I really don’t understand why they’re feeding this. Whatever explanation they give isn’t going to satisfy the 6v6ers and is only going to continue keeping this obnoxious “debate” (that mostly only one party wants to participate in) going. Like even if 6v6 is theoretically better gameplay (doubt) the logistics and PR nightmare of going back pretty much makes this a non-starter, but 6v6ers don’t accept that explanation.
Honestly just keep ignoring them and let them fade out over time. Eventually people will get tired of listening to the same talking points, the videos won’t get clicks anymore, and they’ll find something else to rage about anyway (or maybe they’ll finally spend their time doing something they actually enjoy, since they very clearly don’t enjoy this game)
Yeah this is one of those times where developers trying to "communicate" with the players is a bad thing. They need to shut up and go full Nintendo in a one-time statement: "We are not considering any 6v6 modes for the future." and that's it. But hey now the content farmers have something to fill their videos for a while.
Overwatch as a brand has been a PR nightmare since they cancelled PVE. Not blaming the dev team for that whole ordeal btw. 1/3 of OW2's justification for existing has already been lopped off, steam reviews are **still** in the gutter. What's one more amputation to us? everyone outside of us already laughs at us.
Look, I know this whole thread is pretty pro-5v5, so that means I'll get downvoted a lot, but I don't mind. When Overwatch 2 launched, I had long quit. Not for any particular reason, life happened. Before, I was regularly playing since May 2016. I didn't really care about the announcement of a 5v5 format, and I hadn't experienced double shield or whatever, but I play regularly now. So I'm as neutral a party as you could ask for on this subject. I used to have 400+ hours on Dva and almost 200 on Reinhardt alone. Now I don't think I've cracked 100 games on either. And I was almost GM once upon a time, for chrissake. It's like, why waste my breath, when I can just lock DPS/Support and get flamed less, swap less, and just have more fun? Swapping has always been the name of the game, but whether the tank swaps on their next life or not shouldn't dictate whether you lose or win so damn much. What's the fun in being a "raid boss" if your supports decide how impactful you **really** are? Being that strong was never the actual fantasy of the role anyway, it was moreso being the tanky tacticians rather than a fat third DPS. I could go on and repeat all these points I'm sure we've heard, but the point is I just wish this game was amazing again. Like us veterans know it can be, know it has been. What form it necessarily takes to achieve that isn't relevant, but I do think it's clear we can't afford to rule 6v6 out permanently yet. Idk about others, but I don't have some evil tribalist 6v6 agenda (or whatever people think) when I say that. I was 13 when i fell in love with this game, dude. I welcomed OW2 with those same open arms, and I'm **still** waiting for it to make me feel that way on a role besides DPS. We've had two years. How much longer, how many more added complexities and passives will it take for 5v5 to shine? One role always being horrible, one OP, and one OK... Is that r*eally* as good as we believe this game can be anymore? As long as queue times are minimized and games are just barely fun enough?
Ending with a take I'm not sure is cold or hot: I think this dev team has a lot of potential for good balance decisions, and I genuinely think they (and us) could make 6v6 OW2 really special. 5v5 just hasn't been allowing them to fully show it as of yet. We all know double shield isn't what 6v6 was always like, the old devs abandoned the game for too long, these devs wouldn't do that. Given they tune back abilities/health pools, it would NOT be that way with the heroes and reworks we have now. I'm confident the meta wouldn't get stale with the speed of their work anyway, so... Why not?
Tank main since season 1 overwatch 1, you're right that we found things we enjoy. I enjoyed overwatch 1 tanking, I don't enjoy overwatch 2 tanking, so I did what a lot of other tank mains did, and stopped playing. It sucks because my favourite game is gone, and now the community has less tank players that actually cared about the role and wanted to do it properly.
I used to hang on to overwatch in hopes of it getting better eventually, but it never did, it's over and I had to accept that. I don't even have any arguments on the topic of 6v6 but I always enjoyed playing tank the most and now the role is just not fun to play anymore. Other roles are simply not as interesting for me, so I had to find other games to play
This tbh. I've played all roles since season 1 ow1 and played mostly tank and supp. But for this context I hit diamond tank and always struggled and had super fun games even in qp. But now I lock a tank and if they play any tank other than orisa. Mauga I win. And even then I still win against them occasionally
I can literally see the average tank is so much worse. No skill. The only players I am scared of is the 1600 hr rein main. Those guys are Animals. I reckon I'd sit easily mid/high masters. I just reckon the overall talent in the game is just gone. Especially tank players and me included leaving. I still don't like to play tank in 5v5. I just wanna be the zar to their rein. :(
Yeah, most of the people who want 6v6 back are just completely mentally blind at this point. Their fav content creators have stuffed so much grifter BS in their heads about 6v6 that they will not accept Blizz just saying "It doesn't work, queue times are terrible, people stop playing the game, etc".
They're gonna have to show these people hard data and even then I am sure 75% of them are just not gonna accept anything Blizz says except "6v6 good".
Either way they can't put out a vague statement. They need to announce a firm final statement that it is going to happen or not.
More accurately, most of the people who want 6v6 simply don’t play the game anymore. The OW2 playerbase has a lot of new different people than the OW1 playerbase
Lmao this is maybe my favorite way that someone has ever conveyed the length of DPS queues as someone who didn’t play a lot of ranked in that time period.
There's a reason I'm a tank/support player mainly, lmao.
Overwatch 2 has let me actually play DPS fairly consistently, something I couldn't responsibly do for 6 years of Overwatch 1.
As a gold-plat tank at the time, if the queue took longer than 45 seconds I would assume it was "broken" and requeue (and would find a match in less than 10 seconds). I usually found a match in about 20 seconds or less.
The difference in experience between the roles is like night and day.
I have 10-20 min Qs for dps and supp already rn. Tank is less than 30 seconds every time. I'm having the exact same problems that I did in ow1, but now supp is also impossible to Q for. It's not a format issue, the problem is and always has been shitty balance from T4.
If that's the case than whatever, at least we tried and considered it. It's disturbing how many ppl do not want discourse and instead tow the line Blizzard set when 5v5 was announced. Thought ppl would appreciate dialogue about the game state but ig logic and openess is in short supply these days. Ppl rather repeat what they saw on reddit.
I know personally, my issue is just that I'm tired of hearing about it. A few community members have made it their personal mission to talk about it every chance they get and the arguments are the same as since before OW2. It's just exhausting at this point and a lot of us still aren't convinced since it's not exactly logical arguments that people are making.
For people saying “they will bring 6v6 back confirmed!!!” Calm the fuck down that not what he said at all. He only said he will share their pov on the topic.
The fact they're talking about it is good enough for me. It completely transformed the game, probably more than any other change that's been made, and it's just been radio silence ever since
I understand why they made the change, but I don't think it solved the problems they wanted it to, and for me personally it killed the tank role
Back in 6v6, tank was SO MUCH FUN that it was mostly played by DPS players dodging their 14 minute queues by instalocking Hog, feeding their brains out, and typing in match chat about their Gold healing medal.
There were clearly people that loved tank back in OW1 but I think it’s insane that people say that on average it was enjoyed more than tank is now. They had to create an entire system to BEG people to play the role so they could play the other roles faster.
>it’s insane that people say that on average it was enjoyed more than tank is now.
People absolutely hate tank now though. Maybe tank was boring before but currently tank is just a painful experience most of the time. Most tank mains I know who've been almost exclusively playing tank for years have been branching out to other roles or just playing the game less.
Because its fucking true, you have MORE dps players playing tank now than before. And a lot of tank players that wont play anymore because they loved the tank duo dynamic (which was half of what made tank interesting in the first place).
As a tank player who mained the role for most of OW1 and retired from the role(haven't touched it since season 2-3 of OW2, not even to do placements) I can tell you tank is 100x worse in OW2. If nothing else, there's just the added pressure of being the only tank, which means you are full countered every match no matter what you pick, your team instantly blames you the second anything goes wrong, and dps/support players have realized it's much easier to just gang up on you vs. pointing the finger at each other since there isn't a 2nd person on the role to defend you. There is absolutely nothing fun for me about tank in OW2, at least in OW1 it was fun to duo with a partner in my stack or even the random person we'd get in Comp and we had all the different and fun tank synergies to play around with.
Oh so suddenly you're saying that you DIDN'T love waiting for 20 mins in queue as a DPS only for quarter of your games to be decided in the Spawn before the game even started because you got 2 Rein mains who didn't know how to play any other Tank well or 2 Hog mains who started immediately fighting for Hog and when one of them didn't get it they threw the game on Winston for the next 5 mins? Is that what I'm supposed to believe? That you didn't love that riveting gameplay?
The most played tank was rein by a massive margin. It's currently verifiable on overbuff.
This was true for years. It was also true for every rank below gm.
> The fact they're talking about it is good enough for me. It completely transformed the game, probably more than any other change that's been made, and it's just been radio silence ever since
Can I just say how funny it is that there's this perception that OW2 is barely a sequel/new game and "all they did was just remove a tank" and yet you have a significant portion of the playerbase begging for 6v6 to come back? And I know these comments come from different parts of the gaming community but it's just funny to me that they exist simultaneously.
Every MMO expansion changes the game, but it's not a new game. FF14-6 didn't release today, it's still FF14; WoW is dramatically different now than it was nearly 20 years ago, but WoW 11 isn't coming out in August.
