Flats on 5V5 (trust me he's speaking the truth)

General Discussion
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Transcript, copied and edited from a Reddit post:
" > I had high hopes, I thought that they would know better, but for some reason they thought: “Okay, let a bunch of Silvers play the game and show it up to all the people that actually care about the game and the league and the best players of the world, but we showed it up with a bunch of silvers.”

Now the question is, why did they do that?
Oh, I know why: Because if every single person in this lobby could aim, it would’ve turned into Widow vs Widow, Hanzo vs Hanzo or Ashe+Mercy vs Widow match-ups the entire time with Zen right clicks going across the map and both tanks looking as useless as they looked in this game with Silvers.

That I could have not been any more disappointed with. This is actually unironically the old Vine: “My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.” There is nothing else to be said. I’m genuinely disappointed. I hope to god that they’re open to talking and I hope that we can have a conversation about why this is not only a bad idea for the game, but … unbalanced competitive, everything.

Go ahead, have fun with your PvE. But the fact that you’re destroying PvP as well is disgusting.
The amount of OWL players that just lost their job today is just insane. At least 20 of them just lost their jobs, 110%. Cause you’re not gonna need that many tank players any more cause you’re only gonna need one: someone who’s a jack of all trades, one who can play all the tanks. […] There are probably 5 people in the entire world that can play both MT and OT at the highest 4.6k+ level. Maybe. Because the way you play OT and the way you play MT had been such different skill sets for all these years.

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I think in this game mode with one tank what’s going to end up happening is: As metas shift, you’re either only gonna have MTs or OTs. You’re gonna putting people into such a disarray that games are gonna be more imbalanced than they ever have been before. Because you’re gonna have old players and new players that are trying to learn the game, whether they need to learn Reinhard, need to learn Zarya, need to learn DVa or whatever new tank it is. They’re gonna have to learn all these heroes from the ground up. And you’re gonna have an influxion of SR within 800 to 1000.
One week you’re gonna have a 4500 Chad Winston player on your team, then it goes to a Roadhog meta and they can’t aim on Hog and all of a sudden they’re a 3500 calibre player and they have to go all the way down on the ladder and they will have an awful time losing game after game after game. Or they force their Winston and their team flames the crap out of them: “Why are you forcing this useless hero? Why are you doing that, why are you ruining my game?”

You’re absolutely not only gonna kill the tank players’ experience, but those other players’ experience as well. […] They have no idea what they’re talking about as they said "Double Main Tank is oppressive. There is no double main tank except that weird GOATS rush they did in contenders 2 years ago where you played Winston Rein goomba comp. No professional or high level team has ever played double main tank cause double main tank has always been garbage other than the week or two Orisa Rein whatever was going on. It’s never been like that. The fact that they think like that is ****ing scary. You’re gonna change the game on a level that is gonna completely change Overwatch, it will not resemble what Overwatch is right now. And when this happens, you’re either A) gonna have to find a brand new player base and your old player base is gonna be isolated away, or B) your current player base is gonna find a way to somehow work with it and the new player base is going to clash because the new players are going to try to learn everything at once while the old players will be stuck in their old ways because they will be very good at certain heroes and very not good at other heroes. And it’s gonna create a power dynamic of players of DPS, support and tank which will increase toxicity and increase or decrease your player experience based on what the meta is to a level that is amplified a hundred times worse than it is now.

People hate when the meta gets stuck, they hate it when they don’t like the heroes that are in it: As a Mercy player you hate rush, as a Lucio player you hate poke … Whatever it is, you’re stuck in that meta even worse now, because if you don’t play that one hero you need, it is actually amplified 10 times more. Because before you could kinda get away with it until you were really high up. You had some friction, you had some push back, but at least people could be like: “Well, I wanna play meta, but that guy is not gonna play it, so we have to deal with it.”

Now you’re putting it on one person. And if that one person doesn’t do it, you’re screwed.
And even better yet: That one person isn’t even inclined to, because he will not be rewarded, because of what I’ve just witnessed: the tank players on both sides made no plays for four maps. One guy got 3 hooks on Hog, and that was the biggest play of any tank player on 4 maps. So as a tank player you’re gonna be forced to play the meta and you’re not gonna be rewarded for it. You’re picking the hero that you gonna have to pick to satisfy the rest of the team to make sure you don’t get rolled and then it’s going to become a coin flip […] [Overwatch will become 4 vs 4 deathmatch plus two useless tanks who just exist most of the time. “Tank diff” will be to exist longer.]

You will make the player experience so bad. I didn’t think it was possible to make it worse. But you found a way. […] The biggest tragedy is: You lose what Overwatch is."

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Thank you for including the transcript, this is a really true analysis.

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There’s a lot of assumptions here about how the changes affects ranked, but we don’t know how the ranked environment will look in OW2.

Also a fair amount of OWL teams only have two tanks at present. Depending on how many tank heroes there are, it will be very unreasonable for a team to scout specifically for a tank that can play most or all the tank heroes (unless the team are happy to limit the comps they could play). If OW2 came out tomorrow, there’d only be a handful of players that’d be affected really, 20 is really reaching.

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Couldn’t disagree with him more

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If they really want to allow you to not have to play 2 tanks to speed up queue times, then just make the game 1-1-2-2, which is 1 tank, 1 flex, 2 damage, 2 support.

