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Overwatch is a frustrating game to play because they almost have it right. It's almost there, if they could just tweak a couple things. A good example is the ov

Overwatch is a frustrating game to play because they almost have it right. It's almost there, if they could just tweak a couple things. A good example is the overtime system. One of the worst ideas in games I've run into. For one, it creates artificial and spiky emotions in players, which just burns people out. It's amazing they don't realize basic things like that, which means they actually haven't had the right talent for a long while. 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.

xxpor 5y ago
This is the first time I'm hearing any complaints about the modern overtime system. It seems totally fair to me, the defending team has to actually win the final fight. What would you change about it?
- blibble 5y ago
  oh it's fair, but extremely frustrating to lose after 60 seconds of overtime
  - xxpor 5y ago
    To me those are the best games, it feels like you were evenly matched :) I hate getting just completely run over way more, personally.
    - blibble 5y ago
      people don't want "fair" though, they want to win about 2/3rds of the time of course the numbers don't work when you're exclusively playing against other people this is why smurfing is so popular
      - milesvp 5y ago
        I find smurfing funny. I’ve never tried it in overwatch, but in other games with good match making smurfing doesn’t last very long. You rise to the level of incompetence really fast. I think the last time I smurfed in LoL I got about a dozen games before I started to hit a wall, which was like half as long as my previous attempt. 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.
        Johanx64 5y ago
        That's why buying low mmr accounts for a couple of bucks is a thing, you get tens if not hundred+ relaxing matches for few cents each Maybe things have changed, but up until recently Smurf detection usually didn't work all that well
      - _carbyau_ 5y ago
        "people don't want "fair" though, they want to win about 2/3rds of the time" 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.
        Aerroon 5y ago
        Designing a game around PvE is hard though. It's difficult to create an AI challenge that's interesting and can simultaneously challenge extremely good and mediocre players without feeling impossible. 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.)
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Gene_Parmesan 5y ago
For me, as someone who played OW just to have fun, what pushed me away was just the lack of things to do. No mode diversity meant stuff got stale really fast. 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.
- gizmo385 5y ago
  > ... just the lack of things to do. No mode diversity meant stuff got stale really fast 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.
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chimeracoder 5y ago
> 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 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.
- LanceH 5y ago
  2/3's of the player base disagrees that healers and support are fun. Well more than the majority prefers dps. 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.
  - chimeracoder 5y ago
    > 2/3's of the player base disagrees that healers and support are fun. [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.
    - LanceH 5y ago
      The extremely lengthy queues and support and tanks playing like dps indicate i'm correct.
  - nemothekid 5y ago
    It's hard to theorize because Blizzard made so few tweaks to the game. I can't speak on "fun", but before 2/2/2 the problem was supports were way too powerful (Overwatch has always had a problem with supports being too powerful). The GOATS meta was a reflection of this where you were borderline throwing if you chose DPS. It's telling how many metas were driven by a support that was too powerful (Brigette; GOATS, Moth meta; Mercy, Nanoblade/Beyblade; Ana). Having too powerful supports means that ultimates are the only thing that kills anyone. 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.
jrockway 5y ago
> A good example is the overtime system. One of the worst ideas in games I've run into. 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.
me_me_me 5y ago
I think you are touching on some interesting points, but don't go deep enough. (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
- taurath 5y ago
  Very similar thing plays out in MOBAs. CC is always powerful because it removes agency. Getting killed with no counter isn’t fun. Playing against a ton of healers isn’t fun. Yet for all those things in combination it’s a lot better than a counterstrike-like experience of whoever sees the pixel first wins. 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.

xxpor 5y ago

This is the first time I'm hearing any complaints about the modern overtime system. It seems totally fair to me, the defending team has to actually win the final fight. What would you change about it?

blibble 5y ago
oh it's fair, but extremely frustrating to lose after 60 seconds of overtime
- xxpor 5y ago
  To me those are the best games, it feels like you were evenly matched :) I hate getting just completely run over way more, personally.
  - blibble 5y ago
    people don't want "fair" though, they want to win about 2/3rds of the time of course the numbers don't work when you're exclusively playing against other people this is why smurfing is so popular
    - milesvp 5y ago
      I find smurfing funny. I’ve never tried it in overwatch, but in other games with good match making smurfing doesn’t last very long. You rise to the level of incompetence really fast. I think the last time I smurfed in LoL I got about a dozen games before I started to hit a wall, which was like half as long as my previous attempt. 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.
      - Johanx64 5y ago
        That's why buying low mmr accounts for a couple of bucks is a thing, you get tens if not hundred+ relaxing matches for few cents each Maybe things have changed, but up until recently Smurf detection usually didn't work all that well
    - _carbyau_ 5y ago
      "people don't want "fair" though, they want to win about 2/3rds of the time" 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.
      - Aerroon 5y ago
        Designing a game around PvE is hard though. It's difficult to create an AI challenge that's interesting and can simultaneously challenge extremely good and mediocre players without feeling impossible. 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.)
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Gene_Parmesan 5y ago

For me, as someone who played OW just to have fun, what pushed me away was just the lack of things to do. No mode diversity meant stuff got stale really fast. 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.

gizmo385 5y ago
> ... just the lack of things to do. No mode diversity meant stuff got stale really fast 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.

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chimeracoder 5y ago

> 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 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.

LanceH 5y ago
2/3's of the player base disagrees that healers and support are fun. Well more than the majority prefers dps. 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.
- chimeracoder 5y ago
  > 2/3's of the player base disagrees that healers and support are fun. [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.
  - LanceH 5y ago
    The extremely lengthy queues and support and tanks playing like dps indicate i'm correct.
- nemothekid 5y ago
  It's hard to theorize because Blizzard made so few tweaks to the game. I can't speak on "fun", but before 2/2/2 the problem was supports were way too powerful (Overwatch has always had a problem with supports being too powerful). The GOATS meta was a reflection of this where you were borderline throwing if you chose DPS. It's telling how many metas were driven by a support that was too powerful (Brigette; GOATS, Moth meta; Mercy, Nanoblade/Beyblade; Ana). Having too powerful supports means that ultimates are the only thing that kills anyone. 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.

jrockway 5y ago

> A good example is the overtime system. One of the worst ideas in games I've run into. 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.

me_me_me 5y ago

I think you are touching on some interesting points, but don't go deep enough. (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

taurath 5y ago
Very similar thing plays out in MOBAs. CC is always powerful because it removes agency. Getting killed with no counter isn’t fun. Playing against a ton of healers isn’t fun. Yet for all those things in combination it’s a lot better than a counterstrike-like experience of whoever sees the pixel first wins. 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.