TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
edited January 2023
Hog now has to move up a bit to melee to finish the combo to kill a hooked 200hp hero (or what is more likely other teammates just focusing for a second before moving to another enemy), but reloads quicker and has an extra shot. That's more damage over time. But all of Hog's changes mean nothing because Mercy is still there in the meta to damage boost, and Kiriko still has cleanse to counter Ana. On top of breather still keeping him alive. It's why Sojourn still isn't truly nerfed because the extra charge to her rail, she needs a longer delay from primary to rail, that's the issue, and it still doesn't matter because Mercy is pocketing her.
Hog runs wild because of breather and Kiriko. I have no problem with the hook combo other than he has too much HP and breather bails him out so much he can't die (plus the stupid tank passive of less ult build). Sojourn runs dominant because of Mercy, and the little dinks they do don't matter because she's still got damage boost.
edit: and Orisa is still strong because it's not her health or armor, it's her spear and twirl. If anything just make her spin mean slower movement speed instead of faster.
actually that increase from 5 to 6 was a big deal way back in the day, i wonder how it will shake out now. and if you can land headshots, pulling someone 4 meters away instead of 3 makes it easier. how about increasing the cooldown on kirikos cleanse or giving some other people a cleanse so that it isn't always kiri + mercy?
They made it very clear that he can't one shot anymore, I think that includes melee. They've made basically that exact change in the past and it made him pretty crap. They say there's a bigger rework coming for him "soon", I suppose this was an emergency fix for the health of the game.
The Sojourn change is actually a clever way to nerf high rank Sojourn + Mercy specifically without doing much to lower ranks. Though I still think the railgun shouldn't headshot.
I just hope and pray that his rework involves Take a Breather cleansing anti heal. It's just an absurdly strong counter to a tank that uses healing as his only defensive cooldown. Especially now without the one shot, all he has left is bullying with his bulk, and you can't do that with Ana around.
They did imply that his other abilities are being changed though, so maybe they just replace that entirely. Safe to assume he'll still have his primary and hook. So the only things left are that and his alt fire.
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BRIAN BLESSEDMaybe you aren't SPEAKING LOUDLY ENOUGHHHRegistered Userregular
I'm willing to bet actual cash money that Hog's pick rate is absolutely obscene right now and if nothing else it will be less boring to play more matches without him
That's the ticket for me. He's just boring to watch at this point
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KasynI'm not saying I don't like our chances.She called me the master.Registered Userregular
She will continue to be the best DPS in the game by a significant, overwhelming margin.
Hard agree with the slide nerf (her mobility skill is insane - it has everything you could possibly ask for in a mobility skill on a DPS) and change to disruptor. I even agree with the change to primary fire, and while I know that has an impact on how often she's getting her railgun, they completely failed to touch the broken thing about the character.
Her range and lethality is the most oppressive thing about her and that's pretty much totally unchanged. They needed to roll back the projectile size buff to her railgun, reduce the damage to the point where even with Mercy she's not above the damage breakpoints, and probably tighten up the range at which the damage starts to fall off.
No character should have a hitscan ability that can 1 shot and has the projectile size of a Hanzo arrow, let alone one with the rest of the kit she has. She's essentially a medium-range Widow combined with a Soldier-esque damage profile, it's not okay.
Going to go ahead and copy/paste my response to the Sojourn changes from early December so long as they continue to apply.
Devs should be fucking embarrassed at how inept they've proven themselves on the issue of actually balancing the character.
I can't get over how they gave her the most forgiving hitbox in the game to boot.
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TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
No cap fam, is Sojourn modeled on someone at the company or a wife of someone higher up at Blizzard and that's why they won't actually nerf her? There has been such an immediate pushback from the company with real Sojourn nerfs compared to other heroes that it makes me wonder just what is so important about Sojourn that we plebs just don't understand.
i'm really tired of the one shot meta right now...i tried to login the last few days and play like one game and it's just headshot death everywhere. yes, i suck but its so frustrating to run back or group up with teh team, try to push forward and just get sniped by so many different characters. taking a break until they decide to change things or pve comes out i guess. maybe this is what other people want, it's not for me anymore.
