A madman's rantings

While a meme, the idea of Overwatch 2 coming out is one of the best decisions blizzard could make.  It’s an untapped intellectual property that has brought together a lot of players who aren’t necessarily interested in FPS gaming. It’s precisely because of this vast array of players that it would be dumb to not put out more content in the OW universe.  A great deal of OW players would be considered casual.  They don’t care about the balance of the game or if cool new ability is viable at low and high ranks.  Its more about having fun and working together with friends.  Fans have been asking for a single player version to get more details about the OW universe and learn about their favorite heroes.  So, what do we know about OW2 so far? Most of the guesses about the game is that it’ll primarily be PvE which is following the current trend of PvE games and the return of couch co-op.   This would also address a lot of the complaints that OW has tod...

Sticking with the current community topics let’s continue with our talk about tanks, my last post had a talk about what are some design points for a tank in overwatch.   A quick run down is that tanks need a good health pool to survive burst damage, a low but consistent DPS, conditional burst damage to feel fun and lastly a balance of shield and/or damage ability. The last common thread with tanks, and I’m sure will be a constant going forward in OW, is that tanks lack a significant range option.  With these general guidelines, what are we able to change on tanks to make them feel more balanced and/or fun?   Healthpools seem to be balanced, adding more armor is a possibility but with the armor change it doesn’t make the largest difference in today's game. My personal take on armor is that it serves two purposes.   The first is to protect a hero from specific sources of burst damage, which adds variety to hero design that I believe isn’t used enough.   The ...

I'm not going to lie, i wanted to get a long blog post put out before the announcements this week but the "post" turned into a paper and i'm having a hard time cutting it down.  It contains a lot of discussion that i think needs to happen but let me just talk about 2/2/2 briefly right now. Currently Shanghai just won the OWL and took out the best GOATs teams one after another.  The more amazing fact is that they did it with their own type of DPS comp.  It shines a light on how teams are finally dealing with GOATs and learning how to take it down.  Its key to understand that what shanghai did wouldn't be allowed under the 2/2/2 rule set.  More players are starting to question the entire 2/2/2 push when options are out there and they work.  Blizzard is very close to achieving balance in their game if they can make some hard decisions.  The big question is, how do they balance tanks and i just wanted to briefly talk about them before getting my long pap...

For this talk I'm going to briefly summarize 2/2/2, what the community and its leaders believe to be the advantages of it, and finally why I believe those reasons are incorrect and how this is a short term solution to an age old issue. Currently there's a large push to force 2/2/2 role queue onto the overwatch ladder and professional play.  For those of you that don't know what this means, the idea is that you would specify what role you would fill before queuing up on the competitive ladder. (DPS, Tank or Support).  Once in game you would have to pick a hero from that category.  A team would be locked into having two DPS, two tanks and two support heroes for every match. The main point for switching to this system is that you'd have more balanced games when queuing on the ladder.  Since your team is unable to run 4 DPS players you'd have some form of tanks and support in every game. The idea is that this would create a less toxic environment, allow for players ...

I went over this in my first post in 2017 and wanted to specifically call it out after seeing jeff kaplan's recent post .  To summarize it, he states they didn't expect maining and one tricking to be so dominate.  They expected players to be comfortable only playing torb on defense and never on offense.  This expectation sets the stage for why overwatch is so heavily toxic, why the meta is in such a bad place and why the game has all the balance problems it currently does.  I will be specifically avoiding concepts such as player/gamer mentality and hero loyalty that happens in other games for this blog. The first issue is that the post means they double downed on niche design, which is the same as fully committing to the concept of counters.  As stated before niche heroes are inherently a flawed design in OW.  This is because if a hero can win 100% of the time in its niche, then it's overpowered.  Heroes are weakened in their niche to a point that ot...

With this being part 1 of some changes i'd like to see i'd like to address the problem i see in Overwatch. With a new balance patch on the horizon a lot of people are hoping for goats to be removed.  The problem i have is that goats isn't the issue, its that players are forced to play with only one strategy. To be the bearer of bad news - goats is a legitimate strategy and should be an option.  We need to strive for multiple viable strategies on each map, not completely remove those that we don't like. If goats goes away then double sniper becomes the dominate comp, if we take that away then dive comes back.  This trend will take you back through the strong comps and leave you with the same issues.  A boring repetitive play style or being forced to play what is deemed "correct".  The most popular idea I've heard so far is that a ban system would fix this. While at first glance it looks like a good answer since you can ban a strategy out, it actually ...

I was told I should start writing some of my ideas about Overwatch down, specifically on upcoming changes.  While I missed calling the shots on the torb re-work, I did want to think about Roadhog and the changes they could have in store for him.  All we were told is that they needed an animation for the change.  As always i threw out a couple guesses, like a one handed reload so he could heal and hook while shooting, it doesn't bring to light some of the core issues I have with him. I'll start off saying i'm a huge fan of hog, always have been and always will.  The main reason?  Shotguns.  I've always enjoyed the super shotgun from Quake 2 and the double barrel from doom.  It was always super satisfying to get a meaty shot and take someone out in one hit.  The trick was never the shotgun itself, it was how you moved and positioned yourself that made the weapon so great.  Roadhog has this Wimpy (from popeye) philosophy.  You'll trade a ...

This will be more of a blog post, less paper like.   It's finally starting to happen more often, an event that I saw coming for years is now happening in OWL.  Teams are beginning to run a scout such as Boston Uprising’s Striker who ran Sombra to scout the enemy team composition and then teleported back to spawn to change their line-up.  It seems unremarkable in every way so What’s the big deal about this?   One of the inherent advantages the offense has over the defense is that they have the ability to change their hero picks with little to no drawbacks.  Spawn is usually closer for the attackers and in most cases, attackers are the one who initiate combat.  This means that defense cannot up and leave the point to go to spawn due to threat of an attack at any time.  After a death would be the only good time they are able to change heroes.  Ideally, the offense should always have an advantage over the defense when it comes t...

Core Design There’s been a lot of talk in the Overwatch community on what the developers wanted, about what they expected and how things have played out during release.  The hottest of these topics currently is the idea of hero swapping, counters, one tricks, and how Overwatch was designed around it.  How this “core idea” must be followed and if it isn’t then according to the masses you’re not playing Overwatch correctly.  The problem I have with the “core idea” of counter picking is that there is very little follow through displaying it. While it’s true that some heroes have an advantage over others, it’s been shown that its nowhere near the absolute need to change your hero.  We’ve all won games with a disadvantageous matchup where you “should” lose.  Furthermore, a majority of changes in the game have been made opposite of this “core idea”.  Bastion, Symettra, Torbjorn, Junkrat, Reaper and Pharah have all changed so that they are more effective ...

This is my random blog where i'll post some of my thoughts and observations on overwatch and game design.  Not sure how often or how large my updates will be but i'll try to make them interesting!