I made a new account to play with my friend, thought it would be a good opportunity to check out the new player experience. its bad.
they stopped playing but I was like 10 wins away from ranked so I grinded for a bit. I placed, all 10 games done and got d2. only then did I unlock echo.
the fact that 2 years after release people can go into ranked heroes still locked is insane.
It’s a losing battle. Nobody cares about the new player experience. Been there, done that. As long as it does not effect them, they are content.
I get it but like, it just means that actual new players can get to ranked, place gold and still be limited by the heros they can choose. it doesnt just affect the new player at that point. thats ignoring the fact that it means they dont have time to practice them before bringing them into ranked. its honestly just poorly designed.
the simple fix is just to unlock everyone if you reach the ranked requirements first. or better yet, just dont have them locked in the first place.
But an actual new player likely wouldn’t be going into comp as soon as they unlock it. And if they did, they also likely wouldn’t be trying to play every hero, or even know the abilities of every hero. They probably wouldn’t have even played every map at that point more than a couple times.
Personally idc if they give all the heroes at the start or not, but a new player isn’t going to be playing all 40 or whatever we have at even a basic level before unlocking them all.
I honestly think you would be surprised.
my experience might be a bit biased as I was duoing for most of if but if you have even a bit of fps literacy you will dominate actual new player lobbies.
my friend, who has never touched the game but got masters in apex rolled 90% of the games we were in. I was purposefully off rolling too.
how do you get around this? you go into the mode where you play against people who are supposedly of similar skill level aka ranked.
well yeah, because they physically cannot play every hero.
as for maps, I have played the new one like 4 times. it took 2 to get the gist of it. I might not know where all the megas and minis are but unless I am on a flanker, I kinda dont need to
right but what good does locking the more interesting heros behind a time gate do?
oh this hero shooter looks fun, oh all the ones with cool abilities are locked? guess ill play soldier for 10 hours until the game decides I am mature enough to choose who I want to play
Their point still stands as you both aren’t “actual new players”. You both seem rather skilled at shooters, where even the First Time User Experience is like, “hey, we can see you’re playing well, and you’ve won so much already. Maybe stop stomping actual new players and just go ahead and start playing comp matches, even though you still need to play a few more to unlock the last hero.”
Let’s not forget that the first 6 or so heroes in OW2 were also temporarily unavailable to some players when they launched.
The “more interesting” heroes are typically more interesting because they’re more complicated. There’s more for those heroes to do at any given moment, and a new player could feel overwhelmed by choice and not knowing when to use what abilities. I remember when Sigma first released, and despite being a fairly proficient tank, I was constantly forgetting how frequently I could be using that big stun rock, and where it should be weaved into my rotation.
As an actual new player gets used to playing the simpler heroes, they can spend more of that time learning the maps, positioning, when to engage and reset, and how their hero’s rotation plays in most team fights.
I am not, my friend is though.
right… that doesn’t make him less new.
having transferable skills doesn’t mean much when the new player experience is just bad.
yeah except thats not how it works.
you just need to win 50 games to get into ranked. to unlock echo you need to play 150 (not sure if it specifies qp like the ranked reqs do though).
the game didnt see that we were doing well and fast track us, its just poorly designed.
yeah it it was so universally panned that they got rid of it.
so is echo the most complicated hero? is it just because of her ult?
id argue that tracer has more depth than echo and she’s available from the get go
so we should not let people play those heroes? I never got to play the beta, everyone already knew the heros by the time I joined, at no point did I ever think oh this hero is too complicated.
not understanding how to play something is natural, but not letting people decide if they want to figure it out first hand is just weird.
really? sig? when he had no cd on his shield?
internalising cooldowns comes from playing the hero.
I feel like ball would have been a more apt example here
I get it but why does blizzard not trust their players enough to do that themselves? what about people like my friend? what about poeple with experience in mobas?
I get that this is a small thing that affects very few people but I just don’t get why it exists when all it does is make the new player experience worse? if anything we should be focusing on making it a better experience for them so that there are people ready to replace the poeple that are leaving
But youre not a new player. Your experience doing what you did will definitely not match what an actual new player will experience. You’re conflating your expectations and knowledge with something that will not be true 99.999% of the time.
