that’s fair
I was looking for the pickrates on winstonslab but I’m new to the site and can’t find them
can you link me to them? thanks
There is two major pro metas around OW: Either you focus on killing a single target ASAP and snowball from there, or the team become so resilient that they win on attrition. Every single pro meta this game ever had revolved around one of those stances.
And that’s because when you crunch the numbers, those are the two main win conditions in the game, once you add a guaranteed coordinated team of specialists that work in the same wavelength. You will never see a pro team having 4 different duels in different areas of the map. Either they are grouped together, just spaced just enough that they can converge into a specific target with a single call. So, either you kill people fast, or you survive long enough for all the dust of burst abilities to settle, and win by having a longer staying power. And since pro players play for money, and that money is attached to wins, unless they are convinced that they don’t need more wins, they will prefer to run the same old viable strategy over and over again instead of doing something for the sake of the show.
And yes, I say pro meta because ladder meta is wildly more open than that. If you have the right players, every single hero in the game has been viable on comp, at all levels (given they are fighting opponents of equal skill). Yes, that includes bronze Ana and GM Bastion players.
Locking 2-2-2 simply reduces the options of team compositions. It’s simple math. 30!-24! is a smaller number than 8x7x15x14x7x6. Both are very big numbers, but the chance for something interesting and unique emerging is simply higher if you have more combinations possible. Typing monkey theorem and all that.
I don’t think anyone is arguing the math of it, moreso whether it would make the game more enjoyable for the majority of players. 
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it seems to me like the ‘pièce de résistance’ is Rein/Winston and maybe to a lesser extent Brig’s unblockable damage.
Why run a dps whose damage is completely negated by tank defenses when your ‘maintank’, with a base, and more importantly, effective health pool many times higher is unimpeded by such things. 
Also, Lucio has been a key component in most pro meta’s because speed boost is OP vs a clock. More fights = statistically higher chance to win. Simple.
He was replaced by Mercy during her meta because she provided essentially the same utility, rezing an early pick that would’ve meant falling back for a regroup, salvaging an otherwise lost fight/engagement/chance to win, while being a better healer and having amp.
I find it interesting that this post went up less than an hour after YourOverwatch posted a video saying the exact same thing.
hard disagree
there may be more permutations mathematically possible, but i strongly believe there are far less viable possibilities. the developers themselves have said multiple times that balancing is easier in 2/2/2 and many characters are difficult to balance specifically because there is no lock. more balance means more viable possibilities. purely mathematical stats with no context mean almost nothing to game design.
i’m sure there were plenty of people toting the same “but muh permutations!” argument back when they decided to slash hero stacking straight out of the game, but we’re better for it now and a lot more heros are being picked more often and balanced better for it; more viable possibilities.
if you’re not in the OWL, at least. 
All of this just to mask yet another Brig-whining post. Awesome.
Tell me what happens when Lucio’s speed boost is removed from GOATS. If you want to defeat a slow-moving comp that’s only made viable by not moving so slow, then you need something to defeat speed boost. I get that the Brig-hate train is pretty far from the station, but holy crap she’s been gutted three times over by now. Re-assess the situation, ffs.
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GOATS isn’t just Brig. It has to do with how these characters work in tandem. The issue is that DPS heroes are badly balanced overall. Tanks essentially kill dpses in the same amount of time it takes them to kill the tank in most cases, especially with proper backup, so there’s 0 point in playing a squishier character. With a proper comp designed around this idea, it becomes impossible to play a DPS character.
If you swapped out Brig, there could still be a GOATS. All you need is proper aoe healing and supports who are well defended or who can defend themselves, and big tanky bodies.
The irony is this has a lot to do with how low the TTK is in OW. Every DPS seems to be designed around burst damage primarily, and if they aren’t they suck. Thing is Tanks for the most part don’t care about burst damage. They have the bodies to survive it. Once the burst is used up, they heal up and are good to go.
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The issue with attempts to nerf GOATS is that the first round was aimed exclusively at Brigitte, assuming that if she’s weaker, GOATS will be weaker, since she’s the lynchpin. The Shift to a focus on GOATS as a team was after it became evident that it wasn’t working.
Currently, I do believe that we will be seeing a variant of GOATS going into the first week of OWL, but I am not sure if it’s due to habit or GOATS still being that strong.
I don’t think I can sit through watching another stage of GOATS. I fully expect the stage to at least start with GOATS since that is what everyone had been practicing for so long, but it gets so boring watching 3x3 almost every game.
I agree with the devs on this one. When everything is more homogeneous, it’s easier to simply compare benchmark numbers.
But IMO the most interesting characters in this game right now are exactly the ones that don’t fit the perfect mold of their roles. Making those heroes change mechanics to fit into the mold might end up breaking their playstyle to the point they become unrecognizable. Like they did with Symmetra when they changed her role.
Heroes like Mei or Sombra can work as a third DPS. Brigitte is an amazing third wheel to both support and tank roles. Bastion can be the sole DPS in a comp focused around him. Wrecking Ball have arguments to being both main tank and off tank, and none are as conclusive as the other tanks.
Those are the kind of permutations you lose when you want to lock everyone under the 222 lock. You need to make Mei/Sombra works as well as Tracer/Pharah or Ashe/Junkrat or Symmetra/Torbjorn.
Plus, I personally enjoy the possibility to swapping roles mid-match. More than once I got into a role from another role just to get rid from a carry in the other team. Picking Brigitte as a third healer to deal with a pesky Genji, or going Bastion when I see the enemy don’t have barriers, or going D.va when no one is contesting that soldier on high ground the whole match.
