The company also has a lot of hubris. They spend tons of effort on things like trying to make healers and tanks fun. There's many good reasons to do that and they gave it a good try, but the conclusion should have been: we aren't able to make healers and tanks fun, let's try something else. Instead, they forced people to play them.
Other mistakes include not understanding "the meta." Once they think the meta is balanced in a game, they get conservative and don't want to tweak things too much. They don't realize that the meta is an equilibrium state found by the players. Change the game, a new meta will be found. They don't seem to get this and just let their games run stale because they think the competitive scene drives the player base, instead of the other way around.
Overall the facepalm factor has been too high for too long. Blizzard has always understood the science of game design, but since at least SC2 they lost the art.
Remember OW was supposed to be a different game, one that they cancelled. They reused a lot of the assets and so on and hashed them together with the ultra-popular genre of the time. It mostly worked at the start but it was pretty clear to me after a little while that they didn't really have any clear idea about where to take it. It always felt like a "recovery" game, a "we spent a huge sum of money building these assets, let's at least get something out of them" rather than something with a well-thought out long term plan behind it.
Overwatch has one of the best custom game mode designers I've seen in a game since Garry's Mod. The amount of things that people are able to do with the custom games in Overwatch is incredible and I'd recommend checking them out if that's what you're looking for.
Healers and tanks are fun! The problem is that they keep introducing balance changes that make it incredibly frustrating to play certain tanks/supports. With DPS, this isn't an issue, because there are literally more DPS characters than there are healers and supports combined, so there are more to choose from.
If they made the experience of playing tank/support more consistent, or if they actually expanded the pool of tanks/supports by having more than 8 tanks and 7 supports, there would be more interest in playing those roles.
If I were going to single out one thing that I've never seen anyone mention it is that shields are 1 way only. It makes tanks too powerful and stable, thus support is needed, thus dps is third tier.
Of course Blizzard had a challenge designing supports - if they were too weak they were unfun to play but if they are too strong then your entire dedicated player base complains for months.
Ultimately I think the problem was the lack of diversity among the other supports/tanks. The relatively few amount of tanks/supports ultimately meant that the community would quickly coealesce on an optimal tank setup (Rein/zarya, Winston/dva, etc), and as a tank/support player it became boring to play because picking an off-meta tank would be seen as a throw. There's little that is worse than queing to play your favorite tank and the other 5 players yelling at you to switch to $meta.
*Healing teammates*
Team mate: I need healing
Me: Im already healing teammate
Team mate: I need healing
Team mate: I need healing
Team mate: I need healing
*hasn’t stopped healing*
*Team mate dies*
LITERALLY NO HEALS. FFS HEAL!
End of Match
FFS HEALS UNINSTALL THE GAME.
Cards land.
Top healer of the match, 40% of damage recovered.
Me: What more do you fucking want???
For me, that’s I enjoy the least as being healer. I would rather have 0 comms than that. And the thing is, there is fuck all bliss can do to fix it. Dicks are gonna be dicks, idiots are always gonna be idiots.
EDIT: The other “fun” one is this.
Healers: “We have tracer and or doom fist fucking up out back line”
*tumbleweeds*
Healers: “hey, we are seriously getting are arses handed to us in the back line, can we get a bit of help just so they lay off our back line for a bit?”
*tumbleweeds*
Rest of the team: WHERE THE FUCK ARE RHE HEALERS?
Healers: “Dead, we are both dead. We can’t heal if we are dead or having to attack in order to keep ourselves alive because we have not backup. They have a Rein camping the spawn so I had to switch JUST to get out of the spawn room alive”
Rest of the team: FFS LITERALLY 0 HEALS.
ALSO GROUP THE FUCK UP. And don't spam "I need healing" and then go the opposite way to your healers (If we can't get to you or have LOS on you, we can not heal you), or spam it when you don't need healing (it takes our attenstion off those who do).
Oh and my personal fav(s).. Ask for heals, get a small heal then run away 2 sec's later and than complain you are not at full health, Or be a widowmaker way back away from the team snipping, spamming heals when you are standing 5 meters away from a large medipack. Or be a high mobility char getting healed, take 25% of damage thing "Fuck this PEACE", Leave by a means your healer can't only for your healer to then been stomped on (bonus points if you then complain about healing 0.5 seconds after leaving your healer).
