It IS poor and it’s been getting worse. This video is old now, but still relevant.
CSGO, Rocket League, Fortnite, PUBG.
Even most good fighting games try to keep character “countering” to a minimum.
You don’t need to wonder why this game is dying.
I’m talking about character design dude. You link me a video about the state of all of Overwatch. No secret the game hasn’t been great the last few years. Your list of games is pretty cute too but it still pales in comparison to League of Legends and Valorant. Two biggest games in the world. League in particular is brutal to play because champion counters are so prevalent. But yeah let’s ignore those and talking about the great competitive games of our time: Fortnite and PUBG! The characters are clearly the best part of Overwatch and even those that aren’t working well right now are getting reworked for OW2. So once again, countering is good for the game and exists in the most popular games out there. And the decline of Overwatch was lack of content and communication, not because Brig counters doom or anything stupid like that.
No, a pattern of team selection.
No, the SR is a measure of how many times my team won or lost, not skill.
If I get another account and place higher than my last account, have I improved? If account #1 placed in Silver, account #2 placed in Gold and account #3 placed in Platinum, is that an indication that I have improved? Or is that the matchmaker doing it’s job?
Is English your first language? Getting to top 500 one tricking any character is very uncommon, it’s just not unknown. There are players who have one-tricked almost every character to top 500, but in the pool of players, most of those are very uncommon. Uncommon means infrequent i.e. the tails of the distribution.
There was going to be a list of links here, but I can’t post links. Thanks, OW forums.
Just look up “esports earnings 2021” or “most played esport 2021”
The only thing I can find that makes LoL or Valorant “biggest in the world” is in hours watched on Twitch.
If you think awful characters like Brig didn’t contribute to the falling popularity of Overwatch as a competitive game then I don’t know what to tell you. It’s very obvious that Blizz makes half of their balancing decisions to keep certain characters in check until they can be reworked because their kit makes the game hell.
This argument STARTED because I was talking about how games are very often steamrolls in one direction or another. Character countering is a pretty good explanation for this and being willing to switch characters doesn’t help because you can’t control what your team picks.
People becoming frustrated and having arbitrary wins or losses decided by who the matchmaker places on their team is the natural endgame of hard counters. Nobody wants to lose a match on the character select screen.
Clearly you didn’t watch the video.
You’re the only player to have been in all of your games. But sure man, it’s just your teams.
Wow you discovered placements are pretty useless. Been known for years.
Maybe English isn’t your first language either! It’s uncommon for literally anybody to be top 500. It isn’t uncommon to find players in the top 500 that are one tricks. Maybe your reading comprehension isn’t there yet though. Keep improving your English!
h ttps://activeplayer.io/league-of-legends/
h ttps://www.dexerto.com/valorant/how-many-people-play-valorant-player-count-tracker-2022-1668158/#:~:text=Valorant%20maintained%20an%20estimated%20total,climb%20with%20each%20passing%20month.
League is so far ahead in player count and esports scene that they are rightfully the gold standard for the industry. That is why I most commonly use it as the comparison.
I fully admit that I did get ahead of myself. Brig as a character, immortality field etc, are bad design and bad for the game. But you shouldn’t group everything into one and you certainly shouldn’t claim that countering is bad design. So again, league of legends regularly reworks old characters because it’s near impossible to do everything right the first time. Moreso when the game changes over the course of a decade, or half decade for overwatch.
Y’all refuse to budge, so will I. But I will say that it is the same in every team game. You can’t control your team, oh well. Do what you can and over a larger sample size your impact is obvious.
I mean yeah, I’m not gonna sit and watch a 20 minute video for the one sentence that benefits you. Tracer, echo, ball are still excellently designed characters. Brig stunted the competitive scene but did almost nothing in low elo. So ultimately lack of content and communication did infinitely more harm to Overwatch than any one character.
You can, but some heroes will take much longer than others, require more grind, more co-operation from team mates, more compatible compositions. For example, Window and Nano multiply force differently for different dps/tanks than Coalescence. So playing Bap or Ana requires a lot more from your team mates than playing Moira, who is basically a brain dead spray n pray hero. And Moira ult-charges faster when your team is bad, because they are taking lots of damage, and unlike Bap or Ana, she requires no aim, only a basic sense of positioning, and the Orb is a set and forget remote killing machine. Learn how to bounce it off walls and you’re done.
Or you could stop overbuffing certain heroes, or nerfing others. I think the problem is more a lack of complexity in the individual heroes rather than complexity across the set of heroes. Some FPS games have 9 weapons plus armor and health to manage. When your hero only has a limited toolkit (e.g. primary fire, shield, charge, firestrike), you have to make each of those tools quite powerful because the toolkit is so limited. And when one hero has 4 very powerful tools, you need to make other heroes with powerful tools to counter them, and now you have an arms race that you can never resolve. So you end up with something like Genji or Soldier 76, who can slaughter the support back line without breaking a sweat, and then the question becomes one of :
Do we buff the supports to deal with this? If we buff the supports too much, they become dps, but if we don’t, we need to buff the dps or tanks to counter or peel, and then we risk making the tank or dps counters too powerful etc etc
The OW response to this is team coordination. No single player is a threat against an entire team, so now you are relying on your team mates being cooperative or willing to switch to a counter.
