Open Letter: Advocating for 6v6 Format in Overwatch 2

General Discussion
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Dear The Awesome Team 4,

I hope Team 4 are doing well and thriving in your endeavors to create immersive gaming experiences. As an ardent supporter and a dedicated member of the Overwatch community, I wish to express a collective sentiment that resonates with many of us – the transition from the current 5v5 format to a 6v6 format in Overwatch 2.

Overwatch has always been celebrated for its dynamic gameplay, diverse character roster, and the strategic depth it offers. It’s the unique blend of these elements that has allowed the game to occupy a special place in our hearts. However, the transition to a 5v5 format, while understood as a step towards refining the game, has led to a longing for the original 6v6 format for several reasons:

  1. Team Dynamics & Role Flexibility: The 6v6 format allowed for more diverse team compositions and strategies, enabling players to experiment and adapt to different playstyles. This flexibility is deeply missed, as it often led to unpredictable and thrilling matches.

  2. Inclusivity & Community Building: Overwatch has always been more than a game; it’s a community. The 6v6 format naturally accommodated more players, fostering inclusivity and strengthening friendships within the gaming community.

  3. Strategic Depth & Engagement: With an additional player on each team, the strategic layer of Overwatch was richer, offering more depth in terms of positioning, resource management, and tactical execution. This complexity added an engaging challenge that many veteran players cherished.

  4. Impact of Individual Performance: While the 5v5 format intensifies the impact of each player, it also amplifies the consequences of individual mistakes. The 6v6 format provided a balanced environment where individual contributions were vital, yet the team aspect remained dominant, promoting a cohesive team effort over singular performance.

  5. Nostalgia & Original Charm: For many, the 6v6 format is synonymous with the Overwatch experience. It’s the format that many of us fell in love with, and it carries a sense of nostalgia and a longing for the game’s original charm and appeal.

  6. Resilience to Meta Shifts: With more players in the game, teams can be more resilient to shifts in the meta, as they have more resources and flexibility to adapt their strategies without being overly dependent on one or two players’ roles.

  7. Balancing and Hero Design: Designing heroes and balancing the game can be more nuanced in a 6v6 format, as there’s a broader canvas to ensure that each hero’s abilities have a place and impact in the game, contributing to a richer hero pool and gameplay experience.

a. Impact on Hero Fantasy: Each hero in Overwatch is meticulously crafted, with abilities that reflect their lore, personality, and role within the team. Ana’s Biotic Grenade, for instance, is a cornerstone of her identity as a skilled and resourceful combat medic. It’s not just a healing or anti-healing tool; it represents her tactical genius in turning the tide of battle. When abilities like these are nerfed to fit into the 5v5 mold, it can dilute the hero’s core identity and fantasy. Players who have bonded with these characters and their playstyles might feel that the essence of their favorite heroes is compromised.

We understand that game development is a complex endeavor, especially when it involves a game as beloved as Overwatch. The last “directors take” had great goals and a great vision for the game which I can only see happen with going back to 6v6 format. Start the Hero Balance with the Open Queue health values and adjust when necessary or, use one the many great 6v6 workshop modes as a starting point. A test for 6v6 would be great for “Quick Play Hacked”, this test could recapture the essence that made Overwatch a phenomenon and enrich the gaming experience for our diverse player base. If it does recapture the great game, we all love it could return as a permanent mode.
The issues with 6v6 in Overwatch 1 were all balance issues that could be fixed far easier than changing all the hero’s in 5v5 to fit that mode. With all the balance issues in the game now, many of them are because of the change from 6v6 to 5v5. For in-depth information on how the issues of 6v6 could be balanced check out Samito on YouTube and other Top 500 and Pro players who have also made videos on YouTube on this topic. The group up podcast had a 6v6 Debate where many of these issues are talked about in detail by people who are top level players and they know what is best for the game more than most players.
In conclusion, while we stand by your vision and appreciate your continuous efforts to innovate and improve, we kindly urge you to consider the community’s affection for the 6v6 format. We believe that embracing this change could mark a new, yet nostalgically familiar, chapter in the Overwatch legacy.

Thank you for your attention and for creating a game that means so much to so many. We look forward to continuing this journey with you, side by side, one match at a time.

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Devs, if you reading this please just put 6v6 in arcade mode or whatever so people can get the crutches back they had in OW 1.

