I didn’t read the whole thing, it was too long. But I might later on when I have time. Anyways, it seems like the devs do understand and admit that the tanking gameplay had more in-depth and complex element to it that lured in players that appreciated that in 6v6.
But I don’t think they’ve talked much about a possible solution to tank gameplay feeling worse (less fun, less complex, more tilting) in 5v5 compared to 6v6 and whether they’re even prioritising on improving that.
We went over some of the issues of tank synergy earlier but having two of them allowed one to focus on protecting their backline while the other held ground or pushed into the enemy team. The tank role had a lot of depth in understanding how to work with the other tank on the team. This part of the mastery curve took a long time to learn, and for the small group of people devoted to it, that was part of its allure.
I can’t lie, their queue time reasoning for going 5v5 is understandable though and that alone is more than enough reason for their justification. But I just don’t like how not much effort seems to be done towards making tanking in 5v5 feeling as interesting to play as tanking in 6v6. Queue times matter, but so does a tank player’s enjoyment.
They’ll probably try open queue role limits, maybe an open queue tank limited (max 2) as well. There’s a few ways to go about it than just straight role queue or open queue.
It hardly even is because… we don’t know what 6v6 queue times look like with even remotely decent balance.
The tank role was stuck in a double shield meta for the entirety of role queue. You cannot expect people to play a role that’s stuck in one meta for 3 years straight, the game abandoned, and no strives made to actually improve the feel of the role, ever.
Really? They haven’t tried addressing actual problems. They’ve only tried buffing tanks over and over and giving them passives.
The more they buff tanks the more effective and necessary countering becomes, and the less the other roles enjoy the game. They’ve basically chosen a course to follow and it’s been the wrong course from the beginning.
Now tanking is even less fun because things like DVa matrix is up forever, Rein shield too and then when either of them is down you get a massive chunk of armour to get through, which most tanks are not good at doing. Trying to kill the near-unkillable is no fun for anyone.
Then you get a bad support comp on tank and you die instantly. You are totally dependent on your supports even though you otherwise should be a raid-boss. When you get good supports you may never die until they do.
What they need to address are (there are more probably):"
Ana - yes, No1 problem for several tanks and chasing people away from the role since OW1 I expect
Hanzo - storm arrow on low CD is busted against tanks
Sombra - like Ana can make several tanks miserable to play with way too little effort
Slows - too many of them. You can now get 3 slows on a team and guess which enemy hero they are all used one? I had a game against Ram+Mei+Cassidy (with Ana thrown in) and it was totally unplayable as tank. Even 2 slows, or a trap and a slow, or trap+sleep+name+slow (or hack) and so on. These things stack on tanks and you can have close to 10s where you can do almost nothing.
tank interactions - DVa matrix is broken against anything except beams. It is frustrating for just about any tank to play into DVa. Rein is now broken with all his armour and shield. Again frustrating (and boring) to play tank into Rein. Ram is near unkillable. Mauga is disgusting to play against, even if you win it wasn’t fun. The list goes on.
over-reliance on supports. This does not mean buff them so they are not, but rather reduce the impact of things that delete tanks too quickly - I already pointed out storm arrows, but also cass right-click->roll->right-click, and probably others.
Overall the game is unfun because a few heroes are broken against tanks in different ways. But the combos of those heroes - Ana+Hanzo for example where you get naded+stormed, or slept, woken by hanzo crit, naded and stormed. These things happen way too often and some combos of heroes are just broken against too many tanks.
thats fine…the devs still might not see that as an issue though…if they didnt want counterswapping they could easily remove that from the game with very little effort (is the game still OW at that point though?)
ofc it’s the same dev team that buffed dva during dive meta, didn’t nerf tracer until 2018, and never nerfed monkey a SINGLE time throughout ow1, and decided “ah dive too strong!? brigitte!!!”
You’re still misunderstanding completely. No one is saying remove counter swapping ENTIRELY. The problem is it’s effectiveness against solo tank.
If the enemy team was running Rein/Zarya, you could still walk in with any combo you wanted and still win without feeling like you were trying to ice skate uphill. If Winston committed too hard, you could DM him out.
Overwatch’s current state is proof that Blizzard’s vision of rock paper scissors in nonviable because it makes the entire game revolve around both tanks swapping between the three choices until the match ends or one of them hits Alt+F4 out of sheer frustration. The game didn’t used to be like that, you could play Hog and Ball into double shield and win without getting naded, hindered, slept, rocked, and blown up the instant you walked around a corner.
I agree that they barely did anything to fix the game in 6v6. They literally just abandoned it after 1.5 years…(around when echo was released)
I think rather than trying everything under the sun to make 6v6 work (e.g. open queue with soft role lock, make tank role more desirable to play, etc.) I guess they figured it’ll be much easier to just throw in the towel and halve the least popular role instead…
It worked, but halving the tank role came with its own issues. And we will never know whether 6v6 could’ve been saved or not because the devs simply abandoned the game and moved onto 5v5 just after 1.5 years of 6v6 2-2-2 RQ existence.
So the reality is, 5v5 is here and it’s staying here because the decision has been made. Heck, 5v5 (1-2-2) might not have been the worst idea either, at least compared to other stuff the devs were planning in the past like 1-4-1 or 7v7. But I will never accept that OW2 5v5 is “better” than OW1 6v6 because the latter was never given a proper chance to spread its wings.
From the time OW2 was released (Oct of 2022) to now (July of 2024 as we speak). That’s longer than 1.5 years the Role Queue had been around in OW1 whilst it was continuing to get updates. So more effort and time has been spent into making 5v5 better than 6v6 RQ.
He wrote about the game and issues that they try to sole, 5v5 was a solution that works for a white but core “issue” still exists-- people just dont like play tanks as play other two roles . 5v5 saved the day but made tanks even less attractive role to play.