Hi there. I usually never use the forums, but I wanted to put my thoughts out there. I’m going to be as constructive as possible, but there’s definitely some irritation behind my words regardless.
Frankly, I heavily dislike this feature. It’s removed the RNG element of Stadium which made it relatively fair, and instead made it all about just making the enemy team’s tank have the most miserable experience of their life.
My friend and I queued stadium for TWO games, and we both got to play Winston. His game was AWFUL. He picked Winston first, as we had first pick and he wanted to play the character, and the enemy team proceeded to FULLY counterpick him, picking D.Va, Reaper, Mei, Kiriko, and Moira. Now, this wouldn’t usually be that big of a problem in my opinion, but what made it worse is that they solely focused on making his experience as unenjoyable as possible. Stacking multiple slows (to the point he literally could not move) and their D.Va just hard DMing him so I could not give him heals.
While this may look like a skill issue, I want you to answer this: What are his options? He literally cannot engage, ever. He can’t take space, he can’t use cooldowns aggressively, he just has to essentially afk the whole game as he just gets killed instantly otherwise. It was insanely unfun and it’s just because they saw he picked Winston first.
For my game, I legit hated that game he was on Winston so much I went to the quick play mode. My problem really more lies with how long it takes backfills to take powers and the such, so it’s a bit less important.
Either way, it’s just caused a terrible feeling for Tank in this. You have no agency if you win or lose now, it’s just if you pick last or first that determines if you win, I feel. Instead of it being like 1/8 chance you get instantly counterpicked, it’s now 50/50 if you get to pick first or second.
Not only that, I just really dislike not being able to mirror characters. I get the idea of it preventing stagnant metas, but it’s Stadium! There’s never really a “meta” and most people play the characters they find fun in the mode. This just removes that and makes the mode less dynamic and more unfun.
While it’s supposed to be competitive, Stadium is a goofier mode at the end of the day and preventing two flying Reinhardts from causing chaos removes the charm, I feel.
