Party Frames might be a huge W

General Discussion
41

What is unrealistic about it?

Players will still develop their skills and gamesense over time. This change will help give them more information in real time. I think this helps newer/less experienced players most, but it will even help higher skilled players keep track of their teammates status. It will help coordinate pushes if you know your team is all full HP & what their ult status is without having to do a 360 to look at your teams HP or open the scoreboard for ult charge.

It’s about time! You’ve been missing out on all my spot on hot takes.

Agreed! It’s literally just putting the info on your screen at all times (while not overloading your screens UI if they do it right) instead of having to tab for ult charges

This will help with teamwork coordination big time without everyone having to be on comms.

There isn’t one :smiley:

I’m also guessing it’ll be optional. If you don’t want party frames, you can probably turn them off to get rid of any potential visual clutter. Though if they do it well, it shouldn’t take up much space. Just put 4 tiny circles surrounded by HP/ult charge right above your health bar/icon in a horizontal line, boom. Now you know all of your teammates HP/ult charge at all times and won’t have to tab the scoreboard and block your entire screen to find out

You tell em :muscle:

How are party frames bloated/buggy/break the game? They’re probably going to be optional, and they could take up very little space by your already existing healthbar. It shouldn’t feel cluttered if they do it right.

I think it’s a great service to new players. This game has a pretty large learning curve and keeping track of everything can be hard. These party frames should help with that.

Seriously :laughing: What’s with all the toxicity about it? Seems like nothing but a Win.

I never gave much thought to it, but wow, I somehow didn’t see that thread. Great idea & I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a liked post.

Why is that?

I don’t think it really does that, not to any meaningful degree anyways. It’s not like players can just click portraits to heal their teammates, they still have to play the game. If anything, this just helps teams coordinate better without having to constantly have comms saying what their ult charge is, and it will help coordinate pushes knowing that your team is either full HP, or not.

4 Likes
42

I’ve been asking for this for years and years. When playing Ana, its so cumbersome going in to TAB to see if people’s ult has charged. Small icons on the lower part of the screen and your done.

43

It helps players with poor awareness of what’s going on in the teamfight. The end.

Supports need their skill floors massively increasing and do not need yet another thing to hold their hands.

44

Tbh, I think this decreases the skill floor for tank way more than support but even DPS benefits more than support. Dps and especially tanks being able to know more easily that their support is in trouble will make them far less likely to feed because they won’t get healed.

Does it decrease support skill floor? Of course it does; they can more easily see who needs healing, but support is usually the ones most in the backline anyway so it’s not really a big deal. Tanks on the other hand usually lead the charge so to speak and it can be much harder to be aware of what’s happening behind you than in front of you.

Even from the perspective that supports skill floor is too low, I don’t think this change even benefits them more than it does the other 2 roles.

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45

No, it just makes it easier to multitask. This is huge for Tracer, as her playstyle usually comes down to diving and peeling.

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46

You mean it takes so much skill to keep spamming that tab-button to check ults right? Better to just make it so it’s always available for a simple QoL change.

47

Your post reeks of elitism lol

5 Likes
48

Coming to OW1 from WoW I was kinda shocked I had to track health pools by looking at tiny, constantly moving healthbars. And god help me if the low HP target was standing behind me.

Nowadays I’m much better at it. But to have the option for these frames sounds like there will potentially be less-tunnel vision from players.

Also, the number of people who YOLO into fights when we’re down 2+ people is amazing. At least if people can see how many are dead at a glance we won’t have to rely on people noticing the killfeed.

4 Likes
49

the scoreboard lookin real good rn

50

I would’ve been open to this until the recent changes. Now I think we should keep a few things that need gamesense, especially when all you need to do for this is open up the scoreboard.

51

While I’ll never deny a party frame can be useful in the game I think It just takes out some awareness and knowledge necessary to become a good player and get better.

Its the same issue as giving every class the support passive.

I think these decisions are aimed to make the game more accesible to new players. Every choice lately has been around making the game easier, some would even say dumber. Examples of these are the respawn timer fixing so players don’t go out of base alone, extremly buffing characters like Orisa, Bastion or Torb, releasing characters like Mauga or Life Weaver, etc.