They've explained the situation with Sojourn, she doesn't actually perform that well at most ranks. It's high ranks where she's dominant. So they can't just do a huge flat nerf.
Her winrate across all of ladder is in the mid-40s. Interestingly, all 4 characters in this patch (Roadhog, Orisa, Kiriko, Sojourn) are below 50%.
Part of that is how Blizz weights winrate stats by time (a fast win has less weight than a slow loss) but is also due to the losing team swapping to meta picks to try and recover a lost game.
No cap fam, is Sojourn modeled on someone at the company or a wife of someone higher up at Blizzard and that's why they won't actually nerf her? There has been such an immediate pushback from the company with real Sojourn nerfs compared to other heroes that it makes me wonder just what is so important about Sojourn that we plebs just don't understand.
She’s 100% their attempt to peel off Valorant/Apex players.
They've explained the situation with Sojourn, she doesn't actually perform that well at most ranks. It's high ranks where she's dominant. So they can't just do a huge flat nerf.
Yeah, at my low level, in QP since I avoid comp like the plague, she if far from dominant and hardly ever has a pocket Mercy supercharging her.
is there such a thing as low level qp anymore though? seems like every match i get is one dps player that is just head-shotting everyone and another dps player that seems about my skill level. Healers seem far more varied in skill range. Tanks are harder for me to judge because i'll sometimes see a doomfist that isn't doing anything and refusing to swap and then the next match i'll get a different doom that is just decimating everyone. Same with Ball.
The reality is though, as soon as a widow or hanzo or soj or anyone else that can just instagib me, the game isn't fun anymore. At least with roadhog i knew if i'm going to get killed because he's a big dumb beast, but all those other characters can just pop out, off me, and move on.
I do think Hanzo's one-shot potential has always been quite frustrating, and I hope they do something about it. Widow is all about area denial and the enemy team needs to play around her line of sight - that's fine, that's what a sniper is. Hanzo on the other hand is just constantly letting arrows loose, and if he gets lucky he can headshot you at any range. It's not realistic to stay out of his line of sight because he's fully mobile. The only reason he's not broken as hell is because mostly people can't headshot reliably - but when a headshot randomly happens, you're just fucked.
Zek on
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TexiKenDammit!That fish really got me!Registered Userregular
Are the servers bad for anyone else in the past week? Granted it’s console but I think we’re all on the same servers now but I have no issues on any other device/service or game (KOF and even just checking a match on Halo Infinite working fine), but I’m getting strong lag fam.
We can all aspire to be this polite. Me personally I usually just say nothing except GG the whole game, but there are probably many games I could have won by making suggestions.
This piece is aimed at looking at some of the topics that have come up in the community over the course of Season 2. This won‘t be comprehensive enough to look at everything that players are talking about, but our intent is to do this every few weeks, so we will be able to start diving into smaller topics as we go. Also, the goal here is to keep you up to date on what we’re thinking and planning, but not necessarily to be the source for all the reasoning and detail behind those decisions.
So let’s get to it!
The new Ranked mode suffered from poor comprehension. There was confusion around players’ real rank and how that translated to their skill level, difficulty forming groups with friends, and a negative impression of the matchmaker when players of different ranks were put in the same match (even if their skill levels were similar). We will be implementing some changes in S3 and quite a few more in S4 all aimed at creating more clarity in the system. More details on short-term changes and long-term vision will be coming soonTM.
We’ve gotten feedback from players that the game doesn’t feel rewarding enough to play and that players can’t earn the items they want in a short enough period of time. We’ll be making a change in S3 that should address some of these complaints. This is a first step. We will have more details to share about this next week.
There are a fair number of changes to ult cost in S3. We’ll be lowering the ult refund when swapping heroes to 25% as part of this tuning pass.
