We can't rework our way out of a bad community

General Discussion
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I’m beginning to think Overwatch isn’t the problem at all. Community discourse/expectations are the problem.

Starting with Supports, I notice all of the hated support abilities center around one thing: people think support abilities shouldn’t effect them negatively. Stuns, Anti, Cleanses, IF, Rez, it doesn’t matter. Players get frustrated when they feel like a kill is being taken from them, or when supports impede their gameplay.

I believe this frustration to be irrelevant. It comes from entitlement. The idea that “I shouldn’t be inconvenienced. I shouldn’t have my play stopped, my kills reversed. I shouldn’t have to play carefully due to being antied, I shouldn’t be stunned ever, and if I am, the game has to change. Rework them.” or thinking like that.

I don’t think this is a healthy way of thinking for the game, and I don’t think overwatch fans will EVER be happy if they hate to play against things simply because it counters them. The fact is that Blizzard changed overwatch to meet your expectations where they could, but only where they could. There has to be invulns, and anties and stuff like rez in the game for Overwatch to work well.

These abilities give Supports agency; they simply can’t remove their main play making abilities because they get in your way, can they?

And supports are just one part of the issue. The same is true for people not accepting tanky tanks, or snipers, and such. Complaints about them often come from bad faith. Things like “Snipers have no counters. Don’t tell me to use cover, don’t tell me to flank them” is simply no way to speak about what a sniper needs as far as nerfs or changes. Maybe I’ll make a dedicated post for them, too, but I don’t feel like it now.

My point is that I don’t think many in this community thinks about what’s good for the game as whole. The first thing they think of is “How does this effect me specifically?”, and if the next thought is “I don’t like that”, then the third thought will be “This should not be in overwatch”. That’s no way to make a complaint because we have to think about more than just YOU for the health of the game.

But at its core, I feel like Overwatch’s community is selfish. Look at the amount of people who outright hate teamplay in this team game!

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Incidentally, I think this set of changes would solve the vast majority of community complaints.

[OW2] Weekend PatchNotes I'm in the mood for:

Well, aside from tier list ranking stuff, but that’s never going away.

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What frustrated me most about bloated support kits is that Pulse Bomb - an ultimate ability - is basically useless against the majority of players now. It still takes equal amount of skill to land, but less than half the chance of a reward compared to launch.

That sucks.

But on the bright side, Supports getting more utility and power creep being a thing has lead to Supports being easier for me to play, so I simply play them more instead of making threads about it or complaining too much. It is a thing, though.

The problem is I don’t have as much fun on Support, so I do wish they’d just release PVE already. :confused: I know I come back to this topic a lot, but it would just solve everything for me (and probably a few other tired, disgruntled players).

Give us PVE so we don’t have to deal with the impossible-to-balance bloated kits in PVP. In fact, then we’ll encourage them because they’ll always be a perk against the AI. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Most support abilities are not healthy for this game no matter how much you spin it.

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Its not spin, its logic. You can’t have dramatic offensive abilities, weak support abilities, and expect everyone to be happy.

With that in mind

So, I agree that ultimate abilities should be ultimate. However, I also think characters should have ults in line with their kit. Should Tracer have a super strong ult with a powerful base kit with built in survivability tools? Would that be fair?

Support creep is a problem with damage creep. With damage being super valued and over tuned, support abilities have to be over tuned to match. You’ll notice most tanks need to have TWO damage mitigation abilities to keep up, too.

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The thing is, support players equally twist those same words and hate even .1 damage pellets hitting them and killing them in any capacity.

Some of these abilities are absurd no matter what. Like the concept of invulnerability being completely unhealthy and unnecessary for a game like this. There are better support abilities to come up with than just straight up immunity from death itself.

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Supports aren’t immune to the same things I’m saying about the community. In reality, most players are incredibly entitled, and there are supports who unironically say “Genji flanked and killed me, therefore nerf him”, and that’s just stupid.

No, the opposite is true. We exist in a game where you can die in one or two hits from most characters. We have characters like Soldier or Tracer who can burn you down in miliseconds. We need one of three things to deal with that:

1.) Global damage nerf so we don’t need invulns abilities.

2.) Powerful support abilities.

3.) Accept high damage, nerf supports.

Doing three is highly problematic because who’d want to play a game where damage is just THE answer? Supports would be healing people knowing there’s nothing they can do to save their teammates life, and you can’t buff support damage because they’ll just be the better version of Damage heroes, so what do you do then?

I really think its more healthy to just give supports powerful abilities tied to long cool downs. People need to stop feeling like they “earned” or “deserved” that kill, and remember that you have people actively working to stop your kill.

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The game is supposed to be fun for the masses, nothing is fun about anything blocking your kill. That’s what the majority of players want to do. Kill things. They don’t play OW to sit here and be a heal bot or throw out extremely low skill immunity abilities on high CDs. They play OW to kill the enemy. I understand OW is designed with the 3 role system in mind and I am not saying to get rid of that or lessen it but some things are 100% unacceptable.

It isn’t an entitlement when that’s what the majority wants to do. Why do we think OW is dead in the first place? It isn’t catering to DPS players because if that were true then invulnerabilities or things like Rez would not even exist by now. Begging for the removal of those things hasn’t worked, but do you know what has worked, every single time? Any complaint about the DPS heroes literally just doing damage and existing. Genji isn’t allowed to be viable for anyone at all for more than 2 weeks at a time and then Genji players have to wait over a year or longer to get the most minuscule pathetic buffs imaginable.

