I played almost exclusively 6v6 this season and I’m not sure I can stomach going back to 5v5. Even min1max3 with the troll team comps you get half the time (1-3-2) is better than 5v5 for me.
Btw, the blog post says:
The Role Queue version accounted for nearly 10% of all play hours in the game for most of its event run.
Key word here being “most”, which might be hiding a 20%+ engagement for the first two weeks or whatever… I’m speculating of course, but the possibility is there. We need to see a graph of the engagement, not just the average.
Honestly, I’m sure there is a lot of variables that one could go over that would affect the outcome and percentage of the players playing whichever mode, but for me, the two major things I look at are:
I’ve tried to think of the worst time to perform the 6v6 tests to give it the worst possible chance and I can’t think of one other time that’s worse than when this was tested. A month after MR launches and nabs up a very large portion of the player base (which is 6v6 btw).
If anyone can think of a worse time to try to test it, please share.
Most of the major streamers that stream OW moved over to stream MR.
The player count for OW appears to be on the lower side due to many different variables.
You just have to wonder how many players would have played the 6v6 if they weren’t over playing MR instead.
Had this test been done 8 months earlier, I believe we would have yielded very different results in favor of 6v6.
Now, I’m not accusing Blizz of purposefully picking the worst time to do the 6v6 tests, but whether it was on purpose or not… it was still the worst time.
The other thing is what 6v6 test was up against.
You could either play the 6v6 test which was just qp.
You could also play 5v5 qp or 5v5 comp.
6v6 comp wasn’t an option. So if you are player that only plays comp or mostly plays comp, you just may not be that interesting in playing 6v6 or at least not playing it as much and may have gone back and forth between 6v6 qp and 5v5 comp. If you wanted tighter matched games and more serious games, then you could only play 5v5 comp.
They obviously shouldn’t remove 5v5 modes while they test 6v6 qp, but I believe it’s still gonna skew the numbers to some degree since there was no 6v6 comp option.
To throw in a bonus issue, there are a lot of players that came in to OW2 and only know 5v5. Not only will there be some players that just aren’t interested in even trying out 6v6 because they may enjoy 5v5, but there is also a bit of a difference between the two modes. If you are someone that tanks in 5v5, you may have popped over to try out 6v6, realized you aren’t gigbuffed like 5v5 Tanks, get destroyed and not like the mode. Not because the mode is bad, but it’s just not what they are used to and haven’t learned how to play with the balance of 6v6.
It’s just something that some players aren’t going to learn playing 6v6 games in the course of a couple weeks, if they even gave it that much of a chance to begin with.
Even though there is some awesome and incredibly fun nuances that you can only get in 6v6, it’s very easy to miss them if you are trying to play it like 5v5 and even get frustrated over how it’s not working the same as 5v5.
id say the issue is that its not simply a matter of “i like 6v6”, its that having 1 tank doesnt work
the gameplay loop of original overwatch, even with 2/2/2 role queue was better then 5v5. but it was ruined due to game balance.
the main issue with 2/2/2 role queue though is queue times, which were caused by adding role queue.
the absolute peak era of overwatch was 6v6 open queue (hero limit), pre goats.
if overwatch wants to survive they need to undo all dumb things that lead us to 5v5, including the things that caused goats, which caused role lock and so on.
They’re talking about % of playtime, not % of players. The exact number of players is irrelevant - what matters is which mode the players who are currently playing are choosing.
They have all the competitive and professional scene working around 5v5
And leaving 6v6 for QuickPlay alone, would actually make them look stupid; as not been able to provide the same experience for all their main game modes
I’m sorry, I am reading the OP and I’m reading the replies and it feels like people do not understand what they are reading…
Pulling from the article:
The Role Queue version accounted for nearly 10% of all play hours in the game for most of its event run.
So once 6v6 released, 10% of all playtime of all matches (that includes competitive and arcade) was played in 6v6.
For reference, our Role Queued Quick Play mode accounts for roughly 35-40% of play hours
For reference, normally Quick play accounts for roughly 40% of all playtime (that talks about all modes as well) and they even state that this percentage was obviously lower once 6v6 came out.
Please in plain English explain to me what’s confusing here? And OP I’ve read your post twice now.
Also…
This has to be written in Jest. You can not tell me that you’ve never attempted to watch Overwatch League, or you have not ever seen all ultimates pop at the same time.
The amount of visual clutter at points was pure unadulterated madness
Sure, if we lean into interpretive wishful thinking. We can also just as easily concentrate on “nearly” reading that it got close but not quite there and wrap it in a “didn’t even get 10%” statement. “Most” can just as easily indicate a significant drop off after it moved to the Arcade.
Let them double down on 5v5 latest blogpost just proves this dev team is hopeless, let this game sink even further and whatever “spotlight” is it’s going to finish ow for good
This thread is giving Conspiracy vibes.