Balance frequency is a big topic. Bug fixes to hot fixing should enable us to address balance faster and would have enabled us to tune Hog earlier in S2. We’re still planning an initial and midseason patch each season, but now have the full ability to fill in between those as necessary.
One-shots and frustrating hero mechanics are being discussed a lot in the community and on the team. This is an ongoing discussion, but the topic has a lot of nuances that involves the frequency of those mechanics, trade-offs for using it, the overall power level of a hero, how often the hero is played, as well as things like a hero’s fantasy. Know that we’re listening here, the feedback has been great and very welcome, and we’ll come back to this when we have more to share.
Thanks so much for reading, and please keep the feedback coming. We’re listening.
Aaron
Not super satisfying but at least they're trying. They really need to drill down on matchmaking and stompiness. If they think the algorithm is doing everything correctly and players are mistaken, then say that.
Zek on
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KasynI'm not saying I don't like our chances.She called me the master.Registered Userregular
LOL @ issues with the competitive system as one of "comprehension".
This attitude is a huge red flag, IMO. Even before this, they've continuously defended a system that is worse than OW1's in ways that are more than just cosmetic, and every time they talk about it, I'm left with the impression that they are firm in the belief that the system is fine, it's just that they think the dumb playerbase needs to be better educated about what's going on with it.
I'm quickly becoming a one-issue voter on this game. Dogshit matchmaker has so seriously degraded the quality of my experience most of the time that it feels quite pointless to play at all. It's not that you get losing games, or one-sided games. It feeds you non-games. Where there is literally nothing you can do to impact the outcome.
Doesn't matter how solid the gameplay is or how fun the characters are when that's happening. Very unfortunate.
Well it's certainly true that there's zero transparency as to what's going on with matchmaking. A lot of people in the community have negative comprehension with various conspiracy theories. I think they need to map rank directly to MMR and reveal it on the scoreboard in competitive. Just forget the psychological trickery and go full transparency.
I'm not convinced the matchmaking has changed significantly since OW1. I think OW2 is a stompier game than OW1 was, and if they want to fix that it's going to require gameplay changes. If they did reveal the MMR I think it would show that stomps don't correspond that closely to MMR.
At least they seemed to comment on the fact that their aggressive monetization makes the game feel unrewarding to play. I guess we’ll see if that turns into a worthwhile change or not.
Wish they’d mentioned bringing back the second tank, or at least how miserable playing support has become without it.
I feel like it's only a matter of time before 6v6 comes back as an option. It's an easy win. I don't know why they removed it in the first place when every other major change like that has preserved the old mode, like No Limits. They've said they plan to weaken tanks in non role queue modes, those balance values can be applied to 6v6 as well.
LOL @ issues with the competitive system as one of "comprehension".
This attitude is a huge red flag, IMO. Even before this, they've continuously defended a system that is worse than OW1's in ways that are more than just cosmetic, and every time they talk about it, I'm left with the impression that they are firm in the belief that the system is fine, it's just that they think the dumb playerbase needs to be better educated about what's going on with it.
I'm quickly becoming a one-issue voter on this game. Dogshit matchmaker has so seriously degraded the quality of my experience most of the time that it feels quite pointless to play at all. It's not that you get losing games, or one-sided games. It feeds you non-games. Where there is literally nothing you can do to impact the outcome.
Doesn't matter how solid the gameplay is or how fun the characters are when that's happening. Very unfortunate.
There's little in there that they don't say every dev update. We're going to be more responsive. We're going to do patches more often. We're going to communicate more. We're going to be more aggressive with patches. I was complaining about how they never followed through on that stuff years ago, and they're still saying the same things. I want to see actual events and fun stuff going on, not half-assed arcade modes for old cosmetics on characters I never play that I already own. I can't see them coming up with a good answer to making it more rewarding to play/progress without that. I feel like they're probably just going to hand out a few more OW Bucks per daily/weekly challenge or something.
