Local developer Jeff Kaplam fails to understand his audience. Stunned by results
101 replies, posted
https://www.pcgamer.com/overwatch-boss-jeff-kaplan-didnt-expect-maining-to-be-so-common/
Overwatch, a game that lets you switch characters on the fly, caught director Jeff Kaplan by surprise. In a recent discussion on the Overwatch forums, he said he expected that players would switch heroes more frequently, and "naively" didn't think that maining and one-tricking would become so dominant.
"We imagined a world where players would be ok with Torbjorn on defense but not playing him on attack. The maining/one-trick mindset led to us having to rework those characters to fit with how the game eventually evolved to be played," Kaplan wrote. "I guess what I am saying is we hoped to be able to create more highly situational characters with the thought that players would switch in situations where those characters weren’t as viable."
Tigole Bitties learned a valuable lesson. Humans are selfish.
I mean, it's absolutely the same deal with TF2.
you're meant to switch constantly as the situation sees fit yet players just stick with 1 thing all the time and wonder why they get smacked down.
Yeah, the game is clearly designed around teamwork and shit and switching characters on the fly to adapt to what the enemy are doing, but by nature of how huge it blew up its basically full of drooling morons that literally play the game incorrectly.
Has this man never heard of metas before
What do you mean I can't play Pharah when just because they have Soldier 76, Widowmaker, and McCree. It's not my fault I keep getting shot down, you guys are supposed to kill them for me.
Reminds me of the review video criticizing overwatch specifically for creating characters that are pidgeon-holed into working in specific situations and not letting you just be a character. It's frustrating to have to completely change the feel of the game to have a chance at winning. Although its not unreasonable to expect players to be slightly flexible, ive rarely been in a game where my "fun zone" of characters is compatible with team success.
That would be great, but you balance by meta, making certain classes pointless to play and others too good, making the game center around specific characters.
I think part of the problem with encouraging people to switch characters is that people think of it as a failure rather than intelligent play. They see it less as "I will play another hero so I can counter their counter" and more like "If I switch I'm giving him the satisfaction of having beaten me" so they stubbornly play the same character in a situation not to their favour which just increases the salt levels of them and their teammates.
Hot dev counterpoint:
Blizz designed a 110% character centric driven combat game complete with 'story arcs' and 'character mini-animus' and is then mystified when people only play as a character they give big ups to.
There are certainly drooling morons here, and it isn't the player base.
The thing with Torbjorn is that they made him more worse for defense than he was before.
Instead of having a set cool down after plopping down a turret, you instead have to endure a 10 second cool down AFTER your turret's destroyed. That's 10 seconds of downtime without a turret while playing as a very fragile and easy to hit character, especially now he only has 200 HP instead of the 275 he'd get with armor packs. His new ultimate is also pretty terrible with zoning because it doesn't deal the full tick of damage upon contact and it doesn't cover enough area, which makes it piss easy to escape without much punishment. They played his rework too safe and he's too easy to deal with now that everyone's gotten used to him.
Same thing goes with other situational heroes that were made worse with reworks:
Bastion is the literal definition of Spray N Pray, encouraged too much to sit down in sentry mode with accuracy ramp up, 300 bullets for 10 seconds of uninterrupted fire, damage resistance when transformed, and his clunky kit. His ultimate is also nerfed severely because it doesn't have the equivalent protection of the 150 armor he would get, which was changed when they nerfed IronClad from 35% to 20% DR without compensating for the ultimate.
Symmetra's ultimate is boring, but it has its definite use. However, it doesn't cast immediately so it's useless vs team clearing ultimates like Pharah's barrage where you only have a small window to deploy the shield.
Reaper is completely unstoppable in all the wrong ways with 50% life steal. Instead of allowing him to engage at better ranges and have viable and flexible mobility options, they instead overbuffed his passive to the point that you can't kill him fast enough. There's so many ways to make him play better, yet you ignored his core problems and broke something that didn't need to be fixed.
Mercy is unbearable, and I'd much rather have her rez ult back with the cast time. They really don't know what to do with her, and that's their grave they had dug for themselves, but anything is better than a pick getting rezzed that was vital to taking a comp down.
Yeah, I think it's the exact same thing as the dedicated healer problem. When people are constantly feeling like they're having to make a personal sacrifice to their enjoyment of the game just to fill out a team comp, maybe that suggests an underlying design problem.