Fun facts:
1- Most of us did play 6v6, and did NOT like it (again, many of us)
2- After playing 5v5 we can see it is faster and less forgiving, more like an FPS, less like a MOBA
3- Tank power and design are easier in this format because you dont have to balance permutations
4- 6v6 is fueled by nostalgia and will be killed, again in RQ, due to insane queue times.
Shout out to those that believe that somehow, adding more and more heroes to add more and more complexity would be easier to balance ???
Ask anyone how they feel about raid boss tanks and that’ll immediately disprove your idiotic notion that tank balancing is better in 5v5.
I wouldn’t be shocked considering they sabotaged the tests.
Again, that is due to the sabotaged balancing.
The fueled by nostalgia argument will always fall flat, because oh looky there! Marvel rivals just came in with a game that feels more like OW1 than OW1’s own sequel, and they just ripped away millions of players from overwatch because they’re giving them what blizzard won’t.
Raid boss is not a meme gang, stop it you are lying to yourself.
It’s not a conspiracy theory. Obviously they didn’t rub hands like a villain and say “we gotta make it bad!”
But they put in ZERO effort to make it work. They didn’t remove 5v5 changes from the game and kept it in for a 6v6 test. That’s a test done out of bad faith and a “sabotage” of the test.
Look at the effort put into the test and it’ll tell you the story you need.
I don’t need to be from the future, it’s going to always fall flat because it’s an idiotic argument from start to finish.
Marvel rivals entire existence literally destroys that “it’s just nostalgia” argument.
If you think raid boss tanks are just a “meme” you are lying to yourself, and you are lying in general. Atp you don’t care to have a genuine conversation or argument because nothing anyone says would matter when you rebuttal with a bold face lie.
Raid boss tanks is something that came from the FACT (yes, fact) that 5v5 tanks are designed to be massively overpowered / overkitted, so they can physically function in a solo tank environment. Again, that is a FACT. That FACT doesn’t care about your rebuttal or argument because nothing you say changes that FACT.
It’s official, this dev team is going down with the ship. If we end up with 6v6 role queue permanently its a win for the player base in part, and I’ll take it if it means I get to enjoy the game again, but the ignorance on display is really something. They wasted years of development time and dollars and they are going to refuse admitting it until the bitter end. Unreal.
We could see it coming from the other side of the world considering the dev team always had a certain chronic disability to read the room and have the strength to admit they’re wrong.
They would rather draw the whole stack of cards in a game of Uno rather than to actually try letting go of their own ideas for once.
Whether they sabotaged 6v6 or not really doesn’t even matter anymore. There was not much demand for it, and there isn’t even much demand for 5v5 anymore. OW is not recovering due to the many years of incompetent decisions by the devs.
Thinking 6v6 will save this game now is just naive, so there is no point continuing the 5v5 vs 6v6 debate.
Thank you for saying this because a lot of people seem to not understand this point.
As you said - a vast majority of the issues that existed in 6v6 were not because of 6v6 but because of developers leaving them in.
If nothing else was evident to the developers incompetence - remember they added Sigma to the game when the biggest thing people were complaining about was DOUBLE SHIELD. Think about that.
I’m not a developer professionally. But if Double Shield was a problem and I was adding a tank to the game - I’d make sure that tank didn’t have an arguably more efficient shield than our existing shield tanks already causing problems and actually might consider making a tank who had shield busting capabilities. But what do I know.
I sometimes like to imagine a world where they didn’t (A) abandon Overwatch basically 2 years into the game’s life for a stupid sequel nobody needed and (B) didn’t let OWL dictate how balancing was done.
The game would be in a completely different state. Probably a much better one.
It’s not confusing, it’s just a very strange way to display data on the matter. I’d think if they wanted to be transparent with testing data they would give us the percentage of both 6v6 queues and 5v5 queues during the testing period. But they didn’t. They gave us 6v6 hours vs 5v5 hours before the 6v6 test existed and before rivals launched. And I know this because they said “this number was lower during 6v6 tests” which means they did NOT give us the 5v5 queue data during 6v6 tests. So the only other time that data could apply to is before 6v6 tests, and rivals launched really close to 6v6 tests.
Do you not see how this is trying to manipulate player perception of the testing data? Especially when all data shows that post marvel rivals launch is a 50% smaller overwatch community.
Based on what was said in this dev update, the data could very well look like this for the past 2 months during 6v6 testing:
6v6 player hours 10%
5v5 player hours 10%
And they’d still be telling the truth in their article. See how it’s manipulative now? Comparing data between 6v6 and 5v5 in two significantly different time periods with different populations is very strange and chances are they’d only do that to manipulate player perception.
Based on the past evidence of 5v5 embellishment, I’d say it’s pretty obvious what his goal was here. Perhaps they just really want to keep 5v5 as their main mode and the goal with all this is to embellish 5v5 in an attempt to improve player perception of the mode and then they’ll throw us 6v6 like a dog bone like what they did with OQ. They just throw it to us and ignore it.
And if that’s the case, well it is what it is. I’ll let this game do it’s thing and continue playing marvel rivals.
