Ideas for better Overwatch

Okay, so I have tried putting up this post on Overwatch general discussions page in hopes of someone from Blizzard reading it, but there were so many posts at the time that my post just immediately got pushed back.
So here's my second attempt. This time on Over.gg. Maybe if my ideas make sense, it will get attention from other Overwatch fans and get Blizzard's attention. Even if not, maybe this will start a discussion for people with bright ideas for better future of Overwatch. So here it goes.

I believe the main problem of Overwatch is that it depends so much on who you get as your teammates. Yes, over time, you will be matched with a better team about 50% of time. But it is so frustrating when you lose just because you are matched with a weaker team. Also, it is not as fun when you win just because you simply had stronger teammates.
This is why Blizzard tried hard to come up with a good match-making system, but I think many people will agree that it is far from being excellent. Getting to 50% win-rate once MMR stabilize is not necessarily a good indication that match-making is working properly. It only means that you get a good enough team to win a match 50% of the time. I would love to be able to win when I play well and lose when I don’t (with respect to my skill rating).
I am NOT here to say a better match-making system is necessary as I understand that it is very tricky to improve. I believe the solution I am here to suggest will eliminate the need for a better match-making system. I believe it will even solve the issues related to trolls and hacks.

I have two suggestions to solve the problem of the Overwatch being so dependent on who you get for your team.

First, get a clan system (with a way to rate members of the clan)
I know this has been mentioned before. But I think Blizzard is underestimating the importance of this. Just because of the nature of the Overwatch, good teammates and good teamwork is essential for winning, and for that reason, it would make sense to be able to choose who you get on your team. Yes, that is why we have a group system. HOWEVER, unless you are part of a pro or semi-pro team or have a bunch of close friends who play Overwatch, finding a fine group of teammates is not always easy to do. Even the pros don’t seem to utilize the group system as they should. It would make sense for them to group up with their whole team and practice team strategies, but it is very rare for that to happen because that is considered as “almost cheating” to some people. We really need to encourage people to use group system far more than people do now, and having a clan system will certainly help with that. Yes, it would be very difficult for a group of amateur players to beat pro teams, but a good clan system will help amateurs practice team games more, which will benefit the Overwatch E-sport in the future as well.
It would not require anything fancy. People will be able to search for teammates to group up with more easily with something as simple as a clan chat. Having a separate tab to view the members of the clan who are online will also help. Along with this, if there is a way to rate teammates after each match, clans will be able to distinguish players who tend to be cooperative from the ones who likes to troll if things don’t work the way they want. This rating system will also help to eliminate hacks and trolls from the game as people will need to play cooperatively for a long period of time to build a good reputation.
Finding a good teammate doesn’t only depend on finding a cooperative player, but it also depends on finding a player with compatible hero pool. One problem people often neglect related to current random matching system is that it matches players only based on skill rating. But having a team with six DPS main players certainly is not same as having a team with balanced hero pool. Yes, it is important to be able to play multiple heroes to be flexible, but some people simply are better or enjoy one role over others. It would be much more enjoyable to play Overwatch if I can play what I enjoy the most.