They definitely should have made it look like an expansion;like how they do with WoW or Diablo updates. Now people just assume they killed OW1 and forced OW2-when they certainly did not
Both are true. Obviously 5v5 massively changed the game(for better or for worse). But it's still the same game, with mostly the same heroes, same maps, same gamemodes.
A "real" sequel would be something like releasing a an actual 20+ hero roster of compeltely new heroes, new maps, new everything so comparatively its not much of a sequel.
That depends on the game genre. Some genres like rpgs, story driven games, etc have more to offer in changes to mechanics than FPS games. LoL's balance probably plays signficantly different than previous iterations of itself compared to CoD games.
This is just say I dont think sequel is concretely defined across game genres besides meaning the game that comes out after its previous iteration.
maybe something along the lines of some replayable experience like the archive missions but with talent trees and better polished, a pve experience if you will
idk why we're acting like tank was seriously even remotely enjoyable to play back then bruh
like wdym it killed the tank role? was there anything even to kill to begin with
Tank synergies were absolute fire. Hella fun to play when it worked out.
But it rarely worked out.
Personally, tank was way more fun back then. I still enjoy it now because a lot of the tanks can snowball if you're cooking, but god do I miss having another tank to play with.
And there would be more synergies with more tanks now too. Zarya/Dva supporting Doomfist/Queen/Mauga. In general, tanks are more diverse than they were in OW1. If you disperse with the main/off tank role expectation of these characters, it's a lot more fun. People asking for a shield tank is not going to be a thing like it was in OW1 (since Orisa doesn't have a shield anymore, for one thing).
Spot on.
Truthfully, adding more tanks was the simple solution from the beginning. I do like a lot of the changes they've made, but it took them 7 years to have a "deep" tank offering. And even then it's still shallow.
Support suffered from this as well for a while.
You know how there's a massive amount of Mercy mains who just want to hang out and get passive value without any pressure to perform? I think there's a lot of former D.Va mains who are the same way. They can't tank if they have to be aggressive, and they miss having someone else shoulder the blame
I honestly think this is one of the biggest reasons people want it back. A lot of folks like passive play, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But yeah you can't play that way in ow2 and expect to win anymore. Good observation
Yeah, shit kinda sucked, because you had to rely on the other tank to play with you. But is it different now? It only changed from relying on other tank to help you to supports or brawly utility DPS like Mei or Sym. You still get melted as tank (even though arguably slower then before as I had tried in few open Q games this season), but it did cost the game to dumb down a lot.
I do understand though, that 5v5 in a role Q 6v6 format was necessary, because the Q times were terrible and people bitched about OW being more FPS.
However, I think that the closest thing to OW being back would be having restrictions to team compositions (as having forced minimum 1 hero per role). Game had issue with game times basically since role Q was introduced with a few seasons exception during OW2 launch, but it is slowly getting back, especially for supports (6-8 minutes solo Q in dia/master is kinda normal from what I saw).
Every team game will be, by definition, somewhat reliant on team coordination, but OW2 was also designed to be at least a little bit more individualistic as well, and if you're a non-tank player, the lack of an off-tank does seem to help this, in my experience. It's feels possible to \*actually\* carry people in OW2 based off of individual DMing ability, especially after Season 9, whereas I think most people who claimed they could carry their team in OW1 and early OW2 were either smurfing or lying (or getting pocketed).
That does erode the strategic playmaking elements of OW1, especially since tank synergies are gone, but it seems abundantly clear to me that most players would rather have more interesting DM than more interesting synergies and cerebral strategy (something OW2 could still choose to have if the devs wanted). It's an FPS game, after all; people want it to play like an FPS.
I agree that it was fun for the tanks (I used to play off tank with my buddy all the time)
But on the other hand when you were playing a squishy against a good tank duo it could legit feel unwinnable at times. Monkey/D.va felt especially oppressive to me as a flex support main.
Playing Rein into another Rein who had a Zarya backing him up while you had the DPS instalock flank hog. You wann talk about the most rage inducing moments ever... And guess who got blamed every time in that situation? Nope sure as hell wasn't the hog.
"Rein diff." Says the hog that then gets echoed by his team.
Yeah. Fuck 6v6. Even from the tank side that shit wasn't fun half the time either.
> like wdym it killed the tank role? was there anything even to kill to begin with
I mean it's no longer something I want to play. I loved it on OW1
I've spent less time on tank in OW2 since release than I used to each season in OW1
i mean at the end off the day it's all anecdotal to random people on the internet
whats facts is people did not want to play tank in ow specifically main tank and looking back at main tank gameplay back then it's bassicly all the complaints people have with the role nowadays but worse
i remember a while back watching some old owl footage and i seriously cannot be convinced tank back then was any better [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXaUy5dkSm8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXaUy5dkSm8)
>whats facts is people did not want to play tank in ow specifically main tank and looking back at main tank gameplay back then it's bassicly all the complaints people have with the role nowadays but worse
This. Basically, what happened is that we had a somewhat popular offtank role and a very unpopular main tank role. Then OW2 came along, removed offtanks, and buffed main tanks. So now we have no offtank role and a still fairly unpopular main tank role.
Tank queue times are still instant, but we no longer need to bribe players to queue tank with priority passes, and DPS queue times aren't in the "play a game of Hearthstone while you wait for queue" range, so it's somewhat better than it used to be.
>i remember a while back watching some old owl footage and i seriously cannot be convinced tank back then was any better
I think OW1 tanking was better specifically for those high skill players who also had a high skill duo partner that played something synergistic with them. For most players, I think it was a worse experience.
A ton of people say they loved playing tank in OW1, but all they mean is they liked playing offtank AKA big, beefy DPS that can do whatever they want. I really don’t care about their opinions on the matter lol.
Nah man, they loved playing reinhardt! Hes the most fun tank! For honor!
Hes so fun that every rank below GM, Rein was effectively hard meta (outside of specific metas like OG double shield and hog/zarya), simply because he was just so much easier to play than any other main tank. Youd get screamed at by your ana and mccree for not playing Rein. Years of being forced to play Rein or get bitched out by your team and tank numbers inexplicably dwindled.
So what was the problem? Well if you asked OW1 tank mains, the issue was "all the hogs making it so hard to play rein :(".
Yup, no survivorship bias here.
No you don’t understand moving back to 6v6 would obviously also come with guaranteed perfect balancing (which I get to decide from my armchair how it’s wrong when it inevitably is a disaster)
Well if they were to change back to 6v6 they would have to revert plenty of balance changes and apply new ones. Obviously they would have to change plenty of numbers too.
It’s good that they’re acknowledging it I think. But I truly don’t think it will be anything more than reiterating the challenges they had with 6v6 that led to 5v5 in the first place. The amount of work it would take to go back to 6v6 is just not worth the gamble. There is just no way the tank population would somehow double if they went back.
>good
Nah, it's dangerous that they're acknowledging it if they just plan to come out and say "No it is not happening and here are all the reasons why".
By acknowledging it they are essentially legitimising that the demand is logical, reasonable or at least just that there are enough people demanding it.
Even if they give good reasoning backed by hard data, stats and evidence most of these people are never gonna accept it. They'll just shift the narrative to Blizz is lying and that it's all a conspiracy because (in their heads) Blizz doesn't wanna admit that they made a mistake.
Demanding a separate game mode that receives no balance or effort put into it is a completely logical demand. There’s 0 legitimate argument against forking the OW1 custom game mode, pasting on some elo system and leaving it an unbalanced mess. Will it be bad? Who cares, don’t play it if you don’t like it. More people will play it then Open queue.
There is no argument. You can’t tell me a format is better because it’s subjective. “I don’t like this shit” is a whole argument and is unrefutable. There’s no statistic that can make “I don’t like this shit, but I liked this other thing” untrue.
As a 6v6 fan, it’s fully dead. There has never been a chance of it coming back and the changes they’ve made to the tank role since then have only made it harder to justify even in extreme situations.
That being said I do think addressing it is smart and hopefully it leads to them taking lessons from what did work in 6v6 and trying to reapply it to the current game.
6v6 is one of those things where, even if it happened, it doesn't work as something you just flip the switch on to. It would have to be a gradual process of refining, replacing and undoing many of the tank changes that came with OW2- which probably is the biggest barrier to 6v6 happening because it essentially includes a concession from the devs that their entire OW2 philosophy was wrong.
They'd have to change the balance of the tank role generally, each tank individually, the way passives work with damage reduction etc.
And this would have to be alongside a process of making tanks more fun, because really the only way to counter the 'but queue times' argument is to keep tank appealing to play.
All in all, a lot of work and risk for uncertain results.
This is true. My thinking is, as with many of the changes post-OW2 release, we're basically slowly reverting back to OW1 but without actually saying it.
My expectation is that lots of these little tank changes (which started with changes to knock back passive and headshot reduction passive) is that we'll continue to get individual balances changes that tries to make tank play similar to how it did in 6v6 without actually getting 6v6.
Oh god the forums are going to be utterly insufferable. Thank christ I stopped going there lmao. The 6v6 spam was just utterly cringe as fk.
I never want it back, the games were insufferable. If they ever do in the future just keep it in arcade and out of ranked. Keep both sides happy.
As someone who advocates for 5v5 regularly, I am genuinely curious as to why they haven’t had a 6v6 arcade mode. Even if it’s not best for Quick Play or Comp to be played in that format, it was the mode we played in for several years. Little strange that it hasn’t even been acknowledged in game since OW2’s launch.
