Excluding the new Community Crafted mode of course, the rest of the arcade modes have really high queue times or at least for us playing on EU servers. It doesn’t matter what time of day you are playing queue times for the arcade modes can last 10 minutes or longer. It has never been this bad before.
Something must be done to help the arcade before it’s too late. As someone who almost exclusively plays the arcade modes (mostly No Limits), it’s sad to see it lose more and more active players overtime.
I’m not really sure what can be done to incentivize people visiting the arcade more often without making them feel forced to play the modes. In OW1 the 3 lootboxes you could earn each week for playing in the arcade certainly helped, but those don’t exist anymore.
They simply do not put resources into balancing and updating Arcade modes, simple as that I think.
The only reason people go to Arcade nowadays is for special seasonal events. There are no incentives or theme to draw lots of people in to playing MH, TM, etc. other than like player titles?
Low Gravity : ruined by widow and sombra (a mode where it is fun to jump, you jump and insta-die, yeah fun!)
No Limits : ruined by too many tanks too often
Total Mayhem : ruined by about 5 or 6 heroes who destroy the mode (ball, sombra, moira, lucio, etc.)
Mystery Heroes (not in arcade but really should be) : ruined because every game gravitates towards 3 tanks on the winning team. Happens almost every single game.
They need to make adjustments specific to each mode to make it fun. As it stands, the modes are too easily ruined and you end up with too many leavers that take too long to backfill.
I’m thinking if they feature different modes created by the Workshop community in a rotation, say every 2 - 3 weeks, that could bring more interest in the arcade.
More cosmetic incentives will help a bunch for sure, maybe different namecards you can exclusively obtain by playing 50 arcade games with the namecard changing every season or something like that. Giving people 30k battlepass experience on top of that would be the cherry on top.
The Arcade is the only place a tank can actually play the game. There are deep communities of players that play some of these modes regularly.
It’s the area where Blizz SHOULD be investing in. Every event and alternate mode Blizz creates is popular because, just like Arcade - it’s not the misery that is 5v5 role lock.
Well I don’t think cosmetics will help too much when it comes to actually getting people to play the modes regularly. I think they need to make the game modes…more enjoyable to the casual playerbase.
Like Total Mayhem is far too long, I don’t see regulars playing the mode with the overtime lasting 30 minutes. This also is why you can probably never find matches, the games are simply lasting too long for you to FIND one. While the OT feature is like a core aspect of what people probably find fun, it also hinders the mode a lot IMO.
Each mode has a reason as to why it is not popular atm and that is simply because they are not fun due to all the changes to the core game, and the devs not changing anything in the Arcade modes to compensate for these changes other than like…reduce ALL tank health in these modes (which is just horrible and should have been balanced more properly as every tank plays differently and health reductions hurt certain ones a LOT more than others)
Completely agree with everything you said. I really hope they have something planned for the arcade in the near future. Perhaps a overhaul of some of the existing modes and hopefully a few brand new (permanent) arcade modes to make it feel more fresh.
To me the arcade is very important because it’s the only place in this game where I can just chill with others. QP feels too much like competitive nowa days and I just don’t enjoy the stressful nature of competitive play. Sometimes it’s hardly worth me playing with the arcade queue times being as long as they are currently. At least there are custom games as well but you don’t get battlepass experience in them
when they deleted loot boxes arcade became pointless, this game isnt fun playing just for the sake of it we need rewards, i havent touched deathmatch, 1vs1, capture the flag, free for all, 3vs3, 5vs5 since ow2 launch, i only play 2cp on arcade. the game could be deleted, if they deleted hero mastery why not this?
in ow1 arcade modes had instant queues, always, in ow2 even events could take more than 10 minutes, once i reached 40 minutes of queue on an event and still didnt get a match, i quit
I dont remember the last time i connected to an arcade match, queue times beyond 5 minutes is an instant disconnect for me so i can either play qp or comp, or if im really desperate 1 dad 11 kids
i think the game is general is dying like season 11 is literally the most lazy season ever like the so called challenges for the event are almost done already atleast on my end
I miss when Quick Play ‘Classic’ was in Arcade as I’m sure that brought more people over to those modes. Now that’s its in with the rest of the QP modes, people no longer check the Arcade!
In OW1, they basically bribed you to play arcade with loot boxes - obviously, that’s not going to be happening.
Kind of a shame, because I like some of the arcade modes, but it’s often a hassle to actually get in a game if it isn’t some kind of seasonal event. I used to really like total mayhem, but it’s kind of too broken to mess with these days.
Maybe be more flexible about letting arcade modes satisfy daily and weekly targets? Letting people do achievements in total mayhem is probably a bridge too far, but people do love making all the little stat numbers go up.
