But what about how open queue made hero select/team comp a nightmare most of the time? This quote just seems kinda selfish “people could play pretty much whatever they want” that was exactly the issue. They would play whatever they wanted without any regard for their teammates, it was awful
I assure you that was entirely a hero balancing problem. Powercreep and terrible hero designs warped meta so much that players began crutching too much to OP sustain comps.
All those players claiming to be victims complaining about other “selfish” players just because they didn’t play their preferred heroes/comps. But hardly any of those control freaks who cared so much bothered to take action themselves to control the people in their own matches. The devs gave players plenty of ways to form pre-made groups but players preferred to keep blaming randoms for their losses despite higher ranked players managing just fine. Nobody whined about 3+ dps comps above 3K SR for good reason. Because those players knew how to adapt without crutching on to barriers or excessive healing. This is coming from a flex player who filled all the time. Role queue was mostly responsible for ruining multiple roles for me, and other flex players as well.
The answer wasn’t restricting what players could play by forcing set roles. The solution was balancing the game so that more hero compositions were viable outside of 222/123 comps.
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This game could have 500 players and the Blizzard knights would still be defending it. Halo Infinite still has its defenders when it doesn’t even have enough players left to find a ranked match.
Overwatch 2 is not doing well. It’s stuck in that weird place where it’s been left in the dust by every popular game out there but it’s not quite dead enough for Blizzard to hit the big red button yet.
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What about hero balancing would have changed hero select/team comps being a nightmare because everyone just picked what they wanted without any regard for their team/teammates?
That’s one way you could frame it… but you could also say that the players who just picked whatever they wanted with zero regard for their teammates were selfish since this is a team game. This isn’t all about one player or what they want/think. This is a team game where you’re supposed to work together. Open queue allowed people to totally ignore working together and to just do whatever they want.
That’s a very optimistic view you have on what was possible balance-wise. I don’t know how they could have balanced the game to make any and all team comps viable with any and all heroes without making Overwatch a game with cookie cutter similar heroes. There are just way too many differences between heroes to make just anything work. You need some kind of structure for a team comp to work assuming teams are evenly matched. Two evenly matched teams where one has 6 dps and zero tanks or healers is not going to beat an evenly matched team that has Tanks/Supports and DPS too. That was the problem with open queue.
I’m telling you that teams that only have one support, three supports, or even no supports should still be able to win matches given the amount of effort those players put in. If one of your teammates is getting hard countered then swap to deal with those problem enemies yourself, that was the beauty of open queue. Swap to any hero or role you want, assuming that hero wasn’t already taken.
There was indeed selfishness on both sides. But like I said, at least the OQ format gave players more agency to control their match quality than RQ which grossly limited comp variety and the amount of heroes each player could select, while putting more responsibilities on each individual player.
You and I both know this problem was still very present in RQ. Moving away from OQ didn’t solve that issue. I already told you what did. Forming pre-made groups: Playing with friends, requesting to stay as group with randoms, LFG, etc. For the players who couldn’t handle not having a certain number of tanks or supports on their team they should have used those features more.
That wouldn’t ever be possible given the absurd amount of hero combinations out there. But winning without having a tank or support was very possible in the past and could have been made more viable if the devs didn’t destroy their game with idiotic balance and forced role formats.
I already told you the problem with OQ was the lack of balance which is precisely why 6 dps was at a massive disadvantage against a mixed role team. The support and tank roles at 2016 launch were completely alien to modern tanking and supporting. If the devs were smart enough to hard nerf barriers and rework all the supports added to the game since Ana so that they weren’t OP, then yes I am confident that a team of 4 or 5 or 6 dps could beat a team with tanks, dps, and supports if those players pushed themselves. I have done it before with randoms multiple times in comp. I’m just going to remind you that main tank + off tank + double support cookie cutter comps were a result of Ana being added to the game. Widow, Dive, and Ana have always been oppressing the game but the devs refused to nerf them for years and had more interest powercreeping everyone else to the point where we got stupid GOATS, and then double barrier, role queue, and then 5v5. The nonsense never ends. Go through my list I linked you again and tell me that all those awful changes since the original OQ were somehow worth it.
