I mean… I learned them all. I just know how to play 3-4 heroes reasonably goldy. … do not ask me to play widow plz. We will both be sad.
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I enjoy playing 7 tanks , there’s 3 others I can play occasionally if they’re really needed, doomfist is the only one I never touch. Just because there’s 7 tanks that I like doesn’t mean that it’s fun being forced to play 5 different ones in a single match
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I’m not going to tell you what to enjoy. But you also don’t get to tell me that I’m only saying to swap because I don’t have to. There ARE people who play multiple characters in multiple roles and still have fun. Swapping has been a way of life since the game came out and the method continues to work even in the hellscape that is 5v5 tanking.
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How are you going to say that when, for the past two seasons, literally every tank has been forced to mirror Orisa or play Zarya to win?
It didn’t matter how good you were on Ram, Winston, Ball, whatever; Orisa and Zarya were just objectively better picks that you weren’t going to beat no matter how good you were with the other tanks.
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you can.
7v7 (2-3-2)
remove shields
further adjustments to the balance around damage but not control
I haven’t been forced to do that, does that mean anything? I play Winston or Ramattra into Orisa all day long
I’m talking about competitive not custom games. 
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Yes, well, anyways, I’m your exception to the apparent rule. Do with that what you will.
an interesting thought to have about that.
if you are in comp right and you play in the metal ranks. no matter how many heroes you try to play you arnt playing them properly.
so when people say things like “or they learned how to play 3-4 heroes”, what they are actually saying: im stuck in a rank where everyone is bad so i can just pick up a hero, play it poorly and still get value.
not realizing getting half decent with 4 heroes (aka getting to atleast masters) is fairly difficult and time consuming.
a good 25% of why people end up being hard stuck in the metal ranks is because they try to play too many heroes.
another 25% is because they try to force the wrong heroes
the last 50% is because of ego.
i tried to divide the last 50% up but it just always devolved into ego + something ego related
dont get me wrong, being able to play more then 1 hero is good. but you have to find a middle ground between swapping when your being countered and learning how to play into the counter.
its not an either/or situation. its a very grey area
sometimes your team needs X hero but the enemy is also playing a counter thats very effective against X. so you can either swap to Y and leave your team without X and thus be at a disadvantage OR you can learn how to play X into that counter so the situation never becomes an issue for you.
a good example of that is playing widow into widow+sombra on a sniper map.
your team needs ‘your’ widow to exist to apply pressure to the enemy widow but if your getting rolled by the sombra its very easy to just swap but in doing so you leave the enemy widow uncontested.
(this to be fair exists from every player perspective. if your playing a hero thats not good into widow, you need to learn how to kill widow regardless.)
this doesnt mean someone should just feed the entire time but you cant learn anything if you always give up when something becomes difficult.
for a person thats never hit masters/gm, its better for them to pick a single role and play 1-2 heroes as much as possible so they can have some level of mastery with them.
which will make climbing alot easier.
most of the top 500s people know and sometimes loathe/love are known for a single hero.
some are still one tricks, some arnt but they started with the goal of mastery of a small niche and that makes them far more dangerous then the normie flex player.
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Nothing of this removes most instances of counterpicking out of the game.
It just removes what annoys you specifically.
zero logic⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀
what would remove counter picking is forcing us to stay who we picked in the start of the round. then every start of the round you can swap until spawn doors open. This way, nobody will insta swap, and if you get put up against pharmercy you can swap next round. its foolproof.
Or me who plays Widow and has to swap the second I start doing well and the enemy runs full dive to stop me. Or has to swap the second I do poorly because my team will have a mental breakdown if I don’t.
I still acknowledge that swapping is a necessity for the game with how heroes are designed. This isn’t Paladins and we have heroes like Pharah or even Widow who physically can’t work in an environment without swapping
Basically what you are saying is you want people to let you win instead of trying to come up with a way to beat you.
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Put five seconds of thought into this idea.
Is that why Rein and DF are the meta in most ladder?
Orisa is not the boogieman that people say she is. Much less Zarya.
Most of the time there is a problem with orisa not dying its on the DPS picking headshot dependent heroes, not the tank. Orisa forces Rein into playing a bit more passively but thats about it. Orisa does not hardcounter Reinhard out of the game lmao
Most of the time I win against Orisa is alongside a Rein that makes space for me as I melt the offending Orisa as Symmetra.
Loads into a Push match, picks JQ, sees enemy is Ball/Pharah/Echo/Mercy. Regrets existing because there is only 1 hero on the enemy team you can reliably do anything about. Loses horribly.
Picks Dva next Push match, sees Zarya/Mei/Sym/Moira/Lucio on enemy team, proceeds to spend the next 3 minutes dying horribly because you lucked into playing 4 beam characters that can run you down. Loses horribly.
Fun
Locking swaps would be beyond miserable for anyone who doesn’t enjoy throwing themselves into impossible matchups (i.e. almost everyone).
If you only allow swaps between rounds then you’ll get teams that run Pharmercy for one round and then swap to a counter-counter composition for the next round and steamroll you there.
First round (which includes the entirety of all Push and Flashpoint matches) goes to whoever lucks into picking a less countered comp, Second round devolves into pre-round counter-counterpicking meta-strategy that you have to at least try to follow.
It would get even worse at the top end of the Ladder, as the player pool shrinks and people start to recognize each other.
- “This guy always starts on Hog, so I’ll pick Orisa and we’ll also have an Ana”
- “They know I start on Hog, so I’ll get an easy round by playing Winston into them”
- “He probably knows we would plan to fight his Hog, so he’ll probably be playing Winston instead, so I’ll pick Hog and we’ll have a Reaper and Brig.”
- "I think they will be planning for my Winston so…
And on and on it goes.
you realize people have asked for limits on how many times someone can switch
More like me, who is instantly swapping as soon as I get hard-countered. And yes, it was. I could probably still find a link to that one twitter post from 2016 where someone from the deve team said that hero swapping is a “core mechanic” of the game.
The ONLY method that works anymore. That’s the issue and why it is killing the game.