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On June 05 2016 06:36 Numy wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2016 06:13 killerdog wrote:On June 05 2016 05:52 red_ wrote:On June 05 2016 05:35 AlterKot wrote:On June 05 2016 05:32 red_ wrote:
Watching this GosuGamers Overwatch event, the 1 hero limit format makes for much more exciting games I think. I hope this becomes standard. Big fan of it. Ya getting to actually see consistent play from Junkrats and Pharahs and Widows and Zaryas etc etc etc is a lot more entertaining than having like 10 heroes be niche/filler picks to the top 4 of mccree lucio mercy reinhardt. I'd rather they fix mcree and buff zenyatta than they just accept that half the heroes suck and use rules to force variety :< You are always going to have some guys being better than others. That's why Dota has an integrated ban system. They'll never manage to get everyone played without external rules unless the game is completely homogeneous but who wants that.
Dota is played on a single map, has hundreds of heroes and you can't switch mid-match
What a relevant analogy
Of the problem-characters he mentioned earlier
Mcree is always picked because he's broken and needs a nerf
Mercy and lucio are picked because the only other healer, zenyatta, isn't good enough. presumably they'll be adding more support options later.
There will probably always be a reinhardt in most comps, but 1 of each doesn't change that at all.
Most offense/dps options are cut off by mcree being broken. Pretty much all the tanks see at least situational play, and of the healers there are only two real options, and both see play o.0
Variety comes from:
Different maps, and different stages of different maps, favouring certain comps.
Game modes favouring some comps.
Player specific skill causing some teams to favour picks.
All the current problems point to are a lack of support options and an imbalance in the strength of the dps characters. Bandaiding that with a "one of each" rule so each team runs a token character or two just for the sake of the rules is ignoring the problem just so you can shout "yay diversity."
Not to mention dramatically reducing the number of options for comps just cuts down diversity in the long term, you'll still stabilise to the "best" lineup, except now there's much less room to actually abuse parts of the game where certain combos are stronger, so you end up being even less likely to actually switch between things.
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Chaos draft at the store tonight. Our choice of any three standard legal packs + fate reforged.
Some dude opened expedition wasteland.
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On June 05 2016 08:21 killerdog wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2016 06:36 Numy wrote:On June 05 2016 06:13 killerdog wrote:On June 05 2016 05:52 red_ wrote:On June 05 2016 05:35 AlterKot wrote:On June 05 2016 05:32 red_ wrote:
Watching this GosuGamers Overwatch event, the 1 hero limit format makes for much more exciting games I think. I hope this becomes standard. Big fan of it. Ya getting to actually see consistent play from Junkrats and Pharahs and Widows and Zaryas etc etc etc is a lot more entertaining than having like 10 heroes be niche/filler picks to the top 4 of mccree lucio mercy reinhardt. I'd rather they fix mcree and buff zenyatta than they just accept that half the heroes suck and use rules to force variety :< You are always going to have some guys being better than others. That's why Dota has an integrated ban system. They'll never manage to get everyone played without external rules unless the game is completely homogeneous but who wants that. Dota is played on a single map, has hundreds of heroes and you can't switch mid-match What a relevant analogy Of the problem-characters he mentioned earlier Mcree is always picked because he's broken and needs a nerf Mercy and lucio are picked because the only other healer, zenyatta, isn't good enough. presumably they'll be adding more support options later. There will probably always be a reinhardt in most comps, but 1 of each doesn't change that at all. Most offense/dps options are cut off by mcree being broken. Pretty much all the tanks see at least situational play, and of the healers there are only two real options, and both see play o.0 Variety comes from: Different maps, and different stages of different maps, favouring certain comps. Game modes favouring some comps. Player specific skill causing some teams to favour picks. All the current problems point to are a lack of support options and an imbalance in the strength of the dps characters. Bandaiding that with a "one of each" rule so each team runs a token character or two just for the sake of the rules is ignoring the problem just so you can shout "yay diversity." Not to mention dramatically reducing the number of options for comps just cuts down diversity in the long term, you'll still stabilise to the "best" lineup, except now there's much less room to actually abuse parts of the game where certain combos are stronger, so you end up being even less likely to actually switch between things.