Meanwhile, if Mercy is “bad” or “unfun” holy moly the Mercy brigade is here in a full storm to say that she plays terribly(she played best in S3 btw) and they change her almost immediately(the same can be said for every support hero, which you know the role itself is overtuned now).

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I hate the feed into the stupid DPS vs. Support war, but I mean… eh, it’s how Blizzard rolls.

In WoW, you know what the most overpowered things in PVP are? Tanks and Healers. DPS are only broken when they have huge mitigation and/or self-healing potential. (So Ret Paladins / Death Knights / Boomkin Druids, etc.)

Rogues shine from time to time (like Genji) but a BG is usually decided by your tanks managing CDs and your healers’ skill.

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve played WoW, but I remember the two most broken things being Prot Paladins being nearly unkillable, and Resto Druids having to be nerfed due to making 2v2 and 3v3 Arena unbearable.

Anyway, I think it’s just the way these types of games work. Damage/DPS is great for a bit, but the game eventually gets bloated support / mitigation abilities that outpace it.

TL;DR: Overwatch is old and this is what happens. XP

Which again is why I just want PVE. We can all put our differences aside and not care and just kill the AI. :joy:

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a game as complicated as overwatch with a trinity role system is going to be that way. if you want fair you have to play fps’s that are more mirror in nature and overwatch is by far not one of those games

wow pvp was the same way and i played that for years. i always hated how an unbalanced mess it was but thats worse than overwatch since the pvp and the pve streamlined the same abilities, talents and gear. a lot of mmo’s do that but you think they would have different rulesets for pve and pvp with template gear for pvp

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Threads like these are how we ended up with OW2.

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People are whiny for sure and as a result they’ll ruin anything they can

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Overall I do agree that this community cries way too much. The one issue I don’t agree with is that of the snipers. I’ve always been fair about my game criticisms and such problems. In every game I’ve played with one shot snipers they all bring the same feeling of being unfair to play against. I do play CoD too and i must say quick scoping is skill based and nothing to easily pick up but boy does it compound when the player is good at it.

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You are right and you should say it.

‘‘I can impede your gameplay but you cant impede mine’’ is peak entitlement.

This isnt an PvE game. This is a PvP game. The enemy is SUPPOSED to make it hard for you. To swap and do their outmost, to take any and all advantages they can.

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But not you, of course. You’re the White Knight here to save us all. Thank you!

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Its a thing purely because people whined about tanks and DPS having team survival tools and got them removed or nerfed.

Supports were reduced to the only reliable source of team survivability for a lot of heroes.

They didnt touch flanker survivability or sniper range safety, but utterly shanked things like barriers and overhealth mechanics.

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I get the sentiment but then where do we draw the line? Should hog and sojourn get their one shots back? Can you be more specific because lots of abilities and heroes have been changed due to community complaints.

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No defense or defense in this game can outlast the right hero pounding at it. Like, half the time people just want to not explode. Most of the things removed were way more gated and conditional than any offensive ability.

The line has always been drawn. It was just moved towards fast killing advantage every single time.

Never, but thats because one shots have no place in a game where healing defines an entire role. This is the issue that ended up with GOATS and DS being the metas they were.

Neither can healing at any point of this game’s history outheal sustained damage. The issue is that people would rather complain that they cant Soldier2Win every single match against a Sigma/Orisa tank combo to get them destroyed with nerfs.

Barriers, defense hero overhealths, defense hero terrain creation, reliable anti-mobility damage, and DPS hero CC.

Basically anything that bothered flankers and snipers was removed or nerfed to the point its ineffective.

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To be fair, I think tanks were the ones complaining about stuns/CC. (And I mean, fair enough - they should’ve had the resistance as a passive from the get-go).

I actually miss some of the stuff. Never minded McCree’s flashbang while playing Tracer. It actually made him really fun to fight 1v1. Also didn’t think Junkrat’s trap was unfair (VERY annoying, yes, but not unbalanced.) I’m unsure why they went the route to remove as much as they did.

Some things were always broken, yeah. Like Brig 1.0’s kill combo was just insane and I can’t believe that passed through to creation. But as much as I hated Brig, I think nerfing her shield HP was dumb.

I dunno. All the things people hate about the game are usually blamed on the tribe of players they dislike the most, but in all honesty every group has influenced the game in one way or another with their input.

I don’t think people are a bunch of evil entitled brats, though. Plenty are biased (because we’re human), and getting experience on tons of different characters can help fix that, but we’re always going to talk about personal preferences regardless.

TL;DR: Devs do what the devs do, and I don’t blame any specific sect of the plaerybase for OW’s current state.

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I started playing ow1 late 2019 and double shield was as apparent to me and normal as

anything else in the game. The queue times were unusually long considering the previous

game i came from (apex legends) had pretty fast queues. Overall I loved the game and

didn’t really notice much problems with double shield. They dropped eventually and you

end up killing the bunkered enemies. Back then we weren’t region locked either so you

could theoretically go elsewhere you’d find less double shield Andy’s i guess.

The flashbang is my highlight of ow1, cass is still my favourite hero by far

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