I very much suspect that the increased stompiness is more due to 5v5 more than matchmaking changes, though Push doesn't help matters either, and they've fucked up the messaging and implementation about how they handle it at every turn. Losing someone in a fight causes things to snowball out of control much faster, and the effectively reduced-even-further TTK because there's one fewer beefy defensive dude in play exacerbates how deadly DPS are/how hopeless it is for a lot of supports. It continues to be weird to me that Overwatch struggles so hard with this when similar games or MOBAs that also use a DPS/Tank/Healer setup have all tended to find a relatively good balance while still allowing flexibilty in what the team comp will be. I have to imagine that the core issue is OW's ridiculously low TTK and killbox-focused map design, and any attempts to change/address either of those make DPS feel awful (because they're not instantly vaporizing people anymore).
It feels like they did everything they could to make the game stompier than Overwatch 1, by making the sequel feature a solo class with more powerful abilities, lowering the overall player number, producing a new game mode where comebacks are more difficult, and making new maps larger with longer travel times. This is all separate from issues with matchmaking, which to me is a system they've made so obscure that I couldn't even tell you if it was a real problem or just a scapegoat for the effects of a lot of these other changes.
Many tank players were already expressing some of these concerns with reducing the role from 2 players to 1, but that they did more things to the game to reinforce how lopsided games could get is not something people would have predicted, I think.
i'm still laughing that queuing as support is just constant +100XP, hmmm maybe there's a reason they need to entice people to play support.
There's a lot of design decisions that have gone into why support feels so bad, but there are two that stand out most in my mind. First, healing is the primary fire for almost all supports in Overwatch. Outside of like, TF2 with its one healer, that's extremely unusual for similar games, MOBAs, and RPGs in general. Healing is an ability on a cooldown or with a cost. Usually a fairly short one, but not something that's expected to always be up and always be being pumped into all teammates. You're expected to be at least somewhat contributing to fights too, not be laser focused on your own team, doing nothing but enabling the 'IMPORTANT' characters, and sure, some CAN fight back a little bit, but they're not meant to be able to. They're meant to run away because they're just plain inferior, even when they get the drop on a weakened opponent.
Second, zero automated callouts or thank yous for healing received whatsoever. There's a fucking callout for if the enemy has a Torbjorn, but none for "I have been healed." Healing is usually just plain invisible. Interface encourages and informs player behavior, both for the support, and for the person being healed. People scream bloody murder if their expected 'automatic' health recovery FEELS like it's less than they think it should be, but have zero feedback for how much they're actually being healed. It's all negatives, zero positives. And this (along with tank stuff) is something that KAPLAN said they realized they needed to be doing a better job highlighting/prioritizing years ago, but have... just not. Like, fuck. There's even lobby chatter for when you have two tanks on a team. THAT is somehow a higher priority than this kind of easy QOL improvement.
Here's an anecdote that I think is illustrative of why the community has a flawed perception of matchmaking, and why Keller describes it as an issue of "comprehension". I took this screen in QP a few minutes in because I was popping off:
Guess who won this game?
They did. Decisively. It would have been a bad stomp had those first few minutes not happened.
What happened? I don't know. I died a lot, maybe I'm bad after all. A few people changed heroes. Maybe they just got their shit together. Point is, the matchmaker really couldn't do anything about this - it was a stomp in one direction for a few minutes, then a stomp in the other direction. You can't attribute that to one team being better than the other because of bad matchmaking.
I think Overwatch was already a game prone to stomps caused by fairly random team compositions, and 5v5 exacerbates it by increasing individual impact (and the consequences of an early pick). Ult charge is a snowball mechanic that makes it more difficult to reverse the game's momentum. I think the matchmaker probably always creates games with relatively even MMR. It's just that it's impossible to have an accurate MMR system in this game. At some point you kind of have to live with it. But I do hope they bring back 6v6 for the people who are unhappy with the results of the switch to 5v5.
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
I hear they are actually gonna work on making the currency system not complete shit?