I agree with you and I'm all for the game getting balanced long term, but it's not like this format is being imposed by Blizzard it's the tourney organizers saying the game is broken for now so we're improvising. I just wanted to comment that this event using this format was far more entertaining than the stuff I have watched previously(because while in the current state of broken, McCree's pickrate has risen to far above 100%, so being limited to one is actually opening up slots for the other dps heroes, and map diversity is pushing that even further so that it hasn't just been replacing McCree with X).
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BW control vs GB aristocrats (the rite/company/recruiter version, that replaces Lili with Vile Redeemers for even more tokens), the latter being a lent deck 'cause we were only 3 otherwise.
Game 2, GB has sided-in Virulent Plague because tokens are kinda the main way to beat down BW control has. So there's Gideon and his trusty knight token vs Nantuko Husk (buffed via a scion sac'd before playing the Plague) and a Catacomb Sifter.
As a response to the attacks, I block the Sifter with the now 1/1 token, and I cast Anguished Unmaking on the Husk which eats itself.
Next turn, I look at the two Secure the Wastes that've been sitting in my hand almost from the start. My opponent who's seen them through a t2 Transgress is laughing his ass off when I call myself dumb (it's all in good fun, we both played super sloppy and called ourselves out).
This is why I do badly in standard :f
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United States47024 Posts
Overwatch's roster is currently too small for it, but as the roster expands, I don't see why DotA/LoL-style ban-pick shouldn't become the default for competitive play.
Turning hero selection into an active gameplay element where you're fighting with the opposing team for picks rather than just building perfect teams out of an unrestricted roster is one of the best innovations of the Moba genre. While it's only really usable in games with a roster that's significantly larger than the number of heroes in a given game, more team games should be adopting draft-style team building for competitive play.
The problem with "balancing" the game long term is that the complexity of balancing the whole cast scales superlinearly to the number of heroes in the game. While the total roster is relatively small and manageable now, some number of years down the line when the number of playable heroes doubles or triples, it's not feasible to expect every hero to be balanced against one another.
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Drafting has a sweetspot inbetween having enough characters to make it realistic, and too many options to make it useless.
I'd argue LoL has been moving towards the border of the latter for a while now, though they do a decent job of keeping some champs nerfed into the ground so there aren't too many options in this sense. have to do that if you want to keep releasing new champs. idk bout doto but they prob have a similar thing where the roster is too big so ~half the characters have to be trash tier.
and that's already with champ select itself being the only real choice as they come with static abilities (granted OW also has static abilities), but once you're a game that gives more front-loaded choice (either more viable chars or (even limited) ablility to select skills/stats) drafting just doesn't do anything anymore.
And then.. We enter the realm.. Of Build Wars.
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A System for pick/ban in Overwatch would be incredible interesting to me would be a draft inc reserves,
+ Show Spoiler +B1/B1/P2/P2/B1/B1/P2/P2/B1/P1+B1/P1/P2/P2/P2/P3/P3
3* Bans each, 10 characters picked per team, assigned 2 to a player, in any order the team wants. Players can swap characters once per round, alternately teams can swap 3 characters per round.
PB order is just an example. the important thing is the reserve concept. Keeps the whole character swapping thing in overwatch, but limiting the swaps allows a team to plan strategies and adapt as the match goes on. I think it'd add a lot to the competitive side of the game, which is currently pretty lacking. This would also help define roles in a very soft way for players, rather than harshly enforced roles like in league.
*Bans in proportion to character pool. a 40 pool roster is alot different ban-need than a 100 pool roster.
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Would a ban system really work when you can switch characters in the middle of the game and you can have the same characters on either side? Or, is it necessary? I feel at that point you're only banning because you hate a character.
