Icefrog: Add crazy things (within reason) and let god sort it out.
Riot: The Apple walled garden of competitive balance work
Blizzard: FOTM cycles and a slow but heavy hand.
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DOTA2 |OT14| i give up like your pubs do
- Thread starter Artanisix
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Icefrog: Add crazy things (within reason) and let god sort it out.
Riot: The Apple walled garden of competitive balance work
Blizzard: FOTM cycles and a slow but heavy hand.
Monochromaticx
Member
The fountain tress are stupid. I dont like'em one bit.
Valve - Just throw things around and see what happens (by this point, I believe 90% of what happens in the game in terms of metagame is unintentional)
Riot - Release OP heroes to maximize sales then nerf them and resume to same 25/30 competitive roster because they don't want to disturb the status quo.
Blizzard - Can we add rainbows to it? How about some nonsensical plot/backstory and/or cute anime looks? Yes? Perfect.
If u put enough $$$ in it magically gives it to you.getting tipped several games in a row as a tiny lil support ;__;
beating an invoker 1k higher mmr than u ;____;
realizing you have to play this shit for like 800 more years to unlock the broken op garbage cheater map
Sigismundo
Member
I was hoping for responses that were a little less jaded. Haly's sound about right.
Wok
Member
Icefrog: Add crazy things (within reason) and let Reddit sort it out.
Riot: People want to play free stuff, so just hook them with account-bounded runes and they will pay later.
Blizzard: Fire game developers, hire furry artists and meth dealers.
brown people DansGame
The game's been out for 6 days.
But its not like this is Blizzard's first game or the design decisions deviate that much from their other recent entries.
What design decisions, can you elaborate?
You sound like you've been playing the game quite a bit post-release to be able to give such a criticism.
Cheers.
Alright.
Games like Heartstone and HOTS are good examples of this. Its a more casual version of their genre. They cater to the casual portion of their player base. Its like looking at dota and noticing that most players don't use wards or deny and remove those mechanics. Which is fine if you want your game to be casual fun and nothing more, but ultimately hurts your competitive scene because it limits your skill ceiling.
Overwatch does not diverge from that design philosophy which is fine, but once again many things integrated in the game will hurt its competitive potential. To name a few things off the top of my head:
-Infinite ammo: Ultimately means that spamming is less punished vs good aim. There's no reward for good ammo management and reloading animations aren't very long so spamming isn't punished much. A team can continuously keep firing with no penalty which means it creates stalemates. To balance it out, weapons are made weaker which means individual players do less damage, so they have to rely on their team more.
-Higher Hp + Escape abilities: A solution to infinite ammo is also to give everyone higher hp and more escape abilities which means you don't get punished as much for being out of position.
-Bottlenecked maps: creates more action, but promotes camping corners and hurts flanking and diminishes the importance of positioning.
-Ultimates do not reset upon death: To deal with the issues caused by the two prior points, you have ultimates, which can break a stalemate and turn the tides of a fight. BUT, ultimates charge over time and are not reset over death, so bad plays aren't punished and a team that has done a good job holding its ground can lose an objective because the other team essentially waited until all its ultimates were ready before charging in. So a weaker team is artificially kept in the game vs a stronger team because of it. Think comeback mechanic in Dota. Not being reset through death also means you give a lollipop to bad players because they get the opportunity to have a free kill (obviously this doesn't apply to the non-damaging ults, but how many is that? 2-3?) regardless of how they played throughout the game.
All of this means that you rely more on your team to do anything (which isn't to say you don't see individuals carry their team, but its much less common compared to other fps) apart from when you use your ultimate. It also means your skill ceiling is lower which WILL affect your competitive scene. Worst team are not penalized by bad habits because the consequences of those bad habits aren't there.
Blizzard did the same thing with HOTS, promote it as a casual fun game, but also as an E-sport title, but when you strip down alot of higher level mechanics, the end result is basically a slightly better organized pub match. Same applies with Overwatch.
Casual games are fun because they're casual, but that doesn't (or rarely) make them good competitive games.
Is that enough elaboration?
That is true, I was thinking along the lines of medic ult in tf2. But the thing with ults in dota is that they also scale with levels, have different power levels that is also represented by their cooldowns and costs, so if you dies alot, lower level ult, less impact, and are punished more if you waste a big ult for nothing.