And you wonder why we flip the fuck out, say fuck it and turn into a DPS Moria or a well booping Lucio?
[citation needed]
> Well more than the majority prefers dps.
Well more than the majority of characters are DPS characters. If Blizzard provided the same variety in tank and support characters that they do in DPS, there'd be more of a draw to play those roles.
The problem with DPS is that you can either pick a fun one with a ton of weaknesses that loses your team the game, or you can play hitscan. Pro players and people with a background in other games really love the hitscans, and Blizzard obliges them, to the point where it's kind of throwing to not pick one. (Have you ever been upset to have a McCree on your team? Stun the dive. Cancel ults. Two tap someone across the map. Flank around and McRightclick a support. The dude does everything!) That's not to say you can't win games with the off-DPS -- there is someone out there streaming how you can pick Symmetra or Bastion every game and win 60% of them against the pros.
Support is a fun role. I've always said that Ana is the sniper for people that think Widowmaker is too easy. There's a character where if you play perfectly, you win the game. You make a mistake, or your mechanics falter, you lose the game. (Does anyone ever watch ML7 play and not want to play Ana immediately afterwards? You can do so much... if you're good.)
I'm pretty happy about the current state of tanks. It wasn't always this way, but you can pretty much pair any two of them and not instantly lose. Both players can pick "a fun one". Shields were once pretty much mandatory, but people got better at the game (and they shields got nerfed into the ground), and they have less effectiveness than they once did.So you can get away with the weird combinations. Ball/Hog was meta for quite a while. Winston/D.va has always been good with the right players and coordination. Rein/Zarya is of course a lot of fun for the Zarya player. I've even lost some games to Hog/D.va, though I'm not sure I'd personally pick one of those if the other was already locked in ;)
Anyway, I keep reading that nobody wants to play tanks, and I don't get it. You can spend 15 minutes in DPS queue, pick Widowmaker, get one sick kill for your montage, and then spend the remaining 8 minutes of the game being chased around by some Wrecking Ball spamming "Ho ho ho!" with a D.va in tow that shows up from time to time to remind you that it's the perfect weather for a hotteok. I'd personally rather spend 30 seconds in the queue and be able to switch between 8 dramatically different heroes depending on the situation that unfolds.
I hate getting just completely run over way more, personally.
of course the numbers don't work when you're exclusively playing against other people
this is why smurfing is so popular
I actually wonder a little if smurfs in a game like overwatch with a steep starting cost are tracked and treated special to keep that revenue stream.
Maybe things have changed, but up until recently Smurf detection usually didn't work all that well
This is why I think PvE is more sustainable for a player base and more conservatively solid as a business plan. WoW for instance.
But then by definition it isn't PvP and isn't going to get the same player base.
I think the future of PvE games is going to be in AI. If game developers could put a DeepMind-playing-StarCraft level of AI into games without immense cost, then it's going to change games quite a lot. It wouldn't be perfect, but you could have AI offer a challenge to players for longer without feeling unfair. (It's still AI that doesn't learn based on the player though, which means that the players would eventually figure out the puzzle of the AI.)
I think the immediate future is asymmetrical roles for humans.
For example, one side is playing FPS for a Kill/death ratio basically, the other side is a single person playing RTS for a win/loss ratio.
IE Mechwarrior team deathmatch. Team of multiple human FPS players against a single human MechCommander-with-basic-AI-team.
It'd give scenarios more flexibility and allow for human intelligence to combat the meta.
And allow the FPS people to get a 2 or 3 to one kill ratio.
(Just as a point of reference I played up until the hamster release)
I would say that the core design of characters with cooldown skills and very powerful ultimates that need to be chain to team wipe opposition ARE the crux of why everything is impossible to do right in the Overwatch.
I have played ladder for first few seasons and its essentially, get a 'pick kill' and save ultimates, combo ultimates to push through a chokepoint.
That is very cookie cutter experience that gets old really quickly.
They pushed themselves into making characters that have to have a spike impact in the game (their ultimate) or they are garbage tier character.
Adding new heros that need to follow the same design principles further locks them down into that principle, or they would have to rework +20 characters in one go.
