Overwatch? Is A Team Based Game?

General Discussion
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Overwatch is a team-based multiplayer first-person shooter

This is a phrase a lot of you seem to get hung up on. A lot of you seem to think that because the Blizzard marketing team came up with a very good, if inaccurate, description for the game that it must be so.

Just one problem. It’s a lie.

Yeah, you play on a so called “team” but as I’ve stated before on these forums, wearing the same colored shirt as 5 other strangers does not make you a team.

but Frostbite, the internet tells me a team is
a group of players forming one side in a competitive game or sport

Well Coach Frostbite is here to tell you different.

[Removed by Forum Moderator for toxicity and inappropriate reference.]

As defined by Professor Leigh Thompson of the Kellogg School of Management " a team is a group of people who are interdependent with respect to information, resources, and skills and who seek to combine their efforts to achieve a common goal".

A group does not necessarily constitute a team. Teams normally have members with complementary skills and generate synergy through a coordinated effort which allows each member to maximize their strengths and minimize their weaknesses.

Yes, that’s lifted from Wikipedia. It’s a much truer to life definition of a team. The emphasis is mine.

All of those characteristics of a team are things that simply are not possible to achieve in the course of a 20 minute match, let alone in the 35 seconds or so it takes to select your character.

Wanting to be part of a team and to engage in proper teamwork is a noble endeavor, truly it is. It’s just not actually possible in random public matches.

Now, on to the lie.

This game launched with exactly one team building feature… the friends list.

That’s it.

The game launched and the only way to create and grow a team was to find one tolerable random at a time, send a friend request, hope they accepted, and then try your best to gel with them in future matches while at the same time trying to add more pieces. Except the pieces live in different time zones, work different schedules, and don’t fit with each other because the picture on the puzzle box is the same but some are from the 1000 piece version and some are from the 20 piece version you buy for your 2 year old nephew.

It launched with hero stacking because everyone wanted to play who they wanted to play even if someone else was already playing that character.

It launched with no competitive mode to even try to ingrain players with the idea that winning as a team could be important.

It launched as a free for all that happened to have a glowy square somewhere on the map that everyone could congregate around to kill each other more efficiently.

This was never a team based game. It can be played as a team, if you do all the work to build one, but only the very best are willing to do that. You certainly aren’t willing. If you were you’d have done it by now.

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It is a team game.

Teamwork beats everything in this game, you cannot do well if youre missing even 1 person. You can’t hope to do much without people to back you.

You just made cryptic and vague points that didn’t actually justify your claim. Seems your pretentiousness got the better of you

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https://thumbs.gfycat.com/EnchantingExemplaryHoverfly-max-1mb.gif

I always found strange to balance around pros, since they work and train together becoming real team. Meanwhile we see 11 others first and probably last time in our lives and somehow we are considered team.

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It’s funny that I never see this argument when people talk about one of the flaws with LFG being that it pairs you with 6 stacks

It’s never 6 randos doing exactly what you’re doing and not really a team…it’s ALWAYS 6 people with extensive play history together :thinking:

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and this is exactly why i don’t play ranked, if i would play rank i would play with my friends that i know i could actually form a team with and practice with etc.

but now i’m just playing quickplay doing fun things with a big varied set of characters and abilities while watching people trip over each other because it’s fun to see, and i just want to relax a little.

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I wish they would bring No Limits back more often. That was the real Overwatch, imo. People feel obligated to hero stack there now because its so rare. Shame.

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All your recent threads are doing is proving you are part of the problem that has lead to MANY of us wanting a role que.

…

So basing picks off a mix of strengths and synergy isnt possible? strategizing and working together to try and win a game isnt possible? Using combos/peeling etc must not be teamwork either, ok i guess its “NoT a TeAm GaMe”.

Its a team game plagued by individuals who dont care unfortunately hense the need for role que and guilds. Only the team oriented players actually know the potential of overwatch as a team game.

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Totally agree.

When i first bought the game i played a ton of qp, added people to my friends list and everything.

Once i felt ready for comp

A. No one wanted to play competitive in a group and people said its always better to solo.

B. The leaderboards are lists of individuals.

C. There wasnt a separate team queue, which when i first clicked the glaring purple competitive button i was expecting it to go to another menue to pick soloq, and one for group finding / team queue. Nope, got thrown right into a match. I was rather bewildered.

Still confounding to me why we dont have teambased competitive mode and leaderboard, a true team/guild/clan system, and have to rely on third party apps like battlefy/guilded/discord/reddit to find teams and play scrims in custom games.

