My Thoughts on Competitive Overwatch and Burnout
Team games have been the dominant esports for the last ~6 years. In 2010, LoL, DotA 2, and CS:GO were all incubating and in 2011 we had the first The International, people were pissed off at IPL3 when Jatt and Imaqtpie played in the finals for League of Legends interrupting their StarCraft 2 finals, and CS:GO only paid out a wimpy $220k in prizes the next year in 2012.
All of those games have ballooned in size compared to StarCraft 2 (the hot title along with Halo in 2010) by now, and all of them have team sizes of five. If you don’t pull your weight in those games, it doesn’t mean you’ve lost the game. You can win games without killing a single thing, if you have someone SICK GOOD on your team able to “carry.” In the MOBAs, your hyper-carry snowballs, gets the sickest items minutes before your opposition while you just sit there trying not to die too many more times and get screamed at. In CS:GO, you can waddle into the enemy team and die first literally every round but be rescued by the god AWPer. That can happen because the game doesn’t force people to walk into a predetermined space on the map. Sure, the bomb sites are confined areas, but you don’t need to physically stand in the bomb site to contest someone planting. But I’m getting ahead of myself there.
Your ability to harm your team by playing ‘not great’ is minimized by the ability of someone who IS playing great. It feels better for the newb knowing they didn’t throw the game completely, and the guy who popped off and had a 10:1 KDR probably feels amazing. Your ‘sabotage potential’ statistically starts out at 20% (just one player out of five), but by mid-game if you’re 0–3 and your teammate is 10–1 in a MOBA, your sabotage potential shrinks. You’d have to do some absolutely ridiculous things to manage to not win a game from that position, so let’s say your sabotage potential falls all the way down to 4% or so. Just ‘pass to Kobe’ whenever you can, and you’ll be alright. With that logic precedent, it should hold true that multiple people on your team would have to play poorly/incorrectly to lose a game against equally-skilled opponents, which are what matchmaking and ranked play is trying to give to you. The closer the game is across the board, the more your individual kills and deaths will matter, and your sabotage potential will fluctuate throughout it.
In Overwatch Competitive, you’re 1 of 6 players, so your ‘sabotage potential’ starts out at 16.66% (1 out of 6 players), but if you play poorly or incorrectly, your team is heavily punished, no matter what role you’re playing. If you waddle into the enemy team and die here, the 6 players on the other team are heavily favored because of the following factors:
1. It is incredibly difficult to ‘carry’ or ‘hyper-carry’ in OW. Let’s imagine you have a godlike Soldier: 76. He could even have an aimbot. Barriers, line of sight blocking, and healing all minimize his ability to drill someone down quickly by himself. He needs tanks to cover him so he doesn’t die to the deadeye on the other side of the map that IS protected. Let’s say he even kills 3 people coming through the door, that gives the other 3 people time to literally JUMP ON HIM/shoot him from wherever and deal 200 damage in the span of time it takes him to deal 600 damage to the three guys he killed. If his teammates are playing poorly or incorrectly, he can be dispatched and the work he did is erased in seconds due to respawns/rezzes/teleporters/sound barrier/transcendence/ youfrickin’nameit. ‘Carry potential’ is extremely low. What this means for ‘good’ and not godlike or literally-hacking Soldiers against evenly-skilled opponents is that you can have an above-average game, let’s say 35–40 elims and the payload still might not reach the second checkpoint. In fact, if you’re popping off on your hero of choice, the enemy team can even adapt and pick a soft or hard counter to you. Think Widowmaker vs Genji/Dva/Winston. In LoL/DotA/CS:GO nobody is going to be able to swap 1 minute into the game to deal with the troublemaker, they’re just gonna die repeatedly and try to build what items/buy what guns they can to try to catch up.
