I just wish they dropped it now rather than in a year. Because now this entire year will once again be 90% discussing 5v5 vs 6v6. And that’s it.
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I have this old relic from 2020 saved. Jeff states while they tested the whole 1 tank format 1-3-2, they had issues with trying to balance ‘off-tanks’ and didn’t like the pressure it brought on the single tank and how the game would basically revolve around that player. Ironically enough, kind of like today in a way.
Adding onto that post, he also mentioned trying 141 and it failed miserably because the support got overwhelmed and the tank also was overwhelmed, at the end of the day they all knew being the solo player in any role was terrible
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That post isn’t really him being down on 132. Jeff mentions a 141 experiment they tried internally and he’s down on that, but he makes a case for 132 as well as against it. He describes the problems as challenges to be overcome, not as reasons for never going down that road.
Then in Feb 2020, Jeff says:
Is one of your goals to get more people to play tank?
Kaplan: Not necessarily. This is how I’ve been thinking about it: imagine we’re an ice cream store, and we have three flavors of ice cream. We have chocolate, vanilla and strawberry, and you have to line up for all three flavors separately. So, imagine the vanilla line is way, way longer than the chocolate or the strawberry line. I feel like it’s the wrong philosophy to ask, “What can we do to convince the vanilla people to like strawberry more?” It makes more sense to say, “We need more vanilla ice cream!”
That’s a great analogy.
Heiberg [scrolling through his phone]: Actually, the most popular flavor—it looks like it might be chocolate after all. Depends on the source.
Kaplan: Well, we know it’s not strawberry. Strawberry is the tank.
That’s not a man commited to duo-tanking.
Source:
Yeah but two common denominators for both 141 and 132 is that too much pressure is put on a class. Whether it’s support for 141 or rank for 132. As much as Jeff wanted 6v6 to have one tank, I suppose he just couldn’t implement it in a way where pressure wasn’t too great.
Sure, which is why we ended up with 122 for OW2. Kaplan and co. weren’t confident they could pull off 132 so they went with the “easier” option and hoped for the best. If he’d never left, we’d still be where we are now.
No it didn’t. The 6v6ers haven’t changed. The 5v5ers just were really loud about how much they despised 6v6ers getting choice, and then try to pretend that it means 6v6ers are unhappy.
6v6 remains the better game mode and the problems you list are completely solvable through balance, whilst 5v5s problems are not.
Exactly.
Which again, points towards 7v7 (2-3-2) being a better gameplay mode than this crap. Hell 2-3-3 would be better.
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They didn’t go that route for technical/financial reasons.
Which can be solved through optimisation. Seriously the things in this game they refuse to optimise is kind of hilarious.
Like cmon. We have more complex games running better on the Switch. To pretend we can’t do better is frankly just… Ignorant.
Still. 1-2-2 has had what, 2-3 years to have even the most well known and basic problems solved (Tanks have far too much pressure put on them), and it’s pretty clear that things like the tank crisis just are side effects of the format. You’ve got one tank by themselves and even when gigabuffed the role just isn’t fun. Everyone jumps to counter them and counterswapwatch is only fun for like 3 people.
No one likes it when tanks are overpowered (since that doesn’t solve the problem for tanks), tanks like it even less when they’re underpowered.
And the balance between those two (the mythical right amount of power) still isn’t fun because there’s way too much pressure on them.
Meanwhile the problems with 6v6 are balance concerns that can be solved and have been solved.
As for the ‘oh but tanks don’t want to play enough for 6v6’.
Well maybe if you actually balanced the game in the last 2 years and added more tanks people would want to play tank.
But they didn’t.
Either incentivise people to play tank for 6v6, or accept that there will never be enough tanks in 5v5 unless you kill off every reason to choose dps or support.
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The problems with 6v6 aren’t really balance concerns, they’re gameplay ones. People didn’t want to play tanks in OQ, they didn’t want to play tanks in 222 RQ, and they don’t want to play tanks now in 122 RQ. There’s no balancing their way out of this one. We saw queue time issues in 222 RQ in less than six months, back when the game was getting updates regularly.
As for tank options being a factor in queue times: supports had a smaller roster than tanks did and their last character added in OW1 was Bap in early-mid 2019. And yet, there were roughly double the number of supports playing than there were tanks. Variety is nice to have, but doesn’t get people to queue up.
Double shield destroyed 6v6. Unless that gets addressed then it might not get much traction.
