So this is going to be a long read but it’s mainly for blizz and intelligent people with attention spans longer than 5-10 seconds to read, I don’t operate or subscribe to the “TL;DR being dumb is cool” mentality.
You have created countless issues within your game that you spent a lot of time creating so it’s going to take a lot of time and reading to get out of it now.
Just to be clear, personally I’m Masters 2 but I noticed some pretty serious, major issues going on in lower ranks while climbing when it comes to team play and team reliance that are still affecting countless players in those ranks, the majority of the player population (and who this update is targeted towards), that need to be addressed which I’ll be speaking on below partially.
Some of this will come off pretty harsh but I am direct and honest, you don’t fix or change things for the better by lying and pretending nothing is wrong because it might hurt someone’s feelings a little bit. If you want to train your dog to stop peeing on your living room floor or your bed you don’t avoid doing that because it might hurt the dog’s feelings do you? Kobe Bryant was known to get on his teammates a lot to push them to do better because he knew they didn’t have the work ethic and drive he did and that’s how they won championships, not by pretending nothing is wrong to not hurt anyone’s feelings.
So first thing we have to keep in mind is that changes made to the game are likely going to focus on the experience of lower rank (bronze to diamond or so) players who make up most of the player population.
And this is focusing on competitive play because obviously this ‘self healing passive’ update is mainly targeted towards competitive play where things like actually getting a little healing from your supports when it matters the most is very important to the player and makes a major difference for better or for worse in the match when it’s not happening. Quickplay players generally aren’t taking the game seriously enough to care about that.
I’m impressed that you’ve finally (far too late now though) come to the realization that possibly the #1 issue with this game is the fact that players are so heavily reliant on not having a team being absolute idiots feeding (which is common) nonstop, not having the individual mindset (also common) as the director mentioned himself and whatnot to win the game. To consistently climb in ranks, you have to be so good, so far beyond the skill level of that current rank that you’re able to hard carry the entire team by yourself. Top 500 players have admitted this. Otherwise there’s a good chance you end up being a good player going on win streaks then lose streaks due to having that one guy (or multiple) who just want to play around in comp and not play seriously while you are taking the match seriously, so they feed, for “fun”. Or you keep getting easy wins then landslide losses and repeat because of that. You might be really good at the game, even better than everyone on your team but if you aren’t at a major smurfing skill level for that rank, your enjoyment of the game is solely/primarily based on whether or not you have 4 other people on your team who take the game at least somewhat seriously and want to win - if you have even one person just trolling and want to purposely throw the match for whatever reason, the individual mindset rather than team mindset, doesn’t care about winning, maybe they’re win trading, or straight up feeding, the match is most likely a lost.
9 times out of 10 if one person leaves the match, it’s a loss, even if you’re really good at the game because now your team’s morale is extremely low and will likely leave because they know how reliant you have to be on having 5 people all making the right decisions at the right time and not feeding or purposely throwing the game. Well it’s the same result when you’re dealing with the major issue of a feeder(s) (and when I say feeder I’m talking about people who will repeatedly run ahead of the entire team alone into the entire enemy team and die, alone) in your games or other methods of sabotaging the match which may not be immediately obvious. Feeding is very common in lower ranks (from bronze through high plat and diamond) in competitive play from what I’ve observed, to the point that many will even defend the feeders claiming it’s normal and argue and insult you if you express any frustration with feeders on your team. Both your own team and the enemy team will do this commonly in lower ranks and partly I’m sure because they want to make it look like you hurting the feeder’s feelings by calling them out for it to try to make them stop is a bigger problem than them feeding and ruining your match. Who cares that someone is feeding on the team (even though this is a reportable offense which Blizzard clearly isn’t okay with in and of itself), their feelings are more important and you shouldn’t complain to anyone about it is the mentality of the many horrible ‘human beings’ in this game and it’s reinforced and enabled by this joke of a reporting system. So they use this as a reason to report you as well, abusing the automated reporting system.
So as you can see there are many, many issues and flaws with this game that these developers have created themselves which the many (not all) terrible people in this game are exploiting and it’s just plain out of control now, they killed the game in too many different ways, too little too late.
Let’s first make one thing clear, I’m also a support player so I’m not just some ‘support basher’ or something but I’m not going to sit here and pretend that many (not all) other support players are just plain overwhelmed with the game, many are extremely lazy and love the idea of playing the role that can get away with being lazy the most out of any other role in the game and take full advantage of this. The same way I should be held accountable and correct my mistakes, support players should as well, especially when it’s something so simple as just turning left and right to keep teammates beside you healed, not just only what’s directly ahead of you, it’s just plain very low effort gameplay and seriously deteriorates the gameplay experience for others. This has been a major unaddressed issue for years in the game and it’s part of what has rotted the game from the inside out. The individual mindset exists in the support role too and it’s another major issue in the game.