If ults in Overwatch have all the same CD, it means their impact is supposed to be relatively the same.
One point, and as seen above, I responded.
Well, kvk asked me to elaborate. So I just wanted to be polite. If people want to think i'm trying to act as if its the worst game ever or that I'm angrily typing behind my keyboard out of some weird hatred against Blizzard or Overwatch, thats their own problem.
I don't watch a lot of competitive FPS but I'll say what inkls says sounds good at least on paper. Some of it seems a little silly to me, like does ammo conservation in Counter Strike really set good players apart from shit players? I haven't noticed excessive spray n pray in the pro overwatch I've seen.
Infinite ammo means its easier to hold a position because you don't have to worry about running out of ammo which creates stalemates since both sides just keep firing until one makes a mistake.
Also think of it this way. Two players have a rocket launcher. One player's rocket launcher has an ammo capacity of 5 shots unless you find ammo on the map. The other has a bottomless clip. How different will their playstyles be?
The first player is rewarded more for accurate shots and using the rocket launcher by necessity like in situations where he would be outgunned normally like in a 1v2+
Player number 2 has no restriction, why would he not use his rocket launcher as much as he wants? He's not punished (as much) for missing shots or using it on single targets, because he will always have ammo for it.
Let me use Halo:Reach as an example. In Reach players had lower movement speed and jumping height, while grenades had larger AOE and damage and each player spawned with two. Easily enough to 100-0 a player and with the game's jump height and movement speed, very hard to avoid. So a bad player could lob two, die, get a kill (or more, which was easy with how cramped some maps were), respawn with two extra grenades and rinse repeat.
Kind of. I appreciate you expanding on those points, if anything to let me see where you're coming from. I had a long post to address them one by one but I don't want to seem like I'm trying to proselytize people to the game. If people don't care for it that's totally cool. We can have a long-form over it on Steam an/or Discord if you want.
I will say, in short, minus the infinite ammo point which is absolutely fair, everything else you posted is indicative of not having spent enough time with the game, and putting a bow on it with a "Blizzard did the same thing with this other game that has nothing to do with Overwatch."
shira
Member
this doesn't really seem fair......no ultimates are guaranteed kills for one, for two they charge faster the better you play. ultimates in dota 2 recharge over a fixed time unaffected by your skill, and aren't reset on death either. in a game where the skill level between teams is severely unbalanced the better team can and will win in 5 minutes, because the only thing between them and the other base is the other team.
i do agree about chokepoints tho, i hope there are more open maps in the pipeline tbh.
Just coming from having played alot of Halo:Reach and I can see paralels between it and Halo 2-3 and Tf2 and Overwatch. This isn't new to me.
I'm not sure I understand. Overwatch does follow the same philosophy of removing mechanics from its genre that would be used by higher level players and introducing mechanics that benefit mostly the casual crowd formula that Blizzard has established from its previous games.
Bottleneck maps aren't new to fps games, and seeing those fps and seeing that Overwatch isn't an exception to this, their purpose is to force constant fighting and promote camping, which coupled with higher health, escapes, infinite ammo, promotes stalemates.
If every ultimates had the same impact you wouldn't see pro teams preferring to pick two of the same hero over another. Niche picks don't see much play if they don't fit the meta and in class based shooters if there's few accepted strats then niche picks don't get picked, especially if the maps all rely on the same strategy.
I don't think Overwatch is inherently a competitive title, or rather, I don't think the skill gap will be as big between a good and bad player because of these design decisions.
Blizzard will show how much they want the game to have a high skill ceiling when they'll show how they deal with emergent gameplay that can potentially raise the skill at which the game is played (ex: new tactics or new way of playing a hero). Will they embrace it or remove it/nerf it into oblivion in favor of "The Way the Game Should be Played™"? Based on what they did in the past I think they'll opt for the latter.
If HOTS and Heartstone have the same type of balance, what makes you think Overwatch will be any different? There's a reason companies like Valve or Blizzard are described as "the way valve balanced" or "the way Blizzard balances" instead of "the way tf2 valve balances" and "the way HOTS Blizzard balances". There's a few differences but ultimately they have a global mindset on how their games should be balanced.
