To be honest, it is probably already getting to that point where the majority of active players are adjusted.
No they haven’t; quality has been awful since post role queue tank role destruction began.
FTFY.
It certainly didn’t help, but really though, I had tons of garbo Ball players well before they started beating him with the nerf bat. It got so bad that for my own sanity, I needed to one trick Ball just to spare the team a dead weight Ball, instead they got a relatively useless Ball. But it could have been worse if it fell into the wrong hands, trust me.
They intentionally did the priority thing in order for us to get faster ques. They don’t care about our gameplay experience it’s clear as sky
Wasn’t this the whole point of the priority pass system? And for that matter, the general desire of the community as a whole? Increasing the overall number of tank players? I seem to recall a pretty strong desire from the player base wanting to decrease overall queue times for everyone else not playing tank.
When it comes to production (which OW matchmaking fits the bill as a producer of games between players of similar skill levels), quantity and quality are opposites. It should have been expected that increasing the quantity of tank players in the tank pool would result in decreasing of the overall quality of that tank pool.
“No such thing as a free lunch.”
“Sacrifice.”
etc.
I am not the least bit surprised by this outcome.
The issue is they aren’t tank players… They are flex queue players fishing for priority passes. It just so happens that they get thrown into tank given the nature of the bottle neck.
Flex players willingly choose to flex to what is needed—and, tanks are usually what is needed. So no one should be surprised that flex players have been largely filling that role.
We can only hope they will become better tank players over time and thus improve the quality of the tank pool rather than stop being flex players, either permanently or by choosing to flex less often. Though, of course, the result of the second option will effectively reduce the quantity of available tanks and consequentially increase the quality of the tank pool again.
What drives me nuts is the people who don’t really tank unless if they flex but will only play Hammond or Roadhog…
Like come on? Try some other tanks. Especially if it’s needed.
Otherwise I curse your dps matches to only be Roadhog and Hammond players for life.
Out of curiosity I tried Flex Queue for a few games to see what it was like. As I expected, it tossed me into Support and Tank games (which is fine, I play both roles pretty often). What I was not expecting was literally every Flex Queue game to literally be a collection of Bingo rolls.
It literally felt like the matchmaker just yanked people from every different skill level and tossed them in my game. I had healers that apparently didn’t realize they could heal. I had tanks that either hid in the backlines or ran straight in to die. I had DPS playing like they came straight out of Bronze in a PLAT/Diamond game.
If it was one or two games, I could chalk it up to either bad luck or the 50/50 thing doing its thing. But I played about 8 games and every. Single. One was like this. And it wasn’t just my team, it was on the other team as well. I would see Widow’s staring at walls, Ana’s shooting only the enemies, Reinhardt’s charging off maps like they just expected Rein to stop once he reached the edge of the playing field.
It’s honestly bizarre and I don’t think I’m going to do Flex Queue anymore. I have better things to do than lose a large chunk of SR to poor match ups.
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Constant nerfs lead to decrease in tank quality
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100%. the priority pass system has WAY more cons than pros. please, Blizzard, for the love of god get rid of it. the game is almost getting unplayable.
No they won’t, they don’t care about their tank sr and unless you genuinely have an interest in learning that role and feel your sr is at stake it’s just going to be go through the motions and collect the food pellet (er i mean dps ticket) at the end.
Blizzard keeps dancing around the real issue, the real cause for the long q times in the first place. They so badly want to be seen as a professional shooter game - but with unique characters with unique abilities, hitboxes, team orientated roles it will never be that.
So to force it to be that the time to kill has been reduced to insane proportions, dps has been buffed repeatedly both in power and utility all the while tanks and supports have had their kits whittled down till the loose their identity, impact and can only barely hang in there.
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If only actual strength of tanks and supports wasn’t being moved closer and closer towards going full DPS…
Can’t solve it. Tanks and supports by default are less popular, so they have to be stronger. But if they are stronger, game is slower.
This isn’t really to do with nerfs, but people playing tank (or support) and not putting in the effort, just to get a priority pass.
You still get them on a loss.
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Match quality has gone down the drain ever since flex queue came out.
You see I don’t believe this propaganda, trying to explain away why dps should be allowed to keep getting buffed cause it’s what the masses want.
When this game first came out it was hugely successful because it was so different, it attracted players that other fps games couldn’t. I for one enjoy playing support, I played quite a fair bit of both the other roles when the game started - and did enjoy them - but I like support most. The thing is they are basically sabotaging the tank and support roles to force the game into a direction it was never designed to head.
If you are a genuine tank or support main, they do exist - at some point you will realize - hey my character/s that I enjoy no longer are allowed to have the wow factor and they no longer have the kits they used too, lost their unique identity and I have to play three times harder just to make it work in some situations.
When it gets to that point you either give in and just play dps or simply give up - but it’s not because you don’t want to play tank or support but rather you don’t want to play gimped tank or support.
Also dps characters have a way bigger pool of characters with a far more varied array of utility: turrets, walls, zoning abilities, teleporting, negating abilities, cloning abilities. When you design one role to be able to operate on it’s own why then do you need the other roles?
But it’s, indeed, what masses want.
Tanks and supports were always “bad guys” of any game, as they increase effort required to get those sweet kills.
it’s what the masses are conditioned to want, their is only so long that you can scrape by trying to suck every once of use out of your character only to have it nerfed again and some dps character buffed again.
People don’t want to be left in the gutter so you are forced to either leave the game or start playing dps. Mercy has one of the largest followings in the game - she’s not dps. What about DVA?
This game is on life support and surviving BECAUSE presently no other fps provides proper exclusive tank and support role (except maybe paladins) which is not very polished. How often have you heard people in the forums say I wish their was a competitor game like overwatch. Their are plenty of fps games to choose from but if you want to play tank or support their isn’t realy a choice - so the game is forced to survive a shadow of its former self.
At least until a rival game does offer players what they want.
Not really.
Majority of players are DPS, and most of them aren’t exactly bright enough to see, that by demanding weak tank/supports, they also gain potential “dead weight” on their own team.
Difference is that in other games, developers know about this “little nuance” and do not bend over for horde of DPS players. Here is how it works, each game has 3 main sides:
- DPS, that want all kills to be here and now, ideally as easy as possible;
- tanks/supports, that want kills to be delayed as far as possible with their efforts, ideally to the point they do not happen without killing tank/support;
- developers, that supposed to find some kind of middle ground between two other large groups.
Second thing is “skill vs teamwork”. In normal games, teamwork beats skill - you can be all powerful god, but 2-3 enemies working together put you down with little difficulty.
For some reason Blizzard decided to do the opposite of good design. Majority of our players are DPS? Good, make them rule the game. Skilled players get defeated by correct actions of few freekills newbies? Fix it.
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