In light of the recent discussions, and the devs looking at “swap tokens”, why do some people get upset that someone swapped to another hero? Take it as a compliment they had to change heroes if you feel like they did it just to counter you. It’s also a team game and maybe their hero composition wasn’t working. Hero swapping has been in the game since day 1.
This isn’t LoL where you are locked in and that’s it. I just dont get the legitimate hate of hero swapping in a game that had it since the beginning. A hero hard countering yours? Switch yourself, improve your skillset, or hope the devs do some balance changes. It’s not a reason to get mad at the other person. Every hero has strengths and weaknesses.
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…because rock, paper, scissors is boring.
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“Alright, another day working with the design team on Overwatch - what’ve you got for us today, Aaron?”
“Okay. We all know Overwatch is a team-based game that’s about team composition, swaps and counters. What I’m suggesting is… what if it wasn’t?”
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We don’t like swapping heroes. I know I don’t, I just don’t complain about it
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But playing flat static experiences isn’t?
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Because some of the people who are playing Overwatch actually want to play a different game. And instead of moving on to another game that plays the way they like, they are bound and determined to change this one. This will most likely end with a game that none of us want to play.
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Most of the “counters” require very little effort/strategy to make your life painful. People overrate how effective counters actually are and there are only a few actual heroes that “hard counter”, but it’s still super obnoxious having an entire team swap.
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I don’t understand this line of thinking on context with a game like OW. It has always been “if something isn’t working, adjust.”
Why on earth would you expect the other team not to do that? If you’re on junk and getting completely slammed by phara, who picked phara at the start, and you’re like 1 - 8… you just… keep feeding?
To me this whole concept is the equivalent of you having a gun in a game and the other person only having fists… and when they pull out a gun you go “oh come on that’s annoying”
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There has been a sizable part of the community that has always just kinda stuck to a few things and never cared to or wanted to branch into other things. Their sole interest in the game getting soft or even hard countered has always been their axe to grind when it came to this game.
This is despite the fact that ITS EXACTLY HOW THE GAME WAS MEANT TO BE PLAYED! and rather than find a game that doesn’t punish disregard for the design or has a design that permits just doing anything, limited or otherwise, they want the game to change to suit their finite idea of what fun is.
I understand both sides to this, to be honest. But I’ll have to go more in-depth to explain what the core problem actually is.
The main source of nearly all frustrations with Overwatch games comes from the competing desires of some players playing for the long-term and others playing for the short-term.
In a given match of Overwatch, you have some players who see the present game they’re in as just one minor factor in their overall goal…whether that goal is to slowly improve their skill, farm Battle Pass XP, farm Progression XP, farm Competitive Points for a weapon skin, test certain things about the game, etc, etc… But on the other hand, you have some players who want to win THIS specific game, right now, at any cost. Perhaps it’s because they need a certain number of wins to complete a challenge, perhaps it’s because they’ve just lost 7 in a row and are starting to tilt, perhaps it’s because someone on the enemy team they have beef with or teabagged them, or perhaps they just don’t like losing for any reason, period.
In any given match, you have TEN players (formerly twelve) that all fall in different places on the “Long term” vs “Short term” scale. And the way this most commonly manifests is someone who demands a teammate swap because they feel that whatever said teammate is playing doesn’t work against whatever the enemy is playing. The one who demands the swap is more invested in winning this game and feels it’s ridiculous that their teammate won’t do it at the risk of adding another L to their record. The one who refuses, generally, is unwilling to put their long-term goals (for example, learning to play better on their chosen hero in a competitive environment) above winning right this second, usually because they this see one loss as insignificant.
This conflict of goals is what is at the core of every thread like this.
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You don’t feel these goals can coexist? Predominantly, even?
- It isn’t a sign of skill if you counter swap, it’s just remembering the spreadsheet.
- It’s boring to play
- It is literally against what they said when OW2 launched.
Ult retention should be scraped. As should role passives
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It’s not that swapping is bad, it is that swapping these days results in being HARDCOUNTERED and basically being shut down.
Something Aaron himself said they wanted to reduce (either a lie or a miserable failure)
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I don’t feel this is accurate. There aren’t that many actual hard counters, to the point where they play themselves. Identifying when to swap, being able to play those swaps well enough that you have an impact (because on paper it might seem like R.P.S to you, but with human inconsistency and variables it’s really not for the predominance of the player base), and you need to maintain cohesion with your own team.
Being able to do that is more exhilerating than sitting on a stale pick the entire game and losing because you’re too afraid of upsetting someone who was winning. That’s a you problem. I’m sorry that the enemy team decided they didn’t want to lose?
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Definitely just a failure.
They didn’t lie about what they wanted. They just failed to execute on that.
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Probably because this game was supposed to have less hard counters and these days even in QP it’s a big ol swap-o-rama.
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As a tank main, I’d rather someone had the balls to stick to their pick and out play me. Those defeats always feel better.
Like I had a kings row game, other tank asked for a rein duel… I obliged. After I’d rolled him a few times he went Orissa… Then cried in chat when I swapped to Ball… if he’d of just stayed, I’d of stuck with it.
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Thing is the actual hero swapping isn’t bad. What was annoying was after first fight swapping and retaining nearly a quarter of your ult charge.
I think before they even bring in all this talk on bans (which has been tried before and didn’t work) and tokens they need to look at how this ult retention reduction works.
The only swapping thing that REALLY needs looking at tbh is tanks.
I think a big part of the problem too is that most people see a swap and think they have to counter it. Obviously double projectile into pharmercy isn’t going to work, but if you’re also skilled at Genji and know the weaknesses of your ‘counter’ you can also win that fight.
E.g. Zen doesn’t work against a lot of comps, yet if you know how to exploit weaknesses like playing round cover or being able to survive a 1 v 1 (this is pre-nerf) you can get a lot of value out him even if you’re being hard countered.
It’s not too complicated. Hard counters are so one sided that skill is all but removed from the match and for a lot of situations it’s a “haha swap or I just win” moment.
When you need to play multiple ranks above the other player to stand a chance it’s a bad design and definitely shouldn’t be encouraged by the game. It’s not competitive, not skilful and ultimately not fun to play against somebody who insists on effectively playing mystery heroes whenever they die.
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I think you and I both know that this is silly. It’s fun to roleplay, but you’re not being realistic at all here.