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Senior player here
Competitive was bad and unbalanced back in 2017 but BY FAR better than the current competitive situation
“Should be able to win” doesn’t mean it’s not a massive uphill battle.
Sure you can win with 0 supports, or 0 tanks, or 0 DPS, but you can technically also win with throwing teammates, that doesn’t mean it’s not ruining the game or something that should be accepted.
There was a lot of ugly with open queue.
What do you mean both sides? Only caring about what you want to play is obviously selfish, but what is selfish about working together with your team?
And how can you guarantee that players work with their team in open queue? You can’t. At least in role queue you guarantee that on some basic level due to them being locked into a role that they’re supplying their team with something from a given role, like you may not get the Tank your team would prefer to have, but at least you’ll have a tank. In open queue you can’t even guarantee that you’ll have a role in the first place.
I think role queue gives each player far more agency to control their match quality compared to OQ where you had no clue if you could actually play the role/hero you wanted to play or be forced to fill another hero/role because teammates either picked your hero or that role is already full of players and picking another hero in that role would be putting your team at a disadvantage (like 4 teammates picking DPS and then you also wanting to play DPS, not good)
There is a big difference between being able to pick any hero and any role with zero regard for your teammates in open queue and being committed to a role guaranteeing your team has the benefit of that role regardless of what hero you pick (for example, no matter what support you pick your team is still guaranteed that you’ll be playing a support. Or no matter what Tank your teammate picks your team is still guaranteed to have a tank)
Something being “very possible” (which really means rarely possible assuming teams are evenly matched) doesn’t mean it’s actually a good chance. It’s “very possible” to win with a thrower on your team, that doesn’t mean throwers aren’t ruining the game.
It’s like saying it’s “very possible” to win playing with just one hand, or with a blindfold on, that doesn’t mean you should subject your team to that unless they’re okay with it. This is a team game.
But you didn’t explain how the game could have been balanced with Open Queue. You’re just using vague terms and saying “just do this” without specifics. “just hard nerf barriers” “just rework all supports” but you’re not actually explaining what that would look like
How would barrier tanks work if their barriers are hard nerfed? Their barriers are how they’re able to tank.
How could all supports be reworked?
It’s very easy to say without explaining and proving it would work.
How is it ruining your game if you can fill those missing responsibilities yourself? Or queue with a friend who could fill? By your own logic role queue would makes things worse off because players aren’t able to make up for teammates who aren’t contributing. Which was my personal experience with role queue.
I’m telling you that the devs should have done the exact opposite of what they did and balance their game so players would stop crutching on high healing or overtuned barriers. That way those diverse matches wouldn’t involve such uphill battles as you described.
I saw far more ugly in role queue, because it removed even more player agency. There is a reason “___ diff” toxicity erupted right after role queue happened.
The people who accuse randoms of not working with the team simply because they are not playing certain heroes or roles other teammates are demanding that they play are indeed being selfish themselves. That "guarantee that players work with their team’ doesn’t exist in role queue just because teammates exist together in a 222 or 122 comp. There is no guarantee that your supports will heal or if your tank will counterswap, which goes especially so for role queue because the devs destroyed skillful matchmaking so now any clown can be matched with any skilled player for the sake of faster queue times. You are defending something that doesn’t exist. No team should ever need a barrier or two teammates pumping heals in order to win comfortably. That is a genuine example of poor balancing.
If non-meta comps bothered you so much you personally should have made a group of friends or used LFG to structure your matches instead of blaming randoms for not playing the game to your comfort comps.
How do you figure? Given that after RQ players were stuck with whatever role they queued for before in seeing the map, their teammates, or the enemy team. AND players had significantly less heroes to pick from during the match. A laughable amount really. I already gave you the solutions to that particular problem. Just don’t be anti-social. Not to mention expanding the avoid list would help with your issue as well. Role queue actually screwed up avoiding players, we would have been able to avoid up to four or even five players if the game was still open queue only. But everyone is stuck with only three avoid slots because matchmaking is already impossible with current role queue limitations.
