1 - Put 6v6 mode in Arcade with a 2-2-2 force-lock 2 - Reduce the health points of every tank by 50 to 150HP (depending on the tank) in that mode only 3 - Profit ?
I mean, keep the 5v5, it’s still a fun game although it’s different, I’d still play it to be honest, but just… give us the choice to play between both modes, that’s all.
C’mon… we have wacky modes like Mystery Heroes, Total Mayhem and No Limits… modes which are much more alien than mere 6v6…
So what’s stopping them from putting a single 6v6 mode in Arcade? Is it lack of demand ? Lack of resources because Blizzard is just a poor indie company ? Or maybe just ego ?
PS: to the “jUsT plAY oPeN QueUE” crowd I say the following: “open queue is still 5v5…”
They most likely don’t put 6v6 in Arcade for a few reasons. One reason being that most Arcade game modes are generally dead on most minor servers. Generally the only time you can play Arcade game modes on minor servers is when a special/limited time game mode is available. Sometimes you can queue for the big features game mode and you might find a game in 10-20 mins. The 2 most popular game modes in Arcade used to be Mystery Heroes and FFA, both of which were moved to the QP tab. Adding a 6v6 game mode is just gonna make QP even more dead.
Another reason is likely performance. With OW2 they increased the quality of textures and detailing on character models/skins, along with updated lighting and shadows, the performance hit of these changes was offset by the removal of 2 players from every game. Now if you add back these 2 players it won’t be a huge performance hit for most users as most are on modern consoles and mid-decent PCs, but on lower end hardware like The Switch, old consoles, potato PCs it’ll be a problem for Blizzard.
Now these problems don’t make it impossible for 6v6 to come to Arcade and it could come back one day if the demand was really high but the demand is simply not there. I know it can feel there is good demand if you use this subreddit a lot but this subreddit likely isn’t visited by or represents even 5% of the active playerbase. A massive portion (Perhaps even more than 50%) of the playerbase are new players who started playing after OW2 came out and even within the old playerbase the demand for 6v6 seems like a vocal minority at best (A lot of which has been fueled up by content creators trying to farm views by making vidoes like “Was 6v6 better?! We made a custom game mode”).
Blizzard also has years of hard data and research proving to them that 6v6 was not very well liked as the game was bleeding players even back in 2018 when it was getting a lot of new content actively released. They most definitely also did a lot of unbiased external testing before deciding on the change. Business execs at a big company like Activision would have never let the Devs make such a big change if they couldn’t provide them with hard data proof that 5v5 would be better for the game.