2. The objectives are all confined physical areas. To capture OR contest objectives in Assault, Payload, Hybrid, OR Control, you can kill the whole enemy team but still need to walk your ass over to the objective and stand there like a sitting duck to make progress. This makes things harder for long-range heroes like Hanzo, Widow, Pharah, Soldier, McCree, etc. They’re designed to deal damage from a distance, but if your teammates get picked apart, you’ve essentially got to get into melee range and battle with a slew of characters designed to kill you in melee range (Winston, DVa, Symmetra, Reaper, Mei, Reinhardt, Doomfist, etc). If your melee dudes don’t do their jobs, you have to play a melee dude to stand a chance. In LoL/DotA/CS:GO, kills happen all over the map over the course of a game. In OW, kills happen 80% on the objective, 20% on the paths from spawns to the objective. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel for both sides. Back-capping is pretty difficult to do in a game like OW where you can watch three small doorways and simply say “Tracer trying to sneak in” and blow that sucker up next time she peeks her head in. In LoL/DotA/CS:GO, flanking is always an option because of the map designs. Objectives are numerous: Turrets, jungle buffs, dragons, Baron, hell even OTHER PLAYERS as they reward you with gold for items or guns, or in CS:GO the fact that you can kill the entire enemy team to win a round and ignore the bomb sites completely. A sneaky Tracer on Hanamura B COULD flank and kill 2 healers, get swatted down, and still lose because their team didn’t shuffle their feet fast enough to sit on the point and secure their own kills. Payload maps like Route 66 or the second portion of Hybrid maps like King’s Row have a greater opportunity for effective flanking, but with the addition of Lunar Colony, there are now more Assault+Control maps than there are maps with payloads in them. You can queue literally 8 games in a row, play 8 different maps, and not see a payload. Coordination >>>>>>>> individual performance yet again.
These factors don’t even take into account the numerous ways to instantly die in Overwatch without immediate counterplay. You’re running from the Reaper about to pop Death Blossom? Oh dang, you walked into Widow’s view instead. Or a Tac Visor. Or a Deadeye. Or a DVa bomb. You get the picture. When both teams are evenly-matched, these problems are alright to deal with because you do respawn and you can rely on your teammates to work together to coordinate healing, barriers, abilities and win the fights roughly half of the time.
BUT is it… fun or rewarding to coordinate those abilities? Or is it more fun to play what you like to play, play what you’re good at? People have bad habits. You probably have bad habits. You might be an above average tank AND dps because you’ve played hundreds of games in those roles, but this game you just queued into happens to have 5 other people like you. Nobody wants to play support, or they legitimately all might have very little experience PLAYING support. Nobody wants to switch because they feel that the individual impact that they CAN have in the game will be minimized if they have to sit in the back and coordinate healing instead of damage/barriers. This is also true if you have too many supports or tanks. “Don’t make me play dps, I’m awful at it” has definitely been said in Comp games before. It’s not fun to play something that you don’t enjoy or aren’t good at, and it’s not fun to lose, so why not just stay on your Soldier and hope for the best? At least you’ll enjoy getting some kills and feel like you’re doing a good job, even if the objectives aren’t getting captured. At the end you can say “well I did what I was supposed to as dps, what were those tanks and supports doing??” And if it’s not you saying it, it’s someone else on your team saying it at you. The chance of there being a player like that in your Comp game is HIGHER than other games simply because there are more players on a team, and the dynamics of the game still work against the person who is in their most comfortable role(as described in points 1 and 2). The fact that switching heroes is POSSIBLE yet still not always ENJOYABLE can compound this issue.
SO let’s also factor in: trolls, leavers, disconnects, ACTUAL one-tricks that are hard-countered right away and refuse to switch. Their sabotage potential is ENORMOUS despite being only 1 player out of 6. Your carry potential is extremely marginal. Yes, you can win with a troll or leaver if you play your heart out, but odds are super stacked against you and can feel horrible. I remember 6-hour ladder sessions where I wrote down the ‘big reason’ for losses. Very often, it ended up being misused/wasted ultimates. Supports are unfortunately the biggest culprits here because of their incredible value. You want to use support ultimates to either WIN or NOT LOSE objectives immediately. Any value below that can literally throw a game where you may only generate ONE sound barrier in the span of 4 minutes and lose an objective. Other times, it might be a feeding Genji or Tracer. Those heroes are designed to get in quickly, cause disruption, and sneak some kills. If they don’t communicate WHEN or WHERE they’re attempting to do these things, they can get blown up time and time again. Not everyone uses mics. Not everyone uses the pings/emote wheel. Not everyone even knows how to use “I need healing” which SHOWS YOUR SUPPORTS WHERE YOU ARE. It can be mind-numbing for players that are playing correctly to ram their heads into the brick wall of exhausting themselves trying to make up for these other players, at any skill level. I weep for the people in SRs under 3000, because if it’s infrequent but still bad up here, it has to be Hell on Earth for skilled people treading water in a sea of these players.