I have no clue when you started playing OW but that is a load of bull. A team isn’t automatically well off just because it has a tank and two supports. Some heroes have terrible synergy with each other or get hard countered by certain enemies. In many cases replacing a tank with a third dps was the move if the enemy ran a bunch of tank busters. It really feels like you are blaming OQ because you ran into players locking dps and have been able to scapegoat them for your losses after all this time, but completely absolve role queue for its many many faults despite giving you trash teammates wasting role slots simply because they are always running your comfort composition. Like, just because your team has a tank or support doesn’t mean the match will be easier. This was evident to everyone playing in skilled matches in both OQ and RQ. 3+dps comps were only bad in low skilled lobbies where players weren’t good at killing and didn’t know how to adapt playstyles. The solution was always to just balance the game and to encourage players to use social features more.
When I mean very possible I mean very possible. It wasn’t difficult at all. Just out of curiosity were you a metal rank player back in the day? Because the things I am telling you are not exaggerations. Winning with randoms was easy if you were good at the game, even if one or two players were playing like clowns. Much more so than role queue matches where every player weighs down the team significantly.
The fact that you don’t believe me supports my argument that tanks and support sustain should have been nerfed and other compositions should have been made more viable than just 222/122. Because after everything that has happened with OW so far the game is in one of its worst states ever in both balance, fun and player count. I don’t get how anyone could defend it, or ignore the comprehensive list I linked earlier showing what went wrong.
Stop giving tanks more than one ability to sponge damage with like how they were at launch.
Nerf ally damage fired through barriers by about -15-20%. This will encourage shield dancing and incentivize teammates to play further away from their tanks by rewarding them with more lethality. Because the way barriers work in OW currently is tailor made for nitwits. There is no reason not to use a barrier because they are stupidly valuable. This is coming from a flex player who played a ridiculous amount of tanks.
Remove their mini-ultimates on cooldown. 30 second rez, immortality field, rework anti-nade.
Supports should only have one way to manage teammate health on their base kit, not multiple abilities.
Hard nerf healing back to launch levels with Mercy’s single target 50hps being the highest healing in the game. No more “main healers”, every support is just a support. Go back to making supports that hardly heal or can’t heal at all because the modern OW player is so dumb that they can’t even comprehend the support role without healspamming teammates.
Basically, reset all powerlevels back to launch 2016 because the current powerlevels for all roles are completely stupid and makes everyone rely on their teammates in order to secure a win. And before you tell me that this is a team based game, it was not originally this terrible. Players used to be able to make huge plays without needing to rely on broken supports.
What if I don’t play those responsibilities that my teammates are forcing me to fill? What if they don’t play any of those responsibilities either? I guess we lose because you think it’s fine that we just roll the dice with 6 DPS 
What if I don’t have a friend who fills whatever responsibility is required? That’s the issue, you never know what you’re going to get with open queue
What?? No, role queue makes it better because you’re guaranteed to actually get some sort of supply of every role. You’re not going to have zero heals, guaranteed. You’re not going to have zero tanks, guaranteed. You’re not going to have zero DPS heroes, guaranteed. In open queue there are no guarantees.
But you haven’t described how…
It’s very easy to say “just balance the game lol” without giving any input as to how it would be possible
Why are you framing it as individual players telling other people what to do?
You keep framing everything as some boogeyman player telling everyone what hero/role to play when it’s not about any individual, it’s about the team. There is nothing selfish about the teams needs.
At no point have I said that one player who thinks they’re God can tell everyone what to play
But it does, because at least on a basic level the team is guaranteed to have everyone in a role they queued for and won’t be without a Tank, DPS or Supports. In open queue you’re not guaranteed to have everyone playing the role they queued to play because they might suddenly be forced to “fill responsibilities” due to selfish teammates stacking roles that the team does not need. You do not need 6 DPS on a team. That is an option in open queue, sure, but that is not a need. What you do need is some kind of sustain so everyone isn’t running for healthpacks. Pretending like everyone running around for healthpacks is a viable way to play the game is not real. The opposing team that has supports to keep their team alive and win the game 9/10 times. “Very possible” is bs.
Having “the right tank” is less important than having a tank in the first place. In open queue you don’t even know if you’ll have a tank.