So if you have only had a handful of games where that was not the case in 2600 hours of playing, I want to know what region you are playing in, and how you managed to get 1000s of magical teams.
No, I’m suggesting there is a difference in the SUM of SR between teams. So team 1 might look like
1000, 900, 1200, 750, 900, 1150
and team 2 like
1400, 1490, 1100, 1450, 1350, 1400
And that’s not even accounting for derankers/smurfs.
If you play DPS, that’s probably true. I always place much higher for DPS than Tank or Support, but after that play only about 4-5 games per season.
I find Soldier 76 boringly easy to play, so if I queue into DPS (in 385 games of queuing flex, this has happened 4 times), I will play Junk Rat until the team starts to struggle or I get hard countered, then I will switch to S76, who probably has the best kit in the whole game. He has fast movement, self healing, burns shields, has hitscan and projectile and a wicked ultimate that burns through squishies like butter.
But yea, as Tank or Support, which I assume you don’t play, because if you did, you would never make the above statement, it’s a totally different story. I have countered most of the above with Ana, but you need two very good tanks for that.
No, I’ve won 5v6 when there are 5 players who want to win. Sometimes when the thrower/feeder left it’s been easier to win. I’m not talking about games with saboteurs, I’m talking about games where we were completely and utterly outclassed. Tank diffed, Support diffed, DPS diffed. One, or all three. Those are about 10% of my games.
Thank you for capitulating and admitting that the matchmaker is broken, and that it’s been known for years.
All the top 500 players are in the top 500. They make up the distribution of top 500 players and the roles they play.
Yes, it’s uncommon. It’s not unknown, but it is uncommon. i.e. one-tricks and certain heroes are in the tail of the distribution.
You keep using that word, it doesn’t mean what you think it means.
You’re so fed up on that sentence it’s weird. I stand by what I said. You will commonly find people in t500 that are one tricks. Not as in the majority are, but there are definitely a handful. So if you look in any respective role, you will commonly find a one trick. Do you understand now?
A bit weird that placements having little meaning equates to the entire ladder being a sham. Whatever helps you cope with being forever average.
There are lots and lots of games where people claim they like it, but think it would be better if this one little [defining characteristic] weren’t part of the game.
I don’t get it. I said this 4 years ago. I don’t get the whole attitude. Like, if your individual SR is just that important to you, ffs don’t play OW. The game cannot work like that.
Do you mean “hung up”? Sorry, I didn’t realise that English really is a second language for you.
If they are not the majority, then it is NOT COMMON. That’s literally what “common” means.
Yes, I understand that you don’t know what the word common means.
It’s a bit weird you claiming that placements are completely random, like a dart to a dartboard. If the placement rank is meaningless, does that mean that the matchmaker was working 52% of the time for the subsequent games I played, and broken for 48% of the subsequent games I played? Or the other way around?
Was I carried by much higher ranked players for 48% of the games I played, and if so, how was that a fair match for the team that lost?
If I really am a bronze player, shouldn’t I have dropped from Plat to Bronze in 20 games rather than 200 games? How did I win 184 games in Plat, Gold, Silver and high Bronze if my true rank is low Bronze? Was the matchmaker broken in my favor for 184 games, but working perfectly for 200 games? Or the other way around?
: very tired of (something) : angry about (something that has continued for a long time) I’m fed up with all these delays.
So tell me how ‘fed up’ doesn’t work since you are the English major here apparently.
Crazy how I literally clarified in my post that I did not mean the majority was one tricks yet you still drew that assumption. So let me spell it out one last time
**IT IS NOT UNCOMMON TO SEE ONETRICKS ON THE TOP 500 LEADERBOARD. YOU LITERALLY HAVE TO SCROLL LESS THAN 5 TABS ON EACH ROLE (starting at the back) TO FIND SOMEBODY WITH 0 TIME PLAYED ON ANY OTHER CHARACTER. ONETRICKS ARE COMMON(occurring, found, or done often; prevalent.)
Placements are not entirely random but are still largely useless. It’s a lot easier to maintain a rank than it is to climb to it. But honestly who cares. You spend so much time claiming that the matchmaker is why you can’t climb that you could have improved enough to just do it with brute force. You cannot control what games you get so drop the game or drop the complaining.
If I was “fed up” I would drop the topic, if I was “hung up” I would persist with it. So you could be fed up with me being hung up (and persisting with that particular line of debate), but I wouldn’t be fed up and persistent.
So, if my placement rank trends upward, is that random or largely useless? i.e. is it a trend of improvement, or a fluke, or just the roll of the dice?
I think it’s obvious that you do.
So, the 3 hours I’ve spent writing on this topic versus the 936 hours I’ve spent playing the game is the difference that would make the difference? I’m really only 0.3% away from soaring to Diamond if I just drop posting in forums?
I thought cult members were supposed to work on retaining members. Is this reverse psychology?
