❌ OWL could disallow GOATs if needed

General Discussion
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Updated post, reduced it to only 1 rule change.

Was discussing it in another thread, that timing for fitting in a critical patch to stop OWL season 2 from just being an “eSports Shooter without much Shooters” in about a month and a half is probably too narrow.

But rather than the devs making massive fundamental changes to gameplay balance, without much time to really think it out, there is a much easier way. And it’s not hero bans.

Just rewrite some of the code in the hero select screen, and put in Role Limits:

  • 2 Healers maximum per team.

Team Fortress 2 is perhaps the closest game there is to Overwatch. And they have limits in their 6v6 tournaments.
I.e. 2 max Scouts, 2 max Soldier, 1 max Demoman, 1 max Medic etc.
https://wiki.teamfortress.com/wiki/Standard_competitive_format

Seems like this would be a much safer and easier way to solve the GOATs eSports issue, without some rushed extremely volatile balance patches.

Postscript about Hero Bans

I think Role Limits is preferable to Bans.

That said, a ban system could work with the current hero roster. As long as Winston/Rein and maybe Orisa are unbannable. Those are the key heroes for Dive/Deathball/Bunker.

Otherwise we technically have enough offtanks,offhealers,mainhealers,damage, that you could ban any 2 of them and still have a decent functioning version of all the main composition types.

But I think a lot of pro teams would hate practicing on certain comps and heroes, only to have a key part of it get banned.

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It’s like hero ban. It will never happen.

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I think that this could still restrict the creativity of some teams. What if they wanted to run a dive+hammond, with Mercy, Ana, Lucio? They couldn’t, despite the fact that it isn’t GOATs.

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I think GOATs already heavily restricts what types of compositions will be used by teams that will play whatever they need to, to win.

It’s really more of a qualitative business question of if the devs want their spectacle eSports shooter to feature almost no DPS, when they are trying to shine some prime time light on it.

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TF2 is probably a bad example to go with, because TF2 competitive has the most stale meta of any game ever.

Outright banning any potential setups just to avoid having to balance the game is pretty dumb.

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If game balance has degraded to the point that such a thing would be necessary, then the rather obvious preference should be to improve the game balance instead of adding rules to bypass it.

They branded the tournament as “Overwatch League.” If Overwatch isn’t good enough for its self-titled league, then the league isn’t ready to run and should probably be postponed until it is.

(Not that I think Blizzard is necessarily opposed to running another GOATS League)

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Who cares about OWL tho. And the game is nowhere near balanced to begin banning heroes.

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Goats is the most boring to watch thing I have ever seen… (I watched the Pacquiao/Mayweather fight and was still less bored).

They are going to stamp it out.

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I think you can’t balance a widely successful commercial game, by designing it exclusively for the top 0.0001% of players.

And that putting additional rules on tournaments, to keep things interesting, is pretty common practice.

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I wouldn’t like this. Even if GOATS goes away, it will be replaced by a new meta and everyone will complain about it instead.

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The problem doesn’t only apply to OWL. OWL players are playing the same game we are, just with a lot more team coordination and skill, and the problem here has nothing to do with either of those.

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It’s really a choice between:

  • eSports with very few DPS
  • eSports with DPS

One of those two choices is obviously better than the other.

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I made a very similar post to this, but my idea was slightly different. Same concept though. I think they just need a minimum and maximum for each role.

  • DPS - 3 max / 1 min
  • Tank - 3 max / 2 min (some argued for 3 max / 2 min - either way really)
  • Healer - 2 max / 1 min

It would work. Don’t get hung up on the exact numbers, think about the concept. It can work.

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Yup. That’s the post that got me thinking in this direction.

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I think minimums would be better: at least one hero from each role. You could still do some pretty varies comps with that.

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Even that would work. It would prevent 3/3 comps. Personally, I would like a cap of 3 and a min of 1. That way you don’t have quad anything comps either because those are also terrible in many ways.

But conceptually, it sounds like you agree that some form of boundaries on the roles could improve the game. The exact numbers can be worked out by the dev team and can even be tweaked. The concept is good though.

Even if it was just minimums of 1 each, then that would still be an improvement to the game.

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It’s not a ban. It’s toooootally different from a ban.

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It’s not, though. You’re just banning compositions instead of specific heroes.

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Which is OK to avoid silly comps like GOATS.

I personally believe the game would be in a much better state if each team mandatorily had at least one hero from each class.

In any case I think Lumin’s idea is the best.

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Not really, it’s banning creative comps just to cover up bad game balance.

1 Like