Because RQ guarantees everyone gets to play the role they want to play, not a flip of a coin of whether or not you need to fill responsibilities because you want to play DPS but your team already has 4, or that you want to play Tank but your team has 3-4 DPS and a tank with no supports etc.
There is no player agency if you’re stuck between filling by force or having a good chance of losing the game
Your team is 100% better off being guaranteed a Tank/Supports compared to not
You can keep saying that it’s “very possible to win” with 6 DPS, but that’s the load of bull. Sure, it’s possible, but extremely unlikely.
Load of bull. Unless you were versing players far worse than you, no team of equal skilled players is going to regularly lose to 6 DPS. 6 DPS means anytime someone takes damage they have to find a healthpack while the other team actually has sustain and protection from a Tank. If the team that has protection and sustain can’t chip away at a team with no heals they are not equal teams.
I think you really overestimate how many people would want to go back to not being guaranteed supports or a Tank on their team. Most players don’t want to run around for healthpacks or being totally unprotected against enemy fire.
I don’t think anything you said regarding changing tanks/supports would accomplish what you think it would.
So you are blaming your “selfish” teammates for not wanting to do exactly what you also didn’t want to do? Why didn’t you just group up if dice rolls were such a problem? Meeting people in OW was always piss easy.
Tbh Blizzard is also at fault for not encouraging flexing more and for not adding more support or tank heroes (that were actually balanced). So many bad players don’t even know that they are suppose to secure elims on support and tank which is why they avoid the roles. Making role queue the main mode the game was “balanced” around exacerbated that problem even further.
But seriously, so many of these responses from you can be answered by just telling you to group up before queueing, or just getting good. If you were good at the game and understood it you would have been able to leave the trash players locking dps behind. The OQ format was so obviously not the problem, evident by how badly RQ messed everything up without even solving the issues it was intended to solve.
You don’t have a single friend who can play a different role than what you want to play? How is that possible? Even queuing with just one other person could give you so much more control over your team’s composition.
Are you trolling me? Do you play in lobbies where non-existent players have no effect on the match? Because matchmaking is so bad that players do in fact have no healing presence, or tank presence, or dps presence on their teams despite having all roles filled. Terrible players who can’t contribute anything very much still exist and made the game harder specifically due to force role responsibilities. You are coping by pretending those same issues don’t still exist in RQ.
Why did you reply to this without reading the whole post where I did tell you what they should do to supports and tanks?
Why yes, returning hero powerlevels closer to what they were at launch when the game was actually fun and successful is the move.
You literally called other players (as well as my own take) selfish for playing with zero regard to their teammates while you complained about having to change your hero in regard to your teammates… Just because it’s a team game doesn’t mean your personal take on what your team’s appropriate comp should be was correct.
Again, you keep circling back to my main point that the devs should have made other kinds of comps more viable. What you just described is terrible game design. For one, giving every hero small out-of-combat passive regen would do wonders and remove the reliance on supports for teammate health management. Teams shouldn’t need an OP tank and two supports present on the field in order to successfully play the game at all. I know because I played this game at launch when that wasn’t a requirement to have fun and win. The amount of teammate dependence went up over the years, not down. Hell, four supports in a match of ten players is beyond idiotic I have no idea how that got green lit for the “sequel”. How on earth do you defend the current game which keeps restricting ways to play the game?
This is how I know you are a low skill player. Having a bad tank or hard countered tank is worse than swapping out that tank for a good dps. That “wrong” tank is a giant battery for the other team. Frankly, the players who don’t even know how to play the game without a tank deserve to become miserable if they can’t even bother to queue with a tank player.
Completely wrong. Because smart players picked their hero/role based around the map or their teammates or the enemy. They also changed their role across the match when needed. There was nothing stopping anyone from playing their desired role in OQ except for the occasional thrower having a tantrum. I told you so many times that you could, in fact, control your own matches in OQ but you refused to do so (probably out of laziness). Meanwhile RQ literally forces players to play the role they queued for before even entering the game, there is no agency there like in OQ. Your are so confused.