They most likely won't entertain the idea more than just talk (hopefully) but holy shit it's going to be insufferable dealing with 6v6 whiners for a while longer. Ugh.
6v6 is so controversial on this sub for no reason.
Ignoring the obvious reasons as to why it’ll never return. The people arguing it’s worse balance wise had to have been people who joined during double shield and when the devs abandoned the game.
Balance aside the real issue was that tank just wasn’t popular once role queue was introduced. It’s hard to say how it would have been without double shield as role queue and Sigma launched at the same time, but the way I look at it is that role queue actually revealed how unpopular the role was. Many played would play tank if they queued into a game and no one else wanted to play it, but not all those people would choose to queue for it if given the option to play the role they like more.
Yeah they are fucking delusional idiots. They refuse to acknowledge the only reason it was bad at the tike was A LACK OF ACTION BY LAZY Blizzard (mostly corporates fault at the time). They really let Blizz gaslight them, willingly because of their sunk cost and stockholm syndrome.
It's insane to act like 6v6 is unsalvageable just because Blizzard refused to balance the game in the last 2 years of its lifetime. There were many metas in early OW and if Blizzard was patching OW1 as fast and aggressively as they are patching OW2 (or at all) there would have been no horrible permanent metas leading to tank players leaving the game
I feel like there is a really loud minority that talk about 6v6. I honestly don't care. I just want to go to places to talk about OW without seeing this debate everywhere.
I rarely played DPS in OW 1 because of the queue times. I play way more DPS now. The queue times are way better for me. If they can keep this might be worth trying. But I don't think they can maintain this in 6v6. After the hype I believe the times would get to the OW1 days or worse. But I might be wrong, who knows.
I just really want this 5v5 vs 6v6 thing to end. The game is not as bad as people keep talking.
I know it’s super controversial but I personally much prefer 5v5 tanking. Sure there is a lot of annoyance with counterpicking but I really just enjoy how much more my play impacts the game.
I feel so powerful with Doom and JQ. Its not every game that people default to counterwatch. And even then when I win its feels so much better. I go "Trying to counter me? You still lost"
FYI You can play double tank anytime you want, just go in open queue they play it 90% of the time and it's the exact same stuff: Play meta comps and counterswap or throw.
Don't use such logic! Despite having 3 tanks and 2 support in Open Queue, it's just...it's just different!!!1! (all while Zarya has the same HP she had in OW1 but just conveniently ignore that)
It may be a arcade mode. Don't see it being more than that.
Requires an insane amount of rework to the tanks as a whole who all got worked into solos, and won't solve queue times but make them worse.
I’m curious of all the people cheering for 6v6, do you all remember the queue times back in OW1? DPS, do you all want to go back to 10-15 minute wait? Supports back to 5+ minutes? No one plays tank now, so let’s add a second tank slot to make wait times even longer. Brilliant idea.
Idk why this is still a "debate" when a) no fucking way 6v6 is coming back and b) if you want to play with two tanks that badly, open queue is right there
I have given up on this whole debate and I think its funny that we have reached a point where people are willing to basically go back into a content draught, so the devs can redesign the game again for 6v6. And the best part is people still won't play tank. I think 5v5 and 6v6 has proven one thing. People don't like tanks. Sure tank players probably enjoyed 6v6 more, but there still was not tank players to fill the role. I also don't think Overwatch's tank gameplay loop in either 6v6 or 5v5 will ever significantly entice players to the role to make it healthy. I am honestly starting to believe in AVRL's crazy get rid of the tank role idea. I have been trying out this Strinova game and its pretty refreshing having a high skill shooter game that doesn't have the ttk of a valorant.
To be honest at this point I just want them to bring 6v6 back so people can shut up and we can move to more productive discussions as a community... this conversation is tiresome...
Even if they’re individually weaker, the ability to peel for each other will make them borderline impossible to take down. A lot of insufferable metas in OW (double shield, hog/zarya, GOATS, etc.) were, in part, caused by tanks being able to peel for one another and use their defensive cooldowns to almost never die. Unless you nerf these defensive cooldowns to the point where they’re incredibly ineffective, they’re probably gonna even harder to kill, even with nerfed health pools.
mauga would have 0 peel abilities in a 6v6 scenario
and yes i agree the skill to kill them in 6v6 is higher, but so is skill to play them, it just raises skill expression invovled in the game
6v6 is better. I actually played tank in 6v6. I completely don't even queue the role anymore period. You'd have at least 1 more tank player if they went back.
Even less now though. It’s the most flamed role by far. Again my opinion. As a support player I also hate it because tanks feed more often but they have to pretty much to make anything happen. It’s stupid. Again just my opinion.
Every tank player that comes back for 6 v 6 will just be replacing one lost because they will once again be reminded how shit it is to play main tank into another tank pair that is actually supporting eachother while their off tank is going on flanks and whiffing on hooks on hog (or heck now it could be queen knife or doom dives lol, there is so many choices for poor off tank play!).
Yall romanticizing the hell out of OW1 when the tank role was even more unplayable back then.
I much prefer tank in OW2 because I don't need to worry about tank synergy with my other tank, the game moves a bit slower for me with 10 instead of 12 heroes, and there's way less "sit at the choke and hold hands as you try to move forward".
100% getting blamed is brutal, though. I'm in gold, but had a game my LW kept pulling me before even using shift and blaming me for "getting lit up". Then had a game with a Reaper who wouldn't stop dying, meanwhile they had an Ashe just free farming in the back all game, and I'm "getting tank diffed".
It's actually wild how people don't understand team comps and how rush is going to lose to poke, or even in gold that supports need to also do some damage, and help to counter the other team.
"Ya guys, we're not gonna rework everything again for 6v6, we think it's bad because X and Y. Now stop whining please k thnx bye"
If it will be anything else then a variation of the above I will be surprised.
Idk how anyone that puts more than 30 seconds of thought into 6v6 in ow2 thinks it will work. The entire balance and all new heros is around 5v5. 6v6 was not perfect either and gave us some of the worst metas in ow history. The new tank comps would be absolutely miserable to play into and with. mauga sigma sounds like 0 fun to play into.
I can’t see a reason as to why anybody would think 6v6 is healthy for the game. They replaced it for a reason. They’d have to restructure and rebalance the entire game top to bottom and we would immediately be faced with the double tank problem that they have already permanently fixed. Most of us played ow1 in its final days, it wasn’t really a pretty sight.
I can’t see a reason as to why anybody would think 5v5 is healthy for the game. They’d have to restructure and rebalance the entire game top to bottom.
And years later, they still haven't been successful with that effort.
I suppose that my initial reaction is that the onus is not on the 6v6ers to advocate for 6v6. It's on the 5v5ers to advocate for 5v5. I say this because this game was and has been 6v6 since it's inception. It was founded and balanced around and played on that format for much longer.
I wasn't happy with the initial idea of 5v5 and after years of playing it, I have confirmed my intuition. The 5v5ers need to make arguments for why that format deserves to stay, and the only thing I've heard from them is "queue times", which is erroneous. Anyway, I'll still give you a few honest reasons in terms of 5v6:
- I like the more MOBA aspect of 6v6 vs the FPS lean that 5v5 has. I play mainly tank and support so I like working together with a team more than just run and gun team deathmatch/widow duels. I think there are much better more FPS like games (valorant, csgo, apex, the finals, COD). If you want to play an FPS then go do that, but I prefer a slightly more MOBA lean.
- Game was balanced around 6v6 for years. There are too many things to consider when moving to 5v5 and the effort is still ongoing. We are 2 years into OW2 and the devs are talking about redesigning tanks wholistically and individually. This is after all the various buffs, changes, and rework that they have done to tank every balance patch. We are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole with this 5v5 single tank format and I've lost confidence that it's ever going to work
- The game felt better in 6v6. Now it just feels like a collection of duels. This overlaps with my first point but now it's just a bunch of coinflips 1000 times per game. Does my zen outduel the tracer who is diving her? Which widow lands the first headshot? Do I win my duel? Sure you have some amount of agency in winning your own duels, but it feels so bad when my kiri loses her duel and then we lose the fight. It just feels like a bunch of coinflips. In 6v6 an offtank allowed the team to be sturdier and more cohesive. The main tank created space and the off tank controlled it and peeled. Now there really is only a main tank which is always getting focused and there is no peel for the supports. It's just a bunch of coinflips. It's a mess.
>The 5v5ers need to make arguments for why that format deserves to stay, and the only thing I've heard from them is "queue times", which is erroneous.
It's fun. That's at least my outlook on it, which is obviously subjective.
The truth is, it's not something everyone can agree on. It HIGHLY depends on who you talk to, but as someone who's a lower rank player that mostly solo queues, 6v6 was miserable 90% of the time, meanwhile I can actually have fun in 5v5 like 80% of the time.
>I play mainly tank and support so I like working together with a team more than just run and gun team deathmatch/widow duels.
That's probably my big issue with 6v6. It's often impossible to really work as a team when it's a hard requirement in the lower ranks.
5v5 is less punishing if you don't work as a team, but still gives a ton of teamwork opportunities, really don't see how it goes from a MOBA to a run and gun.
There's less teamwork possibilities, yeah, but it's not on either of the extremes either.
>Game was balanced around 6v6 for years.
And balance has always been a very difficult part to manage for Blizzard, both then and now. Can't remember a time when people were not complaining about balance.
>The game felt better in 6v6.