Also the cancel and force movement abilities are extremely frustrating. I remember reading Team Fortress 2 dev blogs and they made a design point of never doing those, and limit the one shot kill experiences (since then I believe there are couple mechanics like that in TF2 and they are unfun).
There is nothing more frustrating that getting hooked and spending next 2 seconds knowing you will die. Taking away player agency is frustrating experience.
As you mentioned the characters are locked into set meta, railroading players into who you pick and how you played given hero. No flexibility, no verity.
I haven't played CS or TF2 in a long time but on odd occasion I would watch a twitch stream of some tournaments. CS is one of the best competitive esport to watch - hands down. Its very easy to understand, rounds are quick and economy makes sure that there is some verity to available weapons and tactics from round to round.
Despite playing overwatch their esport is not fun to watch. Its messy, hard to follow. Again due to ultimates you have game of hide and seek into all ults are out screen is flashing and after dust settles back to hide and seek.
... man I care way too much about this
By contrast CS offers nothing like this - movement is always strictly along the ground/ladders/stairs etc, and gunfights are more like who saw who first. It just feels boring to play in comparison - sure the tactics are interesting, but there’s nothing like the feeling of freedom you get from some other games.
I’d like there to be more of a focus on games that are fun to play, in terms of movement and combat mechanics just feeling awesome. Horizon Zero Dawn is another great example of making combat awesome.
Having a mechanic that forces fights during inopportune times helps, that’s why I tend to like Mobas with creeps and side objectives. That’s something that OW could add that might force a less “everyone push down mid” mentality.
CS is about reading opponent, creating opportunities and reacting to what is happening.
Pixel hunting is very last step.
That said, DotA is by far the best esport to watch if and only if you played it before and can follow what's happening.
I like the overtime mechanic. It feels fair -- you're about to win, but you ran out of time. But there's overtime, so you don't just insta-lose. I agree that it brings out the worst in players. The calm and methodical team always wins here. (I haven't heard the term "Route 66 effect" for a while, but it's a thing. Players panic, forget everything they know about the game, and lose 2 checkpoints while they stagger in. Don't do that.)
> They spend tons of effort on things like trying to make healers and tanks fun. Instead, they forced people to play them.
Role queue was to force people to play DPS. The problem OWL and the high ranks were suffering from was that 3 tanks and 3 supports won every game against any team that had a DPS character on it. They nerfed the tanks into the ground and buffed the DPS to nightmare levels, and they still couldn't fix it. (They made the mistake of creating the most oppressive meta ever on the same day they introduced role queue. Sigma/Orisa. That was not great, even as someone with Sigma and Orsia at the top of their favorite character list.)
> Once they think the meta is balanced in a game, they get conservative and don't want to tweak things too much. They don't realize that the meta is an equilibrium state found by the players. Change the game, a new meta will be found.
Some of this is the community's fault. They get locked into thinking they have to do certain things, and the result is that they make the game stale for themselves. Blizzard changes something, and it has a totally random effect. Most recently, Orisa got that buff where she can't take critical hits during Fortify, and the meta became Rein/Zarya again. What? It always amuses me.
(Speaking of shaking up the meta, did you play that April Fools experimental card at all? Even though it was an unbalanced shitfest, I found it incredibly fun. I love those kinds of experiments.)
I think a lot of people think they've figured out Overwatch, but they don't play like they have. There's still a lot to unlock there, with or without Blizzard's help.
I also think that Blizzard is often too hasty to adjust things that players complain about. 2CP and Mercy have long been points of contention. The way the attackers win 2CP is to walk onto the second point and use 0 ults (even when it looks good!) to bait out defender ults. You all die horrible deaths, and then walk in and use all 6 ults to get a clean wipe. You win. The counter for this kind of overcommitting was Mercy's team rez. She sneaks away in the heat of battle, people kill everyone they can see, and she then flies in to resurrect everyone. By the time the attackers realize, it's too late. All 6 enemy players alive and well, and 33% of the point not captured. All those ults wasted, and then you just spend the rest of the game losing the ult economy and eventually lose the match. Someone should have noticed that they only killed 5 people and sent someone else to go shut down Mercy, but nobody ever did that, so instead they complain to Blizzard and ask them to remove the only ability in the game that counters overcommitting. Blizzard does. People continue to play 2CP wrong, now that there is no counter to the strategy of a dry push and a clean wipe. They mess it up every time, the defenders stall for 5 minutes (which is a beauty of orchestration and coordination when done correctly), and they complain to Blizzard and ask them to remove 2CP.
