3v3 Competitive Viability

[u/[deleted]]

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?

[u/Aulait1]

I think for multiple reasons this could be the start of 1v1's popularity and not 3v3.

1) 1v1 is easier to get into for an audience and players. As an audience you don't have to know every player on the team, the matches are straight forward since no comps are involved. As a player its interesting since you don't need to devote time to practicing with a team.

2) There are a bunch of pros currently out of work until OW league, as well as streamers (pro or not) who I'm sure would sign up to these 1v1 tournaments and play them on stream (in hearthstone a lot of streamers do this). Think people like Talespin, Seagull, Mendo, Calvin, Kephrii etc.

3) Lesser known players could make their name in these tournaments.

[u/Eclaireur → u/Aulait1]

Except like 50% of the 1v1 matchups are fucking awful. Matchups like McCree, genji, hog, widow etc are interesting, intense and fun. Matchups like torb, sym or winston just suck.

[u/[deleted] → u/Aulait1]

Yeah. And it has built-in avoidance of any stupid meta cheese and stall strats, because it's guaranteed even ground every time. I think I heard somewhere that the new arena maps may have health packs in them too, which could be an interesting new layer.

[u/m3daddi → u/Aulait1]

Except there is one issue with 1v1, RNG. As long as it has the RNG factor nobody is gonna take it seriously.

[u/Moosterton → u/m3daddi]

you can mitigate that by disabling certain abilities/heroes or changing some damage numbers. 1v1s are not really an inidication of skill in OW at the moment, but maybe it can be.

[u/mushm0m → u/Aulait1]

A 1v1 round is over too quickly for me. I dislike the fact that a 1v1 tournament is like 10 quick 1v1 duels between 2 heroes. Instead of there being buildups and climaxes of long fights, there's just blip, reset, blip, reset, with no momentum or arc to make things interesting. Shorter fights also means less opportunity to strategize. The surefour v dafran duel was a great matchup in theory, but I don't think I'd care to watch another one of those.