TLDR down below
Overwatch 1 designs after Overwatch 2 vision is released
- Will this community migrate when the changes happens? OW1 is slated to also adopt the 5v5 change.
Fundamentally the game won’t have changed toooo much but much of the playstyle for tanks will. If its not how people enjoyed playing Hog, Zayra, D.Va, Hammond, etc. will these players still want to play those heroes? They’ve adjust the newer map designs to compensate for the change to 5v5 but what about the original maps? The devs already mentioned they were debating if they were going to to have to steer the players into a different playstyle for the heroes but what happens when your D.Va is diving into their team and you’re on Temple of Anubis? She’s not like Winston with a bubble that others can all benefit from. Should the D.Va player change their strategy, swap to a different tank (lawl yeah right), or will the devs have to update all the original maps to add additional cover like they’ve designed into their new maps?
Queue Times
- 5v5 isn’t going to fix queue times. There’s this phenomenon know as generated demand aka latent demand.
On the surface it makes sense to believed that if you increase the supply of something, you should meet the demand but with this phenomenon as we increase the supply the demand grows. In real life example of this is when they increase width of roadways to reduce traffic congestion they were surprised to find out this didn’t fix congestion it actually made it worse.
"The concept is called induced demand, which is economist-speak for when increasing the supply of something (like roads) makes people want that thing even more.*"
"it is only in recent years that social scientists have collected enough data to show how this happens pretty much every time we build new roads."
How this applies to Overwatch:
Eliminating 1 tank per team doubles the amount of available tanks ready for queue which is a plus thus a shorter queue time. Eventually more tank players and supporter players will go “Oh cool I can’t finally play dps again and not wait forever.” Considering DPS is the MOST popular role in the game as well as the most relatable role for veteran FPS players, people returning or joining the community will most likely be dps players. Soo we’ll be back where we started, complaining about queue times because the more room there is for people to queue for dps the more people that will queue for dps.
Afterthoughts:
If this doesn’t pan out the way they intended, there’s a low probability of this being reverted back to 6v6 and we’ll have to complain about it forever like mercy mains lol.
The Inevitable Power Creep:
Overwatch 2 is going to be more skill based than Overwatch 1. The writing is on the wall. The smaller teams hold you more accountable for your actions. The 1 tank creates more room for mid/long range heroes to be great when there’s less likely chase that the tank’s going to dive them. They wouldn’t dare nerf Widowmaker & Hanzo to no longer get 1 shot headshots. So where does that leave the closer range or dive characters like Symmetra, Reaper, Tracer, Genji, Sombra etc? Are the dev’s going to make them more impactful to match the presence of the mid/long range meta that’s coming? I imagine that’s part of the reason they mentioned moving Symmetra back into the support role. She’s more usefully as a support in a 5v5 comp than as a dps. Honestly I feel like the 5v5 changes alleviates a some issues while presenting a lot of other unforeseen issues that the dev team just can’t predict.
Remember the changes the game’s gone through that seemed the most predictable:
- Duplicate picks in competitive (2 Reinhardts)
- Mercy being able to resurrect her team after the other team exhausted their c/d.
- Attempting to balance with zero restrictions to team comp. (3 Supports & 3 Tanks is unbeatable)
- Releasing a hero to counter a broken meta in the game rather than balancing. (Baptiste)
- New release hero breaking the game and creating new issues. (Doomfist, Baptiste, Brigitte)
With a track record like above, why should we have faith that this 5v5 change is going to roll out smooth?
TLDR;
- 5v5 isn’t going to fix queue times because more dps player will show up once the queue time’s down, which will increase the queue times again.
- 5v5 is going to alienate some players who liked old Hog, D.Va, etc. and OW1 isn’t going to be a safe retreat because it will also implement 5v5.
- 5v5 is going to over-tune the heroes and power creep will happen. (1 less tank -> More freedom for long/mid range heroes -> Close range champions needing a buff to stay relevant)
- The Dev’s have failed numerous times, I have no faith they won’t do the same with 5v5 and I’m not sure we should have faith they won’t based on their track record.