I can agree on some level, but I would say there is more variety in the weapons and strategies you can employ when using a class in TF2.
With Overwatch it feels almost as if it doesn't matter how good you are at an individual hero, due to the way the game is designed. If a certain person counters your hero in the rock-paper-scissor balancing system that is used then you will most likely lose that matchup against them. So it is essentially strong-arming you into switching to another character if you want to win.
In TF2, a class may have a counter that is hard to fight against but things can sometimes go either way; depending on how skilled each player is with their class. There are also the many different weapons that can be equipped on each class, which helps alleviate the need for more classes as there can be many ways to play each class.
These aspects don't necessarily make either game better than the other but instead highlight just how different the two shooters are.
Overwatch borrows heavily from the MOBA mindset of teamplay and strength in numbers rather than individual power.
but it is still an FPS, so it is no wonder people want to prove their skill on individual characters as most first person shooters encourage that kind of gameplay.
Team Fortress 2, despite also having a large emphasis on teamwork, is more traditional in that the individual contributions of even one player can help turn the tide of a round.
What? What he's talking about IS following a meta, and people don't follow metas, they just main their favorite heroes.
So you're telling me this video and the patch notes in the comments predicted this?
https://youtu.be/cHOuLSU274A
Torbjorn changes:
-His sanity has been decreased by 99%
-His new ultimate: Swedesh Hairswiper - Removes all hair from the map for the next 10 seconds.
-His sentry now has a lifespan and can only work after it has reached 18 years of age.
So, my two cents;
That anybody who was making this game would think any tier of player would want to, or even strategically judge that they should switch their heroes on the fly, is a testament to either disturbing levels of naive wishing, or a grand bait and switch for something worse.
First off, the game has always actively punished you for switching your character out. How? By resetting your ult meter. And the game revolves around those. In every iteration, at every level. So that's the first problem.
Second off, switching only makes sense when it's clear that there is an advantage to it. In a 6 on 6 game, that isn't the case. It might be easy to say something like, "oh the enemy has a sniper/hit scan DPS/long range hero, so you should switch off of your projectile based hero." But when you consider that the projectile based heroes (Junkrat, Phara, Mei, Hanzo, whoever else) have tremendous levels of raw damage to make up for their inconsistent ranged combat, and that intelligent mobility play can mitigate the advantage of hitscan DPS, then there are loads of justifiable cases where switching is counter-productive.
Third, sometimes the "intended" counter just... sucked. Or sucks. Reaper, who's entire identity revolved around somehow being a tank stopper (this still baffles me), spent a good portion of the game's life cycle feeling as if he hit his enemies with a squeaky hammer before dying a sudden and nasty death. Bastion, who's identity revolved around creating a hard-point defense, was made obsolete by players literally just not duck rowing in to the machine gun, then was then nerfed anyway because that's hard. This, along with the massive power of AoE healers in a particular era of the game created the Triple-Tank meta that dominated for a short period, which unsurprisingly withered the idea that you should switch as well.
Fourth and finally, it's a class based game. Not even TF2's characters were rigidly class based, in the end, with the Scout being an impressive assassin on offense and defense, and the capacity for the Heavy to both lead or foil a charge is a thing of gaming legends now. I cannot recount the number of times, playing with my own group of friends, that when a player decided to take matters in to their own hands and switch from say, healing or tanking to a specific form of DPS to counter an enemy player, that it descended in to an all out, unmitigated bitchfest (that usually ended up being steered in to lynching the 1 or 2 unfortunate random teammates we 'allowed' to complete our roster).
You know what game made on-the-fly switching work?
Battlefield 1942. The entire Battlefield series, I might even say, but I haven't played them all.
There was no penalty for switching between any class. There were clear advantages and disadvantages to each class. No class was disproportionately more or less useful in a broad sense than any other. The classes were not rigidly defined and having too many medics, or engineers, or assault troopers wasn't always the end of everything.
So bullshit that Jeff Kaplan didn't expect this outcome. His "switching" philosophy is a deflection of the game's core design failures. It's an excuse to keep people from focusing on deeper, systematic problems with creating an arena shooter with rigid class roles, see-saw pitched balance, and no clear game-flow vision.
The only game where I saw maining not be so heavily ingrained in the meta was Dirty Bomb. If you wanted to actually get shit done, you had to eventually swap out to a engineer or medic to make a push.
