Role Queue Ruined OW's Balancing

General Discussion
1

Overwatch was a game built around counter-picking. Initially, if a specific enemy was rolling your team, you could pick any hero in the game to counter them without relying on your teammates to carry you.

Roadhog wiping the floor with everyone? Swap off whatever to pick Ana.
Tracer running behind the team? Swap off whatever to pick Brig, Cassidy, etc.
Pharah uncontested? Swap off whatever to pick a hitscan.

In the past few days of queuing as tank, I’ve had games that went like this:

Enemy roadhog was getting double pocketed and rolling over me in the tank queue. I asked either our Lucio or Brig to swap to Ana, Zen, etc. to help us out, and they both ignored.

Enemy Pharah wasn’t getting challenged in the air, and neither our Symmetra or Reaper were willing to do anything about it.

Enemy Ana was getting insane anti-nades, and neither healer wanted to go Kiriko to help mitigate the situation.

In Overwatch’s original state, you, as the one trying your hardest, could swap to deal with these situations while your teammates could continue to play their way. Now, when say role locked to a healer, how are you meant to carry a game? When role locked to a tank and your have underwhelming healing, how are you supposed to play effectively?

With role queue, this game has become overwhelmingly team-based. Overwatch was always based on having a good team setup, but it was never meant to be to a degree in which you are unable to swap to a different class when necessary as to satisfy some “perfect synergy” style of gameplay. I, personally, am tired of relying so much on teammates who validly do not care much about counterpicking and just want to have fun.

In trying to escape this issue, OW2’s balancing has made Open Queue no longer a valid option, since the entire gamemode is about picking the better tanks. There is no solo carry in open queue with how much health is walking around.

Was it the OW League that made the game like this? Too focused on competitive balancing in their favor? Maybe, but I personally think the OW team backed themselves into a corner with the tank class and didn’t know what to do with themselves, so they forced us into team comps to end the situation.

I accept that the Overwatch I played 4-5 years ago is gone and dead, may as well not even bother hoping that a fun balance change will come. If you enjoy the new setup, good for you, I’m glad that you find it more fun to have balanced synergy, but from a design standpoint I can’t believe this is ever how Overwatch was meant to be played.

33 Likes
3

OW was obviously not made to be role locked, it feels wrong. The reason it exists is that noone would play support otherwise, people complained about 4 DPS in OW1

19 Likes
4

Role queue didn’t ruin OWs balance, the insistence in hero swapping did. Its too hard to balance the game when the player can simply swap heroes mid game, no hero bans and among other things balance wise. There are so many things that cause issues that haven’t been addressed and just made worse that one could try to balance forever like the current state, it wouldn’t/won’t work.

10 Likes
5

No E-sports ruined OW’s balancing

the moment they stopped balancing for casual and fun play, and instead focused on hyper competitive instagibbing sweaty tryhards

was the moment the game started to die

There is a reason TF2 competative is a ghost town… Hero shooters don’t lend themselves to being competative…

you can have a competative scene for sure, but those players need to accept the casual style of balance

44 Likes
6

It’s sad because the reason I picked up Overwatch was because it was casual. I didn’t like that every pvp game out there was very sweaty and only really enjoyable by people that aim train and tryhard it.

Then they removed all the fun little aspects like Torb armor packs/scrap/upgrading, Sym’s multi ults, Reaper’s soul orbs, etc. It all went downhill from there imo. When they stopped caring about interesting and engaging things in their game and opted instead for just run and gun. I liked the slower pace that OW used to have, now it is incredibly fast and hectic. I don’t really have the reflexes to keep up with a Genji double jumping over my head or Sojourn boosting over me. Players like me, who just want to play for fun and casually don’t really matter anymore.

There’s no games like old Overwatch anymore either. So it’s not like I can go find something else. This was the last Bastion of hope for pvp casual games.

16 Likes
7

Aside from Kiriko changes, and the near nonexistent changes to Ana/Mercy.