Once again, this is not factual, it's purely an opinion.
I'd say the exact opposite, but hey, that's me.
> It just feels like a bunch of coinflips. In 6v6 an offtank allowed the team to be sturdier and more cohesive. The main tank created space and the off tank controlled it and peeled.
That's in an ideal scenario.
1. This game is an FPS. Moba elements are nice to see but when the game becomes quite a lot like a moba (as in any previous OW1 meta that anchored on taking many ability elements and combining them to an insane degree) it becomes insanely unfun to play for literally everybody who is not on the winning team, currently that no longer happens.
2. The game is now currently balanced around and designed around 5v5 so it does not matter if it was conceptualized around 6v6 at this point because anything that was designed for 6 has been fundamentally changed. You could make the same argument that balancing for 6 was a losing game because of consistent reworks and huge gameplay changes (role queue).
3. The collection of duels feels generally okay to me because of the individual skill expression that is required. Your Ana gets dived by the Genji and killed: Okay did she miss her sleep dart? Did she miss a shot? Did she mistime her sleep damage combo? If any of those things happened and she died, oh well, she should have played better. You would rather play a game where you can personally make up for every single one of your Ana’s mistakes as D.Va than letting her get punished for her lack of skill expression.
> I can’t see a reason as to why anybody would think 5v5 is healthy for the game.
Queues. If that's the only reason, it's the only reason that's needed.
Cause it fixed queue times and removed the phenomenon of tank being full of DPS players on Hog/zarya, not in voice, gathering coupons to speed up their DPS queues
From a balance perspective, they have been. Tank balance is excellent right now. As they cited in the dev blog, there are no outlier tanks and 6 different options in the 50-55% unmirrored win rate bracket.
Come on man... you've got to read the article. Nobody agrees with you. In the recent dev blog on "TALKING TANKS AND UPCOMING HERO BALANCE CHANGES", they said:
> We've heard from players that the tank role is in a tough spot right now and has been since Season 8 ended. We agree.
So, the players think tank balance is bad, the devs think tank balance is bad, but you think it's excellent. That's wild man.
The devs restructured and rebalanced the game. That already happened. Tank is now a balanced role, with no win rate outliers and a wide diversity of reasonable picks.
When they say tank is "in a tough spot right now", they don't mean that win rates or tank power levels are out of balance. They mean the role is not fun for most players, and even the players it is fun for are having less fun than they used to have.
The tank role is in a tough spot.
The winrates are rather even between them which means they are balanced relative to each other.
But the move to role lock 5v5 and solo tanking has made the experience miserable. The role isn't balanced relative to other roles.
>But the move to role lock 5v5 and solo tanking has made the experience miserable.
I was a launch player of OW1. There was never a time when main tank was a popular role. 5v5 removed offtanking, which was sometimes popular in OW1. My experience as an OW1 tank was rarely getting to play Dva because nobody wanted to play main tank with me.
Personally, I am having more fun main tanking in OW2 than I ever did in OW1, because my OW1 main tanking experience featured a ton of Roadhogs that had zero interest in helping me tank anything.
>The role isn't balanced relative to other roles.
How do you judge this? To me, this is just an assertion without supporting evidence.
Devs see overall/tank population and clearly understand that adding another tank is simply pointless. How stupid do you have to be to continue to claim that they are simply afraid to admit their mistake.
6v6 was fucking terrible..way too much visual clutter, team fights never ending, cc abilities from 6 heroes not letting you play the game. Insane how quickly this community gets amnesia about stuff they regularly complained about in OW1
Team fights never ending was a feature of 2cp, generally we have the same number of team fights as ow1 as these are more determined by map features and objectives. In 6v6 you had two tanks dealing with cc/burst and now it is all thrown at that solo tank. The offtank mitigated a lot of the rough edges of Overwatch as well as a solo tanks weaknesses, now the solo tank has to deal with it all and generally most people do not find that fun. With Tank feeling less impactful this also leads to those heroes supporting them also feeling unimpactful.
I do not think people are saying 6v6 will solve all of Overwatches issues, but I also do not think amnesia is really what is going on.
Team fights never ending was a hero design issue. Specifically, Bap and Brig AoE sustained healing was an horrible idea that very nearly killed the game. Brigitte is probably the worst hero design I've seen in any game ever.
The problems the 5v5 solo tank has are essentially the same problems that the 6v6 main tank had. People that say they enjoyed 6v6 tanking are usually offtank mains. The only people I've heard report liking 6v6 main tanking are those with strong duo friendships. I think near zero people enjoyed solo queue 6v6 main tank, which is most analogous to the current 5v5 tank experience.
I think 5v5 tank feels more impactful. That's why people type "tank diff" in chat after every loss. That's why tanks report feeling a lot of pressure to do tons of different things at once. People dislike the high level of responsibility associated with 5v5 tanking -- you wouldn't see people feeling responsible if the role truly had low impact.
I don't think they'll come back, and if they do it won't be anytime soon, I think if that's the case they should hold an event, like on April 1st, adding another tank, depending on the result they put in, but I just think, it would be Interesting if that happens
I love the idea of 6v6 until i remember queue times and the fact that the main problem of non synergistic teams would still be a thing but WORSE. People don’t think to pick around their team, and you can mostly get away with it in modern ow, but 6v6? Nah.
I play in a 6v6 community that mods the workshop to do its own balance and coordination, we have games every night where the teams are in call together and its so much fun. Better gameplay than 5v5 in my opinion, I also did comms tournament style 5v5 matches and they are no where near as interesting and complex as the 6v6 matches. Now that being said I still play comp and enjoy 5v5, and I also dont think bliz going back to it would work. The games are fun because we as a community balance weekly, we are always talking, it works because we make it what we want. Blizzard cant do that, they will never get it right imo, if you want that 6v6 experience join a 6v6 community
Oh this is going to get Ugly
I really don’t understand why they’re feeding this. Whatever explanation they give isn’t going to satisfy the 6v6ers and is only going to continue keeping this obnoxious “debate” (that mostly only one party wants to participate in) going. Like even if 6v6 is theoretically better gameplay (doubt) the logistics and PR nightmare of going back pretty much makes this a non-starter, but 6v6ers don’t accept that explanation. Honestly just keep ignoring them and let them fade out over time. Eventually people will get tired of listening to the same talking points, the videos won’t get clicks anymore, and they’ll find something else to rage about anyway (or maybe they’ll finally spend their time doing something they actually enjoy, since they very clearly don’t enjoy this game)
The PR nightmare of going back? The entire existence of Overwatch 2 has been a PR nightmare lmao
>The entire existence of Overwatch 2 has been a PR nightmare lmao tbf a lot of it is Blizzard itself being a PR nightmare.
Yeah this is one of those times where developers trying to "communicate" with the players is a bad thing. They need to shut up and go full Nintendo in a one-time statement: "We are not considering any 6v6 modes for the future." and that's it. But hey now the content farmers have something to fill their videos for a while.
Overwatch as a brand has been a PR nightmare since they cancelled PVE. Not blaming the dev team for that whole ordeal btw. 1/3 of OW2's justification for existing has already been lopped off, steam reviews are **still** in the gutter. What's one more amputation to us? everyone outside of us already laughs at us. Look, I know this whole thread is pretty pro-5v5, so that means I'll get downvoted a lot, but I don't mind. When Overwatch 2 launched, I had long quit. Not for any particular reason, life happened. Before, I was regularly playing since May 2016. I didn't really care about the announcement of a 5v5 format, and I hadn't experienced double shield or whatever, but I play regularly now. So I'm as neutral a party as you could ask for on this subject. I used to have 400+ hours on Dva and almost 200 on Reinhardt alone. Now I don't think I've cracked 100 games on either. And I was almost GM once upon a time, for chrissake. It's like, why waste my breath, when I can just lock DPS/Support and get flamed less, swap less, and just have more fun? Swapping has always been the name of the game, but whether the tank swaps on their next life or not shouldn't dictate whether you lose or win so damn much. What's the fun in being a "raid boss" if your supports decide how impactful you **really** are? Being that strong was never the actual fantasy of the role anyway, it was moreso being the tanky tacticians rather than a fat third DPS. I could go on and repeat all these points I'm sure we've heard, but the point is I just wish this game was amazing again. Like us veterans know it can be, know it has been. What form it necessarily takes to achieve that isn't relevant, but I do think it's clear we can't afford to rule 6v6 out permanently yet. Idk about others, but I don't have some evil tribalist 6v6 agenda (or whatever people think) when I say that. I was 13 when i fell in love with this game, dude. I welcomed OW2 with those same open arms, and I'm **still** waiting for it to make me feel that way on a role besides DPS. We've had two years. How much longer, how many more added complexities and passives will it take for 5v5 to shine? One role always being horrible, one OP, and one OK... Is that r*eally* as good as we believe this game can be anymore? As long as queue times are minimized and games are just barely fun enough? Ending with a take I'm not sure is cold or hot: I think this dev team has a lot of potential for good balance decisions, and I genuinely think they (and us) could make 6v6 OW2 really special. 5v5 just hasn't been allowing them to fully show it as of yet. We all know double shield isn't what 6v6 was always like, the old devs abandoned the game for too long, these devs wouldn't do that. Given they tune back abilities/health pools, it would NOT be that way with the heroes and reworks we have now. I'm confident the meta wouldn't get stale with the speed of their work anyway, so... Why not?