I know I am not new. my friend, however, is. if he stuck with the grind, he would be in the same situation as me.
Your friend was also not experiencing the new player experience since he was playing with you. Your experience will have dragged him up in MMR, and likely engage with people better than him with (on average) more heroes unlocked.
There is no scenario where a new player actually gets the proper experience when playing with a smurf.
are you seriously about to sit there and tell me that the majority of new players are coming in solo after hearing nothing but bad things about the game for the past 5 years?
if you dont think people are not trying the game out with their friends who already play then you are delusional.
ok? so if he played solo, one tricked soldier and brute forced his way to the same situation through mechanical skill alone, it would be different?
how?
I thought neither of us got the new player experience bc I boosted his mmr?
The majority of players are likely either coming in solo, or with a group of friends who are also new to the game.
If you decide to join a friend who has already played the game for a while, then you are willfully forfeiting a proper new player experience.
I’ve had my fair share of getting friends to play games with me that I’m already well versed in – it’s never a good experience for them because they end up just being overwhelmed and/or I ruin the experience by just carrying them and they never feel like they get to play the game properly.
Which part of my statement that you quoted contradicts this?
I highly doubt this.
if only blizzard wasnt so stingy with stats.
fair to an extent. no one is upset at him playing in non new player lobbies after the first few bot games, I am complaining that he could have reached ranked without ever having the opportunity to play some heroes in a core game mode. yes, there is arcade but those wins don’t count towards unlocking ranked so why would we play them?
I could have started hard comming, teaching him gm roatations and composition theory but I didnt have to. being able to aim did a lot of heavy lifting and prior game experience in general made him pretty good at adapting to kits.
he struggled with learning different projectile speeds with hanzo and the likes but other than that, none of the abilities in this game are very complicated.
he was not overwhelmed nor did I carry him.
I was either playing bad heros or off rolling. might have made a few calls that a new player might not have seen but other than that, I was having fun with it. until the enemy started sweating anyway
this part
how can we be ruining the new player experience for them if we arent in their games due to our mmr?
edit: I may have misunderstood what you meant. you meant my friend not the other new players. that one is my bad
I wouldn’t be too quick to under attribute your role in those games. Even playing off heroes, your game knowledge will likely strongly exceed that of a new player. What you think might be purposefully holding yourself back will probably still have a strong influence on the game’s outcome. Your friend may have gotten a lot of space and breathing room to perform that he may not have otherwise had.
Strong mechanics are not really the end all of this game. This has been shown many times, where players like Shroud stabilize in plat because being mechanically good does not guarantee you success without map and hero knowledge.
Maybe your friend is better than the average player just due to experiences from other games, but I stand by my point that I dont think the new player experience is designed around playing with other people of the same skill level. Is the new player experience good or bad? I dont know. But I’m not really convinced that the scenario you described is going to provide accurate or constructive criticism of it, because you’ve effectively bypassed half of it’s purpose.
Like every hero game?
I can tell you, I’ve played other games with tons of heroes, and I don’t even WANT them all unlocked. At least, not for ranked. Even for QP modes, having every character is overwhelming.
And most people are going to go into ranked (with a 50 game win requirement) only having learned maybe two or three heroes to a comfortable level (if that). They aren’t going to play other characters in ranked, they are going to practice them outside of ranked, until they are also on a comfortable level with other ones. So, why not have a high requirement to unlock all characters, if it’s also going to help prevent smurfing, in a 9 year old game (which is MUCH more likely what a “new” account is going to be anyways).
we werent playing with new players for too long to be fair. I will give it that, the mmr seemed to do something.
I agree though, I wasnt dying. gamesense alone goes a long way which is why I made the comment about the calls. I see that we killed 4 and there is a tracer that never died, ill assume they are behind somewhere but a new player probably doesnt have the awareness to pick up on something like that.
probably. my first placement game was d4 so I must have been doing something right in the qp games. this has gotten me curious as to where they would have placed now bc he is definately not diamond but id say he could play comfortably in low to mid plat before mechanics alone arent enough to win games anymore though.
you beat me to it, I was going to bring up the same point.
its not, its designed around drip-feeding content in order to drive engagement.
its pretty bad.
it could be worse, we could have to earn currency to unlock heroes but I shouldn’t be giving them ideas.
