Playtime Requirement for Competitive

[Clatratus]

Hey everyone! Clatratus here again with another suggestion! Let's get ready for another fun discussion!!!

Occasionally, I am unable to queue up as a group and like to try my luck with solo queue and there are a few problems I see but I would like to try and address the biggest one in my opinion: players who decide to play a character they never touched before/VERY little playtime. (I check the profiles of all my teammates and see how many hours they have on the character they picked.) Now of course, there are those players that can just pick a hero they never touched before and just be amazing. For the most part though, when a player picks a hero that they never played at before, they are in the experimental phase and that can end poorly in competitive. In my opinion, players start to get a handle on a hero after ~3-4 hours of playtime and they can do moderately well in competitive with that hero. With that introduction, I would like to offer up my suggestion.

In the early stages of ranked play in heroes of the storm, blizzard implemented a very effective rule: In order to play ranked, you must have ~15 heroes that are level 5. I think this rule made ranked mode a lot more enjoyable because it meant you wouldn't see a level 1 murky running around the map figuring out how to play the character for the first time. (If you are a heroes player, you know what this is like. haha) For overwatch, a rule that is similar to this would be VERY effective. Now of course, blizzard would not add levels to every hero so here is my idea. In order to play ranked, a player must have 3-4 hours of playtime with 2 characters in each category. Additionally, the characters that have at least 3-4 hours playtime will be the only ones that the player can play.

Potential criticisms/answers to this rule:
- "Just because this rule worked in heroes doesn't mean it will work in overwatch. Mobas=/= fps." Response: Maybe you are right but there is a good chance that you might be wrong too. There are some rules that heroes has that would probably not work but a rule like this definitely could. Putting a requirement like this not only forces a player to play a hero that they have at least played before which GREATLY benefits the team but additionally, it kind of forces players to try something new. A lot of new players might just tunnel to 25 with 1/2 categories and hop right into competitive. With this system, they get to try new heroes/new categories and maybe have a lot of fun!!!
-"3-4 hours PER HERO?! There are FOUR categories clatratus! COME ON! If you do the math, that's 24-32 hours just to get into competitive. I have a life outside of video games and I don't want that kind of requirement just to play competitive." Response: The average amount of time it takes for a new player to reach level 25 is around 16-40 hours. During that time, players can easily just check how many hours that they have on certain characters so that they can jump straight into comp at 25. As for players who are above 25 and have like 10+ hours only in certain characters in 1-2 categories, think of this as a way of enjoying the full game. You now get to play new heroes that you never touched before! How awesome is that?! I enjoyed getting the opportunity to play most heroes for a few hours.

No TLDR sorry! Please read before posting. Please do not respond purely based off the title of the thread. I put a lot of effort into this and it's saddening when people respond purely to the title.
/Discuss

[Tziva]

If anything, we already have too big of an issue with people instalocking "mains" even if they don't make sense for the comp. At least in the lower brackets, that's a way bigger issue than people playing heroes they aren't good at.

What if you have a match where no one has enough hours on tanks or healers? A lot of times people pick a hero they have very little experience on, it's because that hero is needed. There are plenty of matches where I'd rather have someone who has 30 minutes on Rein than no Rein at all. If anything, I appreciate those people playing what we need more than what they want.

I think the total level requirement to queue is sufficient.

[Jessicka]

I think level 25 is too low. If you're grouped it's actually possible to get there inside a day. That's clearly a far from ideal situation for the other four people on the team when they join; this player might not have even seen all the maps, never mind actually learned the most basic strategies for them or where the health packs are.

They probably haven't fought against all the heroes either or have any idea what to expect from half of them. And that's before you even start to think about the competence with the ones they have played. That experience or lack thereof is massively noticeable when you see them play from either side: and frankly it's as unfair on them as it is on the rest of their team.

You might argue 'well they'll get put in Bronze and you won't see them' but that self evidently isn't the case; the system still has this habit of placing people nearer the middle and spinning them out from there.

[xChurch]

If they went that route, I'd prefer something a bit more broad, like 1-2 hours with 75% of the characters or something. I've found in my experience that I really don't even know if I actually like a character till I have had a chance to play them for several rounds. I really didn't like Roadhog when I first started played, now he's my most played (to give just one example). I feel like people start trying to learn a new character only to start sucking and switch without really fleshing it out. Perhaps if comp required it, people would find more characters they liked playing.

[Henako]

I think level 25 is too low. If you're grouped it's actually possible to get there inside a day. That's clearly a far from ideal situation for the other four people on the team when they join; this player might not have even seen all the maps, never mind actually learned the most basic strategies for them or where the health packs are.

