So… reverting back to how the game was on beta release
Which didn’t work
Can’t queue with friends anymore, again
Which didn’t work
Bringing back min and max servers
Which should never have left
Objective goes back to server browser and stopwatch goes back to quick join
- Which means players will stick to objective mode servers and ignore Quick Join altogether
- Because objective mode is fast and Stopwatch is too slow for casual
- Which is what happened on beta release
- Which didn’t work out in the end
- Because you couldn’t play with friends
I dunno about anyone else but this update makes me think the devs feel completely defeated from all the aggressively obnoxious players that whine about imbalanced games. They’re just reverting the game back to it’s original state and hoping things change when 1.0 comes out. But I can assure you, new players are going to come in, want to play on a team with their friends, and not want to have to go through the infinite hoop jumping required to join up PUG servers, find matches, find times to play, find open servers, blah blah blah. And with no way to play with their friends, they’ll never break their Overwatch days or their CS: GO days or any of those games that they already play with their friends, and DB will once again fall under their radar.
I guess we’ll just have to see, but I can’t see how this move will be anything but immediately damaging to what’s left of the casual community. The people that hated CMM don’t get anything, since they played server browser anyway. The players that only played for Ranked don’t gain anything, as they only played PUG’s anyway. The players that queued with friends no longer get to, and will probably just change games.
While balance algorithms and what have you are changing, people don’t leave games because they’re imbalanced; they leave games because they aren’t winning and can’t change teams. I’ve been in complete stomps with both teams at basically equal player level, and I’ve been in complete stomps where the team with a vastly lower average rank is stomping. I’ve been in perfectly balanced games with a strong back and forth that are suddenly losing because one player leaves, and when they become losing games, the rest of the losing team quits too. It’s honestly very rare that I ever play a game that starts with a full server and ends with a full server of the same players. 90% of the time, more than half the players at the end of the round are not the same players that started the round.
Instead of being 100% negative though, let’s be fair.
- In a game with a very low population, optimizing it for solo queuing is ideal
- Ranked is gone, but with playing competitively being touted as the core of DB, I suspect this means the devs have some plans for making it something good. Going back to the drawing board, growing the PUG and casual tournament community, cherry picking ideas from the communities, then implementing a bigger and better Ranked
- There’s no more mode disparity: 6v6 and/or 7v7 are going to be the dominating modes. I just pray we see more 6v6 in the PUG communities, and a complete abandoning of 5v5 altogether
- As mentioned, while this is a step back to a time that didn’t work out in DB’s favor, it looks more like a step back to redesign, and not a step back to give up
So there’s hope I suppose. I hope. I hope there’s hope. I’m hopeful!
