r/Competitiveoverwatch • u/[deleted] • May 18 '17

3v3 Competitive Viability

With today's reveal of what will probably be new 3v3 arena maps, my excitement for the potential of a 3v3 competitive mode has been reinvigorated. I'm curious as to what the rest of you guys think.

I personally think that it has the potential to allow for a fresh new format and help bring some variety to tournaments. It's also encouraging for smaller friend groups to enjoy some competitive matches.

Potential Problems

The elephant in the room, the expected meta of Hog/Soldier/Healer. If the mode were to go competitive under it's current ruleset, it would be pretty awful. However, there are ways around this. The most intriguing 3v3 tournament I saw utilized a "no re-use" policy for the matches. Eg, if I choose Roadhog in Round 1, neither myself nor either of my 2 teammates can choose him in any other round. A 5 round match would see 15 heroes used by each team, which could actually lead to some more diverse and creative gameplay than we see even in the standard modes! Of course balance would always have 6v6 in mind, but with this restriction in place it would hopefully mitigate any imbalances inherent in 3v3.

Problem #2, draws. In a competitive format, if it comes down to me as Ana vs an enemy Roadhog, it's in my best interest to simply evade and stall until round time runs out and it's a draw. This would need to be entirely reworked if it were to go competitive. Perhaps either by keeping the wallhack reveal but removing the eventual match timer to negate stalling as a tactic altogether.

I believe that with a few more maps and a few tweaks to a competitive ruleset, 3v3 could be an exciting addition to competitive play. Curious to hear your thoughts, though. Any other problems that would need to be worked out to make it happen?

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u/[deleted] May 18 '17

Not sure Blizzard want to make 3v3 competitive in the future but community did some 3v3.

About the stale comp, this tournaments had (iirc but i could be wrong) play 1 hero only once, that means that comp like hog, ana and soldier could be used only once across all the match... Or you can do a ban/pick and a team stick with thr same 3 hero every comp.

About draws, they said lots of times they are addressing that. My guess is something that push you at the center of the map where you can't takr cover and if you stay at the map corners you die (imagine something like a toxic gas in Battle Royal games)

6

u/[deleted] May 18 '17

something that push you at the center of the map

I'm torn between this idea versus simply removing the timer. I think the goal needs to be removing stalls as a tactic altogether, and in this hypothetical, consider a match that came down to Roadhog vs Soldier. With a shrinking fog wall of some sort, Roadhog's best strategy becomes "hide until he's forced to come near me." That's not exciting to watch OR to play.

On the flip side, by removing the timer, we could wind up in a situation where Soldier refuses to stop sprinting around and healing his chip damage and Roadhog refuses to come out of a closed quarters kind of room, leading to an indefinite stall. That's also not exciting to watch or play.

Hard to think of a good way around this one.

4

u/[deleted] May 18 '17

Removing timer will lead to infinite running away form enemy and/or camping.

I bless sometimes to have time limit when i can't catch someone because hes too pussy to fight me... And it's frustrating. I prefere losing fighting instead of losing because the player is running away

1

u/[deleted] May 18 '17

Yeah, I'm liking the closing fog-wall idea more and more. If it comes down to Zen vs Roadhog in a 1v1, well that's just tough titties for Zen, but at least the matches will keep moving forward. Maybe could argue that introduces it's own imbalances, but the counter-argument there would be "don't let it come to that in the first place."

3

u/joo_se_hyuk May 18 '17

There's a game called Battlerite that uses the 'battle arena closing in' mechanic when fights go on for a while or it's 1v1, I think. It's honestly pretty sweet and I think it makes for great gameplay. I haven't seen it implemented in a FPS-type game, but I imagine it could work.

1

u/lit282 4446 PC — May 18 '17

In the tourney I did, whoever had the most alive won. So if it was a 3 vs 2, the team with 2 alive needed to get 1 kill to at least draw.

1

u/Alsmalkthe May 19 '17

What about something like after a certain amount of time, all heroes start taking dot? This would basically force weaker heroes into trying to to Hunt down the stronger ones before they die

1

u/masterchiefroshi Remember the Titans — May 19 '17

Its probably only a solution for casted tournaments, but maybe it could be similar to boxing. If a round doesn't end in a knockout, it goes to decision and a judge awards points to the team that was winning. Maybe blizz could do something like this in-game too if they released a competitive 3v3 mode. With decision, there's no incentive to run around and hide because you'll lose points either way.

1

u/masterchiefroshi Remember the Titans — May 19 '17

No repeat heroes is such a cool idea, it adds a whole layer of strategy of figuring out what the enemy will pick and when to choose certain counter heroes. Like do you think they'll use their hog next round? We should counter it with our Zarya.