You don’t know who’s wrong or not, so trying to squelch discussion (which the devs apparently enjoy) on the basis of that is just… Pointless. Counter productive.
You’re wrong. Take the L. Learn from it. No shame in it.
Was there any feedback from the pros playing the playtest that you didnt expect?
Is there any you are already planning on acting on?
Finally, theres been a bit of talk about Zarya’s bubble cooldown in OW2 as it exists now. Has there been any talks of potential changes to this, such as an async cooldown for each bubble?
Was there any feedback from the pros playing the playtest that you didnt expect? Is there any you are already planning on acting on?
GEOFF - Yep, we had a good mix of things we expected and things we didn’t expect. Probably the biggest surprise for me was just how good they thought Sombra was in this iteration. We had been playtesting those changes for at least a few weeks and while she felt strong, she never really felt like she taking over our games or anything.
Obviously when you get her in the hands of pros with amazing game sense and coordination it makes confirming kills a lot easier. We’ve since focused a bit on her numbers and tweaked her down a bit to try to keep her under control while still allowing her new kit to play well.
Finally, theres been a bit of talk about Zarya’s bubble cooldown in OW2 as it exists now. Has there been any talks of potential changes to this, such as an async cooldown for each bubble?
I think there is a good amount of iteration to still be done with Zarya. I think Josh already touched on some Zarya stuff in another thread but I would definitely say she is not set in stone. She was always going to be a bit tricky to tweak in this 5v5 environment and im sure she’ll see some more changes over time.
I don’t think it’s about squelching discussions, more about encouraging more productive types of discussions (This obviously doesn’t apply to people who were being productive and constructive fyi)
Case in point. People were using the playtests to justify their opinions on Bastion being complete and utter trash in OW2, when the devs had already planned a load of changes for him that didn’t make the deadline.
are the devs content in how tanks performed in the pro playtest/how they play in their tests or is there the possibility for them to get more health?
does it feel like some of the tanks take damage too quickly? for example, does d.va get demeched too quickly or does it sometimes feel like a tank peeks a corner and gets instantly melted?
JOSH - We’re certainly still experimenting with many different ways to ensure that tanks are powerful and satisfying to play in this new format. One of those experiments is seeing how far we can push tank base health up before the gameplay starts to breakdown.
Some of the tank results have been surprising. D.Va specifically has ended up much more relatively powerful with only an extra second of Defense Matrix energy. She has other changes as well but that one did some heavy lifting! Roadhog as well had several experimental buffs along the lines of more damage reduction, resetting Hook cooldowns, or even being able to cleanse himself of things like anti-heal that were taken out because he ended up being just so impactful at a base level (largely due to how valuable an early Chain Hook can be in 5v5).
There are still some problematic mechanics we’re working to resolve like Orb of Discord being nearly always on a tank or Echo Duplicate choice coming down to being the best on the buffed up tanks. Generally we haven’t found tanks to be getting blown up instantly unless they’re hard overextending or aren’t working with their team at all, in which case they should be vulnerable there, but of course we’ll have to see how that holds up at the professional level.
Posts like this are completely pointless. Insulting for no reason for something that is entirely logical.
Feel free to criticize the change but criticizing the people seems immature - normally done by people that have never created something of value in their life.
Has there been any thought put in to a player select Hero Ban system, particularly with Tank heroes.
It seems almost a foregone conclusion that +3500SR lobbies are going to isolate themselves to using about 1-to-2 Tank heroes.
What’s nice though, is that since there’s only 1 Tank player per team, that there’s no need for a voting consensus.
Additionally things like a “Ban meta” can be prevented by randomly blocking one of the top 5 most banned heroes from being banned.
Or alternatively allow players to select a hero that is protected from bans, and then randomly select a hero than can’t be protected from bans.
Alternatively there could be a “soft” ban system, which only bans a hero if both Tank players agree that a hero should be banned. More of a “sporting agreement” approach to things.
Either way, it would be great if there was a way to rotate Tank usage for the top 3% of players, that doesn’t involve rebalancing the entire game constantly.
Alternatively, have Developer selected hero bans that are specific to each map. Which rotate weekly or monthly. That way the map choice rotates the heroes that are used, without blocking them entirely.
Whenever they say “in our internal playtest…” it always makes me think on how the thought about people only playing one Hero for OW1 never even crossed their mind.
Makes you wonder what obvious thing they are missing this time.
It’s not pointless. I think it’s embarassing how many times the Dev team thinks something is balanced and the second they show the pros/community we all agree that it’s entirely unbalanced. Like how out of touch with the game do you have to be to not see it. ex) Mercy rework being totally OP at launch, them not nerfing powercreep for 2 years until pros and community whined for months, etc.
I literally stick up for the OW team so much but that’s an embarrassing and consistent occurrence. And it would be fine if they would usually admit when they are wrong and fix stuff, but they are infamous for being stubborn for months on end and then finally fixing stuff that we’ve been saying for ages, but by that point it’s too late and players are disillusioned with the game and have left.
Well on that note….I forget which thread it was but I was trying to explain to somebody that “testing” is not the same thing as balancing……
“Balancing” phase happens way after and (like you are pointing out) will more than likely extend past launch……as has been the case with just about every single new hero launch for ex……
To the earlier persons point…I don’t expect everyone to like changes……but I do think it’s pretty silly to focus in on numbers when that’s almost certainly going to change (dramatically even) between now and launch (and after)…it’s called a testing phase for a reason…just need to go back through OW1’s test history to see how silly those types of opinions would’ve been back then given how much things changed in the year leading up to launched
You see, I WANT to agree with this, I really do, because you’re right. But historically when it comes to OW this is not usually the case. Numbers that are tested usually go live as is, even after great community/pro outcry.
I can think of maybe TWO changes where numbers were scrapped or changed between PTR and live in the first 3 years of the game; an Ana nade nerf and a Moth rez nerf.
They’ve been better lately, but still, I don’t have a lot of confidence