If they make something halfway decent I might actually get back in.
Yeah, that was their message when Kaplan left and when OW2 was in beta. 'We're listening and care and we're sorry we haven't been great at communicating and we're gonna do more and better' and they just say it over and over.
The current excuses of, 'the game is broken because of a bug in our hotfix patch system!', and 'the game isn't rewarding to play because no one can earn skins fast enough' don't even touch the whole iceberg of bullshit.
The game is unrewarding to play for another 10 reasons they haven't publicly demonstrated they're aware of, and it's been going on 7 years of taking way too long to update the egregious balance issues everyone is super aware of.
Blizzard is gas-lighting people, and the game's only gonna get better if the game sees big drops in player count.
I think they're bad at communication for boring corporate reasons. They don't want to catch flak for teasing something and then changing their minds. Also they want to save the interesting news for big marketing moments, namely the start of a new season. Keller is now trying to straddle the line by communicating on a regular (?) basis while not really saying anything of substance for the aforementioned reasons.
Also, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me:
Just had someone hide in a bush for 40 seconds stalling the point. There was literally no part of them visible and I never would have seen them if not for the kill cam.
That’s gonna be my breaking point…
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DragkoniasThat Guy Who Does StuffYou Know, There. Registered Userregular
Eh as someone who plays a lot of competitive games I can't think of any where people aren't always complaining about balance so that isn't as big a deal for me.
That said I do think it's funny that they made a big deal about communication being better and it's actually worse than it was during the OW1 era imo.
I think a senior game developer, or authority figure in general, who actually wants to engage with the community and can handle intense criticism is one in a million. Kaplan would post on the forums occasionally and actually explain things, that's not normal. What we have now is a fairly typical relationship between the devs and their players - just leave it to PR. Although I don't know why the community managers are also being so quiet.
That's a great point. Kaplan and Overwatch in general were an increasing anomaly to the trends in big gaming. A popular online shooter in 2020 with NO BATTLEPASS? A game director in a massive studio who does constant communication with the community, and is earnest and honest and direct? The fuck?
It was probably also in part Kaplan's overall stature in Blizzard (the man who built Wow, etc).
Kaplan was also an Everquest guild leader and shitlord in his twenties, Tigole bitties. He lived through the rawest of gaming and internet communities. Here's a younger Jeff:
"Whoever came up with this sheer fisting of an encounter can go fuck themselves. Do me a favor so I don't waste my guild's time on this kind of jackass shit-fest again, send me an email at tigole@legacyofsteel.net when you decide to A) Implement an encounter that wasn't designed by a retarded chimp chained to a cubicle A.)Get a Quality Assuarance Department C) Actually beta test the fucking thing and D) Patch it live. And please for god's sake -- do it in the order I laid out for you. Don't worry, I won't charge you a consulting fee on that one. And for good luck you might as well E) Pull your heads out of your asses. While you're at it rename the game to BetaQuest since you've used up you're alotted false advertising karma on the Bazaar and user interface scam of '01.Fix the Emperor encounter. Fix Seru. Rethink your time-sink bullshit. Fix all the buggy motherfucking ring encounters (I suggest you let whoever made the Burrower one do this since that dude apparently laid off the crack the rest of you were smoking). Fix the VT key quest. Fix VT (just guessing it's fucked up considering your track record). Don't have the resources to fix this stuff? Move the ENTIRE Planes of Power team over to fixing Shadows of Luclin AND DO IT NOW. If you don't fix Luclin, you jackassess will be the only ones playing the Planes of Power."
So him posting on the forums sometimes is like, 'oh you sweet children, I was an angry online piece of shit before you were even born'.
The lesson here is that sometimes you grow, I guess. Damn I miss Jeff.
Season 3 will have the role-matching behavior which I'm looking forward to. Later they'll reduce the chances that solo players get matched with groups that have disparate skill levels, which is really important.