I think a 1-2-3 comp would not play well in the game, so I think 1 tank + 1 tank/damage + 2 damage + 2 support would be best. This means you would have either 2-2-2 or 1-3-2.

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5 v 5 with deleting the off tank role from the game then all other heroes will be affected as they will all need to be reworked with their abilities accordingly.

It affects all roles in the game - not just tanks. As Super touched on during the live stream - are they going to rework Mcree’s stun? What about Sombra’s hack? They have already removed Mei’s freeze in place ability. Will they rework all the heroes from the ground up to balance around this properly? I am very dubious that they can successfully achieve this after them releasing Brig 1.0 on the game.

Tank synergy will be gone. Strats based around this will be gone. Depth will be lose from the game. The ‘core’ Overwatch experience will be less diverse, less varied, appeal to a narrower audience and be a big step towards moving the game to a ‘generic FPS’ than the unique MOBA/FPS mix that is/was the Overwatch DNA.

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I watched it live.

Here is the problem with Flats’s take:

  • Flats is a Top 500 player. He plays in the top 1% of the ladder. He duos with Emongg. Tank synergy is fun when you have a competent tank partner. If I had Emongg as my duo partner I would be salty too.
  • In the middle of the ladder 9/10 your match maker partner doesn’t know or care what tank synergy is or why it is important, and goes off and does their own thing and feeds. You, the better knowing tank player, is held hostage by a tank synergy that is supposed to be “fun”.
  • OW1 is basically a game of who has the better tank synergy wins. Every meta has been defined by tank synergies and how strong or weak they are.
  • Tank synergies while fun when done right, is a double edge sword.

Here is the problem with SVB’s take:

  • He is assuming that this change is for the people who left or do not currently play Overwatch. He partially correct. This is also for people in the middle of the ladder that, whether they realize it or not, will greatly benefit from this change because they will have the freedom to pick a tank and not have to worry at all about synergies.
  • New maps have more natural cover so DPS and Support players do not have to be as reliant on the tank. Question becomes if/how they update the existing maps like Kings Row. They did mention Kings Row doesn’t have enough cover without saying if they were updating it to have more.

People also forget that the enemy loses 1 tank as well. When the shield nerfs came in, the concern was “how can I protect my team?”. But the reality is the enemy has the same problem. The game changes. Life went on. The same will be the case here. But the difference is the tank role will be approachable by more people because the role will be self reliant.

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Eh, I’m silver/gold and it’s nice to see the game being played by people at my skill level, I’ll never see high level play, so I at least get to see what I can expect the game to be like for me. Not gonna lie though, some of that play was rough. Even looked like they were playing with controllers a few times. But still, I enjoyed it.

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Tank synergies is the only thing that makes tanks even remotely playable. Barring buffing tank power and defense by 2x, this is an objective tank nerf. You no longer have peel, rotating defenses , and as was the case with Rein, you are going to have less barriers.

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Tanks are getting buffed. They are getting passives. They will be self sufficient. Maps have more natural cover so the team is less reliant on you.

People often forget that supports peel for each other as well, and DPS can peel too. This is not exclusive to the off-tank. The off-tank is a glorified body guard. Both sides lose this. Very similar to how shields were nerfed.

The game is being rebalanced across the board. It might be messy at first, but people will figure out how to play this new version of the game.

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I heard someone say Zarya is basically unchanged, only she will now have two charges of bubble to use as she wish instead of one for herself and one for a teammate… that can’t be true right? That’s decidedly not going to compensate for the loss of a shield.

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They will not. Listen to tank mains when they are sounding alarms.

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In the state she was shown yesterday: yes this is true.

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Wow… I really feel like that just won’t cut it if they want all tanks to see play and not just Rein holding his shield 24/7…

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I’m a tank main and I watched the live stream. I’m also a tank main who does not benefit from the optimal play at the top of the ladder. This change is not for them, it’s for everyone else.

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Im a plat tank. It will kill my play, and plat is hardly the top of the ladder. tanks have not gotten any appreciable defensive buffs. They explode so quickly onlive, how are they going to explode any less quickly here? Especially when Rein has 400 less barrier hp.

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Oh, for sure. The expectation is that they’re not going to leave her and other tanks in a ditch, though.

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The tank nerfs were because of tank synergies. With tank synergies gone, they can revert those nerfs and give tanks even more.

Sure, as a Plat player I can benefit from tank synergies when I get a competent player. But when I get a Ball or Hog that goes off by themselves and feeds, I don’t benefit from that. If the enemy has a competent tank duo, it’s gg. The only time that doesn’t affect me is when they also have a tank doing their own thing. — This NEVER happens in top 500. Tanks always work together.

For the average player the tank going off and doing their own thing evaporates. With more natural cover and less reliance on tanks, you are freed up to do more.

Try to see the big picture here. This is not the same game you are used to playing. And what they showed on stream isn’t even close to the final version.

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Then where are they? I’m judging based on what we saw, and a ranged shot on cooldown for winston does not make up for losing an entire tank.

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It’s a lot of what you didn’t see. Tanks have 2 passives. The big one being when shot tanks give the enemy 1/2 the ult charge. There is way more natural cover for your team. They are expected to use it, and it frees you up to do more. And as they said, they are looking at adding new abilities to the existing tanks and tweaking more things. They are far from done.

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