Some people like OP want less agency over the game and just want to blend in so they aren’t forced to notice the mistakes they make and learn from any of them.

People who enjoy 5v5 don’t want these players in their ranked games and people who enjoy 6v6 more don’t want us in their games either.

I think it’s better to just split the community up and let people play how they want to play. After all, I’m sure as long as people keep buying skins you don’t care what mode people play.

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Open Letter to 6v6 Advocates, it would be really easy to get it into Open Queue, but damn near impossible for Role Queue. If you guys put in 1% of the effort your spending on trying to get it into Role Queue, you’d actually have results by now…

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I think this is a greatly ignored point and the biggest contributor to why the matchmaking is undeniably worse in OW2 than it was in OW.

I say this as someone who genuinely likes 5v5 and wish it could work as i like faster pace, more action/ teamfights and less shields. After playing this game for 6-7 years almost daily, i can say, without a doubt, 5v5 does not work for this game. I wanted it to work, and maybe it could if the maps were made correctly for it and the balance could be honed in better than the mess it is now, but the game has been getting worse and worse -its an almost unaninous sentiment.

And the crux of why everyone semi-hates this game (its love/ hate or maybe just addiction at this point), are the seemingly forced losses/ wins or stomp/get stomped matches. Almost everyone complains about how bad more than half the matches are… 6v6 had some awful matches too, but far less of the just impossible to win matches you get in OW2. Why is it that the matchmaker seems to suck so much worse now?

Well, in 5v5 you cant play around having even 1 potato head on your team while in 6v6 you could… thats about it. You get one stinker on your team and you -dont get enough heals to survive or cant do enough dmg to win a teamfight or you, god forbid, your tank stinks -strap in for 5-10 of the most pointless minutes of your life.

The amount of a buffer having that 1 extra tank afforded the rest of the team is greatly downplayed and i dont think really understood. The game has turned into a game of chess where you start out without a bishop and a no rooks… sure you can still play, you still have 1 queen, a bishop and your pawns, but not only is the overall game harder, but also each piece on the board is way more valuable. Taking that much power out of the game makes the game much worse, less fun and less skilled/ dynamic.

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I really don’t know if you even played 6v6, because even in 6v6, you could make these big solo pop off plays, and could hard carry by yourself as much as you can in 5v5.

Let’s take Widowmaker for example, she is a BEAST in the right hands. It doesn’t even matter what format she played in. Of course, 6v6 with a widow on the opposite side is most likely going to be a nightmare, a little more so in 5v5, so it definitely isn’t a format issue. What counts when it comes to player agency… is the PLAYER, so if you want to blend in and not make mistakes, you aren’t going to learn. That’s a YOU issue.

I was personally a Genji main, and whenever I used blade by itself, I could probably secure a team fight with my ult alone most of the time, going after the supports/other dps. I have realized that even in 6v6, Genji could hard carry games by himself, he could wipe out the entire backline in the right hands (which in my case, was usually a lot because there were a lot of insane genjis hardstuck diamond for some reason).

Also, whenever I played comp back in OW1, I was yelled at probably more for making a mistake than I ever was since OW2. It could possibly be the sensitive ban system they have (i think?), but either way, mistakes in OW2 and OW1 are still mistakes, and you learn from them. Don’t forget that in OW1 there was another variable on each team that could cause you to make a mistake, so there aren’t any more mistakes in one game or the other.

What? This doesn’t make sense. I think you were trying to say that peoples’ games rely on the fact that someone wants 6v6 and someone wants 5v5? I’m really not sure what you were trying to point out here.

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Yeah, because a Junkrat tire or DVA bomb or some AOE nuke went off and it happened to kill 3 people.

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Are you talking about OW1 or 2?

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OW 1 where the map nuke went off every 45 seconds rather than every two and a half minutes.

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D.Va self destruct has one of the lowest ult costs in OW2, I’m not sure if they made it so everyone has a higher ult cost, but I feel like the amount of D.Va bombs I see is similar to OW1.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2F5vhfglefspt91.png
ult charge costs in ow2 at launch

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You are missing two points.

  1. You throw a bunch lets say micromissiles down a lane there’s simply a higher chance that more of them will land when more people are congregated.

