First off I’m very thankful they took the opportunity to finally engage and answers questions. We need more of it because there’s clearly a disconnect between players and devs. What I’m referring to Jeff’s responses to a couple questions that were asked and honestly I find it really frustrating.
Jeff said thought 3 heroes a year was good and that they don’t want hundreds of heroes.
Meanwhile we have been begging for faster hero releases for years. A single hero once every 4 months is so freaking slow. As players most heroes don’t even fit for what we like and we only have 3 chances. A year to find a hero that we actually enjoy to freshen up our game play. That’s horrible. The community has been very vocal for 4 years that 3 felt to slow. It wouldn’t kill us to move up to 4 hero’s. 1 every 3 months should be a good middle ground.
My other problem with part is “hundreds of heroes”. Jeff we aren’t even close to hundreds. We barely broke 30 with in 4 years. Come on. It’s been clear for awhile we need a better hero release schedule.
Jeff also responded that adding new heroes won’t fix queue times.
Which I also disagree with. Will it magically make queue times for dps short? No. But it provides opportunities to a Dps to pick up a tank or support that they find more interesting. Not to mention it provides more diversity for people that normally play those roles. I quit playing tank and support. Why? Because at this point I’ve played all the heroes in them to death over the last 4 years. I decided to play dps. 1. Because echo 2. There’s just so much more variety for to pick from. I would be playing support and tank again if we had more heroes for me to mix up my gameplay with. I’m not saying to never release dps again. No one is but to have more dps than tanks and supports combined is 100% contributing to bad dps queue times. Tanks and supports are bored jumping ship to play dps or quit the game. And you are offering nothing to appeal to dps players that maybe would play other roles. And a lot of them are leaving because thier tired of waiting 10 mins for a game.
Overall I was just really disappointed with the responses. It seems complete out of touch with the game for me and the issues that need to be addressed. Honestly I don’t believe it either, I think its more of a problem with refusing to properly invest in the actual game. Overwatch is one of the best selling games of all times. Yet we have 4 years of repeat copy and paste events, minimal lore, large cuts on skins. And admitted to taking resources away from the game to put it into the esport.
Expand your team already blizzard if you can’t maintain a reasonable rate of content and fix the games issues. So much of what’s being said is leading for OW2 to still be in a poor state for the multiplayer experience.
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Completely agree. They need a bigger team that can release heroes every 2-3 months and can balance out the roster quickly
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This is not the issue. The issue is that the most fun tanks (Zarya, Hog, Wrecking Ball, Dva) are basically throw picks if the other team has a shield and you don’t. The disparity between Off Tanks and Main Tanks is so large that having 2 Main tanks is actually BETTER than having 1 Main tank 1 Off Tank. That leaves “tanking” down to essentially 3-4 heroes…
Until Hog/Dva/Hamster aren’t inherent throw picks, nobody will tank.
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Exactly like I don’t think 4 heroes a year is that crazy. It’s enough time for us to get a hero, figure it out, have it start settle. The whole extra month just feels like such a dead period. It’s too long. Either do that or give us actual events that aren’t just copy and pasted 4 years straight. The people working on events and the people doing the heavy lifting in the hero creation process shouldn’t be the same people
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I wouldn’t want so many new heroes in such a short time. That would make the game horrible and frustrating, especially since one new hero alone changes the entire pace and balance of the game.
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I mean, they are releasing 4 new heroes with OW2, so that’s good I guess.
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A new hero every 2-3 months and expecting them to balance it quickly is a little extreme.
3 characters a year is fine.
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It better be more than 4. We will be 4 heroes behind by the time OW2 releases
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I don’t really think so. I mean we realize that these guys are professional game devs? That go to Overwatch HQ and work on content all day every single day? I mean is it that much to ask for new heroes be released a bit faster, and balancing to nullify any frustration with a new hero?
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I can see being too much but 3 months is reasonable. 4 months only doing 3 heroes a year is slow
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And how will they fund this? Most of their funding comes from OWL because the current business model is failing.
Most of the resources they do have are being put into Overwatch 2, as has been said many times now.
You can’t just magic up new developers to make new heroes.
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Imagine thinking one of the best selling games of all times doesn’t have enough money to expand. They past the billion dollar mark in micro transactions while back and pulled in hundreds of millions from contracts alone from the overwatch league. They have made more than enough money to handle 4 heroes a year. What they did with that money is another story
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There’s the quote of the day
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True, but hopefully they change the financial model with OW2 to something that will last longer. Maybe a free model for PvP with a skin shop or something?
Imagine not seeing its Activision who decides how that many is allocated.
And we all know how greedy they can be.
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at this point I don’t mind if you have to pay with game credit to get the heros ! it will push people to buy loot boxes !
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We all want more new heroes faster (who wouldn’t want a full mecha squad dropped on us the next morning?) But it’s almost impossible, 1 hero could already break the game for a year, now a dozen of them would burn this game to cinder and no amount of savaging can save it. It’s easy for Moba games to design a new hero because they base it on 1v1 aspect, in a more controlling environment (1 single genre.) OW with their 6v6 philosophy, all different types of skill and balance for “all kind of player level” make it impossible, every chance brought hundreds of unforseenable complications that affect each ranks differently. So in order to release more heroes much faster, the only realistic way is to solely balance the game top down (aka only balance for GM/OWL) How many of us would want that?
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the problems with balance come because we only have 7 tanks and 7 healers, of coursde there is always going to be 1 better meta with that trash pool.
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Well, they can balance faster, and maybe in OW2, they can preview characters in PVE.
Also I’m trying to come up with ways they could make balancing easier. Notably this idea dramatically simplifies barriertank and offtank design.
✅ Modified 1-3-2 that can be 1-1-2-2
For instance, they could release Mauga, without worry that you’ll get Roadhog+Mauga as your tank lineup.
Or release 3x more barrier tanks, without worry about Double Barrier interactions
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This part is believable because the FFXIV developers said the same thing when they tried releasing a new tank class. They said the the people that stuck with the new class mostly prior tank players instead of dps players.
However, I do believe adding certain new tanks to the role that are designed to address specific issues with the role will help. D.Mon as a main tank is an example of a hero that I think would address some issues with the tank role by providing a main tank alternative to D.Va and more aesthetic variety to the main tank role.
New heroes can only bring people in to try the role temporarily. The real issue is retention, and would require addressing issues such as CC/Knockback spam.
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