The devs have not done any Support balance changes since July 15th, 2022…

1 Like
8

Yes, pretty much. Also, RQ enables healbots and nothing dies. ‘‘But you just kill support first’’… Yeah, yeah, and now we have the support and queue times problem.

At the end of S1 I switched to Open Queue, the true Overwatch experience. I’m having fun playing there and many matches are close, besides having duos or triple tanks and me being the only one healing… And one thing OP reminded me is you don’t need support to play it, have fun, and win games. Sometimes you just need 1 support.

Hopefully during Season 3 devs will address the tank problems in Arcades and OP modes…

1 Like
9

Game worked somewhat better when It was focused in counter picking to be honest. Now we will have characters that are either too weak or too strong in every scenario.

10

started adding heroes that do too much. I still go 100% against swapping because i hate forced interactions, i want to win purely on outplay and mechanical gap, not by picking a hero that counter X. Pharmercy is by far the worst offender when it comes to why hero swapping in this game is crap.

2 Likes
11

Even while I agree that forced interaction sucks, matches were a bit more flexible. RQ doesnt change so much anyway, the only difference is that if your tank doesnt play well you can swap to a tank in OQ, but It created even worse comps sometimes like 4 healers 2 tanks. I remember RQ being asked for everyone to be added too.

12

It honestly did. The balancing was never “good” but it devolved at an astonishing rate when they needed to further balance around a forced 2/2/2.

But no, they refused to nerf tracer, instead adding brig, and everything came crashing down.

2 Likes
13

try TF2, its free and still going strong, super casual or sweaty has hell depends on the lobby, and tons of community servers

14

I’ve wanted to try TF2 for a while, but not until the bot problem is sorted. That kinda scared me away from it.

15

As I see it, it went like this:
OWL teams were doing everything in their power to win, always coming up with the winning strategy. That strategy was for a long time Dive (DVA, Winston, Lucio, Tracer at its core).
People got sick of watching it, OWL was losing subscribers, and in a fit of panic, the devs tried all they could to kill Dive. They couldn’t and in the end they took a sledgehammer to the problem - and the entire game:
Brigitte.

After suffering GOATS for years and OWL being as good as dead (sent from Twitch to Youtube), the devs took the seemingly “easy” way out:
2-2-2

This resulted in queue problems, a thing that the old system (“Open Queue”) never had of obvious reasons. It got so bad, that DPS T500 (=many streamers) would sit more than an hour in queue, or even more extreme, could not get matched at all in off-hours. Even Diamonds could sit in queue 20+ minutes.
The devs again panicked:
1-2-2 (and OW2)

IMO this entire chain of events could have been solved by not focusing on OWL. Alternatively it could have been solved by actually solving it, instead of taking the sledgehammer (=Brigitte) to the problem.

OWL and Brigitte destroyed this game.

6 Likes
16

Sucks bcuz I love Brigitte, if she wasn’t the nail in the coffin I’d say she’s a great hero

17

It was not Tracer, it was Dive. Tracer was just a part of the problem, not the problem itself.
If they had killed Dive in another way, Tracer would have stopped being a problem.

18

The only thing that ruined OW’s balancing is the dev team. Period.

19

I’ll just say that role queue is their concede to the fact that they failed at balancing the original OW game. Role queue is just an imposed player agency reduction that makes their job of balance easier. And even then they failed miserably.

1 Like
20

The only thing that ruined OW’s balancing are the selfish players, a people problem in a team-reliant game. So devs are forced to try and fix the system when the game clearly wasn’t designed for it. South Korea had people who thought differently than us and we’re more considerate and that’s why Open Queue thrived there.

3 Likes
21

The original game was balanced. It was the players who refused to adapt. Where one team had a tank, 3 dps, and 2 supports and the other team decided they wanted to play 5 dps and a Mercy into that, refusing to swap and eventually lose because they refused to work together and pick heroes that could equal the comp the enemy had. Then those same 6 players would run to reddit and the forums and complain that role queue was needed even though none of them were ever willing to flex.

2 Likes