This is the reason burnout is happening. SR decay is the reason I stopped playing it myself. I tried my darnedest in Season 4 to hit 4000 SR without queuing with players I knew were a league above me. I solo’d or duo’d only. I played over 200 games, where roughly 30–40 of them were impossible to win due to leavers/disconnects/intentional trolls/rage throwers. Yes, sometimes I got a free win also due to the other team having those issues, but who’s to say with my performance that I would not have won those games anyway if it were a fair fight? I still somehow managed to keep a positive win rate (lol 63% D.Va win rate but that’s another topic) and hit a peak of 3844! Not too bad, I thought. A new personal best, and I didn’t abuse the silly-ass SR system that accounts for people in OTHER GAMES playing the same hero as you*** and Mercying my way to the top. I play my placements for Season 5: ouch only went 3–7. That’s variance for you, especially when you have no idea what the SR of the other as-yet-unranked teammates and opponents are, not to mention players doing their placements on second accounts. I got spit out at 3220. Hmm… it took me 200 exhausting games to grind through that amount of SR last season, do I really want to go through that again, knowing 30% of them could be unwinnable? Oh dang, I actually got some work at E3 and can’t play for 6 days? My SR is going to dip even LOWER because I’m out of town? Screw it. I’m done. I know my own value in these games, because I play all three roles, I switch when it makes sense, I communicate. I stream all these games, there’s proof I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. D.Va was my most played by a wide margin and kept a great win rate. My SR does NOT reflect how I’m playing, and thus the Competitive system feels like a failure to me. I’d now rather play Quick Play and Widow just to click heads and not stress about winning and losing because of the anonymous lumps of clay sitting at the 5 other keyboards. Oh we lost in 3 minutes? I still got a funny PotG triple, that’s fine.
One thing that’s interesting to me is that I was casting 3v3 Elimination Lockout at E3, on the new maps designed for it that are offshoots of Anubis, Dorado, and Eichenwalde. Those games were actually FUN. The small compositions and strategy involved in playing multiple rounds with minimum 3 different heroes made for exciting moments. There was no objective you had to cram yourself onto, no respawns, flanking actually had a purpose. Carries were actually possible, 1v3’s actually happened (MikeyA did it in a pro-level 3v3 when Esports Arena hosted that ~$9k tournament). Blizzard recently released a 6v6 Elimination Lockout that Jeff Kaplan mentioned in his latest love letter to game balance: “I think the mode is strong enough to exist in Quick Play and Competitive.” I agree. Because it’s more fun than Competitive. I’d gladly cast that. Deathmatch is fun and has been a staple of other FPS games forever. Do it. OWL won’t be 6v6 Elimination though, will it? It’ll be more tournaments with no map drafts, containing Assault mode, favoring certain heroes like the “dive comp” because that’s h o w y o u t a k e o b j e c t i v e s.
Ok. I think that’s all I wanted to get off my chest. If you’re burning out on Competitive Overwatch like I did, ask yourself why you’re continuing to play? Will the reward of hitting that next promotion to Diamond or Masters make the game any more fun for you? The issues outlined above pervade every division. Watch a pro player stream, there are one-tricks that just say “POMPOM!” on voice chat all game at 4300 and lose 10 SR while you lose 25. You’ll constantly get queued with duos 500 SR below you anyway, you can never escape. Arcade/Custom games can be fun, you should check them out. Overwatch is still a beautiful, fun game, if you know where to look. P.S. plz give more tournaments, I really like casting them. Thanks for reading.
***Reference: https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20754415323#post-1 “The calculation of your SR adjustment after a match doesn’t look at your teammates, but instead compares you to the performance of other similarly skilled players with that hero across an enormous pool of competitive matches. So, we compare your Genji play to the play of other Genjis, Ana vs. Anas, etc. Since we’re comparing “apples to apples”, we shouldn’t see any kind of support specific bias in SR adjustments due to player performance.” — Scott Mercer, Principal Designer