Please admit it. You were a gold player or lower before the RQ update. I’m not trying to rank shame to discredit you, but your take is so bad that you would have had to play in a ELO filled with terrible dps lockers to believe that having any crappy tanks/supports was better than having multiple good dps players on your team. 4+ dps or 4+ support compositions actually became the meta in comp in high ranks right before we got the RQ update. Nobody complained about it except tank mains upset over all the GOATS nerfs that ruined their heroes.
I told you so many times that the game needs support and tank sustain nerfed so that they aren’t as essential (OP). How is this not getting through to you? It’s like you aren’t even trying to hear it. Look at the terrible state of the game and tell us that every change so far has worked out when this game used to be filled with countless skillful and casual players. Sweaty players are dominating quickplay lobbies because they figured out what a joke OW2 balance and RQ matchmaking is. There is nothing remotely competitive about the current game at all because matches are lost the moment players are matched together.
Who cares what you think? You haven’t tried to listen to a single thing I said while having me repeat myself over and over. OW at launch didn’t demand having more than one healer per team or one tank per team in order to win. Players were winning without any of them, too. And it was more popular than the travesty we have now. Players were pulling off crazy comp variety without hero limits because, SURPRISE SURPRISE, comp variety and low sustain enabled more individual player agency. And more importantly, allowed for more fun. I’m sorry that you couldn’t handle having too many dps players on your team and had no idea how to form a premade.
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I am not saying OCE is healthy in any sense, because it isn’t.
No. That’s simply false. Just think for a second what you’re saying please.
Your point, which appears to be simply that there doesn’t need to be an especially large pool of players for the matchmaker to make matches is over simplistic at best.
The goals of the matchmaker are explained in a well known patent. You can look it up.
The algorithm will still produce matches eventually but the amount of time it will allow you to wait beyond the average is limited. Eventually it will start to prioritise you. This is the reason why you find GMs in Plat matches and one Plat in GM matches because eventually in order either to start a match or to prevent you waiting too long it needs to compromise match balance. However, that is not the only goal that “balance” is subordinate to and it’s far from as “fair” as you would imagine.
The patent is an interesting read if you can find it and from reasoning alone reveals that the algorithm would be prone to providing any given player with winning or losing streaks more often than matches with an even probability of victory.
There are also “shadow-ban” type situations where griefers and cheaters are put together.
As to matchmaking being bad because there’s less people to play, to some extent matchmaking is impaired because of a lower population, though not nearly as much as you might imagine. The number of players matters less than the distribution of available players and the fact that since 5v5 that get steamrolled typically quit together, to get mixed with five other groups of five steamrolled players to be backfilled (preferentially) into games that just got steamrolled. If you think the matchmaker is misbehaving, this is likely the pit you have fallen into.
Every once in a while, on other forums, I see people complain about skill-based matchmaking and how it’s bad.
And then I remember all the stomps I had in OW2 and how a lot of matches either wound up with my team stuck in spawn, unable to do anything, or my team just guarding the enemy spawn and standing around, killing them the second they peeked out. Neither of which was really fun.
I just wish those people I’d heard complaining about SBMM would have given it a shot to see what happens when the game just throws a random assortment of people onto a team and every match becomes lopsided.
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No, there’s a difference between “not wanting” and “not capable”
Not having the skills or practice to play Tank or Support while the entire team has gone DPS means every player is stuck with the choice of “we lose” and “forced to fill” which is not a fun choice. That is the problem with open queue. Not having anyone queue for a role also means no guarantee that you’ll have someone who is capable of doing a particular thing. If no one wants to or no one can play Tank because it’s open queue then suddenly the team has to find some bizarre way to win without one which is very unlikely against any evenly matched competent team.
You simply fail to see the problem.
You can’t expect every player to spend several minutes or longer to create some premade group to go against other premade groups. You can however just play open queue.
You make every excuse possible for open queue being awful. Even if I have a friend who can play support while I play DPS doesn’t mean we’ll have a Tank which means it’s open season because we have no defenses. Good luck approaching anything with Widow/Ashe/Hanzo just laying down fire and you have no way to block it
Because what you’ve said is not proven to actually be balanced.
Yes
When did I ever say I’m the one person deciding “what the appropriate comp” is? Or that any one person is?