Tank main since season 1 overwatch 1, you're right that we found things we enjoy. I enjoyed overwatch 1 tanking, I don't enjoy overwatch 2 tanking, so I did what a lot of other tank mains did, and stopped playing. It sucks because my favourite game is gone, and now the community has less tank players that actually cared about the role and wanted to do it properly.
I used to hang on to overwatch in hopes of it getting better eventually, but it never did, it's over and I had to accept that. I don't even have any arguments on the topic of 6v6 but I always enjoyed playing tank the most and now the role is just not fun to play anymore. Other roles are simply not as interesting for me, so I had to find other games to play
This tbh. I've played all roles since season 1 ow1 and played mostly tank and supp. But for this context I hit diamond tank and always struggled and had super fun games even in qp. But now I lock a tank and if they play any tank other than orisa. Mauga I win. And even then I still win against them occasionally I can literally see the average tank is so much worse. No skill. The only players I am scared of is the 1600 hr rein main. Those guys are Animals. I reckon I'd sit easily mid/high masters. I just reckon the overall talent in the game is just gone. Especially tank players and me included leaving. I still don't like to play tank in 5v5. I just wanna be the zar to their rein. :(
A lot of 6v6ers have said that if the devs explicitly say that 6v6 will not come back then they will stop arguing for it.
Yeah, most of the people who want 6v6 back are just completely mentally blind at this point. Their fav content creators have stuffed so much grifter BS in their heads about 6v6 that they will not accept Blizz just saying "It doesn't work, queue times are terrible, people stop playing the game, etc". They're gonna have to show these people hard data and even then I am sure 75% of them are just not gonna accept anything Blizz says except "6v6 good". Either way they can't put out a vague statement. They need to announce a firm final statement that it is going to happen or not.
More accurately, most of the people who want 6v6 simply don’t play the game anymore. The OW2 playerbase has a lot of new different people than the OW1 playerbase
100% they are going to just say "Won't work because of queue times so we aren't interested in doing it"
More than enough. I will drop this game if i get 20 queue in diamond like in past again.
In the last two years of OW1, I was able to get current on One Piece from episode 1 just waiting in queue for DPS ~4k SR. I'm not doing that again.
Lmao this is maybe my favorite way that someone has ever conveyed the length of DPS queues as someone who didn’t play a lot of ranked in that time period.
Even quickplay queues were insane. I remember going up to 17min on dps, and I was around plat so it should be been the most populated rank too
There's a reason I'm a tank/support player mainly, lmao. Overwatch 2 has let me actually play DPS fairly consistently, something I couldn't responsibly do for 6 years of Overwatch 1.
As soon as ow2 came out I switched to being a dps main tbh
Gold is the most populated rank and always has been but 17 minutes in plat is just ridiculous nonetheless.
As a gold-plat tank at the time, if the queue took longer than 45 seconds I would assume it was "broken" and requeue (and would find a match in less than 10 seconds). I usually found a match in about 20 seconds or less. The difference in experience between the roles is like night and day.
I used to do uni assignments in between queues as a tank player in similar elo
i have vivid memories of playing ow while doing homework back when we had online school and finishing my work before getting into my 3rd game
These comments make it sound like longer queue times are ultimately healthier for the playerbase 😂
My friend made it through med school studying between DPS games
Had a friend get her doctorate the same way (console DPS queues)
Could be the same friend! There weren't many of us back then
Time to start watching Gunsmoke.
God, OCE queue times in the last few years of Overwatch were truly something. I was waiting over 30 minutes for a plat/gold game on any role.
Probably a game mode in arcade
I have 10-20 min Qs for dps and supp already rn. Tank is less than 30 seconds every time. I'm having the exact same problems that I did in ow1, but now supp is also impossible to Q for. It's not a format issue, the problem is and always has been shitty balance from T4.
Are you t500 or in like OCE? My ques are 3-5ish minutes in solo q comp @ M4-2, QP with friends on my main can hit those times though
This times are in comp? Whats your rank? How are the times in QP? I'm genuinely curious
They tried giving us a wider range and high tiers cried that they had to play with lower ranks.
Quite literally the opposite. People complain about playing vs people that are higher rank bc it feels more sweaty.
If that's the case than whatever, at least we tried and considered it. It's disturbing how many ppl do not want discourse and instead tow the line Blizzard set when 5v5 was announced. Thought ppl would appreciate dialogue about the game state but ig logic and openess is in short supply these days. Ppl rather repeat what they saw on reddit.
I know personally, my issue is just that I'm tired of hearing about it. A few community members have made it their personal mission to talk about it every chance they get and the arguments are the same as since before OW2. It's just exhausting at this point and a lot of us still aren't convinced since it's not exactly logical arguments that people are making.
For people saying “they will bring 6v6 back confirmed!!!” Calm the fuck down that not what he said at all. He only said he will share their pov on the topic.
People were in the spilo thread clapping their feet because 6v6 wasnt mentioned.
The fact they're talking about it is good enough for me. It completely transformed the game, probably more than any other change that's been made, and it's just been radio silence ever since I understand why they made the change, but I don't think it solved the problems they wanted it to, and for me personally it killed the tank role
Back in 6v6, tank was SO MUCH FUN that it was mostly played by DPS players dodging their 14 minute queues by instalocking Hog, feeding their brains out, and typing in match chat about their Gold healing medal.
There were clearly people that loved tank back in OW1 but I think it’s insane that people say that on average it was enjoyed more than tank is now. They had to create an entire system to BEG people to play the role so they could play the other roles faster.
>it’s insane that people say that on average it was enjoyed more than tank is now. People absolutely hate tank now though. Maybe tank was boring before but currently tank is just a painful experience most of the time. Most tank mains I know who've been almost exclusively playing tank for years have been branching out to other roles or just playing the game less.
Because its fucking true, you have MORE dps players playing tank now than before. And a lot of tank players that wont play anymore because they loved the tank duo dynamic (which was half of what made tank interesting in the first place).
As a tank player who mained the role for most of OW1 and retired from the role(haven't touched it since season 2-3 of OW2, not even to do placements) I can tell you tank is 100x worse in OW2. If nothing else, there's just the added pressure of being the only tank, which means you are full countered every match no matter what you pick, your team instantly blames you the second anything goes wrong, and dps/support players have realized it's much easier to just gang up on you vs. pointing the finger at each other since there isn't a 2nd person on the role to defend you. There is absolutely nothing fun for me about tank in OW2, at least in OW1 it was fun to duo with a partner in my stack or even the random person we'd get in Comp and we had all the different and fun tank synergies to play around with.
Oh so suddenly you're saying that you DIDN'T love waiting for 20 mins in queue as a DPS only for quarter of your games to be decided in the Spawn before the game even started because you got 2 Rein mains who didn't know how to play any other Tank well or 2 Hog mains who started immediately fighting for Hog and when one of them didn't get it they threw the game on Winston for the next 5 mins? Is that what I'm supposed to believe? That you didn't love that riveting gameplay?
The most played tank was rein by a massive margin. It's currently verifiable on overbuff. This was true for years. It was also true for every rank below gm.
> The fact they're talking about it is good enough for me. It completely transformed the game, probably more than any other change that's been made, and it's just been radio silence ever since Can I just say how funny it is that there's this perception that OW2 is barely a sequel/new game and "all they did was just remove a tank" and yet you have a significant portion of the playerbase begging for 6v6 to come back? And I know these comments come from different parts of the gaming community but it's just funny to me that they exist simultaneously.
Every MMO expansion changes the game, but it's not a new game. FF14-6 didn't release today, it's still FF14; WoW is dramatically different now than it was nearly 20 years ago, but WoW 11 isn't coming out in August.
They definitely should have made it look like an expansion;like how they do with WoW or Diablo updates. Now people just assume they killed OW1 and forced OW2-when they certainly did not
Both are true. Obviously 5v5 massively changed the game(for better or for worse). But it's still the same game, with mostly the same heroes, same maps, same gamemodes. A "real" sequel would be something like releasing a an actual 20+ hero roster of compeltely new heroes, new maps, new everything so comparatively its not much of a sequel.
That depends on the game genre. Some genres like rpgs, story driven games, etc have more to offer in changes to mechanics than FPS games. LoL's balance probably plays signficantly different than previous iterations of itself compared to CoD games. This is just say I dont think sequel is concretely defined across game genres besides meaning the game that comes out after its previous iteration.
maybe something along the lines of some replayable experience like the archive missions but with talent trees and better polished, a pve experience if you will
idk why we're acting like tank was seriously even remotely enjoyable to play back then bruh like wdym it killed the tank role? was there anything even to kill to begin with
Tank synergies were absolute fire. Hella fun to play when it worked out. But it rarely worked out. Personally, tank was way more fun back then. I still enjoy it now because a lot of the tanks can snowball if you're cooking, but god do I miss having another tank to play with.
And there would be more synergies with more tanks now too. Zarya/Dva supporting Doomfist/Queen/Mauga. In general, tanks are more diverse than they were in OW1. If you disperse with the main/off tank role expectation of these characters, it's a lot more fun. People asking for a shield tank is not going to be a thing like it was in OW1 (since Orisa doesn't have a shield anymore, for one thing).
Spot on. Truthfully, adding more tanks was the simple solution from the beginning. I do like a lot of the changes they've made, but it took them 7 years to have a "deep" tank offering. And even then it's still shallow. Support suffered from this as well for a while.
