Personally, I think restricting player choice goes against the whole spirit of Overwatch, both in the individual player choice and in potential team comps.
The problem with GOATS is not an issue with player choice, it’s because Blizzard keeps trying to balance for bronze and silver players while still forcing an exciting gameplay style in OWL. So heroes like Bastion, Reaper and Junkrat, who can output a lot of damage, cannot be effective because it would either result in a noobstomp character or result in suboptimal OWL footage. But without the high-damage characters, tanks have no counters since mass tanks is all about stacking damage mitigation.
Another major issue with the game generally is that the concept of the game is changing strategies to adapt to enemy strategies, but the dev team has rejected hard counters and endorsed the idea of never adapting and only playing 1-2 heroes in the game.
Most of the players in OWL have a very limited set of heroes they can play and those heroes are pulled from the smaller slate of all-purpose, no weakness heroes. The whole idea that some heroes are always useful and some heroes are “niche” helped build the idea that focusing on one hero only was the way to go and sidelined the heroes that aren’t all-stars. (See: How Symmerta is basically Ganondorf-tier)
The solution is to accept the idea of hard counters, let “maining” heroes carry disadvantages and focus on balancing heroes with an eye towards, at bottom, gold players and above. Let the lower-rank players figure out the game and go from there.
[Title edited by forum moderator. Forum moderator note: Calling out individual developers or the development team in your title or post is against our forum guidelines. Please focus on discussion of the feedback/suggestion in your thread.]
No. He didn’t “soft launch”’ anything. He shared about the research he has done on it, about how much more work it would take (lots!), and how some heroes aren’t designed for a 2-2-2 forced meta that would require them to retool them (which adds to the work load).
That’s not what he said. They aren’t actively working on it. Dev teams will often “work on”’stuff to try things out and to research. That’s what he was referring to. It was determined there would be a lot of work (and hero rework) to make it possible. Not that it is happening.
He said if they wanted to, they could enforce role restrictions immediately but it would increase the wait time for dps players significantly so they’re researching ways to improve that.
Doesn’t say they’ll ever commit, just that its still on the table if they can find a solution.
Role select happens in a lot of games. Why is it so hard for you to accept the fact that it’s better for almost everyone if they enter a game knowing they’ll get a 2/2/2 with them being able to play what they want, instead of going in and hoping for not ending up with 5 mercy mains instead?
Because I run with a six stack and we often use 4 dps to counter goats. We’re not getting very far and for the most part we’re only playing for fun but enforcing role restrictions would force me as the fill/flex player to constantly play off tank even though I usually play Sombra/McCree in the quadps comp. Some of my favourite games have run Bastion as the only dps (Brig + Ana + Mercy + Orisa + Hog + Bastion) and role queue would only limit our team to mindless Rein + Zarya comps over and over again.
Not quite. He actually said the opposite about implementing a role queue. He said it’s not like he can go to his desk and flip a switch and it would happen. That there would be a lot of work to makeni happen.
He research the probable queue times and dps players would be waiting 28-29 minutes for a match.
Then he said they die heroes aren’t designed for a 2-2-2 and would have to be changed.
Exactly. Jeff didn’t say they were working on it. He said they have looked into it and conducted a lot of research and analysis into what it would take to switch to something like a 2-2-2, and that they have people on staff whose job is to do just that: the research and analysis.
At no point did he say they were working on it. As a matter of fact, from the matchmaker coding, to hero retooling, to the queue time concerns for Damage Dealers, to even the point brought up regarding Comp and the allusion to how a role-based SR would be needed, he stated it would be a ton of work. He also stated that there would be larger budget and resource allocation concerns involved.
All he stated that was done was all the research and analysis by the people whose job is to do that sort of work. Then he stated all the myriad reasons as to why it would be unlikely to be added to Overwatch (without coming out and blatantly saying: never).
He didn’t say “We looked into it, it’s really hard, so we can’t do it”. He said “We’re looking into it, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done, and we’re working on it.”
At 8:10 here: www.youtube. com/watch?v=hgOjeYYLXI4 he says it would be a great idea, there’s no magic switch to enable it, but there’s a team working on it now.
Also, I need clarification - Does “calling out” the dev team consist of any mention of them whatsoever, or was the alteration abusive moderation?