 in the first place. Almost anyone who enjoys OW and actually loves OW would sit in a longer queue for a better and more fairer/fun match than deal with 5v5s atrociously and permanently bad gameplay.
It’s good we will test but let’s be honest about it, do not hide the test. Do not put it in the arcade. Let people actually determine how they want 6v6 and make sure that this will be permanent otherwise the game will not matter in a few months time.
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tl;dr (sorta) Stop prioritizing the damage role (and their mindset) so much unless you just want to turn the game into COD, the more problems healers or tanks have the less they are going to play and you’ll have to correct again for this issue. If you want COD OW, you should have made a overwatch TDM or something with the OW2 ideas and kept the more team orientated OW as two separate modes or even “games” maybe like COD/Warzone, LoL/LoL Swarm, Fortnite Survival/BR/Creative. I don’t disagree that double shield could be annoying but just nerfing the shields (which they still did) would’ve been so much easier and caused less more complicated issues. OW1 was a team orientated objective based game, OW2 is an identity-less mess. Also I NEVER queued for a healer/tank match for even 2 minutes forget 3 minutes and was just as often awarded for playing healer as tank.
OW2 prioritizes the damage role in every way. I get it since a majority of the players want to play as if they are playing COD that they would think to neglect the other two roles. The OWL League was certainly prioritized as well to the detriment of the regular player-base which I’m sure was a large thought as to lowering the overall players in lobby with the switch to 5v5, and that clearly didn’t work out.
As was said it was possible for multiple CC to be ineffective against a properly healed tank, multiple CC could pick off a healer though resulting in the enemy team failing apart so it was beneficial to the game. You know who got boned by CC the most though? DPS monkey’s trying to play COD in a team-based game that OW1 used to be.
The queue times largely impacted the DPS class as well. Though this chart gives me question of how they obtained this information because I never had to wait over a minute (solo queue, team comps sure) as healer or tank. They emphasize how tanks would get 25 credits and once a day a lootbox (not XP that’s just incorrect that’s how it operates now not back then) but just as often you would get this as the healer as well. This seems so hyper focused to blame the tank role and excuse the change whereas if you google “overwatch role queue lootbox/coins” you find more images of both or just healer alone, that isn’t to say that tank didn’t get it just as much but you can even log on now and see that it is just as often that the healer role is in need.
Giving damage roles self-healing has increased the amount of damage roles that feel confident leaving their team (knowing they will passively heal) who now only have 1 tank and not 2 tanks, which leaves the healers vulnerable and once they are picked off the tank easily falls. It generally just incentivizes lower team coordination.
This leads into the fact that since there is only one tank, the role has become critical to the success of the match. Losing your tank is almost always a death sentence for the team unless you put an immense amount of pressure to stale or drop an ult.
This game is simply not fun to play as a tank or healer anymore, all too often there is no team coordination when the objective requires the team this isn’t a TDM. Infact the game doesn’t even have a TDM (main) mode so why are updates treating the game like it is a TDM and not an objective based game.
"In a 6v6 setting, these upgrades can have significant impacts for our players, causing the game to underperform on older systems. "
This sounds like a nonsense cope, OW1 came out in 2016 there has been “pro” versions of the consoles and a new generation (4 years old now), there have been 3 generations of nvidia GPUs. Even if you are using 4+ year old hardware which can be had used pretty affordable (at least in the US, I can’t speak globally) there is no problem running this game and adding outlines, healer vision, and “more technically demanding hero kits” shouldn’t cripple hardware.
This game has lost it’s identity and seems to be trying to avoid losing the largest damage role player-base at any cost to the detriment of the game.
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Yeah, sure… But that’s not a 6v6, 5v5 argument.
That is an argument the abandoned OW1 for the longest time, so we had the longest time the same meta.
That “slow” argument isn not about match length but gameplay pased.
The same like people back in the day said about Battlefield and Cod.
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IMO, its too late to switch back to 6v6. As much as I think that is a better format, too much work has been put into 5v5 hero kits, map design, and balance to throw that all away for something that would increase queue times for a playerbase that is increasingly disillusioned and impatient with this game.
also,
Overwatch is a team sport,
lol. sport.
Imma just be blatant, if 5v5 stays OW is dead.
Marvel Rivals is literally OW1 pre role queue, anyone who loved OW1 is shilling this game right now (minus the 3rd person aspect as I’m not a fan of that).
The other thing they could do is release ow1 classic but all it is is just turning on the OW1 servers and giving us back the OW1 client.
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The work is already done to an playable state.
The 6v6 community is balancing there workshop regularly.
But the main issue is still like you say players in tank.
But let’s be honest. The game gives nor ever gave a reason to learn tank which is the most uncommon role to the majority.
As a DPS you don’t need to open YouTube to understand how to dps, you just need some aim… But tank has a little more room for error on other places.
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if you would read even the first paragraph, he says theres a summary at the bottom.