In my opinion, Doomfist alone is not necessarily a problem. In a pure 1v1, Doomfist can be easily outplayed with most other DPS heroes. Remember like Pharah, he invokes havoc on uncoordinated teams.
Define harder bans? Please remember to keep the following factors in mind. All disconnections and crashes counts as leaving the games. There is no effective way around that rule either. They also will not increase skill rating deductions for those who leave Competitive Matches. The game already forces players to return to the competitive match if it is still active before joining any other game mode or match and provides a minimum 10-minute suspension (which quickly escalates). It can take a little as six leaves to trigger a season ban, and three season bans results in that account being permanently banned from Competitive Play.
This seems like a bad idea that enforces the existing problems of the higher ranks. Right now in a Solo Queue environment, it is too easy for players to be conflicted with what roles to play.
I suggest a bit of patience on this one, with the recent announcements and revelations about official mouse and keyboard support for Xbox One and being able to detect XiM devices, we may have solutions coming soon.
The last three patches have had 25 hero balance changes within the last two months. Almost triple of the three previous patches over a three-month time frame.
See above.
But would that be fair to legitimate new players? Contrary to popular belief there is still a steady increase of uniquely new players to Overwatch.
Just remember that Overwatch is a team game, I believe it is more fair and more fun to encourage grouping up and playing coordinated to win games, especially at higher levels. If you can’t do this as a solo queue player already, then I debate if you belong at that rank.
Just to clarify, the development team have specifically stated they do not find it wrong for a player to own a second account to Overwatch, but to deliberately tank or boost the SR of their own account or the accounts of others is wrong.
Sounds like a recipe to bring back a solid triple or quad tank meta like that of winter 2017.
While I do not believe this will never happen, the developers have specifically stated they have no plans to increase beyond 103 (sorry 21:9 users).
These ideas are not bad, but it would I would not hold your breath based on their need to address bigger issues of the game.
Your requested hero balances leave me under the impression that your situational awareness needs a lot of work.
Forced 50/50 is a myth. Scott Mercer details here:
It already does this based on your hidden MMR which your skill rating should be dependant off of.
What is this suppose to mean?
The system should maintain skill level variances based on the same grouping spreads in Competitive play. If you are talking about game modes outside of Competitive, you must understand those modes track an entirely seperate hidden MMR.
Back in season 1 it used to adjust both teams SR adjustements based on if there was a leaver this let to rather bad matchmaking so it was removed. Your system would allow SR gains to be exploited. See this post for details:
Leavers will never lose more than 50 SR (with the exception of any massive losing streaks already in progress which is EXTREMELY rare). Click here for details.
Have you ever had a series of repeating technical problems in a short time frame? Remember technical malfuctions counts as leaving, this is why there is a balanced number of chances players have to correct their issue before getting banned for the season.
3 season bans already results in a permanent ban. I’d say that is more strict than your proposal.
What is a OGWatch game mode?
The reason why there is rotations in the arcade is to not spread the matchmaking of these modes too thin. If there is too many modes, then there is a chance it will take exceptionally long time to play a match in them. That is what the game browser is for.
I do agree the game status screen needs work, right now the current score screen encourages players to criticize other players rather than criticize their own performance.
Are you asking for third-party managed servers? Not likely to happen based on Blizzard’s track record for how they approach World of Warcraft and StarCraft private servers.
Perhaps.
Do you really want me to get started on this?
Agreed.
WHY?! I report Abusive Chat in over 90% of my reports and I get positive feedback most often for my reports so I know that Abusive Chat continues to be a REAL problem and Blizzard is working to resolve it. If you are being account actioned for Abusive Chat, believe me… THERE IS A VALID REASON.
I could see where grouping up is seperated from solo-queue, but the question is whether it negatively impacts both. I would like to see it tried based on the fact that is how Heroes of the Storm operates their ranked system.
The problem is separating the gold and platinum group. If you do the research you will see over 50% of the community has very little difference in their actual performance stats. I am not saying this is a bad idea, but where does the development team start with this? Also what happens to Bronze rank players currently? There is a severe variance between the bottom of the barrel to high silver. Would squishing that down negatively impact the matchmaking experience of those players?