Even gw1 competitive had true teamplay and leaderboards. And they called soloq “random arenas” and you wouldnt be ranked there, because… Well… Youre not really a team competing… Youre just playing with random people with little to no coordination.

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It is a team game, however we have to have realistic expectations.
Expecting the MMR to cater personal preferences and make 6 random dudes solo queueing “a team” comparable with 3 stacks that are friends and play together often, is simply absurd.

Whats next, complaining the sky is blue? Cmon man …

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Its a team game, but you dont control the whole team, just like RL. Just because people dont do what you say or do what you think they should be doing doesn’t make them less of a teamate, imo.

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You misunderstand the point. Picking characters to account for the strengths and weaknesses of the other characters is super easy.

Accounting for the strengths and weaknesses of your team, of the actual human beings involved, is not. It’s simply not doable in such a short time. That’s why real team play is not possible.

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Ok we didn’t need a college essay. And no, it is a team game.

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I don’t get what point this is trying to make.

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This is your fourth topic about 2-2-2 lock, but at least you aren’t trying to tell us what we want in this one. Are you trying to milk the cow for all its worth?

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It is team game and just like basketball, soccer, hockey, paintball, etc., there is organized play and unorganized play. You can play in an official league where there are set teams, regular practices, etc., or you can just head down to the local gym, field or rink and join a pickup game.

Will a pickup game of basketball down at the local Y look as smooth and polished as an NBA game? Of course not. But it’s still basketball and it’s still a team sport.

FWIW I win more than I lose when I LFG 6-stack so there must be a lot really, really bad 6-stack teams w/extensive play histories out there. :wink:

And it’s not like LFG is the only place mismatches happen. I was watching Surefour’s stream a while back and he solo-queued into a team that also had three Seoul players (I think it was Fissure, Fits and Michelle). So that’s 4 OWL players plus two randos against a team of 6 randos. Guess how that went down?

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OP writes a wall of text just to say they’re a terrible sportsman and teammate.

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Let’s take this reasoning to it’s logical extreme.

4 year olds playing on a playskool hoop. Still playing basketball? Or are they just running around chucking a plastic ball and breaking lamps? Are they a team?

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Despite what you may have gone through in your last match that caused you to make this post, yes, it is a team game, where the entire team is required to succeed. Like all games, there’s variance. Maybe all of you are having a good day, and you roll the team, of vise-versa. Maybe there’s a smurf on the enemy team and their skill level is so high that they can effectively carry the team, and vise-versa. Maybe none of you are feeling good that day and you get stomped on, and vi- you get the point.

Don’t tell me to swap off Widow,
Coolbreeze

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Overwatch is a team game in the same way a single round of Mafia is a strategy game. While the same basic principles apply, the game only really starts when you know how the others in your match play.

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To the OP:

I, absolutely, I agree with you. OverWatch, for most, is a team game in the same way 10 random strangers on a basketball court say “Lets have a game. Shirts vs skins.”

Yes, these people are playing as a “team”, in the sense that 5 of them are on one side and 5 are on the other and that all 10 people know the basics of the game. But, they are not a team in the proper sense. Not like an NBA team would be. They don’t play with the same people, game after game. They dont practice with the same people, over and over to get better. Etc.

In OverWatch, it’s like comparing ladder competitive to OWL. Its just not the same thing. The teams in OWL actually play with each other, on a regular basis and know the strengths and weaknesses of each of their teammates. They’re not just six random guys thrown together at the last minute.

But, thats what the rest of us deal with. Bronze to GM, 99% of players are not playing with a real team. We’re playing with 5 random strangers that we hope will do everything properly. But, in reality, that isn’t the case. You get people who will throw, leave, treat escort like it’s Team Deathmatch, avoid grouping up no matter how many times you ask, etc.

You dont see this in OWL, because they play a different game than we do. They play OW as the Team Based FPS its supposed to be. The rest of us? Well, we’re just playing pretend, really. Most of us are not experiencing OverWatch the way it is meant to be played. And thats just fact.

And, it goes further than just 2-2-2 or not. The very issue lies in the people playing the game and random way im which we are all thrown together. You cant put six strangers in a room and expect them to play like a proper team. You just can’t. Its unreasonable and its one of the reasons why the Comp ladder is as screwed up, as it is.

OverWatch’s style of play, at its very core, is flawed. You can’t have a team-based game without a proper team. Simple as that.

Exactly. They are playing a different game than the rest of us are.

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