I feel like I'm the kind of player that Jeff's been targetting. I don't main anyone. I could play pretty much any tank or healer class to my own average skill level (Gold/Plat Rank).
When Zarya came into meta a while back though, that would really be what the team wanted somoene to play, so I would play it... Way too often.
Compositions aren't always just based on situational gameplay though, but also team composition. Grav Dragons be damned. And goats is just 😴
Haven't played the game in like six months though
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/234048/02798314-ad0e-4fa7-bba8-a74270aff595/unknown.png
I guess I'm one of those people?
My take: While vanilla TF2 was essentially that, the arsenal of each individual class expanded to allow different "Builds" of each character for different situations; Meaning that a person with a very good handle on his favorite class could reliably adapt on the fly in casual play by changing up his specialty without actually swapping off characters. Plus there are only nine TF2 classes; While everyone is still a specialist, it's manageable enough at that point to make sure everyone can pull their weight somewhere on any given map or mode.
I can play any class in TF2, but Pyro is by far my favorite, and with his options it is almost never essential for me to switch to someone else entirely in casual play (but don't mind doing so in those cases due to getting to play as Pyro so much with no issue). I can play any class in Overwatch, but Mei is by far my favorite, and I can just get fucked forever.
Every statement from Blizzard about what they're doing with Overwatch in the past year has been fucking baffling. The one that stands out, and I have to keep bringing it up, is this statement that "We have to put less effort in events to provide the same amount of regular updates we usually do" and everyone got super confused as...
regular content doesn't come out for Overwatch that isn't event related
"We want players to switch to roles that are needed in the moment."
Then they made a system which highlights a single moment in a match with the "Play of the Game" system. A system which overwhelmingly favours damage and kills, meaning characters with powerful AoE ults are incentivise if you want to get the play of the game, and the ult metre resetting if you switch character means no one will ever want to switch.
Like, ignore game balance issues and horrible, poorly thought out character design, the game is built around highlighting one person and one 'achievement'. It's the antithesis of what a team based game should do.
The biggest issue Overwatch has is that Blizzard does not know how to balance games at all. They alternate between kneejerk reactionary nerfing/buffing that makes the development of any kind of long term meta nearly impossible and just leaving characters in the dust for months if not years.
Any games that they've released that are considered balanced were done so by complete accident ie Starcraft.
This is probably the biggest reason for why people specialize. A class based game should have at least some sort of Rock-Paper-Scissors style of balance. Every character should be at least in part, shut down by one or several classes, yet Overwatch has none of this. Only one I could think of is Widow vs Pharah, but Pharah isn't used much and Widow can basically counter everyone if the player is good enough.
You use TF2 in your comparison and it has those elements. Pyro shuts down Spy, who shuts down Engineer, who shuts down Pyro. If you play Heavy in a game where the opposition has 3+ snipers, you switch to Scout. Overwatch has no functional counter system, so players can easily stick to one hero and win against any reasonable team comp given their team is competent.
Dirty Bomb was pretty solid in that regard. Not the constant lightning-fast switchup that Kaplan seems to want but I found myself switching between my permanent lineup of Stoker/Sparks/Proxy at least four or five times each match.
Even with the frustrating thing it did where you had to pick your 3 mercs before you knew who you were facing or even what side of the map you were playing, Dirty Bomb was better than Overwatch. And Dirty Bomb was free.
I mean... its just tf2 with more... well everything except hats.
In tf2 you don't really need to swap classes. Since there are only 9 classes and 12 players on a team, there's usually almost always at least 1 person on each class. The main difference is the classes are capable of multi-roling and aren't rock paper scissors, so sticking to a single class isn't great, but with enough skill you can work around any downsides.
Yeah, this is why the concept of "maining" is something I never liked, and consider one of the worst side effects of MOBA's infection of competitive games. To be effectively competing you need to understand a wide range of characters/classes, in games like TF2 it's easily possible to learn and retain a decent skillset for all of them. Sadly the problem is Overwatch, in its obsession with taking bad ideas from MOBA, heavily discourages this both within an individual match thanks to the "everything is on a cooldown" approach to abilities and the "play of the game" systems, in addition to the bloated roster. Note: a large roster is not necessarily discouraging to variety of character selection, I'm someone who picks "random" on Smash Ultimate, but the way Overwatch does it characters is not conducive to so many.
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