This is not the fault of the matchmaker though. This is player behavior. You could fix it by changing the rules of the game (so people could not group with players of different skill, or even only allowing solo queue), but the issue could come up regardless of the matchmaker unless you made that rule change.
It has nothing to do with the matchmaker.
I mostly play Tank and Support. I’ve definitely played DPS (I’ve played a fair amount of all three roles over the course of 2100+ hours), but I’ve spent probably twice as much time on either Tank or Support as I’ve played on DPS. And, yes you can counter pretty much anything as Tank/Support.
Zen is actually quite nice as a counter sniper. Lucio can 1v1 just about anyone if you are decent (not great, decent) at wall-riding. D Va is quite good against Pharmercy or Widow. Roadhog is better than you’d think if you know the maps well. Tanks can always take high ground rather than simply pushing main, etc. Sigma works quite well to wall off Widows and eat damage. There’s a lot you can do if you aren’t simply playing Reinhardt and holding barrier in a choke.
And the other thing is that you do not need to kill the Pharmercy or the pocketed Soldier/Ashe/whoever. You just need to keep them from getting value. If you can push the Mercy off of them and have the DPS ineffectually trying to kill you, you can get enough value to let your team accomplish what they need to.
Usually the big issue is that the Pharmercy or the pocketed DPS or whatever is getting a ton of value because they are going uncontested. If you can contest them, you can often get enough value to help your team win. But those Gold Pharmercy duos or pocketed DPS duos are usually not very good. So you can deal with them as a healer or a tank easier than you might think.
All of these strategies rely on co-operation from other players on your team, so the idea that you can hard carry 5 players to victory sounds dubious. You need the co-operation of at least one other tank/support/dps to do that.
I notice that you did not address my point about a 2000 SR difference between teams. Do you disagree that can happen?
If anybody is the cult member it’s you. You’re the guy with the conspiracy that blizzard has a rigged matchmaker. If you use some rational thought and a neutral point of view you can probably decipher that what you’re saying makes no sense. Every competitive game uses a matchmaker and MMR but somehow blizzard is the only one rigging games.
How are you gonna list how to counter widow and completely miss her biggest weakness. She is so easy to dive. You don’t even need follow up from any of your team. That’s what the HP nerf was for. With each thing you type, it further reinforces that you lack critical thinking skills.
You are the one with the massive conspiracy that you believe blizzard is pulling. Cults usually have odd conspiracies so it does line up for you.
All these widow counters and you still miss her biggest weakness. Widow is so easy to dive. That’s what the HP nerfs were for. Somehow you miss that one too.
Diving requires covering distance, often through enemy territory, so that’s not her biggest weakness. Unless you play brawl widow, which wouldn’t surprise me, but most Widow players take advantage of long sight-lines, which means a lot of enemy territory to contest before a dive tank can get to her.
Literally the entire video is relevant to what I’m saying and it’s coming from a former pro player.
Being a team game means relying on other people, but hard counters multiply your dependency on teammates by 10.
I would rather a stubborn/clueless teammate at least have a fighting chance on the character they’re playing rather than know I’ve already lost before the match even started.
It’s practically impossible to not have good/bad character matchups, but hard countering should never be a thing.
If me picking x absolutely forces you to play y or lose then there’s a problem.
If the entire game was hard counters then there wouldn’t even be a point in playing. The team with the losing composition would just leave as soon as they see the other team.
You continually amaze me! It really isn’t that hard to get to the backline. If you are on ball, tracer, genji, they are built to do that exact thing, and they are very good at it. Like just roll through main on ball, get a health pack and you are free in ‘enemy territory’.
I’m assuming you’re talking about yourself being countered. I honestly think that one tricks aren’t as bad as most people think. But if you do one trick, you shouldn’t be surprised if people try to counter you. And saying that you rely more on your team is like a given. You are able to do less if you are countered, so your team must do more themselves to win. That’s relying on your team to carry you, not to do the bare minimum to win.
In a game like Overwatch, I disagree. Balance should not consider one tricks, so hard counters will likely always be a thing. If you are being countered, switch. If you refuse, so be it.
Most counters aren’t even this cut and dry. It’s more of a swap off of ball to any other tank if I go mei or sombra, not a specific tank.
In the end, hard counters are just a ranked and lower elo problem in general. In pro play, playing the best comp for the map is almost always better than running a counter comp. So I guess the situation isn’t as bad as either of us are making it out to be.
I’m in the mazing business.
I didn’t say it was hard, just harder than sniping with Ashe or Zen. So diving is not Widow’s greatest weakness. In fact, it’s probably 6th on the list after (1) Squishy and lack of close quarter combat (2) Reduced situational awareness when in scope (3) long cool down on movement ability, so evasion is difficult (4) long way from team in the best sniping positions, weak in brawl position (5) Very loud primary fire and movement, long lasting tracer, so very easy to triangulate position.
I’d like to see tracer or genji dive Widow on Kings Row in the top window. Do you have a video or a replay code? Even ball would struggle. Normally I would just put a Rock through there and knock her off her perch, but if you think that diving that position is easier, I’d love to see some footage.