Nevermind skill level, from what I’ve observed with many supports, there is just very, very little effort put into watching anything besides what is directly in front of them - it’s just plain laziness and the MANY who do this get mad and make a whole uproar and argument about it if you have any problem with it - that is never how anything involving teamwork to win a match whether game or actual sport should work. In actual real life sports for example, if a teammate lets you know like “hey, you’re doing this wrong, you gotta be aware of more than just one thing”, you simply fix that problem, not start a whole argument and uproar about it because you want to be that sensitive and escape any accountability or responsibility.
Yeah there’s the idiots who spam “I need healing” unnecessarily but most of the time, it’s for a very good reason but the supports in lower ranks in particular tend to be very sensitive about any critique whatsoever, as if they are always doing everything right and make no mistakes, like they’re top500 supports or something so they will start a whole uproar if there are any complaints about healing, they will go to match chat even and find a way to make you look like the bad guy and play the victim so they don’t have to take any accountability for anything they’re doing wrong, while they’ve been ignoring people dying beside them the whole game.
There are some really good/decent supports out there who I love to death who actually try very hard to help their team but there are also MANY who are just plain lazy and take advantage of the fact that they can get away with performing pretty horribly and no one (or most) really noticing because it isn’t as obvious how they’re positively or negatively impacting the match compared to the Tank and DPS roles - like whether or not they’re healing the right people at the right times or not, are they even bothering to heal that soldier or cassidy next to them that is about to die? Are the supports even healing the cassidy going against a pharmacy (pocketed pharah + mercy) that they want the cassidy to kill so badly? Are they swapping to a more sustainable consistent healing support like Mercy to heal the cassidy going against the enemy pharmacy if he’s having trouble against it? Is the kiriko teleporting over to their flanking DPS in danger to save their life and saving their cleanse for enemy anti grenades? Is the zen even discording anyone or are they just primarily DPSing and just healing occasionally when their tracer or pharah or genji could’ve used the healing to keep them alive and not die? Are the supports even bothering to ever watch for who needs healing beside them or behind them at all? This is the tunnel vision issue I mentioned which is a huge problem in lower ranks because it simply takes a lot of effort to constantly be watching your front, sides and back and many if not most supports in lower ranks just usually are not willing to put in that amount of effort for hours at a time every day it seems.
So these many supports in lower ranks who decide they just want to exert minimal effort, play on autopilot only healing what’s directly in front of them like the tank or if DPS happens to be in front of them and making all the mistakes above can just claim their overall healing amount is decent and that’s all that matters when that isn’t the case.
And to make matters worse, there is yet ANOTHER major growing issue in the game where the opposite can happen where many supports are now primarily healing the DPS and healing the Tank is the lowest priority for them. In your mind you’re thinking “my support behind me has my back when I need healing, surely they know that healing the tank who is protecting the entire team is top priority for supports in ANY game” and you end up not getting healed one bit, you see the supports are pocketing DPS and deserted you in the kill cam.
Then you have the other issue of those people just playing the support role out of boredom or just because they feel like it and dont care about winning the match. I’ve had some of these people tell me themselves, “this is not even my main role I’m just here because DPS queue is long”.
THEN you have the issue of casual players who just decide they want to play competitive instead of quickplay because competitive is more organized, less chaotic but they go into the competitive match with their same casual, lazy, careless mindset which leads to the countless issues that ruins countless matches for people, main ones which I mentioned above.
As for this self healing thing…it’s hardly even worth addressing. Who really even notices this passive healing that every support hero has always had when that support hero is in danger? No one. It hasn’t made any real difference in fights for supports who all had it for years so obviously with a TUNED DOWN version it’s going to be the same result on any other role. This just seems like a PR move by Blizzard to fool people into thinking they care about what players are going through and care about helping people enjoy the game more when all it amounts to is a self-healing passive that hasn’t ever even made any meaningful impact to supports who have all had it for years already.
You are giving other roles a useless passive while pretending this is some kind of update to help players, stop it blizzard. This wasn’t even worth announcing to anyone and if anything, it’s an insult to players showing how little you’re actually willing to do to help with the major countless issues they’re facing by making a whole blog post about it as if it’s something significant.
“Look! We threw you a bread crumb! Aren’t you guys excited?”