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They’re gameplay ones addressed through balance.
Again, least heroes of all formats, and no incentive to play it.
In 6v6 there is. Because you can have two to solve the pressure problem and go from there.
And they were still better than 5v5 ones until we reached the 18 month content drought, where it was left in a double shield meta.
Again, left in double shield, worst meta for tanks, for 18 months.
Balance concern.
Solo tank has been destroying 5v5 since relaunch.
The first change you’ll be testing is a Triple Damage—1 tank, 3 damage, 2 support—team composition. Where did that idea come from?
Heiberg: When we rolled our Role Queue with 2 damage, 2 support, and 2 tank players per team, we ended up with a lot more damage players in queue than tanks and supports. This created longer queue times, and one of the things we considered was, what if we tried to make the team composition closer to the actual ratio of players by role? If that did work out, people would be waiting less, playing more. So, it behooved us to actually try it.
So Heiberg mentioned that OW1 2-2-2 ended up with a lot more DPS players than Tank AND Support, not just Tank.
OW1 2-2-2 Queue Times cannot be used as an argument against 2-2-2 itself because:
(1) The rampant CC issue was never addressed in a big way to improve the game play experience of Tank players.
(2) OW1 2-2-2 released with a horrid roster of 8 Tanks, 16 DPS, 7 Supports, and the ONLY new hero we got for 3 years was Echo; our 17th DPS hero when we already had so many.
(3) Completely selfish Tank designs in OW1 2-2-2 (Roadhog & Wrecking Ball) were never addressed, all Tanks need to give some level of defensive value to their team to take pressure off the other Tank and make for way less bad Tank combos.
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- No, there have always been people who were pro-5v5.
- Now that the trend has slightly shifted towards 6v6, they feel the need to say something, just as 6v6 people felt the need to say something before.
Genuinely no one knows. Blizzard might find out when they eventually get a test running.
Personally, I believe most people don’t actually care. Most people aren’t pro any format, they just want a fun game.
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I get that, but double shield made me actually stop playing. My biggest gripe atm in 5v5 is the matchmaker being of very low quality and the hitboxes being the size of trucks to lower the bar for casuals (cash cows). Yes and balance could be improved greatly and then there’s the need to increase the tank population (unless 6v6 is open queue with 3 max per class limit).
I haven’t launched the game for a year. And I soft quit months before that.
Double shield never managed that for me beyond brief breaks (and double shield was the worst meta for 6v6 in my opinion).
Which would be solved via balance and other incentives. Tanking can be very fun in 6v6… But in 5v5 it’s always been a “Well, whose going to tank queue for the group so we can get into games”. Whilst solo tank queueing almost always gets you a 4 stack team and a 5 stack enemy team because they need you. Because there is never enough tanks in 5v5 nor will there ever be enough tanks.
How many Overwatch creators are there now compared to before? Where’s the new blood? The people trying out the game that aren’t paid to do so?
Supports had fewer characters than tanks, actually.
Tanks: D.Va, Orisa, Rein, Roadhog, Sigma, Winston, Wrecking Ball, Zarya. Eight characters.
Supports: Ana, Bap, Brig, Lucio, Mercy, Moira, Zen. Seven characters.
And yet we had double the number of support players.
The trouble with duo-tanking is that you can’t just have two tanks because then the queue times explode.
Queue times weren’t better than 5v5 ones. We had the devs acknowledge that there was an issue with queue times before Feb 2020, scant months after 222 RQ’s release. They were already testing to change the format; they saw the tip of the iceberg.
Queue times didn’t improve when double barrier fell out of vogue in top ranks and also, queue times were an issue across all ranks. Rein’s always been a metal rank miracle but it didn’t matter, queue times were bad for metal ranks regardless.
It would be good if it succeeded as 6v6 would be easier to balance the matchmaker (easier to carry dead weight with more people). But I’m not sure how they’re going to get people to play tanks without ruining it for everyone else. I have very little faith in the balance team.
And they were also substantially less picked than dps.
And they were left in a far better position during the 18 month content drought.
And this would have been better solved through incentive not restriction.
How well has restriction been going Potatoad? Throwing us into 5v5 has only made it so that it can never get better because the problems are now inherent to the format.
…By adding more? By the fact that they won’t suck to play when you have two? By nerfing double shield?
Yep. The majority of the tank playerbase will be queuing for 6v6 only. Having both options is gonna be a head scratcher.