Something I like about computers is that you can't negotiate your way out of being bad. But Blizzard listens to the community, and that has actually become an option! Instead of playing the game they're given, they play the game they think they personally can win, and then convince Blizzard to change it to that. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't work, and you get to listen to some streamer have a meltdown about how tough it is to play computer games for a living. Metagaming at it's finest, and a great strategy in real life. But at some point, I think players should try to play the game as implemented and see how it goes. There's probably a strategy you haven't considered yet -- go try it! It might be good.
This is what I would describe as the state of Overwatch. After sinking thousands of hours in this game, I stopped playing my favorite game because Blizzard didn't care.
1. They pretty much gave up on any new content for OW2 development. 2. Competitive was broken from the beginning. Good behavior was rarely rewarded and bad behavior was rarely punished. Most of my games were grind really hard to win and get 100SR, only to have two consecutive games where people would leave early and then lose 4v6 or 3v6 and have that SR disappear. 3. Elo hell was real. I was in Bronze because that's where I started from when I began the game, but eventually when I got better, I could never jump out of the ELO hell. I ultimately had to create a new account, and lo and behold I was immediately placed in Diamond. 4. SR awards were bs. I was a Moira main who'd get 40 kills and pretty much own the game, but just because Moira is rewarded on healing and there was a Lucio on the team, you barely get any SR for carrying your team, meanwhile Lucio reaps all the SR. 5. The event based content was so bad, recycled game modes from 3 years ago, recycled skins, recycled pretty much everything. 6. PvE modes were garbage. 7. Lootboxes were so frustrating, I at one point spent $50 to buy a fuck ton on lootboxes for a special event that had a ton of legendary skins, I managed to get just 1. Had a ton of repeats, that have minimal payoff. 8. Constant meta changes were brutal towards the end. Everything that came after Brig was just ridiculous. 9. 2-2-2 was BS. 3-3 was worse. 10. Everything, EVERYTHING was more catered to OWL than the player base.
At some point these MBA types who don't game, decided what's best for making more money and went ahead on executing in that direction. Player base was forgotten. And that has been pretty much the state of OW and all the Blizzard IP.
essentially all that matters is your win-rate, if you can win more than 50% of your games over a reasonable stretch of time your MMR will increase and your SR will follow it
performance based SR is only a very small bonus (up-to diamond)
initial placement is essentially a guess: over 25 or so games your MMR will converge to where you're supposed to be
(4200 support main)
I find the competitive in OW especially bad considering other games like Apex really do it well. There is simply no excuse to ignore all of these problems. I’ve literally had games where 5 of my teammates quit, and I sit through it because I’ll lose SR to only find that I lost more SR by sticking around. It’s inexcusable.
This might not be a big deal, but the game isn't static. It changes, which means that the skills someone picks up might not be as useful in the next patch anymore. This keeps the rankings somewhat unstable.
Team games inherently require more games to stabilize a rating too. You can get lucky or unlucky with your teammates. On top of that, a game where you can end up with a character you're not strong with probably increases the number of games to stabilize a rating even further.
On average it might work out, but are enough games played to actually reach that? My guess is that for most players the answer is 'no'.
but if you have a high win rate you climb more or less immediately (once you've unstuck the MMR confidence value)
Ended up creating a new account, ended up in high plat and quickly became diamond, never to drop lower again.
Why/how did this happen? I'm not sure, but ELO hell was real for me.
(Dva main)
as a 4k support main I found qp games with silver friends extremely frustrating due to the extreme chaos and lack of structure (normally devolving to team deathmatch)
the tanks don't know what they're doing (e.g. rein charging on cooldown, sniper dva feeding, etc)
the DPS don't know what they're doing (mccree going for cheeky flanks and dying most of the time/getting a single pick)
the other support doesn't know what they're doing (wandering off alone to duel people)
adjusting your playstyle works, so as a support you become super aggressive, the enemy makes near constant mistakes and you pounce on them immediately
vs. a GM game where everyone knows what their role is and the game plays much more "normally", and I can't get away with that sort of behaviour
true: SR change isn't constant, delta SR after a game is based on the difference between your MMR and SR
SR is essentially irrelevant, MMR is the only number that matters
your SR oscillates around your MMR, essentially at random
MMR also has a confidence value, "elo hell" is where you can't win enough to unstick the confidence value
if you win more than 50% consistently the confidence value will drop, your MMR will increase, then your SR will follow it
a new account has a zero value for the confidence, which is why the MMR (and SR that follows it) is more volatile, at least to begin with
Although actually, perhaps a better example would be Smash Brothers Melee...