If you're queuing into these people, you might have larger problems.

[Tziva]

If they went that route, I'd prefer something a bit more broad, like 1-2 hours with 75% of the characters or something..

I think 75% is way too high. That means someone would need to have multiple hours on 18 toons. At lower ranks, no one is going to be good enough to need to access that many heroes, and at higher ranks people are good enough to know when they need to learn what (and also probably high enough skill to be able to quickly pick up new heroes).

Level 25 might be too low, but 75% is kinda insane to me. Ideally, I'd like for everyone to have some hours on at least one hero in each role but realistically if someone hates supports so much they are literally never going to pick them then it is pointless to require them to have hours on them. I think ultimately this is the kind of thing that solves itself in ranking. If you're only good at one or two toons, you're probably going to hit a ceiling on how far you can rank or not initially rank well at all if you have a habit of testing out new heroes in competitive. Conversely, people who are good at a lot of characters are going to move up the ranks eventually and away from those people.

But, like I said, I think it's a far bigger issue of people instalocking "mains" that aren't useful to the game rather than people playing heroes they're not good at, at least at the three lower ranks I've played in. That's the opposite problem than the one this is addressing and in fact something that would be aggravated by limiting people to only being able to pick characters they have hours on.

(I'm rank poop so it probably doesn't matter but there are seven characters that I have zero minutes played on outside of Arcade, and a feww more that I have less than an hour on. I've never felt like I needed to pick a character I didn't have experience on or that this negatively affected any matches. The ten or so that I do play a decent amount has always been plenty to choose from in every situation. Although it helps that a lot of the guys I don't have time on are very popular (genji, hanzo, tracer, mei, etc).

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

At lower ranks, no one is going to be good enough to need to access that many heroes, and at higher ranks people are good enough to know when they need to learn what (and also probably high enough skill to be able to quickly pick up new heroes).

This.
In what rank is this a problem?

[Jessicka]

This.
In what rank is this a problem?

When they queue up with ranked friends, happened some in Placements, not been a thing since then though. Their ranked/higher level friends aren't good enough to carry them.

[Explicit Teemo Nudes]

When they queue up with ranked friends, happened some in Placements, not been a thing since then though. Their ranked/higher level friends aren't good enough to carry them.

Ok. I don't care about placements that much, as they don't really matter other than on a personal level as far as I know. And even if you're ranked lower than you should be, you should be able to climb really fast anyway. That's my experience atleast.

[Deleted]

Won't work in a game like OW because of the way in which you are able to swap heroes. Assuming that you get a 2-2-2 comp going where people can only play 2 heroes from each category you are likely to be in a situation where across roles the same heroes are available as people will most likely go "WHAT IS GOOD FOR COMP ME WANT GO RANKED" and then based on a list get the playtime on 8 heroes. If they are countered they are pretty much fucked. There's also heroes that work better on certain maps.

It's fine to ask for a certain amount of playtime overall before being able to join ranked but making it so that the playtime is distributed across heroes makes little sense.

[Tharkkun]

Except people that have played FPS's consistently in other games would be punished. You aren't ever going to get the perfect queue and character makeup you want until you queue with 6 people. That's life. Designing all these new concepts to try and perfect your group make up will only increase the queue times.

This would also prevent smurf accounts from jumping in sooner. So they would be stuck in quick play causing drama by destroying new players instead. Then when they hit comp they will roll through teams until they get back up to the plat/diamond ranking.

[xChurch]

I think 75% is way too high. That means someone would need to have multiple hours on 18 toons. At lower ranks, no one is going to be good enough to need to access that many heroes, and at higher ranks people are good enough to know when they need to learn what (and also probably high enough skill to be able to quickly pick up new heroes).

Level 25 might be too low, but 75% is kinda insane to me. Ideally, I'd like for everyone to have some hours on at least one hero in each role but realistically if someone hates supports so much they are literally never going to pick them then it is pointless to require them to have hours on them. I think ultimately this is the kind of thing that solves itself in ranking. If you're only good at one or two toons, you're probably going to hit a ceiling on how far you can rank or not initially rank well at all if you have a habit of testing out new heroes in competitive. Conversely, people who are good at a lot of characters are going to move up the ranks eventually and away from those people.

But, like I said, I think it's a far bigger issue of people instalocking "mains" that aren't useful to the game rather than people playing heroes they're not good at, at least at the three lower ranks I've played in. That's the opposite problem than the one this is addressing and in fact something that would be aggravated by limiting people to only being able to pick characters they have hours on.

