MonteCristo's thoughts on why 2-2-2 is good for the game

General Discussion
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Yeah, but if not now - then it might be too late. I also think that we need more variety in tanks / supports and I fully expect that next two heroes will be a tank and support.

I actually had most fun in gold rank just playing rein on solo ladder and just learning the game naturally. Six stacks were even more fun, but required a lot more commitment and I got better at the game rapidly because I wanted my team to do better. Learned stuff like ult economy, shot calling …etc.

It’s actually very hard for me to find a game that I can say I enjoyed right now in solo queue (which is why I quit it pretty much). I want to get better, but other than just mechanically improving I feel like I am stagnating because weird comps are basically a deathmatch where there is no synergy between characters.

I don’t mind losing, but I do mind not learning anything / improving from a lost game and that’s how it feels rn. Finding a six stack using LFG takes too long, and people usually leave if you god forbid lose one game. But it’s still a better experience than solo queue. Even if I get rolled by smurfs, I feel like I improved playing X character in a team setting. I just wish I could select a role and queue up for it, knowing that there is a good chance I’ll have an ok setup to work with.

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Dude, may as well stop replying to me, I don’t care what you have to say anymore. Should have tried empathy, sympathy, and actually thought out long responses before resorting to ad hominems.

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Another thing I have been thinking about is how 2CP will be a lot less worse with 2-2-2 lock simply because defending team can’t swap to all the stall heroes they want and swap off role to do so as well.

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Yeah, especially with Baptiste I see 2CP becoming even more of a pain rn (at least that was my experience on PTR).

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2-2-2 NEEDS to be a new rule across the board. No questions. It is the only thing that will fix the game and every single hero would need to be rebalanced for it.

Overwatch has been a hot mess for a while and it isn’t fun to play anymore because hero balance is all over the place.

2-2-2 is a great foundation for all hero balance to come from. How in the hell could you ever balance anything the way the game is right now.

They need to get on this. Like. Now. Its already needed to happen for so long

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Actually, Silver to Platinum is the bulk of the playerbase, encompassing ~80% of the players. Gold is the median (ie, where the halfline cross).

Diamond is already a top rank. GM is pretty much bragging rights, given how minuscule its population is.

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My only issue with 2-2-2 is that the queue times will be longer for certain roles, apart from that - great.

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Sorry sorry. I wanted to say BUFF.

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That’s a offer and demand question… Unfortunely, the offer for the DPS slot is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too high right now, so it will obviously have very long queue times.

However, as people realize they won’t be stuck on the other roles for bad compositions with 4+ DPS, they might even feel compeled in trying their hand at other roles. Even more if we get separated SR per role, as people won’t tank their SR by playing something they do not excel at. Plus, people will be able to kinda bypass long queue times play queuing together with a Tank or Support.

At the end of the day, the experience overall will be better, except for those Solo Instalock DPS players that never swap or play anything else…

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He makes some interesting points. And I like how well thought out it is. But, I don’t think he’s right.

A lot of that probably has to do with perceptual bias from League of Legends though. LoL is very much a game built on hero archetypes. It’s an old debate whether the LoL archetype style of hero design is better or worse than the DotA style “every hero is unique” approach. There are pros and cons to both, but Overwatch is the latter. Turning Overwatch into an archetype design would fundamentally destroy what makes Overwatch what it is, I think.

LoL’s archetypes don’t promote team diversity, as he suggests. They stifle it. You more readily get “best in class” heroes that dominate the meta for a role when heroes are more similar in design. Well, I suppose that’s true in Overwatch too. But, at the very least it won’t improve the situation. (You’re also not picking a role in LoL. You’re picking a lane. It’s not the same thing, but I digress…)

That said, role queue may not be so bad. Provided they figure out a way to get it to work with the idea of switching heroes to counter. What’s the plan there? Lock hero picks for the entire match? So you can’t switch role to counter? LoL is a game where you pick a hero in a draft system and then stick with them for 30-45 minutes. Switching isn’t part of it. You have to counter in the draft through picks and bans. So, again, it’s maybe not the best comparison to make.

However, I think role-specific SR is a terrible idea, likely to do more damage than good. It assumes the primary determinant of skill in Overwatch is role, rather than mechanics. I see no basis for that assumption. For example, your skill with Widow is more likely to translate to Ana than your skill with Mercy is; your Rein skill will translate better to Brig than Hammond; etc. You can see that they are designing Overwatch around this too by having diverse play styles for the hero categories (eg, Ana, Baptiste, Brig, Mei, Doomfist).

Plus, role is a very weakly defined concept in Overwatch, and probably always will be, so I don’t think it’s a good thing to base a matchmaking system on. Case in point, a lot of conversations seem to think “DPS” is a role and that “hybrids” are a thing. Neither of which is true.

Anyway… I think a ban system in competitive, or even just pro play, would be a much better way to introduce team diversity. Role locking seems super sketchy, way too complicated, and off target from the problem.

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Monte’s video opens up a lot about Overwatch League issues in regard to no role lock yet.

A role limit and role queue solves more problems than it creates. DPS heroes finally return, games are more balanced skill-wise (provided separate SR’s are calculated per role), players can finally pick what they want and get the teammates they need. On top of this, Overwatch League is more exciting to view, easier to watch, and Overwatch League job security greatly increases.

But there are consequences. Monte is right in that balancing would be a major issue to address post 2-2-2 implementation. And according to Jeff Kaplan, it seems that the development will take a while. If this is the path Blizzard wants, then they should start implementing it ASAP because any balancing they do prior to introducing 2-2-2 would be a colossal waste of time and effort.

And there’s the myth that there would be less composition variety. Yes, Goats, Quad Tank, Triple Tank, and even the rare Quad DPS would go the way of the dinosaur. But variety would arise in new ways. Bringing DPS heroes back into the mix adds so much more due to the DPS role simply having the most heroes.

Finally, would queue times really be that long? If players hate waiting for games, they can just play different role once in a while.

One popular idea I dislike is soft role queue (role preference with 2-2-2 matchmaking, but no hero restrictions.) It sounds great at first, but because queue times by role are different, players would ultimately abuse the DPS role to get faster queue times. It needs to be a hard lock.

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Dude Monte cristos are good sandwhiches

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MonteCristo uses League of legends as a reference but only when it supports his point tho. There’s a lot of flaws in his reasoning

When picking a “role” in League of legends, you don’t choose to play one of the 7 heroes in this “role”. Once you have your role, you can choose the type of champion you want to play. Most heroes do have a lane where they work best, but you’re not always essentially restricted. If you get the toplane or the jungle, you can play a tank, a bruiser, an assassin, a mage, a melee character, a range character,… And all champions interact in a somewhat same way with others.

If we had to transfer that to Overwatch, everyone would get a role, and then they could choose the character they want. Your main tank could play Brigitte. Your DPS could play Zarya. Your support could play Roadhog.
Those choices wouldn’t be the best ones, of course, but it would be allowed, if it worked like League of legends.

He also talks about how role queue is GREAT in LoL, but he doesn’t even mention the auto-fill system.
Basically, for those who don’t know, you can get auto-filled in each game. It can’t happen too many times in a row tho. Auto-fill means you don’t get the role you asked for, because the game couldn’t make a fair match with the preferences of everyone in the game. It happens in every rank, and for every role, even the least popular ones.
To “compensate”, you actually have to select 2 roles : your favorite role, and another role, your second choice. That means you kinda have to learn 2 roles if you want to be really efficient. Let’s be clear, nobody expect you to be great on 2 roles, but you gotta have a back up role you’re not TERRIBLE at, that’s all.

Now if we transfer that to Overwatch… If LoL can’t make players have their prefered role every game with its playerbase, it’s clearly not possible for Overwatch either.
We would possibly have to select 2 roles instead of just one. People WOULD get auto-filled, and DPS players would get auto-filled more often than tank players., because having a 20 minutes average queue is not realistic.

I personally don’t have any issue with that, but everyone HAS to realize that a perfect world where you get to play your role in a 2-2-2 comp against a 2-2-2 comp doesn’t exist. You gotta make sacrifice in order for a system like that to work.

Now on role-based SR… League of legends does not have such a thing, and I believe it would be absolutely terrible if it existed.
It would encourage people to not care about their SR in those roles. Diamond support players would queue in gold/plat DPS queue and do whatever they want. Why would they need to care and try to win, if they are on their trash role ? If they are only there to train their Widow skill, why would they switch when they get countered ?
People complain all the time about smurfs, but they dare support the idea of a role-based SR.

If you want to play another role, you have to bring your SR into play. There HAS to be risks for people to care about ranked. (at least as much as they do now)

Now if there were a prefered role, second-choice role, and an auto-fill system, there could be some adjustments on SR gains and losses. Losing when auto-filled could even lower your MMR less than losing on your main role. That’s a possibility.

That said, I’m not against a forced 2-2-2 and role queue system. I simply believe it would be way more complex to introduce, and that if it’s not done properly, it could easily cause even more issues. I also believe we can’t get everything we want, we need to reach compromises.

TL;DR :
Not a good video at all. We’re just getting told the same things that we heard 100 times already, and MonteCristo doesn’t address the obvious cons and flaws his arguments have, and that makes him lose credibility. We need actual debates and not a bunch of videos from the point of view of single dudes who like seeing Widow headshotting people in OWL.
(Also, starting a video by saying “I am HIGHLY in favor of a role lock system” already makes you extremely subjective. Don’t do that)
(What I just wrote is not even a TL;DR but you know what you can read the whole post if you want to and flûte hein)

And while I’m at it, Overwatch has never been really balanced, even when everyone was playing 2-2-2. Saying “with role lock the game will be easier to balance, therefore Overwatch will be way more balanced !!” is a shameful lie. Don’t expect such things, and most importantly don’t use that as an argument in favor of forced 2-2-2

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As far as im aware LFG is not really a mass used tool in this game so you gotta take that into account too.

The reason why i picked wow is because just as OW they have much more dps than the total numbers of tanks and healers what results in absurd wait times to get into a dungeon.

People have already made some posts here that lfg takes half hours to find people for basic setups so the experience is quite random.

Anyway if forced 2-2-2 role quene gets put in the game i would like to see that in lfg you could create any kind of group setup you like and enter the game with it. This would make sure that the game stays somewhat balanced and those who have creative composition ideas can still try to run one without ruining the match for others.

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The funny thing about forced 222 is, that for role queue to be a success, you have to keep the queue times reasonable. To keep the queue times reasonable, you have to make playing tanks and supports more attractive. If you successfully make playing tanks and supports more attractive, you probably don’t have to force 222 anyway …

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That would require a different queue all together as putting people who are free to play whatever vs. role locked is not balanced at all.

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It is balanced around the idea that you can only get these formations if you can find some people who like to experiment.

2-2-2 is supposedly the most balanced, highest winrate setup you can find and this is true up to plat/diamond where actual teamwork starts to matter. You cant find GOATS in gold unless a team of smurfs decide to band up and ruin the matches of a bunch of people but that doesnt happen.

With LFG staying open as a gate of creativity you would rarely got into unbalanced setups and even in those cases you still supposedly have to hold the upper hand because of you balanced setup. I mean just look at how hard Blizz is going on “balancing” goats away, if a bunch of LFG scientists would come up with a new unstopable not 2-2-2 meta Blizz would make sure it wont work that good.

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And without a seperate queue, you’d be able to play by different rules than others which isn’t balanced. When the enemy team can’t even mirror then it’s not balanced. Honestely, things like that would be better as arcade modes.

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I’ve always wondered what would happen if they just capped the healers at 2. Everything else can be flexible.

Because in this current age of overwatch, 3 healers becomes pretty strong. Just in what I’ve seen and what I’ve had to face.

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What mirroring would you need?

Lets say you are 2-2-2 and the enemy is goats. We already know that sombra counters them good, if we mix in the current balance patch changes there are ways to deal with them without having to mirror anything.