No, what I’ve described is an issue with open queue. Your ideas are terrible game design. You have a delusional take.
Ditto lol. You can cry for eternity, role queue is going nowhere.
Oh i know I was just agreeing and confirming based on my own experience
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I love how people are like “Would you prefer 5 minutes queues like in OW1?” when I’m getting 7 minute queues NOW.
Not me, I never wait more than a minute and a half for any role most of the time.
Lucky you, meanwhile
https://imgur.com/uqqf6y1
Please, I’m begging you to use your brain. You keep claiming that no team can win without a tank which is already complete bull, even after I told you that the game’s balance should have been fixed so that low skill lobby teams could play without one and succeed more viably. I am genuinely shutting down your sorry excuse with my suggestion for the devs to just balance their game. But oh right, you BS some nonsense about how I don’t understand balance despite the fact that you were a hardstuck wood rank player who doesn’t even understand how to play tank or support themselves while I could fool around and reach GM without needing aim. You keep replying and making a fool of yourself here because I already proposed what should be done to stop you from whining about not having competent tank or support players on your team. Stop making a fool of yourself.
… Newsflash, the OW team has only proven themselves to be incapable of balance since the game first launched. Not one single patch has ever given us roster balance. Role queue didn’t fix it. 5v5 didn’t fix it. Of course what I suggested earlier hasn’t been proven, because it hasn’t been put in the game to be tested! Do you listen to yourself?? What you said isn’t even an argument. Meanwhile asking for heroes to be returned to previous powerlevels for when the game actually had success and was more fun is based by some actual merit. The game as it currently stands is hated by most to the point where shills like yourself had to make a new account to defend it.
Nobody is selfish for not catering to your personal comfort comps. I guarantee that I filled heroes and played more selflessly as a team player than you ever have at this game. Stop scapegoating other people and OQ for you not getting an easy-mode comp like a child and try taking responsibility once in your life for your lost matches.
When you said winning was very unlikely if your team didn’t have a certain number of tanks or supports. I didn’t claim you to be the only person doing it but you still did. You held that expectation and blamed the OQ format for your own inadequacies instead of actually just getting smarter like every decent OW player did. Nor did you demand appropriate balance from the devs so that your teammates could win more with 3+ dps comps.
Which I already addressed actually just stems from terrible balance, not because players could pick from any role during a match. You keep losing this one-sited argument by pushing the fault to OQ when RQ has the exact same issues because teammates don’t automatically start sustaining their teammates appropriately just because they are playing a tank/support hero.
You really got me. Said the loser who has to keep getting corrected, boogiemanning a more popular mode because they didn’t know how to make friends or play anything else but dps in wood tier lobbies.
If you are literally complaining about not having supports to spam healing on you while the other team does than you are pointing out a fault in bad game design. The lack of self awareness you have is just…
Yet OW2 is already losing massive amounts of players despite relaunching and going f2p. How odd. It’s almost as if some aspects of their main mode make the game substantially more unfun and too restricting. You really don’t think that the devs should consider the classic version of the game that had better balance and good matchmaking? Is sticking with RQ or its countless issues that millions of players hate worth it if it means that you can’t blame your losses on not having a tank? lol. It’s been over four years it clearly doesn’t work and won’t suddenly start working now, especially after almost all the players have been driven away thus destroying matchmaking further.
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Quoted for truth.
I dont know why people have so much confidence that Blizzard is going to cling to a game state which is in playerbase decline just because.
If they believe that a classic mode is going to attract players back to it. They will do it. Simple as that.
Remember WoW classic? “You think you do but you actually dont”. The result? They did wow classic simply because it led to profits.
For an Overwatch classic mode, In terms of development is just numbers to be changed since all assets are there already.
If they believe that sacrificing their employes to an elder lovecraftian entity will give them more profit. They will do it.
They dont cling to those decisions, they will revert it if they believe it will lead to profit. Some of the playerbase is more loyal to these changes than the dev themselves. The devs answers to the higher ups, they have no emotional attachment to 5v5, only some people here have it.
Can anyone here say with a straight face that 5v5 (or as some call it, Ow2) is working? That everything is fine and dandy with the franchise?