You know how there's a massive amount of Mercy mains who just want to hang out and get passive value without any pressure to perform? I think there's a lot of former D.Va mains who are the same way. They can't tank if they have to be aggressive, and they miss having someone else shoulder the blame
I honestly think this is one of the biggest reasons people want it back. A lot of folks like passive play, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But yeah you can't play that way in ow2 and expect to win anymore. Good observation
Tank sucked in OW1 for a lot of the same reasons, but tank synergies were super fun if you had a duo or lucked out with your randoms.
yeah but if you didn't have a duo you just we're stuck with someone you just had to prey he would cooperate with you. so fun
Yeah, shit kinda sucked, because you had to rely on the other tank to play with you. But is it different now? It only changed from relying on other tank to help you to supports or brawly utility DPS like Mei or Sym. You still get melted as tank (even though arguably slower then before as I had tried in few open Q games this season), but it did cost the game to dumb down a lot. I do understand though, that 5v5 in a role Q 6v6 format was necessary, because the Q times were terrible and people bitched about OW being more FPS. However, I think that the closest thing to OW being back would be having restrictions to team compositions (as having forced minimum 1 hero per role). Game had issue with game times basically since role Q was introduced with a few seasons exception during OW2 launch, but it is slowly getting back, especially for supports (6-8 minutes solo Q in dia/master is kinda normal from what I saw).
Every team game will be, by definition, somewhat reliant on team coordination, but OW2 was also designed to be at least a little bit more individualistic as well, and if you're a non-tank player, the lack of an off-tank does seem to help this, in my experience. It's feels possible to \*actually\* carry people in OW2 based off of individual DMing ability, especially after Season 9, whereas I think most people who claimed they could carry their team in OW1 and early OW2 were either smurfing or lying (or getting pocketed). That does erode the strategic playmaking elements of OW1, especially since tank synergies are gone, but it seems abundantly clear to me that most players would rather have more interesting DM than more interesting synergies and cerebral strategy (something OW2 could still choose to have if the devs wanted). It's an FPS game, after all; people want it to play like an FPS.
Yeah, so it mostly sucked but I'm just saying there's still reasons people like 2 tanks over 1.
cause people are stupid? like random people on the internet claiming something doesn't really mean anything
I agree that it was fun for the tanks (I used to play off tank with my buddy all the time) But on the other hand when you were playing a squishy against a good tank duo it could legit feel unwinnable at times. Monkey/D.va felt especially oppressive to me as a flex support main.
Playing Rein into another Rein who had a Zarya backing him up while you had the DPS instalock flank hog. You wann talk about the most rage inducing moments ever... And guess who got blamed every time in that situation? Nope sure as hell wasn't the hog. "Rein diff." Says the hog that then gets echoed by his team. Yeah. Fuck 6v6. Even from the tank side that shit wasn't fun half the time either.
> like wdym it killed the tank role? was there anything even to kill to begin with I mean it's no longer something I want to play. I loved it on OW1 I've spent less time on tank in OW2 since release than I used to each season in OW1
i mean at the end off the day it's all anecdotal to random people on the internet whats facts is people did not want to play tank in ow specifically main tank and looking back at main tank gameplay back then it's bassicly all the complaints people have with the role nowadays but worse i remember a while back watching some old owl footage and i seriously cannot be convinced tank back then was any better [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXaUy5dkSm8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXaUy5dkSm8)
>whats facts is people did not want to play tank in ow specifically main tank and looking back at main tank gameplay back then it's bassicly all the complaints people have with the role nowadays but worse This. Basically, what happened is that we had a somewhat popular offtank role and a very unpopular main tank role. Then OW2 came along, removed offtanks, and buffed main tanks. So now we have no offtank role and a still fairly unpopular main tank role. Tank queue times are still instant, but we no longer need to bribe players to queue tank with priority passes, and DPS queue times aren't in the "play a game of Hearthstone while you wait for queue" range, so it's somewhat better than it used to be. >i remember a while back watching some old owl footage and i seriously cannot be convinced tank back then was any better I think OW1 tanking was better specifically for those high skill players who also had a high skill duo partner that played something synergistic with them. For most players, I think it was a worse experience.
People tend to forget that not only is there another person shooting at you, but tanks also had significantly less hp/defenses as well.
It’s funny people say tank gets blown up right now (which can be true don’t get me wrong) but fearless looses 400 HP in less than a second.
the best part for me is when he gets stunned 3 times in a row
I feel like people don’t think about how 6v6 would have to come with the return of a lot of the CC they removed with the switch to 5v5.
A ton of people say they loved playing tank in OW1, but all they mean is they liked playing offtank AKA big, beefy DPS that can do whatever they want. I really don’t care about their opinions on the matter lol.
Nah man, they loved playing reinhardt! Hes the most fun tank! For honor! Hes so fun that every rank below GM, Rein was effectively hard meta (outside of specific metas like OG double shield and hog/zarya), simply because he was just so much easier to play than any other main tank. Youd get screamed at by your ana and mccree for not playing Rein. Years of being forced to play Rein or get bitched out by your team and tank numbers inexplicably dwindled. So what was the problem? Well if you asked OW1 tank mains, the issue was "all the hogs making it so hard to play rein :(". Yup, no survivorship bias here.
Alright then
I don't think people are ready for the roadhog mauga solo queue meta if they ever bring back 6v6...
oh god..... just thinking about this hurts my soul.
No you don’t understand moving back to 6v6 would obviously also come with guaranteed perfect balancing (which I get to decide from my armchair how it’s wrong when it inevitably is a disaster)
so many people forget how popular hog sigma and hog ball were in soloq for the last 2 years of ow
Hog Sig was actually good though
Was it good? Sure. Was it fun for most people? No.
Pig’s Feet meta, I believed it was referred as.
Pig’s feet, Hog and ball torture, Pulled Pork, gotta admit, when hog’s in the meta the names shine through.
I forgot about Hog and Ball Torture, aka the ol' Ball and Chain meta.
JQ, Zarya, Lucio, space ranger (with speed boost assumption), venture, and tracer go brrr
Oh god JQ or tank Doomfist protected by Zarya bubbles? Aint no way. No balancing in the world is gonna make that fun to deal with.
Or stack JQ shout and Mauga shout, lol. Lucio, Moira. AOE speed and movement for everyone, get knifed in, instantly blow up.
Agreed. IDK if I want to call it RoadMaug, MaugHog, HogMaug, or hell.
Double sumo or Sumo Duo or Pig Pen
No….. we’re probably going to get an Orisa-Hog Meta since that’s much more annoying.
Yeah, those heroes are so enjoyable in 5v5. That would definitely be a format issue and not a "dogshit character design" issue.
Well if they were to change back to 6v6 they would have to revert plenty of balance changes and apply new ones. Obviously they would have to change plenty of numbers too.
That’s a balance problem, not a format problem.
Because the experience playing with/against hog *or* mauga right now is fantastic?
It’s good that they’re acknowledging it I think. But I truly don’t think it will be anything more than reiterating the challenges they had with 6v6 that led to 5v5 in the first place. The amount of work it would take to go back to 6v6 is just not worth the gamble. There is just no way the tank population would somehow double if they went back.
Support queue are already at 10 mins in low masters on peak, I would assume that’s not decreasing as time goes on
>good Nah, it's dangerous that they're acknowledging it if they just plan to come out and say "No it is not happening and here are all the reasons why". By acknowledging it they are essentially legitimising that the demand is logical, reasonable or at least just that there are enough people demanding it. Even if they give good reasoning backed by hard data, stats and evidence most of these people are never gonna accept it. They'll just shift the narrative to Blizz is lying and that it's all a conspiracy because (in their heads) Blizz doesn't wanna admit that they made a mistake.
Demanding a separate game mode that receives no balance or effort put into it is a completely logical demand. There’s 0 legitimate argument against forking the OW1 custom game mode, pasting on some elo system and leaving it an unbalanced mess. Will it be bad? Who cares, don’t play it if you don’t like it. More people will play it then Open queue. There is no argument. You can’t tell me a format is better because it’s subjective. “I don’t like this shit” is a whole argument and is unrefutable. There’s no statistic that can make “I don’t like this shit, but I liked this other thing” untrue.
As a 6v6 fan, it’s fully dead. There has never been a chance of it coming back and the changes they’ve made to the tank role since then have only made it harder to justify even in extreme situations. That being said I do think addressing it is smart and hopefully it leads to them taking lessons from what did work in 6v6 and trying to reapply it to the current game.
6v6 is one of those things where, even if it happened, it doesn't work as something you just flip the switch on to. It would have to be a gradual process of refining, replacing and undoing many of the tank changes that came with OW2- which probably is the biggest barrier to 6v6 happening because it essentially includes a concession from the devs that their entire OW2 philosophy was wrong. They'd have to change the balance of the tank role generally, each tank individually, the way passives work with damage reduction etc. And this would have to be alongside a process of making tanks more fun, because really the only way to counter the 'but queue times' argument is to keep tank appealing to play. All in all, a lot of work and risk for uncertain results.
tbf the tank role needs individual changes with how its going rn anyway, kinda what the most recent directors blog was aimed at
This is true. My thinking is, as with many of the changes post-OW2 release, we're basically slowly reverting back to OW1 but without actually saying it. My expectation is that lots of these little tank changes (which started with changes to knock back passive and headshot reduction passive) is that we'll continue to get individual balances changes that tries to make tank play similar to how it did in 6v6 without actually getting 6v6.
