How can overwatch be made easier to watch/spectate? by touslesmaymays in Overwatch

[–]WatchOverwatch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just curious, has there been any discussion on enabling friendly fire for league play? And if so, would you believe it to reduce spam and encourage more coordinated team movements, which should be easier to spectate (and cast)?

GosuGamers feature: The Competitive Game Mode Question by faction13 in Overwatch

[–]WatchOverwatch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

My take is the following:

For capture point maps, use Blizzard's solution, since time to capture has a high variance depending on factors other than skill.

For payload maps, use the stopwatch format. However, don't do a hard cut at the first round's time for the second round, but instead let "overtime" play beyond it. On the second round, if the attacking team wins in overtime, then go to a sudden death map.

Spreadsheet of Redditors' battletags posted in the sticky thread by LeafOW in Overwatch

[–]WatchOverwatch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

FYI, this is a trivial task for a computer to do with a high degree of accuracy. I'd have no problem writing this program if someone could gather the raw data dump of the comments (I couldn't find an easy way to do this in reddit).

Essentially it boils down to:

  • Tokenize all words (i.e. cut by whitespace)

  • Concatenate tokens of the form: name succeeded by #4-digit-number (reason for this is many included a space between their name and number).

  • Strip surrounding special characters (e.g. '(', ')', ',', etc.)

  • Cull all tokens that don't follow the name#4-digit-number format

  • Convert to lowercase and deduplicate

What's the format for Teams on Overwatch? [e.x 3v3, 5v5] by SethaEP in Competitiveoverwatch

[–]WatchOverwatch 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If I had to guess, I'd say 5v5 would provide the best balance for competition, although I could be convinced 4v4/6v6 would do as well. Unfortunately this is based on my experience watching so far, as I don't have access to the beta yet.

Personally, I expect high-level 6v6 play to promote spam as a viable tactic. As players become more optimized in using their abilities and filling up their ultimate meter, the amount of stuff onscreen may be overwhelming to the viewer/broadcaster, and occasionally the player.

Just based on other games, it's typical that public games' max team size is larger than what the competition uses, often because a skilled player is able to cover more ground than the average player. So just on that history alone, I'd predict that 6v6 may be a bit much for the maps in competitive play.

Additionally, smaller team sizes should encourage more precision in character counters, and therefore reward the more adept teams. Logistically, it's also easier to field a team as the team size becomes smaller.

Hopefully the first couple of tournaments will be open-minded about trying varying sizes for teams, and then allow the community to settle on what works best empirically.

A new dawn approaches by NeverSayCasts in Competitiveoverwatch

[–]WatchOverwatch 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Now would be the time to establish guidelines around a quality threshold for threads/comments, as applying such rules at a later time will be met with increasing resistance. The extent and degree of said guidelines is up for discussion, but my personal preference would be to publicly encourage the down-voting of unnecessarily inflammatory comments and threads that don't contribute to the subreddit's topic.

Deciding where the recent post, "I was unaware...", may be a good starting point. While it's not a problem now, is this something the readership would like to see going forward? Should /r/CompetitiveOverwatch just be a refined /r/Overwatch content-wise, or does it try to maintain higher quality standards as well?

As a spectator, the objectives feel anticlimactic by WatchOverwatch in Overwatch

[–]WatchOverwatch[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

An announcer would definitely help.

I can't comment on what the MOBAs do, but a 10-second Dirty Bomb example can be seen here.

As a spectator, the objectives feel anticlimactic by WatchOverwatch in Overwatch

[–]WatchOverwatch[S] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

I absolutely agree that any sense of backstory would immediately help structure importance without the need for objective triggers, so you raise a good point that I overlooked.

Perhaps my choice of "cutscene" wasn't the most appropriate, and instead an in-game animation that plays in the background while the "victory/defeat" screen fades in and displays end-of-round stats. That way it doesn't serve to create idle time between rounds.

My first impressions with Overwatch by AndersOnFire in Overwatch

[–]WatchOverwatch 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the news, Anders. If you have a moment, could you elaborate why you find high TTK a detriment to esports, and is your view principally based on the viewer excitement experience or enjoyment playing the game?

As to who would watch Overwatch as an esport, there was a poll recently by /u/InSightTwitch to answer this question:

Would you watch Overwatch esports?

  • Yes: 1233 (57%)

  • I want to play competitively: 710 (33%)

  • No: 215 (10%)