Tanks are now solo so can be buffed and balanced independently and without having to worry about tank synnergy. No other role suffers from this like tanks do on live. You don’t have to worry about Ana becoming OP because you buff Lucio. But Rein and Zarya’s balance are often tied together, same with Orisa and Sigma (as we’ve seen her get gutted so that double shield won’t return). Orisa can get 100 more HP or 300 more shield HP or a literal gallop passive or whatever because they don’t need to balance her around her in a tank duo, but rather just around herself. If a tank is bad, they can buff them any way they want now.
Tanks will be stronger as a whole individually, with more playmaking tools, aggression and offensive capabilities that attracts a wider audience of players, and more impact
Tanks will be the sole role with strong CC while also having CC resistance, while the DPS will be either losing CC entirely (like Mei freeze and Mcree flash being removed) or having it nerfed substantially, AND hyper mobile DPS will be looked at like Tracer and Doom who making tanking unfun, AND snipers will be looked at being nerfed. So not only are Tanks going to be stronger, the DPS role is looking to be weaker and less frustrating to play against as a Tank. Again, attracts more players to the role.
If you think the queues are gonna be long in 5v5 idk what to tell you. There’s 2 less players needed by the matchmaker per game, and those are 2 tanks which is the hardest role to fill. That alone will make queue times MUCH faster, regardless of if the tank playerbase doesn’t increase in size. But the changes to the tank role to be more aggressive (attractive to more players), addition of new OW2 tanks, and overall influx of new and returning players in OW2 is going to make queues so much faster than they are on live
The only con I see for tanks is that they will have to 1) be flexible because the meta tank will probably be map dependent instead of Rein Zar every game. gasp How terrible, I know! They might have to play Winston or D.va or Ball on dive-y maps with highground!
And that tanks will have more pressure on them to perform well. But I thought these tank players loved the “tank fantasy” of being the shield/team leader/center of the team who holds it together and now they don’t want that responsibility? It’s confusing.
That also frees them up to design more tanks in the future with less restrictions/worry
You are supporting my argument. The issue is the ratio of players queuing for tank is below the 1:1:1 ratio of slots, as you and I are both saying. If people queued in even numbers for tank/dps/healers, it wouldn’t make much difference if OW was a 1/1/1, 2/2/2, or 3/3/3 game, as the ratio in queue would match the ratio needed for a game.
In fact, the way the matchmaker currently works gives a benefit to having larger teams, as you don’t need to wait for 12 gold players if you have 10 golds, 1 silver, and one plat in queue. That works counter to the slight increase in time due to additional players needed for say a 12 player game vs a 10 player game.
The dev’s AMA suggested open queue wouldn’t be a thing anymore, either. Again the keyword here is “suggested”, as in it’s not concrete. I’ll post a direct quote from the pinned thread where the forum MVP “WyomingMyst” relayed the questions and answers from the AMA to the forums.
But on the other hand, if they were planning on supporting it, they wouldn’t have to evade such a question with uncertain answers. The problem is that tanks are being changed in such a way that the game can’t handle two on a team anymore, so it’s not even going to be an option. No more open queue, no more 6 v 6. Because at that point you’d need to maintain two separate balancing acts for two different formats of the game, and they’re not going to put that sort of effort into it.
Plus, if two different formats existed, they’d run the risk of the 5 v 5 mode being so massively unpopular that it was losing population constantly to the 6 v 6 side. At that point, they’d have to be forced to admit failure and abandon it and all the work they’re putting into it. So instead they’re going to axe the 6 v 6 game mode in the hopes that enough people don’t care enough and just port themselves over without issue.
This is probably the exact reason Role Queue didn’t immediately launch alongside Open Queue. They needed to know it was stable enough and popular enough that it could stand on it’s own merits before reintroducing a rival game mode. The OW2 devs don’t have that sort of faith in 5 v 5 format.
Is Call of Duty a live service game like Overwatch? I don’t play it.
As I said to someone else, my comment was purely based off what I’ve seen from the community. Countless people complaining at the lack of content and saying they’re leaving because of it. I can’t imagine those people would choose OW1 over OW2, especially without OW1 getting balance updates.
I do not know whether or not this is the case but it is true that the game is now under new leadership and that things could change.
Certainly it may be a concern however let us not forget that they are already in the middle of developing overwatch for mobile as well as updating the other platforms which already causes split in development resources.
I agree that this approach might be worth considering.
Exactly why I would be interested in it.
I believe that they can do it well but at the same time it could be done poorly.
Personally I do this sentiment but I also understand the other side of the coin.
It is certainly correct and and they would still need to maintain the original game but at least it would not need to make updates to content.
Really they would just need to maintain the servers and Report system and anti-cheat measures.
Eventually I could see the game dying from a lack of updates but I believe there will always be a small dedicated community who will play it and I also believe that Blizzard should allow players to host their own servers and in this way the game will never die completely.
I have my doubts that a mobile version is being done by the same developers, more likely then not it’s handed to a different team.
As well as other systems, Overwatch is pretty notorious for having the same balance across all platforms even when console has specific issues that are generally ignored.
They wouldn’t have to touch balance but I don’t think that balance even requires that much development resources. Geoff Goodman was able to do the entire pro players patch in about a day.
Simply put, they won’t. Since OW1 and OW2 is going to be such different games, they will have to be balanced separately. Meaning they effectively have to have 2 teams to operate what is essentially 2 games.
And that won’t pay off. There’s simply not enough money in OW1 to keep it running alongside OW2.
You might be right about that . I’m thinking they should handover more control to the community to be able to host their own servers and create custom maps and even Heroes and people could vote to have certain modes be put into Arcade.
Indeed, in fact I’ve advocated mod tools released for OW1 for a long time. I think in order to extend a game’s longivity outside of 2-3 years, you need the modding community on your side. It took them a long time to realise this, and only managed the workshop, but even that shows the importance of involving the community.
Skyrim should be a prime example of just how important modding really is for a game. Blizzard know this, they practically gave birth to the MOBA genra thanks to modding back in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Hopefully they understand just how important it is with community driven content in OW2. They need to add dedicated servers, map tools and modding tools so that people can play around with OW2 from a modding perspective.
