I think it’s even worse. People will know in advance what hero is banned just like it is with map pools which will indirectly encourage SR exploit for a lot players.
With SR decay not existing anymore, it will be even easier for people to take advantage of the whole system by simply selecting what weeks they’re going to do placements matches and what week they’re going to play the most in order to climb.
If a week is too problematic in terms of meta with the heroes available, most players will simply not play the whole week and wait until the hero pools changes the following one.
I foresee an amusing issue on ladder: players will wait until an extremely powerful hero is unlocked, play for that week to get a high ladder position, then sit on that rank while the hero is locked the next week. Others will have a hard time taking their spot without playing the same hero, of course.
I think the funniest part about most of the people complaining on the forums is that they hardly even play competitive. The game will remain completely unchanged for them in regards to hero pools if they continue to just play the modes they usually play - it really seems like they just want to complain.
I think the funniest part about most of the people complaining on the forums is that they hardly even play competitive. The game will remain completely unchanged for them in regards to hero pools if they continue to just play the modes they usually play
What a silly argument. They probably don’t play competitive because they’re disillusioned with the state of competitive Overwatch. They complain because they wish it would be fixed.
You are really good at formulating strawman arguments. Perfect balance is nearly impossible for any game, but that doesn’t mean that OW balance isn’t laughably bad.
Watch the international this year to see how competent devs balance around large hero pools. Oh by the way that game has over 117 heroes and yet maintains a standard of balance OW has never even come close to touching.
Maybe blizzard could throw out a patch more than once every 3 months and actually tweak heroes instead of swinging nerf/buff hammers and expecting gameplay to improve.
Look at past patches in this game and how laughable they were. Mercy 2.0 was so absurdly broken when she first was introduced and yet she stayed broken for a year. How does anyone take this game seriously after patches like that?
Take ironclad bastion who even a small child could have reasoned would break the game entirely, which he of course did. So do the devs tweak Bastion then? No of course not they revert him like 3 days later and never touch him again. Yeah these devs are really competent over there at Blizzard oops I mean Activision these days.
Who says that those below GM/Masters would suffer from hero pools? I’m pretty sure low ranks would benefit from & enjoy not having to play against Mei/Moira/Rein/Zarya for a week
Of course low ranks suffer from hero pools. The meta is not a huge thing at those ranks anyway, and most players there play purely for fun. Disallowing their favorite heroes is contrary to that.
You don’t need to train in comp since Quick Play was changed to 222. Besides this, the community abuses their right to choose what they want during matches. One tricks are not encouraged and Overwatch has been and needs to be about changing your heroes to suit the situation. If not, changing your heroes is reduced to a perk rather than it being a core part of Overwatch. If anything, this change should make the differences between a Competitive and Quickplay.
Side Note: Those players that belittled those that requested others to be liberal in their hero choices are getting what they asked for. Complain on the forums and not to the players and your request to have players fall in line with what Overwatch is designed to be may happen. Again and and no, simply choosing whatever hero you want is not enough to be in line with Overwatch’s design.
There are heroes that will become useless if heroes they synergize with are not available to be played with them either so yeah it will be a crazy s*** show to watch, especially when it comes to balancing the game.
I guess even QP will be a better option to analyzing the balance issues :p…
Hero bans will also antagonize certain heroes and categories of players even more. The DPS category will be blamed even more for instance and OTPs will make even less efforts when it comes to switching heroes.
It will be literally impossible to convince someone to take another hero if said player had to wait 1-2 weeks to get to play their OTP. They will simply say “No, I won’t switch, I waited two weeks to play my favourite hero in Competitive”. End of story (and beginning of even more toxicity within the community).
That “reality” was shoe horned in by the players. The devs are performing the same action accept its more in-line with Overwatch’s design. This may be crass to say as well this next bit but “your” training in comp better be passive.
Note: People improve whether they want to regardless of whether or not it’s in training or competing. The degree of that improvement is what people focus on in an attempt to understand if what they improved is “worth” noting.
Competitive doesn’t promote players using it as a platform for purposeful training sessions. Bad games are more than likely to happen when this is done and it seems a lot of people feel their time is wasted when this occurs. Competitive should be a mode that gives you the highest chances at experiencing incredible games. Players that do not understand what they are doing for their rank “eliminates” this possibility.
First of all, only a few characters are banned, and they are banned for the whole week, and you are told who will be banned. It’s not changing every game, so you don’t know who will be banned next.
Second, why are you practicing a character in comp?
You’re right in that, yes, Akuma was banned. However, the reason that ST Akuma was banned was because he was not balanced for competitive play. You were playing the boss mode Akuma with fewer recover frames on projectiles, increased meter gain and amplified damage output. Akuma was normalized in succeeding iterations.
They say they will be doing balance changes more often and more aggressively, so I assume they will nerf Mei’s freezing and wall, and buff her dmg to compensate.