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Hog runs wild because of breather and Kiriko. I have no problem with the hook combo other than he has too much HP and breather bails him out so much he can't die (plus the stupid tank passive of less ult build). Sojourn runs dominant because of Mercy, and the little dinks they do don't matter because she's still got damage boost.
edit: and Orisa is still strong because it's not her health or armor, it's her spear and twirl. If anything just make her spin mean slower movement speed instead of faster.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
Glad to see the Orisa nerf, she has felt link too much of an unstoppable force in OW2 if she has a decent healer.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
They did imply that his other abilities are being changed though, so maybe they just replace that entirely. Safe to assume he'll still have his primary and hook. So the only things left are that and his alt fire.
That's the ticket for me. He's just boring to watch at this point
Going to go ahead and copy/paste my response to the Sojourn changes from early December so long as they continue to apply.
Devs should be fucking embarrassed at how inept they've proven themselves on the issue of actually balancing the character.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
Part of that is how Blizz weights winrate stats by time (a fast win has less weight than a slow loss) but is also due to the losing team swapping to meta picks to try and recover a lost game.
She’s 100% their attempt to peel off Valorant/Apex players.
Yeah, at my low level, in QP since I avoid comp like the plague, she if far from dominant and hardly ever has a pocket Mercy supercharging her.
I've pretty much fallen back off playing again though, so whatever.
The reality is though, as soon as a widow or hanzo or soj or anyone else that can just instagib me, the game isn't fun anymore. At least with roadhog i knew if i'm going to get killed because he's a big dumb beast, but all those other characters can just pop out, off me, and move on.
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
We can all aspire to be this polite. Me personally I usually just say nothing except GG the whole game, but there are probably many games I could have won by making suggestions.
Not super satisfying but at least they're trying. They really need to drill down on matchmaking and stompiness. If they think the algorithm is doing everything correctly and players are mistaken, then say that.
This attitude is a huge red flag, IMO. Even before this, they've continuously defended a system that is worse than OW1's in ways that are more than just cosmetic, and every time they talk about it, I'm left with the impression that they are firm in the belief that the system is fine, it's just that they think the dumb playerbase needs to be better educated about what's going on with it.
I'm quickly becoming a one-issue voter on this game. Dogshit matchmaker has so seriously degraded the quality of my experience most of the time that it feels quite pointless to play at all. It's not that you get losing games, or one-sided games. It feeds you non-games. Where there is literally nothing you can do to impact the outcome.
Doesn't matter how solid the gameplay is or how fun the characters are when that's happening. Very unfortunate.
I'm not convinced the matchmaking has changed significantly since OW1. I think OW2 is a stompier game than OW1 was, and if they want to fix that it's going to require gameplay changes. If they did reveal the MMR I think it would show that stomps don't correspond that closely to MMR.
Wish they’d mentioned bringing back the second tank, or at least how miserable playing support has become without it.
There's little in there that they don't say every dev update. We're going to be more responsive. We're going to do patches more often. We're going to communicate more. We're going to be more aggressive with patches. I was complaining about how they never followed through on that stuff years ago, and they're still saying the same things. I want to see actual events and fun stuff going on, not half-assed arcade modes for old cosmetics on characters I never play that I already own. I can't see them coming up with a good answer to making it more rewarding to play/progress without that. I feel like they're probably just going to hand out a few more OW Bucks per daily/weekly challenge or something.
I very much suspect that the increased stompiness is more due to 5v5 more than matchmaking changes, though Push doesn't help matters either, and they've fucked up the messaging and implementation about how they handle it at every turn. Losing someone in a fight causes things to snowball out of control much faster, and the effectively reduced-even-further TTK because there's one fewer beefy defensive dude in play exacerbates how deadly DPS are/how hopeless it is for a lot of supports. It continues to be weird to me that Overwatch struggles so hard with this when similar games or MOBAs that also use a DPS/Tank/Healer setup have all tended to find a relatively good balance while still allowing flexibilty in what the team comp will be. I have to imagine that the core issue is OW's ridiculously low TTK and killbox-focused map design, and any attempts to change/address either of those make DPS feel awful (because they're not instantly vaporizing people anymore).