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United States47024 Posts
On June 05 2016 12:05 Dandel Ion wrote:
I'd argue LoL has been moving towards the border of the latter for a while now, though they do a decent job of keeping some champs nerfed into the ground so there aren't too many options in this sense. have to do that if you want to keep releasing new champs. idk bout doto but they prob have a similar thing where the roster is too big so ~half the characters have to be trash tier.
I'd argue that half the heroes being shit in a game like this is an inevitable consequence of the roster size, not an intentional design choice.
On June 05 2016 12:42 PrinceXizor wrote:
A System for pick/ban in Overwatch would be incredible interesting to me would be a draft inc reserves,
I had a similar thought with the reserves idea, though conceptually, I like the idea of the entire team sharing the picked hero pool, rather than having specific picks locked to specific players.
On June 05 2016 12:44 Requizen wrote:
Would a ban system really work when you can switch characters in the middle of the game and you can have the same characters on either side? Or, is it necessary? I feel at that point you're only banning because you hate a character.
LoL only started with blind pick too. Just because the default game mode has non-unique picks doesn't mean the draft mode has to as well.
Currently the problem is that the roster is too small for a draft to function well. Even the bare minimum of 2 bans per team and minimum picks puts you at 16 picked/banned heroes which is already nearly 4/5 of the roster. I don't think ban/pick becomes feasible until the roster size is about double what it is now, but as a gameplay mechanic, I don't see much reason not to include it once the roster is big enough.
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On June 05 2016 12:53 TheYango wrote:
Currently the problem is that the roster is too small for a draft to function well. Even the bare minimum of 2 bans per team and minimum picks puts you at 16 picked/banned heroes which is already nearly 4/5 of the roster. I don't think ban/pick becomes feasible until the roster size is about double what it is now, but as a gameplay mechanic, I don't see much reason not to include it once the roster is big enough.
Until then you could do 1 ban/team and 2 restricted picks per team (limits to 1 of a specific hero) So like 2 heroes get eliminated, and 4 are limited to the team that chose them, and the rest are fair game
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A large part of the OW design philosophy from blizzards sude involves being able to switch characters in game though.
Removing that just because it enables pick/ban seems kinda dumb. Especially with how rock/paper/scissors the relationship between some of the picks can be. Why neuter its potential in order to make it more moba-esque?
Much more interesting imo would be more maps and gamemodes which encourage creative comps, and switching up comps during the game.
Gibraltar is an interesting style of map because different parts of it favour different styles/comps. Taking that kind of idea and running with it could potentially lead to some very unique opportunities for strategical optimizations.
Besides, I don't think there are quite as many niches in fps as there are in moba for unique heroes. I have a hard time imagining them releasing more than 5-6 new characters over the next year or two without the clutter and overlap going crazy.
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If you don't have some restrictions on character select everyone will default to the best team comp and never switch anyway. Or worse. endlessly rotate through hard counters and make the game super swingy and boring.
On June 05 2016 14:52 killerdog wrote:
Besides, I don't think there are quite as many niches in fps as there are in moba for unique heroes. I have a hard time imagining them releasing more than 5-6 new characters over the next year or two without the clutter and overlap going crazy.
Incredible overlap between characters didnt stop league.
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On June 05 2016 15:51 PrinceXizor wrote:If you don't have some restrictions on character select everyone will default to the best team comp and never switch anyway. Or worse. endlessly rotate through hard counters and make the game super swingy and boring. Show nested quote +On June 05 2016 14:52 killerdog wrote:
Besides, I don't think there are quite as many niches in fps as there are in moba for unique heroes. I have a hard time imagining them releasing more than 5-6 new characters over the next year or two without the clutter and overlap going crazy. Incredible overlap between characters didnt stop league.
League also had a long period of churning out a champion every two weeks in a desperate attempt to gain more players, not really something OW needs.