In OW 1 you had two tanks to shoot at that gave you as much ult charge as the squishes. Tanks are easier to hit because their hitboxes are larger. It’s easier and more consistent (assuming farming an ult is your only goal) to shoot at the bigger hit box enemies.

  1. When the AOE explosion from the DVA bomb goes off because theres more possible people it can hit there’s a higher likelyhood at least one person will get caught into it.

This applies to anything AOE including healing abilities. If you are playing Brig in OW 1 you can get up to 5 other players in your aura. In OW 2 you can only get 4 plus yourself.

When I played OW 1 for 1200 hours most of what I did besides standing there and abusing the two things I just said to farm beat as fast as possible was speed boost the team forward when they were ready to team wipe with either grav or shatter.

The win condition for most fight in plat or diamond would be one of those two abilities. In higher elo like mid diamond grav + dragon was used more often while in plat shatter was a more common win condition due to it being easier to set up in those games.

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By that same logic, wouldn’t 12v12 be even better? After all, 12 players on each team allow for even more diverse team compositions and strategies and fosters more community building. Just imagine the extra strategic layers trying to organise 12 players. It’s also more resilient to meta shift and offers an even broader canvas.

Outside of nostalgia, I don’t see a single argument for exactly 6 players on each team, and I don’t consider nostalgia to be a compelling argument by itself.

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This goes for every hero in the game, which was more fun in my opinion, because ults are just fun and cool to use to swing a match in your favor. 5v5 got rid of that, and it would probably fit more in 5v5 due to the deathmatch style it has. Faster play should equal faster ults.

OW1 and 2 both do this, it is the core team play element that overwatch has, not a format thing.

Same thing as above, combining ults is a thing you can do in both.

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It didn’t. The game devolved to GOATS, and entire role was rendered irrelevant. So they modified the compositions down to 2/2/2 format, that reduced flexibility, and diversity and led to stale metagames like double-barrier and brawl compositions.

Overwatch is notorious for being one of the most toxic communities in competitive FPSes. This is not surprising when the game lacked community building systems such clans, tutorials, and general ease of play.

Game, again, devolved into a 3 tank 3 support composition, largely static with only one or two substitutions depending on the map or strategy. 2/2/2 compositions, again, didn’t fair much better eventually settling on double-barrier and brawls. Support-role saw almost no diversity (not that Blizzard did any favors here, anyway), and the Damage-role was largely seen as effectual, but largely irrelevant.

Again, no it did not. Again, game devolved to a 3 Tank, 3 Support metagame, There was no better composition, or attempts to break this mold. 2/2/2 further limited this.

Again, nope. Tank defined the compositions, and Supports were largely locked to one free substitution with Ana being far too valuable to substitute out.

Game only works when the team’s actually work to enable and actively support the Damage-role. However, the Damage-role is made too challenging, too weak and too dependent on external team mates (supports and tanks) to effectively work solo against opposing roles. This hasn’t changed in over seven years, and it is clear that the secondary impact to this was creating overpowering Tanks and Supports that could do a bit of everything while the Offense and Defense roles were simply limited to trying to get picks at a much more mechanically demanding and unforgiving rate than the other two roles.

5v5 accentuates this issue, and the map designs heavily favor sustaining power found in Tanks and Supports over the glass-cannon Damage-role.

6v6 didn’t really have problems until the 2/2/2 composition was forced onto the general playerbase. Then the perceived expectations of each role became apparent to the team, and when said team mates failed to meet expectations, quality of the matches and general toxicity amplified into its worse states.

5v5 doesn’t change that, because matchmaker was adjusted to quickly finding matches, rather than finding quality matches. It’s locked into a vicious cycle because the game’s heavy team dependencies, force a binary win/loss match-making regardless of individual skill. No matter how well you perform - whether you tower over yours or the enemy team, it didn’t matter - only wins and losses did, and you’re not skilled enough to carry an entire team to victory, you would be locked into same groupings.

That’s why they had to adjust the bell-curve shortly after launch, because they noticed a pattern that more and more players were losing the games. So they had to adjust it, but it didn’t really improve match quality, but now their data-gathering statistics more closely approximate where players stand.