Blizzard: Pailryder#1101
GoG: https://www.gog.com/u/pailryder
At least in OW1 it occasionally was XP/daily loot box to play tank.
Many tank players were already expressing some of these concerns with reducing the role from 2 players to 1, but that they did more things to the game to reinforce how lopsided games could get is not something people would have predicted, I think.
There's a lot of design decisions that have gone into why support feels so bad, but there are two that stand out most in my mind. First, healing is the primary fire for almost all supports in Overwatch. Outside of like, TF2 with its one healer, that's extremely unusual for similar games, MOBAs, and RPGs in general. Healing is an ability on a cooldown or with a cost. Usually a fairly short one, but not something that's expected to always be up and always be being pumped into all teammates. You're expected to be at least somewhat contributing to fights too, not be laser focused on your own team, doing nothing but enabling the 'IMPORTANT' characters, and sure, some CAN fight back a little bit, but they're not meant to be able to. They're meant to run away because they're just plain inferior, even when they get the drop on a weakened opponent.
Second, zero automated callouts or thank yous for healing received whatsoever. There's a fucking callout for if the enemy has a Torbjorn, but none for "I have been healed." Healing is usually just plain invisible. Interface encourages and informs player behavior, both for the support, and for the person being healed. People scream bloody murder if their expected 'automatic' health recovery FEELS like it's less than they think it should be, but have zero feedback for how much they're actually being healed. It's all negatives, zero positives. And this (along with tank stuff) is something that KAPLAN said they realized they needed to be doing a better job highlighting/prioritizing years ago, but have... just not. Like, fuck. There's even lobby chatter for when you have two tanks on a team. THAT is somehow a higher priority than this kind of easy QOL improvement.
Guess who won this game?
What happened? I don't know. I died a lot, maybe I'm bad after all. A few people changed heroes. Maybe they just got their shit together. Point is, the matchmaker really couldn't do anything about this - it was a stomp in one direction for a few minutes, then a stomp in the other direction. You can't attribute that to one team being better than the other because of bad matchmaking.
I think Overwatch was already a game prone to stomps caused by fairly random team compositions, and 5v5 exacerbates it by increasing individual impact (and the consequences of an early pick). Ult charge is a snowball mechanic that makes it more difficult to reverse the game's momentum. I think the matchmaker probably always creates games with relatively even MMR. It's just that it's impossible to have an accurate MMR system in this game. At some point you kind of have to live with it. But I do hope they bring back 6v6 for the people who are unhappy with the results of the switch to 5v5.
If they make something halfway decent I might actually get back in.
The current excuses of, 'the game is broken because of a bug in our hotfix patch system!', and 'the game isn't rewarding to play because no one can earn skins fast enough' don't even touch the whole iceberg of bullshit.
The game is unrewarding to play for another 10 reasons they haven't publicly demonstrated they're aware of, and it's been going on 7 years of taking way too long to update the egregious balance issues everyone is super aware of.
Blizzard is gas-lighting people, and the game's only gonna get better if the game sees big drops in player count.
Also, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to me:
That’s gonna be my breaking point…
That said I do think it's funny that they made a big deal about communication being better and it's actually worse than it was during the OW1 era imo.
It was probably also in part Kaplan's overall stature in Blizzard (the man who built Wow, etc).
Kaplan was also an Everquest guild leader and shitlord in his twenties, Tigole bitties. He lived through the rawest of gaming and internet communities. Here's a younger Jeff:
So him posting on the forums sometimes is like, 'oh you sweet children, I was an angry online piece of shit before you were even born'.
The lesson here is that sometimes you grow, I guess. Damn I miss Jeff.
Season 3 will have the role-matching behavior which I'm looking forward to. Later they'll reduce the chances that solo players get matched with groups that have disparate skill levels, which is really important.