Forcing two tanks, two healers, two DPS characters leads to eight minute DPS queues. But if you don't force this kind of team composition, the game becomes incredibly unfun for the team that has five DPS characters and no tank.
You'd figure that this would drive DPS players to switch to the other roles, to reduce the time they spend in queue - but no, the queues today are as long as they ever were. It's probably because a lot of people don't find the support roles fun to play.
Contrast it to something like League of Legends, where queues for each role are much closer in length - probably because a large portion of the player-base finds supporting roles fun in that game.
This has been a criticism of Overwatch since day one. If the core problem was the actual core formula it wouldn't have grown so large to begin with. Millions of people wouldn't have billions of hours into the game in the first place if the core formula wasn't fun. I think you have a valid point, but I don't think it's why Overwatch hemorrhages players. None of the issues your brought up are any different than they were for the past 5 years (except role queue).
Also, you can't point to queue times, then mention League has a better system. It wasn't rare at one point (I don't play League anymore) to have 30 minute queues even in diamond. DPS queues in OW currently are 10 minutes max even in GrandMaster.
Then they started restricting your team choices. You could no longer have two of the same hero.
You then had to be forced into meta-roles ONLY.
You then had to queue specific roles and were not allowed to pick anything else at all.
All lack of balance and content aside, what the hell?
The worst part is/was (unsure if this has changed) that you are hard locked into specific hero categories even if you are queued as a full premade. Even when you are with a full team that is OK with swapping, you can't swap roles as needed. Incidentally, I played dps junkrat back when it was categorised as a defence hero. And the categories were decided and changed by Blizzard - Junkrat might have been the only defense hero I'd be willing to play, and now the only offense hero since they recategorised him - I would rather heal than play mccree, but there you have it
The other issue is that if you play casually and get a terrible healer, then you will almost certainly lose. Being a fantastic player only gets you so far.
Other people mentioned Valorant, and it appears it has a very different style with exchangeable weapons that apply to all classes, but just different abilities and more strategic games. It seems like a really good player can make a bigger difference and play solo. I'm going to look into that now.
Maintenance requires switchups to these dynamics, but when you have created a system that's devoid of these events, your game is going to be stale no matter what you do. New maps, new characters, etc.
Power spikes can be fun because it can be fun to have a feeling of power, or see the balance change in your favor in a game. They can be frustrating because you can be faced with a power spiked player and feel helpless. It is a design choice with pros and cons.
The competition isn't driving away people from Overwatch. The game is incredibly stale, and IMO, is probably the death knell of full price online games.
There has been little to none new content and changes to the game. The competitive community has always complained about the slow trickle of balance changes and the casual community has always complained about the lack of new content (maps, events, heroes). The communication was decent at first then fell off a giant cliff. A lot of competitive players and streamers burned out of playing boring and/or frustrating metas (for a year or more) and casual players ultimately got bored.
My theory is (I'm stealing this from someone else) is essentially Activision saw they had a huge player base who paid $60 once and never again. The extremely consumer-positive loot box system (you can get ample loot boxes by just playing the game, and loot boxes avoid giving you items you already have) means that most players didn't need to buy loot boxes; in fact if you played the game a lot (as a potential whale) you didn't need to pay at all for your favorite skins.
Activision saw that after Year 2/Year 3 the revenue growth for OW fell off a cliff and deprioritized people who would have been making new art/content for the game. In order reclaim that revenue those people were then moved to "Overwatch 2" and all new content was focused on that game. However that game has been delayed (again, and again) so now the player base is hemoragging even harder.
I say this as someone who loves the game, and doesn't play any other game. The game might have lasted longer if they followed Riot's model and made it free to play with micro transactions.