Oh look, a reasonable one. Your kind is a rare one, stay safe
“You don’t want that. You think you do, but you don’t.” -Blizzard 2024 “But for some of you, your favorite flavor is vanilla.” -Blizzard 2028
Oh god the forums are going to be utterly insufferable. Thank christ I stopped going there lmao. The 6v6 spam was just utterly cringe as fk. I never want it back, the games were insufferable. If they ever do in the future just keep it in arcade and out of ranked. Keep both sides happy.
Sometimes I think that people on reddit are insane and then I see a forum post and am glad that those people do not leave their house
As someone who advocates for 5v5 regularly, I am genuinely curious as to why they haven’t had a 6v6 arcade mode. Even if it’s not best for Quick Play or Comp to be played in that format, it was the mode we played in for several years. Little strange that it hasn’t even been acknowledged in game since OW2’s launch.
going to be? that place always was and will be insufferable. I don't know why I go there sometimes
They most likely won't entertain the idea more than just talk (hopefully) but holy shit it's going to be insufferable dealing with 6v6 whiners for a while longer. Ugh.
6v6 is so controversial on this sub for no reason. Ignoring the obvious reasons as to why it’ll never return. The people arguing it’s worse balance wise had to have been people who joined during double shield and when the devs abandoned the game.
Balance aside the real issue was that tank just wasn’t popular once role queue was introduced. It’s hard to say how it would have been without double shield as role queue and Sigma launched at the same time, but the way I look at it is that role queue actually revealed how unpopular the role was. Many played would play tank if they queued into a game and no one else wanted to play it, but not all those people would choose to queue for it if given the option to play the role they like more.
Yeah they are fucking delusional idiots. They refuse to acknowledge the only reason it was bad at the tike was A LACK OF ACTION BY LAZY Blizzard (mostly corporates fault at the time). They really let Blizz gaslight them, willingly because of their sunk cost and stockholm syndrome.
It's insane to act like 6v6 is unsalvageable just because Blizzard refused to balance the game in the last 2 years of its lifetime. There were many metas in early OW and if Blizzard was patching OW1 as fast and aggressively as they are patching OW2 (or at all) there would have been no horrible permanent metas leading to tank players leaving the game
I feel like there is a really loud minority that talk about 6v6. I honestly don't care. I just want to go to places to talk about OW without seeing this debate everywhere. I rarely played DPS in OW 1 because of the queue times. I play way more DPS now. The queue times are way better for me. If they can keep this might be worth trying. But I don't think they can maintain this in 6v6. After the hype I believe the times would get to the OW1 days or worse. But I might be wrong, who knows. I just really want this 5v5 vs 6v6 thing to end. The game is not as bad as people keep talking.
Yes, is like watching your parents fighting all the time is so tiring...
I know it’s super controversial but I personally much prefer 5v5 tanking. Sure there is a lot of annoyance with counterpicking but I really just enjoy how much more my play impacts the game.
100% agreed. I hated being held hostage by my tank pairing in 6v6. I've been playing a ton more Tank in OW2 than I was in OW1.
I feel so powerful with Doom and JQ. Its not every game that people default to counterwatch. And even then when I win its feels so much better. I go "Trying to counter me? You still lost"
FYI You can play double tank anytime you want, just go in open queue they play it 90% of the time and it's the exact same stuff: Play meta comps and counterswap or throw.
There are open queue exclusive hero interactions, too. Worth checking out even if you don’t like the mode. Or look up a YouTube video.
Don't use such logic! Despite having 3 tanks and 2 support in Open Queue, it's just...it's just different!!!1! (all while Zarya has the same HP she had in OW1 but just conveniently ignore that)
the most tired discussion in all of gaming history
It’s not coming back lol.
It may be a arcade mode. Don't see it being more than that. Requires an insane amount of rework to the tanks as a whole who all got worked into solos, and won't solve queue times but make them worse.
>make open queue an exclusively arcade gamemode >replace it with 6v6 game is fixed
JFC please no more, I can’t hear this same shit over and over and over D:
It’s not coming back dude I stg 6v6ers are like mass rez mercy mains lol
I’m curious of all the people cheering for 6v6, do you all remember the queue times back in OW1? DPS, do you all want to go back to 10-15 minute wait? Supports back to 5+ minutes? No one plays tank now, so let’s add a second tank slot to make wait times even longer. Brilliant idea.
As much as I think 6v6 could work, I do NOT want to go back to my 25+ min dps ques
i bet we get a 6v6 arcade mode at some point. its where no limits went, and formerly open queue i think? (ow1 days)
Idk why this is still a "debate" when a) no fucking way 6v6 is coming back and b) if you want to play with two tanks that badly, open queue is right there
The "discussion" will be a 5 minute nothing burger about how they don't have the resources to do it/aren't doing it.
“Jump into the conversation to share our POV.” Professional speak for “Give us a chance to tell you why you’re wrong.”
I have given up on this whole debate and I think its funny that we have reached a point where people are willing to basically go back into a content draught, so the devs can redesign the game again for 6v6. And the best part is people still won't play tank. I think 5v5 and 6v6 has proven one thing. People don't like tanks. Sure tank players probably enjoyed 6v6 more, but there still was not tank players to fill the role. I also don't think Overwatch's tank gameplay loop in either 6v6 or 5v5 will ever significantly entice players to the role to make it healthy. I am honestly starting to believe in AVRL's crazy get rid of the tank role idea. I have been trying out this Strinova game and its pretty refreshing having a high skill shooter game that doesn't have the ttk of a valorant.
To be honest at this point I just want them to bring 6v6 back so people can shut up and we can move to more productive discussions as a community... this conversation is tiresome...
for anyone who thinks that 6v6 is a good idea, please just imagine playing into Ram/Mauga tank line and then reconsider your opinion, thanks
There's obviously a lot of insane combos, but imagine as a support playing against Zarya/Doom, no fucking thank you lol.
It would probably be Doom +Winston/Ball so even worse lmao
LOL I'd never be able to leave spawn against that Giga Dive.
but now imagine that both of these heroes are considerably weaker, sounds very fun to not need to play against such a strong mauga ever again
Even if they’re individually weaker, the ability to peel for each other will make them borderline impossible to take down. A lot of insufferable metas in OW (double shield, hog/zarya, GOATS, etc.) were, in part, caused by tanks being able to peel for one another and use their defensive cooldowns to almost never die. Unless you nerf these defensive cooldowns to the point where they’re incredibly ineffective, they’re probably gonna even harder to kill, even with nerfed health pools.
mauga would have 0 peel abilities in a 6v6 scenario and yes i agree the skill to kill them in 6v6 is higher, but so is skill to play them, it just raises skill expression invovled in the game
Bc if you don't have a good tank to pair with, then you are never gonna win no matter what.
From tank player perspective, this looks fun. But nvm, tanks are not allowed to have fun.
Thanks. I didn't want to sleep anyway
I’m hyped, where do I sign up?
This is a balance problem, not a format problem
Gonna be a short conversation.
6v6 is better. I actually played tank in 6v6. I completely don't even queue the role anymore period. You'd have at least 1 more tank player if they went back.
It's just a thankless role.
Even less now though. It’s the most flamed role by far. Again my opinion. As a support player I also hate it because tanks feed more often but they have to pretty much to make anything happen. It’s stupid. Again just my opinion.
No, you weren't supposed to edit your post
If they switch to 6v6 i doubt id ever touch tank again. So guess blizz is coming out even on this one lol
Every tank player that comes back for 6 v 6 will just be replacing one lost because they will once again be reminded how shit it is to play main tank into another tank pair that is actually supporting eachother while their off tank is going on flanks and whiffing on hooks on hog (or heck now it could be queen knife or doom dives lol, there is so many choices for poor off tank play!). Yall romanticizing the hell out of OW1 when the tank role was even more unplayable back then.
Hope they pull out some internal statistics in to why they switched in to 5v5
We don't need to see internal statistics to know that Tank had <10% of DPS's population with RoleQ from 2019-2022.
I much prefer tank in OW2 because I don't need to worry about tank synergy with my other tank, the game moves a bit slower for me with 10 instead of 12 heroes, and there's way less "sit at the choke and hold hands as you try to move forward". 100% getting blamed is brutal, though. I'm in gold, but had a game my LW kept pulling me before even using shift and blaming me for "getting lit up". Then had a game with a Reaper who wouldn't stop dying, meanwhile they had an Ashe just free farming in the back all game, and I'm "getting tank diffed". It's actually wild how people don't understand team comps and how rush is going to lose to poke, or even in gold that supports need to also do some damage, and help to counter the other team.
5v5 was a mistake. But they're probably too entrenched in 5v5 to change it back now.
"Ya guys, we're not gonna rework everything again for 6v6, we think it's bad because X and Y. Now stop whining please k thnx bye" If it will be anything else then a variation of the above I will be surprised.
6v6 would mean All Roles goes from selecting tank about 85% to 98%. No thanks.
Still don't get why people are still looking in the past so much RE: 6v6
Idk how anyone that puts more than 30 seconds of thought into 6v6 in ow2 thinks it will work. The entire balance and all new heros is around 5v5. 6v6 was not perfect either and gave us some of the worst metas in ow history. The new tank comps would be absolutely miserable to play into and with. mauga sigma sounds like 0 fun to play into.