as I said above. its purpose is engagement bait. I think its incredibally misguided and the grind for ranked should be engaging enough on its own if the game is good. which it is. as much as everyone wants to complain, the core game is solid and its in a generally pretty good spot right now. which is part of the reason why I don’t understand why it is the way it is. if anything it is more likely to make people stop playing because they don’t want to play 150 games to try the other flying hero.
im not sure what you are asking here. its a poor design choice in every other game that does it too. they just charge you 50 dollars to unlock all at once. ill give the devs that, they didnt try to monetise it
is it though? there are 3 different roles, play a few games on each, try a different hero each time and youll generally figure out what you do and dont like. having every hero does not mean to you need to play every hero.
oh and we should probably talk about how you could have hazzard locked but the enemy doesnt.
oh that guy looks cool, let me try him. ‘play 57 more games’. how fun.
and that is not an issue.
idk man. I have always said learning new heros is best done in ranked. its why one trick alt accounts were so common before ow2 made you attach a phone number on new accounts.
in what way does it prevent smurfing? 50 wins is way less time consuming that grinding to level 25 ever was. not having access to echo doesnt mean much for me when I am a support player. it doesnt mean much to any tank players either. and then the dps, all of the good ones are already unlocked. if someone really wanted to smurf, theyd be on cass soj or freja.
if nothing else, being able to choose the few heroes you want to learn before jumping into ranked is better than having some characters literally inaccessible to you.
I disagree – at least partially. Hero based games with lots of game mechanics can, and do, overwhelm a lot of players. You may see it as a grind and/or drip feeding content to drive engagement, but it’s really more about scoping the content of the game to not overwhelm players with too many mechanics.
As someone who has been playing OW since the OW1 beta, it’s really easy to think to myself how obvious things are, but I’ve been on the opposite end of this in other games. When you constantly get thrown into situations where you have no clue what’s going on is a totally terrible feeling. You get so overwhelmed that you find a single thing that works and cling to it, which inhibits your growth throughout the rest of the game.
A great example of this are card games like MTG or Yugioh. I like to occasionally play these in tabletop simulator with my friends who are way beyond my skill level. I do have some fun, but they pull out the insane combos and play a bunch of cards one after the other and it just fries my brain to the point where i just zone out, and at the end of their 30 chain combos I just say “uhh… ok” and just trust that what they tell me happened, happened. If I was someone who invested in the game much earlier and kept up with cards as they came out, these mechanics would be much more obvious to me, but being thrown in the deep in is NOT a good new player experience at all.
It takes a lot of time and effort to master these skills. Something like 150 games may sound like a lot, but in many cases it isn’t. Maybe for your above average Joe it’s slow, but you have to remember that the game is free to play, catering to people of all ages and skill levels. The average gamer is actually quite bad compared to what you probably have in mind.
I’m not saying the new player experience cannot be improved, but again, I really don’t think your scenario is an accurate reflection of the intended goal.
its weird how it was never an issue in ow1 though huh. yeah there a few more hero’s now but not letting them play those heros doesnt make it any less intimidating. if anything it makes it harder to understand those heros because you cant actually see how they work. you just see they play against you.
again, this happened in ow1 and limiting the hero’s people can play does not solve this.
I used to play yugoih, when I tried to return there were a few mechanics that are hard to get your head around but I think comparing pendulum summoning into a link chain to a first person shooter with pretty basic objectives is a bit of a stretch.
I get where you are coming from but if someone used all of those new mechanics against you and you literally didnt have access too them it would feel pretty bad. card games are tricky though because of the money involved in building a decent deck and just the sheer amount of cards to choose from. apparently there are over 10000 now.
but you do have access to those mechanics. you might not understand them but you could go and learn about them. there is nothing stopping you but knowledge (or money if we mean irl)
I honestly dont even think its the amount that bothers me, its that they clearly haven’t thought about it. I could win all 50 qp games and go into ranked with 2 dps and 1 tank that I am just not allowed to play.
Ngl I completely forgot heroes need to be unlocked ever since they took them off the BP
What’s the unlock method nowadays?
For the record I disapprove before anybody says anything
its just games played. its honestly not that bad but I just find the fact that you can unlock ranked before all heroes to be insane