This is basically the same discussion as "what does pay to win means" as some people will describe pay to win as "if money doesn't give you 100% winrate, then it isn't pay to win" instead of "Pay to win gives you an advantage compared to a player who didn't put out money". See my point? Ultimates may not be guaranteed kills if you can't aim, have bad positioning or an opponent does a good move, but in most case they're designed to give you a kill with relative low effort like a power weapon in other fps but without the drawbacks. In other words, everyone has a 2 min timer for a 90% chance of getting a kill. A better player will do more with an ultimate compared to bad players, but he still has the same amount of ultimates to use compared to a bad player. So who benefits the most from this?
Yep, I ban Alch or Slark every game, and if I'm with a friend, they ban whichever I don't.
I did successfully wreck an Alch yesterday. It was kind of annoying because I had to prioritize stopping him from doing his big ancient stack, then steal it myself after killing him and most of his team.
http://www.dotabuff.com/matches/2399559677
Ttk in overwatch is very low for most characters. And better players gain charge faster as your charge increases for landed hits and kills. It could create stalemates but it more easily creates massive snowballs for the winning side in current competitive games. It used to create stalemates in the past when you gained charge on taking damage ala sf4 but that is no longer the case.
Not saying the game isnt inherently casual but what you're claiming is demonstrably wrong
Not saying the game isnt inherently casual but what you're claiming is demonstrably wrong
but ults charge faster the better you play........
overwatch is still an fps and so the big skill gap between players will ultimately come down to good aim vs. bad aim (especially because head shots count for more like traditional fps)
and because of this which heroes will be most successful? Heroes that are the most aim intensive, and are able to best take advantage of good aim (I.e headshots) and by extension have the highest skill cap--heroes like McCree and widowmaker. this is why competitive picks are limited, you pick the most damaging "aim-based" heroes (McCree/widow), a guy that can best protect them and push the objective off their kills (Reinhardt), and then a guy who abuses the choke-point map design best (junkrat). Boom rip diversity and the other 20 heroes.
and like inkls states it will be interesting to see their balance philosophy with regard to these heroes. Do we nuke them from orbit or embrace their design?
now the osfrog approach would probably be to nerf flashbang (allows bad mccree's to get kills regardless of their aim) or tone down widow's sidearm/close-range. The traditional blizzard approach would be to nerf their damage and increase their TTK, headshots and good aim be damned and the high skill floor mechanics preserved (flashbang and widow's sidearm)
will be interesting to see how the overwatch team addresses stuff like this going forward
and because of this which heroes will be most successful? Heroes that are the most aim intensive, and are able to best take advantage of good aim (I.e headshots) and by extension have the highest skill cap--heroes like McCree and widowmaker. this is why competitive picks are limited, you pick the most damaging "aim-based" heroes (McCree/widow), a guy that can best protect them and push the objective off their kills (Reinhardt), and then a guy who abuses the choke-point map design best (junkrat). Boom rip diversity and the other 20 heroes.
and like inkls states it will be interesting to see their balance philosophy with regard to these heroes. Do we nuke them from orbit or embrace their design?
now the osfrog approach would probably be to nerf flashbang (allows bad mccree's to get kills regardless of their aim) or tone down widow's sidearm/close-range. The traditional blizzard approach would be to nerf their damage and increase their TTK, headshots and good aim be damned and the high skill floor mechanics preserved (flashbang and widow's sidearm)
will be interesting to see how the overwatch team addresses stuff like this going forward
That's kinda the main reason I don't think I'll watch much of it. I can see these people are way better than me, but watching makes me want to go play it instead. You could argue that's the point, but I don't mean in the "I'll play right after this match is over" -- I mean in the "I'd rather be playing than watching/learning from these players."
yeah the ult criticism isn't accurate at all. they charge over time but so slowly that bad players get maybe 1-2 ults per match while good ones will get 4+
i agree with the infinite ammo/spam criticism. and while some of the maps are pretty chokepoint heavy others (anubis, king's row, all of the koth maps) have lots of side areas and flanking possibilities. it's not battlefield but i think it's actually a bit more open than tf2 most of the time.
Do they? My bad then.
I remember reading the patch notes change in the beta where they went from only scaling from your performance to scaling with time, so I must have missed the later part.
