Posts by Taylor

New map looks great.

Splitting players up into sticky tiers to solidify progress, stop them focusing on a MMR number, and give them short and long-term goals is the right thing to do. Most of this seems fairly standard. But I hope the team requirements are really loose near the bottom.

For all the talk of competitive points the system seems relatively stingy. If 60 represents the top 6% of players then having 65 as the "get this or you wasted months getting annoyed by competitive mode" target seems really steep. 22 of these guns exist and they are the main reason the rank and file are playing.

We're talking high level here, though. Why would these players purposely stand and fight a losing duel? How is Symmetra running through Reinhard shield, and why doesn't D.va know what her defense matrix counters?

There will definitely be some competitive game where Symmetra drops her teleporter behind enemy lines and epic levels of cheese occur.

Quote from Jetsetlemming

On 8/12/2016 at 7:40 PM, Jetsetlemming said: Ana can actually heal faster than her if she's accurate with her needle shots, incredibly. The most common hero that is hunting and murdering me as a healer, at my level of play, is Pharah, because she can fly over the heads of the frontline to shoot past them. She's really uncommon in that pro chart, though... huh. I'll see if I can find videos of some of these matches. Genji's the only really common flanker, and he's great in really skilled players' hands obv, but in my experience Symmetra actually hard counters him because he can't reflect or dodge her beam.

At high level play where McCree is some twitchy teenager on his 10th can of Red Bull I don't think Pharah being able to fly above things is such a great advantage.

I don't really see Symmetra hard countering Genji because he can just peace out with his dash. I also think Symmetra is probably the overall weakest hero because she gets dumpstered by people like Winston.

Oh, cool. Well, that is some comfort.

jk played another one anyway.

I don't know if this was just the servers being awful. But apparently players can crash the server in Nepal.

Hidden message says "buy loot boxes".

I gave competitive another chance as I would like to get a golden hook but I think this was enough to seal the deal. First one we lost and I had all 5 gold medals for our team, which made me a little upset but I shouldn't expect to one-man carry so that's fine. Next game the teams are horribly stacked as we're all randoms versus a 2 man and 3 man queue, but we actually win it pretty hard... until someone disconnects and then we lose. So, I notice when my team disconnects I still lose a shitload of rank, which is in stark contrast to when the enemy team ALL LEAVES and I get 5% of the rank for winning. This is completely ass backwards.

I don't really enjoy competitive. It seems to go against every every design principle of this game for DIGITAL SPORTS. It makes a feel-good game with a positive loop feel like a constant kick in the ribs, especially when every game is full of horrible players (in terms of personality) and it provides open insights into how utterly broken the ranking system is. Back to quick match for me. If you want to give me 300 points just let me know.

The Blizzard polish seems to have all been chipped off this last patch and it's unfortunate. UI VFX lingering during screen fades, popping back into the game after rounds end, lots of interfaces fighting for your attention at the end of a match, UX being really bad in places (the alert telling me I can leave the game after my team mates leave is drawn on top of the overtime display ffs). Would be nice to see that stuff fixed up. Just feels like it lost something in the updates.

Also, DotA does that "you can now leave" thing... but in DotA you can actually leave. In Overwatch you're still going to lose rank so why even bother displaying it?

I never played ranked again after I was punished because the enemy team rage quit. No joy to be had there at all.

I imagine the under performance of the WiiU and success of the DS is why they're combining the two. I also had a lot of fun with my WiiU. Still not convinced them trying to reel in third party is a good idea given their audience (and how much power they'd need to stick into a handheld). Maybe if they focused on remote play instead, but I think we're a decade too early on all that.

The updates to their flagship franchises are usually really good. They also created great new titles like Splatoon and gave Platinum all the money they needed for Bayonetta 2. Haters.

People buy Nintendo hardware for their first party games so the pissing contest with other console specs almost seems pointless. Doesn't really matter if gritty sepia man shooter 12 will run worse on it because it's going to be used for rendering a cell-shaded Mario onto a minimalist landscape, or Pokemon games that are still using gigantic blocky tiles after 20 years.

A lot of the time when I'm playing my WiiU I don't bother turning the TV on and I spend ample time on my DS. It seems like a good move to combine the too.

People are putting some pretty good graphics on mobile. The problem I find is people also want to use their smartphones for other things and these games kill your battery in about 30 minutes. It also seems like the market is shifting more and more casual, so I'm not sure controllers are really going to change anything.

New D.va is ridiculous. Her block is always up when you need it so you're shooting down a lot more ultimates. I still hate that she's immune to her own ultimate explosion, mostly as a D.va player who thought it was fun to have to scramble away from it with everyone else - now I'm just guaranteed I'll kill at least one person shooting them in the back of the head and daring them to stay in the blast radius.

Ana is strong but people just player her like Widowmaker even though her gun does half damage. In my experience you want be with the offense heroes, usually not bothering with your scope, throwing grenades at your feet and sleeping people so they can run a train into them. Her sleep is really good for stopping Bastion, too.

D.va buffs sound absolutely ridiculous.

Too bad people still won't shoot that turret or bastion you're pointing your defense matrix at.

Edit: It doesn't use damage or medals. But it does punish healers.

50 is average. The system is 0-100 and you start 45-55 based on placements.

Getting only a tenth of a level for winning was because the enemy team left. It's extremely frustrating after a big loss streak to get so little for finally pulling out a win. It's not "off," you can deny people rank xp by rage quitting.

I take it all back.

I went 1-5 today and each loss took a whole rank. But when I win I get about 10% of one level. What the hell is this? I'm going to need like a 50 win streak to get back to that sweet, sweet 50 "you're average" rank.

You have to not care. These ranking system take hundreds of games to actually give accurate results and you only have agency in ~30% of your games (the others are going to be stomps either way). You're only getting some shit weapon reskins anyway. Wow a gun nobody can see on one of my characters is now gold.

The only really bad thing with competitive is you get matched up with full teams queuing solo instead of just other solo players. DotA removed this, hell even HotS removed this. LoL added it, said they were going to remove it, then said JK dynamic queue for life. Because Riot Games.

There's something in the patch notes about aim snapping. But Roadhog ultimate still has that bug I posted a few pages back where an elimination makes him look at the ceiling.

Going better now we're an organised group. Honestly, I went in with all this baggage because LoL ranked made me basically hate the game. Mostly because you need to reach the reward tier or it's a waste of time and the constant BO3/BO5 promotion/demotion nonsense.

However with Overwatch the moves are tiny even within the placement games. It seems what you mostly need to do for the higher ranks is play a shit ton of Overwatch. Not sure how many points you get at the end of the season, or if the idea is Season 1 is all about golden guns (so you'll get a lot of them) and Season 2 is something else (pink guns, perhaps).