Every time an update comes out (recently with Cassidy) OW restarts the Rolodex of daily games and time and time again Total Mayhem is last on the list. I can’t remember when the last time it was in rotation. I am a HUGE OW fan but it drives me crazy that they seem to seriously hate TM. Why? Put it - along with Low Gravity, and others like for some reason Capture the Flag modes - on permanent. Put them in their own little home called “Classic Modes” or something like that and strip XP gains down by 90%. They’re just for fun and y’all make OW less fun when it’s taken away.
Might as well just create a TM custom game then.
I’d like to see the numbers of who plays what modes tbh, TM doesn’t seem that popular, but the few who like it are very vocal.
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Like mystery heroes, I’d bet the popularity would rise if they did just a little bit more balancing. Some heroes are just anti-fun in TM as they are today.
Custom games dont have matchmaking which is an enormous problem for a mode like that. Also as the server changes owners, people like to throw in their own rules. “Oh I think Sombra ruins this mode, lemme just disable her” etc.
TM is easily one of the most popular modes in the game. When they did a poll a few years back it was more popular than everything but mystery heroes (in the arcade). Queue times are always extremely fast.
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Here are the deets to why Total Mayhem is more out of favor with the devs.
The problem with that mode is the fact that it doesn’t play like it was originally designed for back when the game first launched. Way back in 2016 (back when the mode was simply called “Arcade”), there were no hero limits, and there was no Sombra, no Doomfist, and no Ana (all of whom badly disrupt the gameplay in that mode). I remember before they made the change to Ana’s sleep dart cooldown adjustment in the mode I would completely stop a player indefinitely because I could non-stop sleep them into ragequitting.
I do speculate (but have no evidence to confirm) the mode will very likely be permanently retired (from matchmaking mode options) as alternative causal gameplay in Hero Missions PVE will attract a lot of the chaos that Total Mayhem which was originally designed for. Overwatch PVP is steering toward to being a more competitive game, and the more casual aspect seems to be shifting to PVE. I understand that is not going to make some players happy, but that is the decision of Blizzard.
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I don’t think PvE and total mayhem fill the same niche at all. PvE is all about being able to feel powerful without other players stopping you. Total mayhem is about a giving up control for wacky bs.
Like your quote said, they are probably hoping that modes like total mayhem will live on in the arcade.
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If they got rid of it I doubt I’d return very often at all. The normal values are just unfun to me most of the time nowadays, for a variety of reasons.
I used to be fine with it and played QP; but that got boring after a while. I then encountered Arcade and the fun of Mystery Heroes - but again, I got sick of that. Eventually the fun of the TM and NL card made its way into my view and I stuck with that for my entire playtime since; until I dropped NL due to the obnoxious state of it and default values. Now I just cannot stomach more than a small handful of games with normal values and refuse to stay on unless TM is up.
I also like CtF… but that isn’t very common at all (and is usually locked into one map cards…). You’d think an actual UNIQUE mode would have a perma-card, right?
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TM maybe shows up once in the rota whenever seasonal modes are out. This is most likely due to the fact of:
1 permanent DM slot
Mystery Heroes
QPC
Event card
Competitive arcade flavor of the month
Casual version of the same mode…
…all restricting the arcade screen to only one rotating card, maybe two. It’s rng with the only criteria apparently being that it can’t be the same as it was the day before.
Or maybe they do really take out the TM/No Limits card to make way for the comp mode.
Everyone has their own level of like or dislike for TM. The creator of it also has his own opinion of it. All of those opinions are great and valid, but at the end of the day people like TM. Yes they are vocal about it, but for every vocal person going to forums like this or Twitter to complain, there’s a thousand people sitting at home wishing these modes were on permanent rotation. So like the modes or hate them …TM, LG, even CtF, they’re beloved by fans still tinkering around with loot boxes waiting for OW2 - why not just make us all happy and make them a permanent slot like MH? No personal preferences - or even the opinion from the all mighty creator of total mayhem himself - changes the fact that these modes are fun and we OW fans are asking for them. Loudly perhaps.
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Why Jeff say it like that total mayhem is more competitive than whatever comp is
Every time there’s an event me and 30 other people in our mayhem group don’t even play bc there’s no fun in the base game our group has gm players we can’t just host customs bc everyone will leave and no XP is a turnoff
So here we are again another event no mayhem we aren’t playing and since we are all gold border 3+ we have 10000s of credits so we just buy the skins and ignore the game till the event ends playing other things
They don’t want you to have fun, they want you to be a sweaty tryhard so their cringe eSports scene doesn’t die. The brass at Blizzard absolutely hates casual players because there’s no big money to be made from them.
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+1 for Permanent Mayhem please.
Reasons I play TM:
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Regular Overwatch, your characters have unbearably low defense and dying is extremely common, and getting rolled once the other comp is together is not fun at all. It’s hard to fight back once there’s momentum. You have to be a competitively tight team. But not all players want this.
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Custom games have no queue power so nobody wants to set up a custom game there. It’s rare to keep 12/12. No dedicated servers exist. So many problems with the dev’s recommendation. If a dev wants to silo a game mode into a crappy custom game workflow, the mode will die and people will just find something else.
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The post-launch characters that were released solely to break basic game abilities are to blame and not the mode.
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To those like me, the mode is the most fun there is, and people who play it don’t have tight expectations of performance.
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It’s faster-paced.
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You live-longer.
I recommend:
OW continues to make broken post-launch characters, just clouding it up. Kill-off or let users vote on characters to remove before the match starts. (Seriously, kill off Sombra and Echo, they ruin the game)
They should just make all Arcade modes selectable, like TF2 always did.
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I really hope you’re wrong in the long run, otherwise I’m gonna need something else to scratch the itch TM gives me.
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Finally someone said it.
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+1 on the cringe from their ESports. I don’t identify with any of it, and I’m a different demographic player. I want intense gameplay without hiding behind a shield and ducking the whole game.
I HATE the focus on competition. The competitive matches are decided by flukes, random occurrence, ironically similar to their decisions with the game and the arcade rotation. No direction.
Snubbing mayhem during these unlikable events boils my blood.
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