Same was true in 6v6, 2/2/2 compositions. With the role-lock, you were unable to ‘flex’ into your teams other roles, to supplement or replace under-performing teammates, and keep the game from becoming a one-sided affair. Once the role locks were fully implemented, ‘flex-players’ were unable to help their team (ie teamwork) to aid or supplement compositions. This put greater emphasis on Tanks and Supports to actually perform, and if they were unwilling or unable, there was not much one could do. With the role-lock, you reduced Overwatch’s overall depth and team variance down to its two most powerful roles as being the only ones capable of making an impact, rather than on individual players.

Of course, a fundamental flaw was the inherent balance issues with the roles themselves that Blizzard never bothered to adjust or attempted to curve. A fundamental flaw in core of Overwatch’s design; those templates are still in use today, and they continue to enhance or undermine (depending on how you want to look at it) how each hero fits into the overall power scheme.

Again, this only applied to 2/2/2 compositions. For the bulk of Overwatch’s life, it was 3 tanks and 3 supports. 2/2/2 didn’t even last as long as GOATS did, let alone flexing roles.

No, the game turned into a game of Tanks and Supports, and the most popular roles, Offense and Defense, were completely irrelevant.

This basically running a full team of Queens and Rooks; pawns are never used or played.

In general, Tanks have the cheapest ultimate costs in OW1; that includes D.va’s Self-Destruct.

No, you didn’t. You either had no tanks, one tank, or three tanks. Again, 2/2/2 compositions didn’t happen until the near end of Overwatch’s end of service.

You basically pointing out a situation where the team compositions could be fluid, and not mandatory 2/2/2. Gravity Surge + Dragonstrike was practically non-existent by the time 2/2/2 rolled in, as Baptiste and Zenyatta became far more capable at nullifying that strategy.

Dilution means individual efforts would apply even less, and Tanks and Supports would come to dominate far more effectively than anyone from Offense or Defense.

It did not, it’s far harder to stop individual ultimates now. Especially those from the Tank-role.

Most players do not combine ultimates anymore in OW2.

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The game is no longer focused on teams. This is not to say teams are not great, it is just that first-person-shooter generate more income when promoting individual gameplay nowadays (see other games).

Community is good to have, but from a perspective of profits it is not something wanted nowadays. Look at the forums and how they are, just to get a feel of what “community” means in their perspective. There is a saying: divide and conquer.

True, 6v6 is way more strategic. But then again individual gameplay is more profitable.

Individual performance is much more rewarding when playing alone while forcing others to play alone too. This is the direction of the game. Impact of a player within a team is not a priority, because nowadays people would rather play alone while feeling kings and dominating others, instead of being a cog inside a team mechanism.

New players and especially whales are a huge priority. Overwatch 2 is much more different than Overwatch 1, and likely the direction is to switch away from its roots. Likely the company wants to tap into that first-person-shooter gaming market.

This is extremely important, otherwise the game would be dull. In an individual gameplay the player will buy the battlepass for instant access to the new overpowered hero. Meta will shift with every season.

This is not that relevant. Every hero is special. Balancing is done around shifting the meta and new heroes which increase sales. At the end of the day the battlepass must sell.

In my opinion this ship has sailed. PvE got cancelled, even though PvE was the justification for “2” in “Overwatch 2”.

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Rename 5v5 to “Simple Baby Mode”, limit it to role queue quickplay. Maybe put it into arcade or next to “vs AI” mode in practice.

Merge comp modes into one mode: 6v6 with no role limits and you must queue as a group of 6 players. The way competitive was originally meant to be.

Quickplay is now 6v6 open queue. The game is balanced around this mode. Most balance changes are slowly rolled back to how they were in OW1, with maybe some changes (current Rein stays, sombra debatable, dva nerfed back to OW1 launch version, etc.)

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Just make open queque 6v6 and leave that mess role lock 5v5 no one cares. We already have different health pool for tanks in open queque, just do some tweaks for open queque and we’re fine.

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I’ve been fine with NBA Jam just being 2v2, and I don’t mind OW2 being 5v5, we don’t need 15 minute queues back, imagine making a thread to directly encourage the destruction of the game we love.

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I personally vastly prefer 6v6 over the current 5v5 pay to win game we now have

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6v6 has to return.

I can show you thousands of videos in which you can see higher quality in the OW1 matches than in the current ones.

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They never should have taken out the second tank. BRING BACK 6 vs 6. I twould also be nice to BRING BACK MERCY HUGE REZ.

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