The PTR serves a very different function from what most of the community perceives. Lead Engineer Bill Warnecke recently posted on Reddit that the PTR is more of a platform to minimize possible bugs and ensure the new patch is stable for live release.
I would not be surprised if this doesn’t happen for Overwatch eventually. I think the D.Va Nano-Cola challenge was a possible test into such a feature. Heroes of the Storm and Hearthstone also do this currently.
While playing the PVE event brawls are fun, they are very limited in features in comparison to a full PVE campaign like in other games. As such they are strictly kept available only during the seasonal events in order to make sure they are kept special.
I understand your desire for new event content, however, remember they did say in the latest development update video that the priority focus is to improving hero balance and overall game features for right now.
This I am not a personal fan of, but there have been no official responses to my knowledge that says yay or nay about this. That being said, I am more likely going to predict that modes like Competitive will eventually start using a limited map pool (just like how Heroes of the Storm started doing in 2.0).
Definitely a would-be nice feature, however, I don’t think that is a high-priority for the developers at this time. As a reminder all media can be viewed on the Overwatch Official Website.
Jeff Kaplan (being a TL4 user) did post a couple of polls when the forums did launch, I would not mind seeing more of them.
The better question is what are they going to do with players who are deliberately tanking or boosting their rating (alternate account or not)? I agree it is a problem and I do know there are internal systems and procedures in place to catch the worst offenders, but I won’t deny that the problem is still happening. I myself got accused of tanking my rating strictly on my XP level (when in fact I know I am your every day gold/plat brat since this game launched).
That is twice now. DO YOU REALLY WANT ME GETTING STARTED ON THIS?!
I don’t see how Overwatch’s eSport programs (which are very separate from the Competitive mode) affects the perceived smurfing issues. Even well before Overwatch League launched, there have been gigantic mega threads addressing this.
But why should the perceived experience levels matter? Based on your proposal, I would have staggering long queue times at my XP level compared to my rank.
This seems too vague. Remember heroes like Pharah, Junkrat and Doomfist merely punish bad play and team coordination. As a Pharah main myself I know I am countered then the enemy team is working together, not when a hit scan simply comes into play.
Maybe is because I am a hardcore player who earns an average of three boxes a night in a single session, but I don’t see this as bad of a problem.
See my comments above on why PvEs are not permanent.
Lame Pun Raccoon approved…
It will be a never ending struggle for any game at any time. Hopefully the upcoming “Play Nice, Play Fair” panel at Blizzcon will have some insights to what is coming toward handling this problem.
But League of Legends is a top-down MOBA, Overwatch is a shooter. They have said that while they would love a Replay System the steps toward making that happen are still a long way out. (Though the Highlights update and the Esports Spectator updates were steps in the right direction to this goal.)
Don’t get me started on this…
I doubt this will happen, one part of balancing a hero’s kit is maintaining that hero’s identity. Rez is the trademark of Mercy.
Then this would incentivize players to unplug their computer from the internet to bypass the harder penalties.
While this happens in the early part because its too early to tell how the match would have played out, this does not happen in the majority of the match because it would incentivize bullying teammates to leave and be extremely unfair to the team without the leaver.
Actually, while not while there is no skill rating change, I do believe the hidden MMR does adjust based on strength of schedule and (if platinum and lower) performance based stats. However there has been no confirmation to this. Meaning your hidden MMR will be slightly out of alignment in the next match and the adjustment may be reflected the next time you get a win or loss (but it is so minor it will be difficult to tell). However please remember, skill rating is not a progression system, it is a rating.
I rather see a system that only provides feedback to your own statistics provide feedback on how you are performing with your hero (based on community averages of that hero).
Can you elaborate?
Agreed.
Details? Placement matches for returning players is merely the qualification period to earn the end of season rewards, and yes while beyond that they have little meaning, I think it is important to understand that the development team stopped doing rank resets starting in season 3 to ensure the start of the season is not choatic and unbalanced for the community.
Hang on I will get to role queue in a minute.
Unfortunately in order to keep Competitive as a competitive game, backfill will never happen. It is just not fair to the other team as it no longer is the same match pairing at that point.
