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…”
There were a lot more fundamental problems with 6v6 and 2 Tanks than just double-shield, double shields only existed for a year. They did not make 5v5 because of double shields. Business execs at Activision would have never approved such a massive change to the game for such a small reason. The people who played OW through years obviously liked 6v6 enough to keep playing. It’s natural that a lot of them did not (and still do not) feel and understand the problems with 6v6 to the same extent that people who stopped playing OW did.
If you ask long-time players of any live-service game if they like its core gameplay design as it is then they’ll almost always say yes, why would they have kept playing a game whose core gameplay they didn’t like, but does that mean the core gameplay of that game is perfect and can’t be improved.
The game had sold 30-40M copies by 2018 but the queues still took multiple minutes to pop in Gold elo and that’s when the game was Open Queue and the queues weren’t divided into 3.
This is why they do unbiased external testing and other forms of testing. This is why they most definitely also got the opinions and tested people who stopped playing the game through the years, before deciding on making 5v5. As there were more people who had stopped playing OW1 than people who had kept playing it.
I can promise you that big changes like Hero Limits, Role Queue, 5v5 were not just made on a whim and not just because the devs decided they were better. These changes definitely went through a ton of testing, 100s, likely 1000s of people within and from outside Blizzard likely tested them and gave their opinions on them.
If 6v6 was truly, genuinely better and more liked by the OW1 players than 5v5 then I can guarantee you that that would have been by far the number 1 thing anyone would have been talking about this game over the last year. Despite the fact that the new players have never played 6v6 and they make up for a massive portion of the playerbase. All these issues like Monetisation, Heroes being locked behind Battlepass, bugs, PvE cancellation, all of this would have been tiny at best compared to that issue. If it was a real issue. Which it isn’t.
6v6 is preferred over 5v5 by a tiny vocal portion of the community at best and most of these people still like 5v5 enough to keep playing and talking about the game or they would have just moved on and stopped talking about OW entirely at this point as it has been over a year.