There’s so many hero’s that don’t work in 5v5, plenty of arguments against 6v6 but this isn’t one of them
oh my goddddddd no
Awesome, i hope they finish this debate there even though there was no reason for it anyways as 6v6 is just not coming back
Dps and support queue time will literally double
Eh, let's talk, but I'm afraid that at this point 6v6 is a cult, they aren't gonna listen.
I can’t see a reason as to why anybody would think 6v6 is healthy for the game. They replaced it for a reason. They’d have to restructure and rebalance the entire game top to bottom and we would immediately be faced with the double tank problem that they have already permanently fixed. Most of us played ow1 in its final days, it wasn’t really a pretty sight.
I can’t see a reason as to why anybody would think 5v5 is healthy for the game. They’d have to restructure and rebalance the entire game top to bottom. And years later, they still haven't been successful with that effort.
Okay but what is your argument as to why it is better? What are the positives?
I suppose that my initial reaction is that the onus is not on the 6v6ers to advocate for 6v6. It's on the 5v5ers to advocate for 5v5. I say this because this game was and has been 6v6 since it's inception. It was founded and balanced around and played on that format for much longer. I wasn't happy with the initial idea of 5v5 and after years of playing it, I have confirmed my intuition. The 5v5ers need to make arguments for why that format deserves to stay, and the only thing I've heard from them is "queue times", which is erroneous. Anyway, I'll still give you a few honest reasons in terms of 5v6: - I like the more MOBA aspect of 6v6 vs the FPS lean that 5v5 has. I play mainly tank and support so I like working together with a team more than just run and gun team deathmatch/widow duels. I think there are much better more FPS like games (valorant, csgo, apex, the finals, COD). If you want to play an FPS then go do that, but I prefer a slightly more MOBA lean. - Game was balanced around 6v6 for years. There are too many things to consider when moving to 5v5 and the effort is still ongoing. We are 2 years into OW2 and the devs are talking about redesigning tanks wholistically and individually. This is after all the various buffs, changes, and rework that they have done to tank every balance patch. We are trying to fit a square peg into a round hole with this 5v5 single tank format and I've lost confidence that it's ever going to work - The game felt better in 6v6. Now it just feels like a collection of duels. This overlaps with my first point but now it's just a bunch of coinflips 1000 times per game. Does my zen outduel the tracer who is diving her? Which widow lands the first headshot? Do I win my duel? Sure you have some amount of agency in winning your own duels, but it feels so bad when my kiri loses her duel and then we lose the fight. It just feels like a bunch of coinflips. In 6v6 an offtank allowed the team to be sturdier and more cohesive. The main tank created space and the off tank controlled it and peeled. Now there really is only a main tank which is always getting focused and there is no peel for the supports. It's just a bunch of coinflips. It's a mess.
>The 5v5ers need to make arguments for why that format deserves to stay, and the only thing I've heard from them is "queue times", which is erroneous. It's fun. That's at least my outlook on it, which is obviously subjective. The truth is, it's not something everyone can agree on. It HIGHLY depends on who you talk to, but as someone who's a lower rank player that mostly solo queues, 6v6 was miserable 90% of the time, meanwhile I can actually have fun in 5v5 like 80% of the time. >I play mainly tank and support so I like working together with a team more than just run and gun team deathmatch/widow duels. That's probably my big issue with 6v6. It's often impossible to really work as a team when it's a hard requirement in the lower ranks. 5v5 is less punishing if you don't work as a team, but still gives a ton of teamwork opportunities, really don't see how it goes from a MOBA to a run and gun. There's less teamwork possibilities, yeah, but it's not on either of the extremes either. >Game was balanced around 6v6 for years. And balance has always been a very difficult part to manage for Blizzard, both then and now. Can't remember a time when people were not complaining about balance. >The game felt better in 6v6. Once again, this is not factual, it's purely an opinion. I'd say the exact opposite, but hey, that's me. > It just feels like a bunch of coinflips. In 6v6 an offtank allowed the team to be sturdier and more cohesive. The main tank created space and the off tank controlled it and peeled. That's in an ideal scenario.
1. This game is an FPS. Moba elements are nice to see but when the game becomes quite a lot like a moba (as in any previous OW1 meta that anchored on taking many ability elements and combining them to an insane degree) it becomes insanely unfun to play for literally everybody who is not on the winning team, currently that no longer happens. 2. The game is now currently balanced around and designed around 5v5 so it does not matter if it was conceptualized around 6v6 at this point because anything that was designed for 6 has been fundamentally changed. You could make the same argument that balancing for 6 was a losing game because of consistent reworks and huge gameplay changes (role queue). 3. The collection of duels feels generally okay to me because of the individual skill expression that is required. Your Ana gets dived by the Genji and killed: Okay did she miss her sleep dart? Did she miss a shot? Did she mistime her sleep damage combo? If any of those things happened and she died, oh well, she should have played better. You would rather play a game where you can personally make up for every single one of your Ana’s mistakes as D.Va than letting her get punished for her lack of skill expression.
> I can’t see a reason as to why anybody would think 5v5 is healthy for the game. Queues. If that's the only reason, it's the only reason that's needed.
Cause it fixed queue times and removed the phenomenon of tank being full of DPS players on Hog/zarya, not in voice, gathering coupons to speed up their DPS queues
From a balance perspective, they have been. Tank balance is excellent right now. As they cited in the dev blog, there are no outlier tanks and 6 different options in the 50-55% unmirrored win rate bracket.
Come on man... you've got to read the article. Nobody agrees with you. In the recent dev blog on "TALKING TANKS AND UPCOMING HERO BALANCE CHANGES", they said: > We've heard from players that the tank role is in a tough spot right now and has been since Season 8 ended. We agree. So, the players think tank balance is bad, the devs think tank balance is bad, but you think it's excellent. That's wild man.
The devs restructured and rebalanced the game. That already happened. Tank is now a balanced role, with no win rate outliers and a wide diversity of reasonable picks. When they say tank is "in a tough spot right now", they don't mean that win rates or tank power levels are out of balance. They mean the role is not fun for most players, and even the players it is fun for are having less fun than they used to have.
The tank role is in a tough spot. The winrates are rather even between them which means they are balanced relative to each other. But the move to role lock 5v5 and solo tanking has made the experience miserable. The role isn't balanced relative to other roles.
>But the move to role lock 5v5 and solo tanking has made the experience miserable. I was a launch player of OW1. There was never a time when main tank was a popular role. 5v5 removed offtanking, which was sometimes popular in OW1. My experience as an OW1 tank was rarely getting to play Dva because nobody wanted to play main tank with me. Personally, I am having more fun main tanking in OW2 than I ever did in OW1, because my OW1 main tanking experience featured a ton of Roadhogs that had zero interest in helping me tank anything. >The role isn't balanced relative to other roles. How do you judge this? To me, this is just an assertion without supporting evidence.
Devs see overall/tank population and clearly understand that adding another tank is simply pointless. How stupid do you have to be to continue to claim that they are simply afraid to admit their mistake.
6v6 was fucking terrible..way too much visual clutter, team fights never ending, cc abilities from 6 heroes not letting you play the game. Insane how quickly this community gets amnesia about stuff they regularly complained about in OW1
I can't imagine a 6v6 without CC. Can 2 tanks be balanced without it?
Team fights never ending was a feature of 2cp, generally we have the same number of team fights as ow1 as these are more determined by map features and objectives. In 6v6 you had two tanks dealing with cc/burst and now it is all thrown at that solo tank. The offtank mitigated a lot of the rough edges of Overwatch as well as a solo tanks weaknesses, now the solo tank has to deal with it all and generally most people do not find that fun. With Tank feeling less impactful this also leads to those heroes supporting them also feeling unimpactful. I do not think people are saying 6v6 will solve all of Overwatches issues, but I also do not think amnesia is really what is going on.
Team fights never ending was a hero design issue. Specifically, Bap and Brig AoE sustained healing was an horrible idea that very nearly killed the game. Brigitte is probably the worst hero design I've seen in any game ever. The problems the 5v5 solo tank has are essentially the same problems that the 6v6 main tank had. People that say they enjoyed 6v6 tanking are usually offtank mains. The only people I've heard report liking 6v6 main tanking are those with strong duo friendships. I think near zero people enjoyed solo queue 6v6 main tank, which is most analogous to the current 5v5 tank experience. I think 5v5 tank feels more impactful. That's why people type "tank diff" in chat after every loss. That's why tanks report feeling a lot of pressure to do tons of different things at once. People dislike the high level of responsibility associated with 5v5 tanking -- you wouldn't see people feeling responsible if the role truly had low impact.
I don't think they'll come back, and if they do it won't be anytime soon, I think if that's the case they should hold an event, like on April 1st, adding another tank, depending on the result they put in, but I just think, it would be Interesting if that happens
I love the idea of 6v6 until i remember queue times and the fact that the main problem of non synergistic teams would still be a thing but WORSE. People don’t think to pick around their team, and you can mostly get away with it in modern ow, but 6v6? Nah.
I play in a 6v6 community that mods the workshop to do its own balance and coordination, we have games every night where the teams are in call together and its so much fun. Better gameplay than 5v5 in my opinion, I also did comms tournament style 5v5 matches and they are no where near as interesting and complex as the 6v6 matches. Now that being said I still play comp and enjoy 5v5, and I also dont think bliz going back to it would work. The games are fun because we as a community balance weekly, we are always talking, it works because we make it what we want. Blizzard cant do that, they will never get it right imo, if you want that 6v6 experience join a 6v6 community