There is no denying that is frustrating, but at least they do have a window to stop the match early on rather than having one team playing a man down.
Now if there is a leaver in the pregame during the initial hero selection, I may not mind a backlfill.
I would like a Guild system, however I see the challenges in running and maintaining guilds. Furthermore, should guilds have any sort of advantage in comparison to playing on your own? Goes back to the groups vs. solo queues in Competitive.
Actually a majority of the community (including myself belive) that skill rating needs to be completely independant of your own personal performance but strictly on whether you win or lose. The problem of course is dealing with unwinnable situations that Overwatch is known for. So the problem is more about finding solutions to build better team compositions and experiences rather than personal performances.
I did some digging in and I did find an answer from Jeff Kaplan on reddit about this during the AMA of March 2017:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/5yj2zk/ama_request_jeff_kaplan/dew41x8
I read the forums quite a bit, and contrary to popular belief, so does Blizzard. Just remember they don’t typically respoind unless they have information to reveal to us.
The problem here is that other modes are not identical experiences to that of Comeptitive. For example, I win frequently as D.Va in casual modes and I like to think I am becoming a really good D.Va player in all game modes. Right now my win rate with D.Va in competitive is 39%. Your proposal seems like a very frustrating system that would discourage players from playing Overwatch at all.
They have said they are hesitant to add more rewards in order to keep the mode attractive to only players who are looking for a competitive experience and not attract players who only want to collect cosmetic goodies.
WHY?! Are you trying to deliberately promote a toxic environment to Overwatch?
Not to say this won’t happen, but they have expanded it once so far, but they are being very careful to not impact the ability for honest players to find a fair game, especially if they are being avoided for the wrong reasons.
Agreed.
While I see the logic in this statement, I think the biggest struggle with increasing XP penalties is that would discourage a player to fix any tech issues and returning to play.
Right now I think the frustrating thing for us all is that there is no public showing that they are tackling this. You can’t really effectively report tankers or boosters unless they are committing gameplay sabotage. They don’t want you to report it either as they have the means to track deliberate tanking and boosting. Which means its difficult for us to see when action is being taken against such players.
So ou think Overwatch should only be about the Competitive experience… well I firmly disagree. Overwatch does put a large amount of attention to Competitive, but the game would quickly become boring if this is the case. Remember the arcade mode is about having crazy fun, same with quick play. A good portion of our community does not play Competitive frequently if at all. They play to have fun. That is why I started playing Overwatch… to have fun. Now Competitive provides a kind of fun that challenges me to perform my best, but I would get bored very quickly or get tilted to the point of quitting the game if there was nothing outside of Competitive.
Well that was fun responding to most of you. Now let me touch up on a few things…
Role Queue
Okay, I still maintain the belief that while Role Queue would directly help to form better team compositions especially in Competitive, I am very certain it would not remove any level of toxicity from Overwatch. I look back in season 1 when Competitive did allow no limits on hero selection (for a short time in that season). The change did help make better team compositions, but it had a very little impact on the toxicity of Overwatch that was already growing, it merely redistributed that toxicity. I will accept and use a Role Queue feature if it is ever introduced, but if you are looking to get away from toxic behavior in Overwatch, this solution will not completely solve it.
What I think the real problem is
Despite the huge boost of improvement from the Looking-for-Group tool, there is no encouragement to play with a team that you can consistently rely on. Overwatch is BEST PLAYED with friends you can trust and come back to again and again. This is how I played Overwatch when it first came out but unfortunately the Competitive system discourages this by pairing groups with equally sized groups in most matches. As I said, LFG helps, but there is no incentive to stay with a group made in the LFG especially when the team takes their first loss together.
That being said, I still feel the best possible thing that can be made (and what I think is being made as the third social feature which was postponed), is a guild/clan system. Players who are dedicated under a single banner have something to play for other than themselves. I could go on about what a clan/guild system could have, but in short, the overall theme is encouraging players to help each other succeed.
Thank you everyone for tolerating my individual responses, but I do so to ensure that you are aware of what has been done in the past and why the system works the way it does currently. The experience of Overwatch is not perfect. It sure is a hell a lot better than what is was a year ago though, but it has a long way to go. Cheers! (^^)v