I really dont think the direction of the game is towards player base retention. It rather goes to get new ones. Which you can think is great, but its bread for today and hunger for tomorrow.

I apreciate that Aaron started the year sharing the team pov about where they want to go with the game, but I fear is not gonna be in the direction the original player base loved about the game.

Anyway, we can only wait, play it if we still have fun or move on if it just stops being overwatch and become another generic FPS.

52

That’s kind of how I feel about it. I want supports paying attention to their team and actively engagedin fights, not staring at their HP on the party frames and waiting for someone’s health to drop.

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53

I never needed something like this in the game because I have great game sense and actually keep track of my teammates health. I’m disabling it immediately because I don’t want more UI clutter.

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54

And that’s your pregorative, if you want to turn it off you can, but that’s not a reason to not have it at all.

4 Likes
55

I’m sorry, but even I have to agree that this was needed a long time ago. The default UI doens’t really give you a sense of where anyone is or anything.
I’d go even further and say there needs to be a minimap that also shows where people are so that I know when to pull back…etc. And by “people” i mean my own team–it doens’ need to show opponent’s locations as that would be unfair.

1 Like
56

Of course it is, blizzard has chosen the LiVe sErViCe model, cos of greed.

But there is one undeniable fact about LiVe sErViCeS, and that is that they live and die by there ability to attract and retain new players.

Adding a qol UI change won’t negatively effect us old hat players, because it will only display information we already have access to in the live game, the newbies will still need to develop there awareness, so they actually know what to do with this information.

57

The player frame would be awesome for… anyone.

As a support player obviously, you mostly dont have time to play a “find waldo” kind of game to check if all your teammates are still full. Not to mention that you can manage your ressources better and maybe support that DPS player that is low, stands behind you, but you still would never heal him, just because he does not press X, never goes into your LoS and you dont want to ignore the enemy.

As a tank this can also be a very effective tool! Just look at the health and then decide, “ok we can push” or “I need to protect them to give the supports time to keep the DPS up”.

Even as a DPS I think its valuable to know how damaged your tank and supports are, to know that you might play more careful, as long the other play passively until they have their health back.

In my opinion, its a new skill point, what you do with that information. The simple fact is that in such a fast game as in OW, most people dont have time to do a 360 view, especially because something is up every single second.

It was always wild, that we have the frames in PvE, but not in PvP.

Not to mention that OW is a very complex game no matter what. So having a bit of QOL would not hurt anyone.

People who are against it mostly fear that the enemy or your other mates can make better decisions and I dont know why.

4 Likes
58

Because egos are fragile, people seem to be worried that noobmaster5000 fresh from cod will be able to play ow in their games and beat them, then latch onto the new feature and blame that. for their loss.

(Seriously what’s wrong with me today I’m agreeing with poytheon and now h1story as well, next thing I know hugepick is going to come in with a scalding take and I will agree with him. I need to revoke my doomer card)

3 Likes
59

Like others said it would mostly combat tunneling and lead to better teamwork for everyone. OW is a hard game and most people forget how brutal the game is to learn if you are truly new. You have so many things to worry about, that you should not have to play a hide and see game with your own mates DURING A FIGHT to know how the game is going for you.

For such a team focused game, OW still lack a lot of team QoL features. Very glad that they stated to play around with more team focused ideas like the team respawn or now the player frames.

I am very sure most casual players YOU PLAY WITH have no idea how to look which % of ult your team mates are. This would make the game just much better.

4 Likes
60

Which while true, you have to consider if the game is currently too challenging. I don’t play league or dota because it’s absolutely overwhelming to learn. The only reason I ever got into overwatch was because I played with friends and slowly started to play by myself after a while.

More and more I think maybe it’s gotta become separate modes. For example fortnite no build as a more accessible version of the same base game. I’m not saying we have to go back to 6v6 open queue or no limits and have an overwatch classic but maybe something similar where we have a mode for the hardcore players who want all the complexity and one that removes some of the complexity and simplifies the gameplay somewhat

Or maybe all of this is an overreaction and it doesn’t significantly change the game. The passive sure but I don’t think party frames lower the skill cap of the game. It doesn’t really reduce the amount of awareness necessary to play at the top ranks whatsoever, it just makes the game a bit better in bronze where people have 0 awareness