Who benefited from that change though?
I hear what you're saying. I'm just not certain that the ways in which you think the skill ceiling is lowered by design decisions like that are going to make the competitive scene for the game less compelling. Time will tell on that I suppose.
The only Bliz game I've watched competitively is a bit of HotS and I'm not intimately familiar enough to say whether or not its casual factor and lack of a skill requirement relative to more obtuse MOBAs is the cause, but I've seen some intense matches of that. Real hard swings. Crazy comebacks. Really fun to watch.
My biggest complaint with competitive/pro Overwatch so far is the way the payload and attack/defend maps are played out where both sides play it, the first of which sets a time to beat for the 2nd team which, if not met, just ends the game mid-match. Leads for potentially anti-climactic series finishes.
How does competitive TF2 handle that? Same way?
User 85168
Banned
not sure about payload maps, but attack/defend maps, yes to the stopwatch. and it's built in to the competitive matchmaking
I'm not familiar enough with Blizzard games pre-WC3 so I have to ask here, did Blizzard ever really cater to the "hardcore crowd", or did they simply try to capture whatever was popular at the time?
Because it seems a misrepresentation to say they're just wantonly casualizing everything when casual gaming is simply more popular and more profitable than hardcore gaming.
Because it seems a misrepresentation to say they're just wantonly casualizing everything when casual gaming is simply more popular and more profitable than hardcore gaming.
It's not a misrepresentation nor is it a criticism.
-They've been explicit that they don't balance wow arena around the 3ks as opposed to the 1500s. Ex lead dev has said he stopped enjoying his job when they stopped catering to players and started designing with "can my grandma play and understand this?" in mind
-HOTS's entire design and appeal is that you can load up a game and finish within 15 minutes not to mention there's no last hitting, items, denying, etc... It's all very quick and straightforward and designed not to burden you, and the lack of mechanics, slow MS, and low damage (and high hp pools) is meant to dampen individual skill or domination.
-Hearthstone supplements any sort of mechanical depth with mass RNG to keep people interested and shit players like myself occasionally excited about getting good dice rolls
This is just how blizzard has operated in recent years, part of their goal is to appeal to as wide a base as possible and you do that mostly by eliminating frustrating or over-complicated mechanics which has the side effect of diminishing individual impact skill, and alternative ways of out thinking or playing ur opponent.
Not to say no skill exists (that's stupid and obvious), there are still bad wow players and good, bad hots players and good, etc.. It's just the gap and impact of the good is smaller and more limited compared to a game like cs or dota. That's not inherently good or bad, it just is. Different strokes for different folks.
Did blizzard ever hold a different design philosophy? Maybe when they were in infancy with diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft especially because gaming was so niche. We live in very different times and it's clear from the top down (interviews, wow movie, etc...) that they want to hit and appeal to as wide an audience as possible with all of their media. And between overwatch and hearthstone, seems they are hitting their goal. Hots? Not so much... LoL has too much of an irongrip on their target audience.
sry for any errors typed from my phone
where did i imply they did it wantonly?
I was writing this post earlier when Inkls made his dissection of Overwatch, but had to go do something, so this is mainly in response to that. I will try to read posts afterwards and edit this accordingly if necessary.
I agree with most of inkls's points except for two: Bottlenecked maps and infinite ammo rewarding spamming.
Infinite ammo: Very few heroes in the game actually have weapons that reward spamming at all, and the ones that do, that's what you're SUPPOSED to do. Pharrah lays down suppressive rocket fire, as well as using the concussive grenade to blow people off of the objective. Junkrat is a brute force way of busting through a choke point in a map. The other ones beside debatably Bastion don't really reward spamming, and require some kind of precision or positioning to be successful. Reload animations are short, but long enough to matter if someone is in your face already that reloading can be what kills you, since the pace of the game is pretty fast.
Bottlenecked maps: Usually you do need a frontliner, be it a Reinhardt, Winston, Zarya, or something else entirely, but plenty of characters have a lot to gain by getting around the bottleneck and causing chaos from the back. Tracer can rush straight for the objective and make the other team have to respond to that, giving your team an opportunity to push forward. D-Va can do this too, and Reaper can get behind them to start picking off people. Reaper is particularly useful in going behind a Reinhardt shield and taking him down from the back. Often the point in this game is to find your way to break through the bottleneck, or get around it and break it.
