The devs have said that player counts are 3 to 1 in favor of 5v5 and I’ve been genuinely curious why that is. Every post I see complaining about one tank or another needing nerfs or changes, I’ll click on it and go, “Yep, they just need to play 6v6 where the tanks can be killed.” Not saying the balance is perfect of course, but nothing feels too oppressive that bans can’t take care of it (quick PSA for console players, stop banning Symm. There are lots of other heroes that are more annoying by way of being OP. Thank you!).
The best potential reasons I can think of for people not playing 6v6 are below, but curious if there are others I’m missing:
Open queue causes some stress or barrier to entry. In most of my games I can play whatever role I want, and people will be nice enough to pick around me. In some difficult games I’ll need to know how to swap to win, but that’s true in 5v5 too. Maybe people don’t know you can largely play what you want? I can’t remember the last game I had in competitive that didn’t start on a 2-2-2 composition.
It’s a more difficult format for DPS players and Supports have to heal more. With more players on the field, you have to be more careful as a DPS (especially if you’re diving). When I play support, I’ve noticed that I needed to recalibrate how much DPS I’m weaving in, but there’s still room to make plays, especially if the team knows when to try triple support.
It’s not the main format, so people have to click two more buttons or move their cursor to the right of the screen in the main menu. It sounds dumb, but maybe it’s just laziness?
Some tank players might enjoy being overpowered raid bosses. If you’re the strongest player in the game, then you have more control over the outcome. Maybe as DPS/Support, you feel you have higher carry potential as well?
Personally I just prefer 5v5 after I got used to it. Played the 6v6 role queue test for a few hours seasons ago and didn’t like it as much. I prefer role queue, while I have issues with 1 strong tank, I never liked playing tank in ow1/6v6. Where as I enjoy being the 1 stronger tank. I find supports more fun in 5v5 where I can weave in more dmg instead of pumping heals into 2 tanks all game. Dps I may have liked more in 6v6 as tanks are more killable, but isn’t enough for me to want to play it.
It’s not the tanks, it’s their (braindead and too effective) abilities. I don’t want to double the number of cheap tricks I have to deal with. Personally, I think this game would have been better with no “tanks” as blizzard imagined them.
As a person who mains tank and support, my primary concern is role queue. My secondary concern is that tanks don’t feel bad. So my reasons.
It isn’t role queue. And unless they make it role queue, I’m not touching it. For me it is 2/2/2 role queue or not at all.
D.Va specifically needs to feel good to play and like she doesn’t explode too fast. She was weak at the end of OW1 and unless she’s stronger than that in this mode then I’m also just not interested. I don’t want to be an OP raid boss, but I also don’t want to feel weak which I do in this mode.
I also find in 6v6 that supports become unfun for me. I prefer supports in 5v5. So if I ever play 6v6 it would just be to play tank and right now I prefer 5v5 tanking because this version of 6v6 doesn’t feel good to me as a tank player.
Bottom line, unless they make it role queue I’m not going to play it. If they make it role queue, I will try it but I need to feel like I have real agency as a tank.
I got so burnt out with QP, that I don’t even touch the modes anymore. I play Mystery Heroes or VS Ai. That’s been pretty much it lately. Which is really sad.
I would guess that by and large, people don’t like the uncertainty. A guy might be able to get away with playing DPS and DPS alone in Max 2 Tanks - but then again, they might not. RQ guarantees that.
Given that there are too few tank players to make 222 RQ work, people are having to choose between the security of 5v5 RQ and the uncertainness of 6v6 OQ, and it looks like most of them will plump for RQ despite all the stuff you point out.
Which is fine by me as long as they continue to keep Max 2 Tanks around. As far as I know, they’ve not confirmed it yet, and we’re getting close to the end of season. I haven’t played 5v5 since 6v6 has been available and I’m not keen on going back.
Dva sucks in 6v6 since for whatever reason they decided to nerf literally every part of her kit meanwhile sigma gets away with a bit less health and that’s it.
I’m not playing a gamemode where I have most of my power taken away and have to rely on the other tank to make up for it, especially when that tank could be a roadhog.
I’m not saying that isn’t true for you or anything, but I doubt that sort of thing’s why, generally speaking, 122 RQ is more popular. I suspect that 5v5 OQ was also far less popular than 5v5 RQ, and that mode had fully-powered tanks.
There’s just not enough dedicated tank players around to make that much of a difference either way, really. I’d bet that they could stick D.Va (as she is in RQ) into 6v6 and it wouldn’t change the player distribution at all.
Well the dedicated tank players I imagine like myself would rather play the game mode where they’re actually good and have impact where they don’t have to rely on the other random tank to be good at the game.
I definitely feel the RQ issue, and didn’t know D.Va wasn’t great, but hopefully that gets fixed. There were bound to be balance woes.
I will say though, Open Queue has grown on me a little, since I don’t really want to be stuck on a role if my favorite hero gets banned. Personally I dislike the design of a lot of the tanks (looking at you Mauga, Hog, Orissa), and like that I can swap to DPS or Support in the event of an unlucky ban.
I also play Zen, Brig, and Kiriko on support, so the stronger emphasis on healing doesn’t affect me as much, and I’ve kinda gotten used to it after a while on Kiriko. Totally makes sense though if you play anything else other than Mercy/LW.
you actually addressed that
-Open role can give me very bad games with no hearler or tanks, and people tend to play worse going alone and being killed instead of grouping up.
-Healers need to heal more and usually to fewer targets so it is more boring for me
-Dps need to group up more and can’t flank or dive because of the second tank, only a few characters with mobility can do it like tracer or genji. So I feel like I’m spamming more with the other dps and it is more boring to me.
-The battles, when they are in a group properly, tend to be longer instead, even if you can kill a tank faster, killing two takes a lot more time and a lot of times it gives enough time that someone killed, respawns and come back before finishing the battle.
-Actually I don’t like to play my tanks in this game mode, I feel it improves the experience with main tanks like sigma, orisa… but doomfist, maybe monkey and wrecking ball start to feel like just a bruiser dps and not a tank, and can only survive if they flank and attack sneakly. I actually like to play those heroes and soak damage for my teammates like a tank, but I tend to die very fast if I do that.
Totally agree about Sigma (even if he isn’t my least favorite tank design), but it seems there are too many other heroes that people want banned. We just have to hope that the balance team pleasantly surprises us with some good changes on that front.
As someone who plays very casually, i simply dont want to put the effort to learn the pacing and balance for 2 seperate modes. If 6v6 ever became the main mode i would play that instead.
The only time I play 5v5 is when I’m tired of being forced to solo Tank because everyone instalocks Support who absolutely should not, and too many DPS.