They have such a good diverse cast right now, why ruin all that just to gimp the uniquely fluid gameplay, just to be more like mobas >.>
Artificially imposed macro strategy on that level has a place in Moba's where most of the game is downtime in terms of player on player combat. Arena shooters not so much.
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On June 05 2016 16:06 killerdog wrote:
Macro strategy on that level has a place in Moba's where most of the game is downtime in terms of player on player combat. Arena shooters not so much.
What? this is backwards yeah? micro level strategy has a place inside downtime. not macro level.
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On June 05 2016 16:08 PrinceXizor wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2016 16:06 killerdog wrote:
Macro strategy on that level has a place in Moba's where most of the game is downtime in terms of player on player combat. Arena shooters not so much. What? this is backwards yeah? micro level strategy has a place inside downtime. not macro level.
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Stuff like drafts having specific interactions which then dictate the flow of the rest of the game, such as scaling comps, split pushing or grouping or defending or sieging, hitting power spike timings, contesting or giving up objectives and map pressure etc.
That kind of overly complex macro-strategy and long-term decision making is huge in moba's because of the level of downtime. Much more active games like overwatch don't need that complexity to be interesting or fun, and if you try and turn it into pure chess you're just losing out on much of the potential fun of the genre.
Having a game with strongly unique heroes where you can change on the fly, with only the loss of ult meter, is a potentially amazing concept. There are plenty of edges which need ironing out, both in terms of character balance and map design, but I'm pretty surprised to see people wanting to completely remove that in the name of "strategy" o.0
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What overwatch needs is more supports healers and more snipers (we only have widow as a sniper right now)
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United States47024 Posts
On June 05 2016 14:52 killerdog wrote:
A large part of the OW design philosophy from blizzards sude involves being able to switch characters in game though.
Is that really mutually exclusive with draft play?
Teams can draft a per-team hero pool of more than 6 and freely swap between the heroes they have drafted but still be restricted to only those heroes from their draft. I don't think full roster access 100% of the time is necessary to gain the gameplay benefits of mid-game character swapping.
On June 05 2016 16:06 killerdog wrote:
They have such a good diverse cast right now, why ruin all that just to gimp the uniquely fluid gameplay, just to be more like mobas >.>
Because I have zero faith in Blizzard to not ruin a good thing anyway. I have a hard time believing that Blizzard is just going to stop making new content when the hero pool is diverse enough to avoid redundancy. That's just not really how any game developer operates these days even if the content addition actively makes their game worse.
I'm not saying that Blizzard should go up to 40-60 heroes with partial redundancy to make draft play happen--you're right that's probably worse for the game. But I'm taking it as a given that Blizzard's just going to keep adding to the roster regardless.
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Playing with wave is fun. Playing overwatch alone is the worst experience i've had in modern games. Blizzard needs to fix that before they worry about catering to their paid-for competitive scene, anyways.
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On June 05 2016 17:14 PrinceXizor wrote:
Playing with wave is fun. Playing overwatch alone is the worst experience i've had in modern games. Blizzard needs to fix that before they worry about catering to their paid-for competitive scene, anyways.
We'll play more together if you're willing.
I don't think I've ever seen a reaper carry as hard as you did.
(I don't mind OW alone honestly)
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On June 05 2016 17:38 WaveofShadow wrote:Show nested quote +On June 05 2016 17:14 PrinceXizor wrote:
Playing with wave is fun. Playing overwatch alone is the worst experience i've had in modern games. Blizzard needs to fix that before they worry about catering to their paid-for competitive scene, anyways. We'll play more together if you're willing. I don't think I've ever seen a reaper carry as hard as you did. (I don't mind OW alone honestly)
there are a few characters where i can play alone and be cool with it. roadhog is one. but so much it's just an exercise in disappointment and frustration with the netcode when im alone.
And ty. been trying to get better at reaper since i stopped playing widow.
anytime you see me on and i'm not on "busy" or something feel free to send a message. Bnet client sucks though so i might miss it. it just means i'm dumb, not rude!
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EPT
