The Competitive mode is terrible. Prove me wrong!

Competitive Discussion
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The current iteration of the Competitive mode is terrible and needs to be reworked. Here are several reasons as to why:

The True Skill variation Blizzard are using for everyone below Diamond (the matchmaking that features a personal performance factor, that affects SR gain/loss at the end of the match) is terrible, because in a heavily team dependant game, your performance can be greatly affected by that of your teammates.

The Elo system Blizzard are using for everyone in Diamond and above is terrible, because the system was created to handle units and for finding opponents. It was developed for chess. The only way it can handle units is, if it was handling full stacks only (full premades if you will) and treating the entire team as a unit. It worked fine in other games, because it handled premade teams.
It’s not good for assembling teams from random people and finding allies.

Football (soccer) wouldn’t have been the most popular sport on the planet, if the matches were assembled by random players mere minutes before the game, especially if one of the teams could get eight out of eleven (or eleven out of eleven) of it’s members being goal keepers.

Overwatch expects you to be able to play any role on the same level, when in reality even professional players and athletes are usually focusing on one or two.

It expects you to be able to coordinate and cooperate with random people you’ve just met in-game, when the worldviews of said players can be drastically different.

The devs have said multiple times, that they believe the best way to play the game is premade vs premade, but the current implementation of the game does not match that. No Team League, no Clan support.

It also punishes attempts for playing in a full premade as of current, because of queue times; and because if the game fails to match you versus another full premade, you’ll most likely get stomped by better, higher rated players, while at the same time you’ll get treated like you had the advantage, and you’ll lose a lot of points.

Basically as of current, the current iteration of the Competitive Mode is setting you up for frustration.
The solution?

Competitive needs to be reworked. It should allow only premade vs premade. It would provide better experience overall. It would fix a lot of issues with so called toxicity, because the issues would be handled by the teams themselvesm. Less support tickets, more happy players.

You want to mess around? Quick Play is that way ==>

Prove me wrong!

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Yet everyone has to do this so no one has an unfair advantage…

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I never brought up anything about lack of fairness. The point was, that the Competitive Mode is setting you up for frustration.

Just because everyone has to endure the negative aspects of the game, doesn’t mean, that the current iteration is good.

But come to think of it, can you honestly say, that every player gets equal amount of matches with 4 or 5 support mains on a team? We don’t have the stats, so we don’t know, but I doubt it’s equal amount across the board.

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The game is going on for 3 years now. You have a lot of on and off players like myself who log in for 1 comp match and come back maybe a few weeks later to play another.

Just face the facts… comp is a casual game mode.

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My point was, that it should be reworked in a manner, so that it should no longer be a casual game mode.

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exactly this. it is why the pros don’t like to play comp cuz it is not competitive. they will do pugs instead because in pugs you get team play and people who want to work as a team in order to win. in competitive you get those who are there just to mess around and dont care if they win so they wont try, or you get those that play into their counters constantly and refuse to swap and ruin the game for everyone. ive started to play in pugs held by jayne and omg i can tell you its so much better, you get teammates that want to win and same with the enemy team, so you dont get the roflstomps like you do in comp.

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Pugs work for pros, because… well, they are pros. But what about the problems I mentioned?

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if you read the second part youd see where i said that ive started to play in more pugs and they make the game 1000x better

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Unfortunately there aren’t many modern competitive platforms out there unless you’re into battle royales. It also doesn’t help that they keep adding heroes with mega damage, and increasing the damage/sustenance of DPS heroes while nerfing supports and tanks.

Playing away from DPS is so uncompelling unless you’re just trying to ride the wave. I think this game would be a lot more competitive if playing tanks/supports was a little more attractive.

When Sombra was announced, I imagined her as more of an abathur type hero who chills back and buffs their team, to which I was sorely disappointed.

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would not a 222 role q solve the ‘‘premade’’ issue. as it would be able to judge the players skill level for the role they select much more accurately and therefore put together much more evenly match players into a coherent composition.

there is the other side in that you would loose the switching nature of the game and forcing a 222 isnt ideal as other comps can be played.

but is that worth having the current matchmaking system created by such a game with so many variables.

222 role q would limit the game but it might provide much more stable matchmaking and so better quality of games.

i think they could add it as an option and let people decide for themselves which they prefer.

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I wouldn’t call battle royales competitive in any way.

My hypothesis is, that battle royales are backlash against games like Overwatch. Basically, Ovedrwatch is a heavily structured, team-dependant game, where the Competitive mode is implemented in a way, that leads to frustration.
Battle royales are about bad hit registration, terrible gunplay, RNG (you may lool a trash one, or a legendary one) and as a result, you can die within the first few seconds, or survive till the end.
They choose to mess around and get few laughs out of a round, because they got sick and tired of being frustrated with flawed competitive modes like the one you have in Overwatch.

Which characters are you referring to?