One of the beefs I do have is that D-Va and Roadhog are listed under "Tank", but neither of them are really what you would consider a tank. They both have lots of HP, and some kind of defensive ability, but neither is really well suited for going right in the front of everything. D-Va almost has to be played like a tankier Tracer in a way, while Roadhog makes good pickoffs.
I agree with most of inkls's points except for two: Bottlenecked maps and infinite ammo rewarding spamming.
Infinite ammo: Very few heroes in the game actually have weapons that reward spamming at all, and the ones that do, that's what you're SUPPOSED to do. Pharrah lays down suppressive rocket fire, as well as using the concussive grenade to blow people off of the objective. Junkrat is a brute force way of busting through a choke point in a map. The other ones beside debatably Bastion don't really reward spamming, and require some kind of precision or positioning to be successful. Reload animations are short, but long enough to matter if someone is in your face already that reloading can be what kills you, since the pace of the game is pretty fast.
Bottlenecked maps: Usually you do need a frontliner, be it a Reinhardt, Winston, Zarya, or something else entirely, but plenty of characters have a lot to gain by getting around the bottleneck and causing chaos from the back. Tracer can rush straight for the objective and make the other team have to respond to that, giving your team an opportunity to push forward. D-Va can do this too, and Reaper can get behind them to start picking off people. Reaper is particularly useful in going behind a Reinhardt shield and taking him down from the back. Often the point in this game is to find your way to break through the bottleneck, or get around it and break it.
One of the beefs I do have is that D-Va and Roadhog are listed under "Tank", but neither of them are really what you would consider a tank. They both have lots of HP, and some kind of defensive ability, but neither is really well suited for going right in the front of everything. D-Va almost has to be played like a tankier Tracer in a way, while Roadhog makes good pickoffs.
I also disagree with the maps and think that perception is a poor understanding of map layouts. There are a LOT of flanks and workaround positions for heroes with vertical mobility options, and you should absolutely have these types of heroes in your party i.e. Genji, Pharah, Junkrat, Winston, Hanzo, Widow, etc. A lot of these spots are NOT OBVIOUS and unknown to most of the current playing population. I do not have troubles flanking on any map except maybe Hanamura B.
NormalFish
Banned
Inkls' post is quality.
I wasn't referring to exclusively overwatch, though. All of blizzards games follow this model. WoW has increasingly been streamlined in ways that the hardcore community is vocal about their distaste for, hearthstone is the most approachable ccg I can think of, Diablo has also been streamlined though I think it's an odd case for these things given the genre. HotS and Overwatch seem to follow the same model.
And again, that's not even a bad thing. But in a few months time when some issues become more apparent, we'll see how it's handled. And then we'll know.
I wasn't referring to exclusively overwatch, though. All of blizzards games follow this model. WoW has increasingly been streamlined in ways that the hardcore community is vocal about their distaste for, hearthstone is the most approachable ccg I can think of, Diablo has also been streamlined though I think it's an odd case for these things given the genre. HotS and Overwatch seem to follow the same model.
And again, that's not even a bad thing. But in a few months time when some issues become more apparent, we'll see how it's handled. And then we'll know.
I'd be happy to discuss other games but y'all got no breadth
Assuming that a player has decent aim, it honestly feels like that said player is skill capped to the hero's skillset rather than their ability as a deathmatcher. Like, in Team Fortress, a great scout can maneuvere and meatshot an entire team 1v6. But, tracer is limited to whether your Recall/Blinks are off cool-down, and whether your opponent's lineup will allow you to do damage -- instead of your own skill at ground movement/air control (sidenote, dear god air control in Overwatch is awful) or raw deathmatch ability.
It feels like Blizzard took the quake heritage away from a quake-style game, and it feels weird. But it's enjoyable for what it is; I just do not see it ever working in a competitive setting. It doesn't feel natural towards what the game is.
It feels like Blizzard took the quake heritage away from a quake-style game, and it feels weird. But it's enjoyable for what it is; I just do not see it ever working in a competitive setting. It doesn't feel natural towards what the game is.
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