(I'm rank poop so it probably doesn't matter but there are seven characters that I have zero minutes played on outside of Arcade, and a feww more that I have less than an hour on. I've never felt like I needed to pick a character I didn't have experience on or that this negatively affected any matches. The ten or so that I do play a decent amount has always been plenty to choose from in every situation. Although it helps that a lot of the guys I don't have time on are very popular (genji, hanzo, tracer, mei, etc).

I'm just spitballing, I doubt they could do much to solve this particular problem from their end without something dramatic. I think like you said though, it will work itself out in ranking. I think this was probably more of a problem in earlier seasons when rankings weren't giving as much variance as they do now. I can't imagine very many people who don't branch out get that far unless they happen to instalock useful chars like Ana or Rein.

[Clatratus]

I like xChurch's improvement to the first part of the rule (1-2 hours with 75% of the characters). It solves @AnoExpress 's concern involving the need to swap mid game to counter the opponents. I guess I should revise the second part of the rule to fit with @xChurch 's improvement. The second part would be in order to play X hero in competitve, you still must have 1-2 hours on that character. With the recent announcement about Orisa going live next Tuesday, I thought of another reason why this rule would be very effective. The rule could prevent players from auto locking newly introduced characters in competitive. (We all know that this could be a good thing. We all had those games where people insta-locked sombra day 1 and playing super poorly.)

[Tziva]

The second part would be in order to play X hero in competitve, you still must have 1-2 hours on that character. With the recent announcement about Orisa going live next Tuesday, I thought of another reason why this rule would be very effective. The rule could prevent players from auto locking newly introduced characters in competitive.

It would also prevent players from being able to play a good team comp if you ended up with a group where no one had enough hours on critical heroes (or all on the same heroes). What if no one has hours on a support? What if no one has hours on something they really need to counter a team that is wrecking them? What if the only person that has hours on tanks is also the only person with hours on supports? What if the enemy team looks them up and builds their comp around things they can't play? There are times when it's better to have a new person on Reinhardt than no one at all.

I have a really hard time imaging that there is such a rampant problem with people playing heroes they've never played before in competitive that we have to have these crazy restrictions that prevents our team from picking from the whole selection of heroes. This must be a huge problem at high ranks because I rarely see it in the basement. Usually the problem is just that people are, well, not very good, and I'm not sure forcing them to only play a few characters is going to help much, at least not outweigh all the downsides and other repercussions.

(Also the easiest solution to preventing people instalocking brand new heroes in competitive is not allow them until they've been out for a couple weeks, if that really is an issue.)

[Kaos Incarnate]

I usually pick a hero I know the basics of most of the time so I tend to be flexible in competitive, the problem is I tend to never master or I am slower in mastering a hero, unless I go into qp or arcade which doesn't work well unless grouped up with friends as group comps are based on what they find fun or want to learn.

Having a playtime requirement on a hero would only interfere with the game design of switching heroes based on what the team needs, all I would suggest is raise the level requirement for competitive to 50.

[Perfectdoll]

I agree with Kaos that the level to get into comp needs to get raised and that 50 is a good level, it'd mean people have at least an idea on how to play all maps effectively (hopefully) with a variety of heroes (hopefully). Even so, asking for a minium playtime of 1-2 hours of a character to be able to play them in comp isn't too much imo. That at least means you know what the buttons do on them. I have legit have more than one comp match where someone, for reasons unknown, has decided that it's a great time to try out Sombra for the first time. Needless to say, those games didn't go well.

Beyond that though, I would really like MMR to have some sort of metric added to it that groups people around what they've played the most because I have legit had games where there's _four_ support "main" players, in that approx their three most played characters is Lucio/Mercy/Zen/Ana. Or games where there's 4-5 dps "mains" with no tank or healer, leading to either 1/1/4 or someone playing a character they don't know how to play/don't play well due to feeling browbeaten into changing to.

[xChurch]

At least restricting the new char in Comp for a bit at the start is a step in the right direction.

[Jessicka]

At least restricting the new char in Comp for a bit at the start is a step in the right direction.

I dunno, maybe a week to help balance but it's not enough for people to get good and those who really wanted to had 3 weeks on PTR.

[xChurch]

I dunno, maybe a week to help balance but it's not enough for people to get good and those who really wanted to had 3 weeks on PTR.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an eloquent solution to this, but at least some time is better than making comp nearly unplayable for a week instead. Though it might just end up delaying that a week...

[Tziva]

Giving it a week on live seems like a good compromise. I can't really fault people for not installing and playing the PTR.