I don’t necessarily mind mega damage. I don’t think healers should be able to compensate for every mistake. If that mega damage requires effort and skill to be pulled off, and if the recipiant “allowed” for it by making a mistake (say I fail to stay behind a shiled and I get shot in the head by Widow. I made the mistake when it comes to my positioning, thus allowing Widow the opportunity to do mega damage. Then, if Widow is skilled enough to land the headshot, she is rewarded for her accuracy)

I’m against that as well.

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Doomfist comes to mind for his one-shot mechanic, but Ashe also deals some absurd focused DPS. She’s not as reliable as Widow for picks, but she can easily put down any squishy from dominant range. I feel like we already have enough of that in the game. We should just fix Soldier instead of adding new quasi-snipers.

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I highly doubt that.

  1. Role queue would not resolve many of the issues I listed in the original post. I doubt I need to list them, as you can read it again and see where things don’t fit, especially the part of the different views.

  2. To my understanding, 222 is not the most effective strategy on certain points and maps. I’m not even talking about goats here.
    On some maps and points, 1 tank, 3 supports, 2 DPS, or 1 tank, 3 dps, 2 supports, or 2 tanks, 3 DPS, 1 supports can be better than 222.
    It doesn’t factor things such as… say Brigite is a support, but she can offtank… hell, I would argue, that a good Moira or Reaper in his current form can offtank…
    Removing that would limit strategies, punish creative play and it would be bad for the game.

  3. From what I gather, the professional players don’t even look at roles the way we do. For them the roles are Main Tank, Flex Tank, Main Healer, Flex Healer, Main DPS, Flex DPS. So, in reality, even if what you want were to be implemented and we end up with 222, it will only reduce some frustration temporarily, untill the understanding of the player baser catches up to that of the pros, and people will start to demand for a 123456 role q… and even if we get that, it would still not address things I listed… so yeah.

Premade vs Premade is the only thing, that would not be restrictive when it comes to creative play, it would address most of the issues, and put the responsibility on the team itself. Also, the focus would finally be on playing as a team, the way the game was meant to be played.

I am all for options in general, but when it comes to Overwatch, setting up multiple competitive modes would be wrong. It would split up the player base.
Premade vs Premade or Team League (as it was known back in Heroes of the Storm) should be the only mode, that should hold the title of Competitive.

Anything else is just people messing around.

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Why would I even try to prove you wrong, when you’re not wrong?

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  1. That part was a clickbait. Unfortunately, nowadays you have to resort to things like that to get some attention.
  2. Im used to expecting stupidity or trolling, or some combination of both in various proportions. For some reason, some people get really annoyed when you call call a spade a spade…
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Nothing is stopping people playing premade vs premade. I think Most people just want to play soloq I.e press a button and start playing.

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As long as premade vs premade is not standardized, you will get punished in one way or another.
I’ve explained it in a not scientific way, but really, that’s all you need to know.

But should such a mode be called Competitive? I would argue, that it shouldn’t be. Why bait people, that don’t want that?

“press a button and start playing”… sounds an awful lot like Quick Play to me…

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It’s a minority of players that would want to play clan vs clan and you can already do that via discords and custom games, so I doubt they will build comp around that.

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I am not talking about clan vs clan skirmish games organized on discords.

I am talking about Premade vs Premade becoming the standard Competitive mode, where you can play as a team, where the team is rated instead of the individuals, and where there’s no personal performance interfering with your SR gains and possibly the MMR.

I doubt it too, because Blizzard have proven time and time again, that they can make the wrong decision. They have proven, that at times when they need to listen to the majority, they instead listen to the top 0,1% of the players;
and when they should be listening to the pros, they listen to the casuals instead.

Building a mode around players, that “just wanna press a button and start playing” and calling it “Competitive” is a mistake. It’s an insult to every person with a functioning brain, who spent some time thinking and alanyzing what is actually happening in the game.
It will backfire, if it hasn’t already (see my hypothesis about the success of battle royale games).

Your post basically suggests, that the people, who enjoy the current Competitive mode are the majority, and that people, who want something better are in the minority. I would argue, that the number of players, who are enjoying the current Competitive mode are diminishing every day, and some are asking fore something better, while others simply stop playing Comp or Overwatch.

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It’s always going to be a casual sort of game mode, that’s why there are 3 tiers past GM/Top 500. That’s true comp, the rest is sort of pick up hoop at the local gym/park level of play. Yet much like pick up hoop at the local gym, better players will STILL win more game.
That’s why whines to rework/reset everything from all of us average sort of players is near meaningless.

That’s why some, I think Jayne (stream/OWL coach) has brought up the idea of a mini tournament system in the same basic format as I think one of the DOTA like games. Where you team up as 6 and enter into a weekend or just one day tournament with ranking as a “team”. Throw some rewards at the players and there ya go, a more hard core try hard comp mode for players. No throwers, no leavers and better team play.

but other then that I don’t see anyway to rework everything to solve what amounts to mostly community problems. Throwers, smurfs, crud team comps, toxic stuff, low effort, no supports, no main tank etc etc etc is all community issues.

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