#fixowcomp: A Call for Community Action!

Dear Blizzard Community,

We’ve all been there, playing those competitive games where we absolutely own in one round and then get absolutely hammered in the next one. Balanced games are nowhere in sight and the game obviously punishes you after you win a game or two by stacking you with less cooperative team-mates. Everywhere I turn there are tilted players and a lot of people feel as though the system is rigged to keep most players stuck in the same place.

This is not a question of being placed versus enemies that far surpass one’s skill, this is about getting team mates that are unfriendly and uncooperative.

The solutions are simple, you know them, we know them, we are just banging our head to the wall hoping the community will magically change.There are trolls, there will always be lone wolfs, so its best to accomodate them seperately from the cooperative players instead of trying to weed out human nature.

The demands are simple and anyone that is not playing competetive because they are waiting for this changes [for about a year now] should join in to make this thread huge!
#fixowcomp

Needed changes:

[Team Que - Solo Que]
This is an option in most [competetive] online games and we need it as a choice. When I am solo que-ing, I don’t want to go up against a well seasoned 3 stack no matter how much my stats are higher then them - this is a team game and I will most likely lose. The opposite is of course true for Team Queing as well, as sometimes you will get paired with a group of randoms that are SO much higher in skill that there is no game to be played [or get grouped with solo-s that pick Torb+Sym on attack].

Give us the option to pick what we are paired against.

[Role Preference]
This is NOT going to ruin the free-pick spirit of the game. Just place a marker on top of every player once they get in the game for what role they had que’d and they can choose whether to pick that, or if something else can work better for that match. Players that missuse the system to get faster que times and then “sh*t-pick” will get reported and consequently be blocked from using that filter in their games.

Give us the option to play with like-minded people.

[Mic/Language Preference]
Too many games of “solo-pros” that just go one by one in the enemy team’s meat grinder. Too many games where half the team speaks 3 different languages that are not english. Too many games when a composition cant get synchronized [to a meta] because a player playing a key role is not on voice chat.

Give us the option to find the communicative players.

[Meta HUD]
It is a simple fact that most players don’t inform themselves enough about how the cogs of the game work and simply dont know what is the appropriate pick for a map or versus a certain composition. There are three ways to approach this:
/Ingame Community Guides/ - Let players suggest the best heroes for a certain map based on their expertise [as well as explain how they should be used on the map].
/Map Statistics/ - A bit of a cognitive behaviour editing with this one where you’d simply note to the team:
“74% of teams win this map with : X,Y,Z…”
/Synergy Indicators/ - When someone picks the first hero, everyone should get some kind of a tooltip for what heroes it synergizes with to what extent. An obvious examples would be “Zarya primarily sync-ing with Hanzo, Rein, Brigette & Doomfist,secondarily with Tracer, Phara & Moira and tertiarily with Junkrat, Reaper, Roadhog etc” or “Ana primarily sync-ing with Genji, Soldier, Rein & Orisa, secondarily with Winston, D.va, Road and so on and so on”. You can most likely use the stats again to provide actual insight on how these synergies perform.

Give everyone the background knowledge so that we can play on equal terms.

In the meantime, I am going to go play Quick Play because strangely I am getting more rational compositions and team-mates for competitiveness there, as opposed to competitive.

Toodles!

8 Likes

I support #fixowcomp

Thank you for the care Silent, it has been removed and you should be careful by leaving it as your quote you might be inciting a boycot yourself!

Now that we have that out of the way, what are your thoughts on the issue?

#fixowcomp

1 Like

PLEASE BLIZZARD DO SOMETHING. I already stopped playing Ow as much as I did past seasons because of so much frustration.

So, two of your points:

“Give us the option to play with like-minded people.”
“Give us the option to find the communicative players.”

might actually be answered through their upcoming feature that they’re working on:

So I’m pretty stoked about that. :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m not an advocate for any in-game feature that forces or suggests a certain meta, simply because I’ve played with people that can do wonders with all different kinds of heroes on all different kinds of maps, plus it’s not really the most important part when working as a team IMO.

#fixowcomp

Characters required.

I sure hope it is going to be answered, however I feel as though they are too detached from the community when making a system that is supposed to sort it and filter it. And if it turns out to be any [or all] of the long-requested systems from above, it will be freaking Kafkaesque for how long they took to test out something everyone have been asking for since day 1.

This is confusing for me, especially being against something that “suggests” a meta. I never proposed any fix that includes locking players into a role.

Yes, every hero is viable on every map - but that is in no way mutually exclusive with giving players the knowledge of what the most optimal way of playing the game is.

This would be pretty cool. Surprised your qp games are better though haha. Mine aren’t.

Tbf, OW has come a long way and a lot of stuff has happened and been added or changed in the game. It was a brand new IP that essentially (kind of) started and popularized a whole new game genre. :smiley:

Toxicity and the need for a way to find like-minded players wasn’t that big of an issue year one. The major issues back then was game balance. Year two, they tried combating the ever increasing toxicity with the report system and the way and the rate they actioned players. At least that’s what I picked up over the years of playing this game.

In the Meta HUD section, you are giving examples of features that basically serve as Meta suggestions. Even something as simple as showing stats on which hero/es win a particular map is bound to cause tilt within the team if someone diverts from said stats when choosing a hero. It also wouldn’t matter much if certain heroes would be countered. That is why I’m not for it. I’m looking for a little more flexibility, but I do understand how difficult that can be to manage as well. It’s always easier working with what you know, right? :slightly_smiling_face:

I believe most people (me included) think the most well-rounded comp is 2-2-2. But beyond that, you’d have to take a number of things into account, most of it will be through analyzing how the match is going in real-time: what comp the enemy team has, their strongest player, how they’re positioned, which strat your team is going for, your strongest players etc., not global stats.

The Synergy Indicator feature would probably be a handy tool for lower tier/new players. Personally it feels like too much hand-holding. Which heroes fit well together is pretty much common knowledge if you have a decent amount of hours in the game. It would ultimately have as much impact on hero choice as the “Too many X”-text. :sweat_smile: