Noobs (almost) might as well not bother

General Discussion
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It’s really not easy being a noob on this game. I’ve played a lot of games. The overall message you get as a noob is “Get out of here, we don’t want you.” I’ve watched a ton of tutorials, I’ve even spent money on tutorials. But even the tutorials are all geared toward high-level players, players that have teammates, players that play on teams that actually have other players that play their roles, etc. I’m just getting matched up with other noobs, usually noobs that shoot as Zarya’s bubbles the whole match even though I try to warn them politely not to pre-game… but then there are always one or two decent players on each team, which means someone on the other team just counters every hero I use, especially easy when I’m a tank and have no support or resources, etc. I don’t know, it sucks because I really love the game otherwise. It’s just not fun constantly being humiliated… and I don’t mean that “my teammates suck” by any means… Trust me, I suck, I know it and I don’t blame them ever aloud, or bash them aloud… I’m always just positive in chat and try to be helpful and pleasant. It’s not their fault for being new… I’m new too.

Solutions I suggest because #noobsmatter:
1) Post-game, let us see our stats for more than just 5 seconds. Unless we want to watch all of our replays, there is no way to even know how we did or what to improve on. Did I do damage? Did I heal enough? Did I assist? Were my ults effective? Let us see a record of our matches and stats per match, please. This is an almost automatic feature in almost every other FPS game and it really helps players that want to get better.
2) Give us suggestions based on our performance. When I look at my career profile, my damage per 10 minutes, healing per 10 minutes, etc., are my stats good?? Bad?? What can I compare them to? What hero’s am I strongest with based on my stat performance? What should I focus on to improve?
3) Tips: The tips I see are great, but they come at a horrible time. Right in the middle of gameplay, I’ll see something flash on the screen for 2.5 seconds that says something about being careful against Ashe… and then it disappears… and I’m in the middle of playing the game and trying to get out of the respawn area and there’s a Tracer in my face. It’s just not a good time for a tip. The tips need to be given when you have a chance to read them.
4) Zarya’s bubbles should be something that noobs know are dangerous intuitively. This single change would make a lot of noob matches a lot more tolerable. Seriously. You wouldn’t believe how much noobs just sit and shoot Zarya bubbles the entire match.

I love this game. Sorry to sound negative. Overall, it’s an amazing game, in some ways my favorite game I’ve ever played. Yet, I feel humiliated and frustrated playing it as a noob more than most games. Hope the creators will do a few things to help a noob out. Thanks for reading :slight_smile:

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Noobs, and console players, and Switch players, and girls, and niche hero mains, and low ranked players and…

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I totally agree that this game isn’t friendly to newbies. A lot of it is just because the game is so complex and the matchmaker doesn’t really help matters.

I would say that you shouldn’t put too much stock into your stats. Aside from the fact that they don’t really give you much information on the parts of your performance that matter, Blizz seems intent on making sure we can’t easily compare ourselves against other players.

The best tools we have for comparing stats are things like overbuff, but the reliability of these sorts of services is a bit questionable since player profiles all went private by default.

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For points one and two they’ve actually discussed a scoreboard you can view in a match that’ll (hopefully) display stuff like healing, who’s getting how much, etc. You only get to see your own stats and friendly ult charges and it’s not enough information for a solo queue player to glean.
For 3, this game does a terrible job at teaching. The tutorial is so bad they should just let people skip it because it’s useless, it does not teach Overwatch gameplay. And the tips are just… Kinda thrown in, they’re best turned off. Again these are ideally issues they’re gonna tackle in OW2, which should help with point 4

It’s very hard to be a noob in Overwatch, it’s a super complicated game in the sense that so many different things can be happening all at once. Learning is such a slow process because most people don’t even know what’s going on for a little while. And in addition the attitude towards noobs makes it hard to even want to try. If they actually TAUGHT players about their game it’d be better but they don’t. There’s a lot of things that are “hopefully gonna get better with Overwatch 2”

I’m glad I got into the game like 4.5 years ago, because if I tried getting into it within the past 2 years I promise you I would’ve quit by now.

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I’m answering all of the replies in one reply because if I try to do more than one reply, on the 2nd reply I try I get an error popup alert box that says “object [Object]” and can’t actually post my reply. Very annoying when you spend a lot of time typing a reply only to find out you wasted the last 20 minutes typing a reply to no one. So this is my workaround…

"Fool me once… huh, huh,:thinking: can’t get fooled again. :clown_face: " ~ W.

I hear you. Isn’t it lovely being called “trash” everyday? lol, sometimes I’m able to ignore it. Other times I find myself wanting to say things that could probably land me in a jail cell. The girls thing is a problem in all gaming, as I’m sure you know better than me… It’s always insecure, sad, pathetic, weak dudes every time. Just make fun of their tiny weeny’s.

I had a feeling that was the case… bc it seems like they are literally hiding our stats from us… I get it. I do agree, so many other games have stats that become the sole focus of many players and that is, indeed, a very annoying problem to have. I just think it’s overkill. They should let us see our own stats and just skip the Leaderboards and other things that encourage comparing stats to other players publicly.

Good, I hope so! And perfectly stated, not enough info for a solo queue player to glean.

I’m trying so hard not to… Hopefully I can catch up before getting too bashed in… And hopefully OW2 helps pull me through the growing pains.

Thanks for all your responses… just a few people reading and validating helps a lot, so thank you.

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Clever idea.

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These do not matter because they fluctuate, just because you didn’t get golds doesn’t mean you did bad.

Like sometimes as example if you’re a support sometimes you’re gonna be healing INSANE amounts because your team is taking too much damage and you’re like “How did I lose I did 30k healing in 17 minutes!!!” then other times you’re gonna do 17k healing in 17 mins and win lol and be like “WELL HOW DID I WIN THIS AND NOT THE ONE WHERE I DID 30k!!!”

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They should take a tip from Paladins and have new player play against A.I only for the first 10 lvls or so

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to make matters worse, there seems to be a plethora of new accounts being purchased by plat+ players jumping back into the ‘shallow end of the pool’ sorta speak. The match maker can’t keep up. this also has the obvious side affect of making the game even more difficult for actual new players

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Two issues here - first there is badge shaming. Your time in the game should be hidden just like your profile.

Second, they should do a better job of easing new players into the game. Maybe you have to play X number of games vs AI on a role to unlock them for PvP. This mode should give you useful role tips and you get loot boxes or cosmetics to as a reward for completing these. This isn’t a typical shooter where any FPS mechanics you may have learned elsewhere can immediately be applied to this game.

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A very difficult thing to do, what do you compare them to? It’s actually fairly common for GM players to get lower stats on average than master players, so should you tell masters players to do less damage? What do you do for tanks or Lucio players?

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Been saying this for years now. I’ve had the dubious privilege of playing a few imploding online shooters, and without exception they all degenerate into closed communities that despise new players and drive them out, either passively or actively. In my experience the ones with leaderboards are the absolute worst offenders.
All that said, the writing has been on the wall for Overwatch for a loooooong time. It won’t get better before 2.

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It’s been a big point of complaint for the game’s whole life. The only comment they’ve made about it (that I know of) was saying that a more traditional scoreboard wouldn’t accurately convey performance, which I do agree with to an extent, but that’s a problem they could work around if they really wanted to.

I believe the real reason is that the game has historically had some fundamental design problems and that public player stats were a fairly reliable way to show that they’re issues and why, so they were hidden.

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This is such a genuinely nice and wholesome post that I’m going to go out of my way to not be my usual crabby self and say;

Try other game modes. Try Mystery Heroes, or Deathmatch in Arcade. These will give you significantly better, and more consistent matchups, that give you teams that are actively trying and not throwing more often than any other mode in the game. Even arcade QP is full of throwers and trolls and smurfs, you’re not going to get a ‘real’ match of Overwatch anywhere else, so you may as well master your heroes in other areas of the game so that you at least feel less frustrated when you’re playing the ‘real’ game and your own hero mastery is down.

I’ve been playing all 5 years and the experience of playing the game just gets worse. I wish I had something positive to say, it’s one of my all time favorite games too - I don’t watch Civ 5 tutorials online but I do for Overwatch, that’s how much I like this game. Unfortunately, I’d be lying if I said it had improved at all.

Unfortunately the game doesn’t really exist anymore, unless you’re able to get an account that’s ranked really highly and keep it there - which is a difficult balancing act if you’re a normal human who has a life outside of the game and no friend group to play with so you definitely get your SR back after a bunch of solo-q losses.

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You can press ‘tab’ (PC… not sure about console) to bring up a mini-scoreboard screen during the match that shows you all your stats… dmg done, elims, deaths, dmg amped, accuracy, team ult charge, etc. The OW devs are looking into adding official scoreboards in the OW2, but for now thats all we have.

Typically people use the website ‘overbuff’, to get a general look at hero specific stat averages. It also shows the playerbases’ most played heroes for the week/month for each rank. However, generally you want to have better stats than the people in YOUR rank. This means checking career profiles (the ones not set to private) and observing enemy/ally stats each game. If you’re much lower than them, you could improve it.

In order to climb, you need to play better than the people in your current rank.

Whichever one you win the most on. You can check this in your career profile.

The tips are pretty bad. In fact, they’re terrible and the same 10 tips just cycle through the system. I recommend disabling tips. Instead, you can press f1 (iirc) in the practice range and read information about each hero and how they work.

Otherwise, if you’d like a better summary… I recommend searching the Overwatch heroes on this website (minus the spaces): overwatch . fandom . com/wiki/Overwatch_Wiki
This website has literally every detail on each heroes kit, and how they operate and goes into very specific details.

As for tips that are actually useful, search youtube. Content creators will ALWAYS give better tips than game devs. For example, there’s videos like ‘1 tip for every hero when playing against ashe’ or ‘1 tip for playing ana against every hero’, etc.

Overwatch is not noob friendly. Once upon a time… it was.
The entire playerbase was new… people thought Lucio needed to shoot allies to heal them. Zaryas didn’t know what the bubbles did. Junkrats would try to throw traps AT people (hilarious). But now, the game is much older and with OWL a lot of players quickly improved. Now new players get left in the dust. I agree Blizzard need to add more accessible information… however, this is normal for old games.

Personally I’d like something that League(?) has… where each hero has a hero description with a mini video/gif demonstrating each hero ability + with tips.

I highly recommend joining a gaming community or discord. You’ll have tons of casual Overwatch players in them constantly looking to group up in quickplay or comp. You can also request coaching.

Generally in older games, you learn the game most seeking help from other players rather than the game itself.

Also one word of advice:

Improve your accuracy. Don’t just have high accuracy, but also fast reaction times. If you do this, you can carry yourself on any role up until at least plat-diamond. Focus on dps’ing even as a support. Of course still heal, but whenever you see an opportunity, you shoot. Same with tank. The reason for this is because the whole teamwork thing doesnt start until plat-diamond. If you can get up there, you can actually start playing the game it was meant to be played. Otherwise you can join a team and learn with them : )

Best supports to climb on: ana, bap, zen.
Best DPS to climb on: hanzo, echo, reaper, widow, ashe, mccree
Best tanks to climb on: roadhog, zarya

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If you’re a Support player, I can’t recommend enough that you watch specifically ML7’s unranked to GM’s.

They’re actually 100% educational and very informative. Definitely the best guides out there for Support.

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To me, OW is The Most Noob Friendly Multiplayer FPS Ever, because I’ve been trying to enjoy the genre since Halo started and everywhere I went was like walking into a brick wall of other players and never having an opportunity to learn - until Overwatch. Somehow.

This took like six months, really, but my advice to noobs is this: main Mercy to start. Help your team - the objective is to get wins. She can’t miss her heals and she’s got great survivability. Practice two super important things - staying alive and helping your team, in that order. That’s how you git gud at OW. The more you die the less value you are and vice versa.

As you do this, you’ll grow to know both the maps and the ebb and flow of teamfights as supports see them.

Then practice or check out and play every character. Get to know when each feels powerful and vulnerable - this will better inform you when you go up against that hero next time. By the time you’ve finished this, you’ll know who you want your main to be, or at least your main role.

And turn off match chat. I’ve only been around it for a few weeks and I’m pretty horrified.

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