Killing cross-role changes is killing the game for me.
The issue with no hero limits was not permutations (although we had a 3-hero meta at the time as well). The game was too young for that. The issue was that the defense team would switch to 6 Meis in the last point and stall forever instead of trying to win the fight.
Removing hero limits was the first attempt to fight eternal stall. Later we also got overtime timer running down faster the longer it went, the defense team getting longer respawn timers if the attacking team outnumbers them on the point, and so on.
Honestly, I think if they just made Mei not being able to contest on Cryo-freeze (like Sombra can’t contest invisible anymore), or nerf Tracer (like they still need to do, eventually) it would had solved this problem. But that bus is long gone.
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Goodness there is so much involved with this that I haven’t realized 
Maybe they can do a 5 month test with Comp only having 2-2-2 and if the data shows well and such they keep it and if not, try fixing another idea with the data they have?
I have seen some people on this forim want Sombra nerfed. And I don’t think the pro want her nerf just yet.
Also to note I did… ehem I mean forgot to check their profile though, but probably gonna hit a private profile.
iirc, it was double genji+zen or double monkey double tracer double lucio, not mei. It was too hard for them to balance the game when you were able to stack too many overlapping good mechanics.
Since all we have is retrospect and theory crafting, guess I’ll just leave all of the opinion debate at that.
That was on beta, when Zen orbs didn’t required to sustain line of sight. The meta was double genji, double zen, Symmetra and an extra DPS (usually Soldier for healing or Torb for armor). Immediately after launch, Zen was never meta because he had 150 HP, and could be bodyshot by Widow (her fully charged shots were also 150 damage).
That was the first recognized meta, and the origin of the “2-2-2 is the most balanced comp”. But as I said, the game was too young at the time. We had no idea yet how much hero stacking would affect the pro scene. And since the tournaments were in the hands of third parties, there was a moment when people didn’t knew if it was going to be 1-hero limit per team, 1-hero limit per match, or 2-hero limit per team/match.
On pro tier, yeah. Pros simply focus fire and kill everyone asap.
Alongside the casuals, it was too easy to stall forever, and that was killing the rhythm of the game. Again, the game was too young, and the devs couldn’t let the game environment sway too far from their intended playstyle this early.
Also, all those changes about overtime were added in the same patch as the hero limit for competitive. Clearly, the eternal stall was the problem they were fighting.
idk man. imo, they did not let the environment sway too far from their intended playstyle by implementing limits. if anything, they had brought it closer to their intended playstyle. yes, stacking heros to abuse insane synergy through stall was a problem they were fighting. luckily they chose to tackle it not by taking away from iconic parts of the characters kits or gutting them, but by imposing more order on the game so that more characters and more synergies had to be used in unison to succeed. it added more depth and nuance to the gameplay and the fights that were happening, even if at the core you still mostly saw dive (though with winston/zarya/lucio/tracer etc at the time ofc).
i suppose this part is more philosophy than something worth debating, but it is never “too early” for a developer to change the software to fit the reality that is the way clients use it. given you’ve got a reasonable sample size to show that they’re abusing it like they are, that is. they had plenty of cause at the time to justify hero limits back then.
game designers simply can not always accurately predict how players will play their games. that’s the woe of being a game designer. this team in specific has been way off the mark with their predictions about the playerbase (not expecting people to main heros? LOL). taking months upon months to recognize obvious flaws and fail to address them properly ends up making the actual solution harder because… well, like we’ve seen on the forums, a lot of people have grown accustomed to the flawed implementation.
thank god they patched hero stacking out as fast as they did. i remember i was a bit upset about it back then, but it didn’t take more than a few days to get over it. unlucky they’re taking as long as they are to just tear the bandaid off and treat the wound now. 
Well, in the patch notes I linked there is a post by Jeff explaining why they implemented hero limits. You can refresh your memory by reading the comments and how tired everyone was from eternal stalls.
I agree with the philosophy that once a game is launched, it’s no longer just the devs baby. The players also interact with the game and mold it from there on. However, unlike the current calls for forced 222 and role queue, there were no doubt that hero limit was coming for competitive, and the main question was more on how much they would limit it.
(There was a huge outcry when they implemented it for Quick Play, but at the time, Arcade was just launched, and the devs promised No Limits to be permanent. It only stopped being permanent once Custom Games Browser became a thing)
Seems to me that 3-3 actually hinders the number of meta comps atm.
from the link: “For example, we’ve seen organized teams on Assault and Hybrid maps use hero stacking to overtake the first point before the defense has a chance to counter. We’ve also seen players use specific stacked compositions just to frustrate their opponents or cause indefinite delays in overtime (among other strategies)”
that sounds a lot like:
my point this entire time has been that spamming mei to stall or spamming lucio/tracer is a symptom of the problem that hero stacking caused, and the game is better off without it. yeah, you lose some really wacky one-off gimmicks… but we’re seeing more viable everyday compositions and generally more balanced matches as a result.
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3-3 isn’t forced. The teams are the ones that choose to play 3-3.
Goats isn’t the villain by itself. The main issue everyone is trying to fix with a sledgehammer of forced 222 is that the patches on OW are slow, and let the meta settle long enough that the pros only play mirror.
The best moments to watch pro matches is exactly after a big balancing path (or a new hero introduction), because everyone is experiment new stuff. Blizzard didn’t catch the proper timing to do those without it being too chaotic.