Second, make it easier to carry a team with individual performance by tweaking the objectives a little
The second point is a little more complex, but I still think it shouldn’t be too difficult to accomplish. One of the FPS games that I enjoyed the most was “Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.” Although Wolfenstein is a very different game from Overwatch, it entails some of similar features to Overwatch: the game has players with different roles and have objectives that build up into a final game-finishing objective. One crucial difference was that it was possible to achieve the final objective without going through other objectives (these mini-objectives were not essential, but achieving them helped to get to the final objective more easily). Of course, it was very difficult to accomplish the final objective without most of the objectives accomplished because you needed a spy who stole enemy’s uniform along with an engineer who can install a dynamite to go through the enemy spawn without getting caught, and defend the dynamite from the opponents who can simply spawn very close to the final objective. But because of this option, even if your whole team is being beaten horribly in the front line, there was an option to “backdoor” with a few good teammates (sometimes even just by yourself).
The reason I am saying this is because one of the reasons it is so difficult to carry a team by individual performance in Overwatch is due to only having single objective (at a time) with pretty much single path to achieve that. For this reason, if your team is not putting a good focused effort into that objective, there is no way for you or part of your team to work around it. Why not tweak it a little? For example, for the capture and escort maps, why not make it possible to start moving the payload before capturing the point A? Of course, it would be very difficult to move it far as the enemy spawn is much closer to the payload, but getting on payload can force the opponents to come toward the payload and off from the capture point (assuming the initial payload location is changed to be a bit apart from the capture point). Who knows? Maybe setting up Bastion, Orissa, Reinhardt, etc on payload might allow one to move the payload far without capturing point A. Or maybe the defensive team will not notice the payload moving far and pull a C9. This change will most certainly allow more creative plays.
For escort maps, having several spawn points that teams can capture would be interesting. Currently, you need to push the payload a certain distance to get new spawn location, so if your team is not doing well pushing the payload, you have no other option but simply to try harder. What about having several spawn points you can capture like capture points? This way, if your team isn’t doing well at pushing payload, you can try going for capturing some spawn points to help the team. Again, more strategies, more interesting plays. Is it only better for offensive teams? Well, allowing the defensive teams to capture the spawn points back is certainly an option. This change will also lead to usage of more defensive heroes even on attack.
For capture point maps, simply allowing the attacking team to capture point B without having to capture point A would probably not work. Although it is harder with further spawn location without capturing point A, if the attacking team manages to set up at point B, it is quite a distance for defensive team to go back to defend. Maybe having more obstacles until point A is captured would be necessary for that to work. Also, making it take much longer to capture B without capturing point A is an option.

It won't let me write more. Maybe I reached maximum length? I will continue in comment.

Of course, this second solution will require a lot of play testing to balance the attack and defense, but I hope you can see the advantages it entails. If Overwatch continues to have only single objective at a time, it is very difficult to overcome when your team is not working well together. But if there are more than one option, if plan A does not work, you can go for plan B. I think this will allow for more creative and more interesting strategies.

One minor suggestion I would like to add is about “prefer this player” option. There used to be an option to “avoid this player” in the past, but Blizzard removed the option because people tended to avoid players who were talented, so they would not have to play against them. But with that option gone, I often find myself being placed into a same team with the player who just trolled in the last game. Why not add “prefer this player in the opponent” and “prefer this player in the same team” options? This way people will be able to avoid having trolls in the same team over and over again, and this will not entail the problem that was present with “avoid this player” option. Also, this will help to punish trolls in the long run as if many people add the troll player to “prefer this player in the opponent,” it will take longer for the troll to get placed into a match.
Also, this will help to avoid players with same hero pools. Incompatible player for one does not necessarily mean that the player is also not compatible with others. It’s not difficult to find players who favor one role strongly over the others. If that role overlaps with you and many other teammate, the team is more likely to fail. By using “prefer this player in the opponent” and “prefer this player in the same team” option, you will be able to prefer the players who play the roles you normally don’t into a same team, and prefer the players with the same hero pool in the opponent. As a result, this will allow people to be placed into a team with balanced roles more often.

Thank you so much for reading. Please add more ideas to this post! :)

in my opinion the first solution would be nice for a small percentage of players but the vast majority would never use it, it would be a nice feature but wont fix the problem, 2 second solution just doesnt seem fun or realistic to me, the third option has some potential after it being in place for a while if its done correctly wich i dont thinnk is easy and i also dont think jeff is gona like it. hope blizz is gona listen to well tought out suggestions from the community like this one.

I think the best solution is self management. Maybe we get put into games with a 1-2% chance to win quite often. But we can always think about new ways to play in those situations. We can work on keeping our focus in overwhelming fights. Staying calm so our logical minds function at a high level in these situations as well. We can beat the ranking system on its own terms instead of letting it beat us with our own emotions that we control.

Things like factoring in stats to mmr changes can help but with every addition of new rules adds the potential for the rule to enforce innacurate rank shifts. In 1v1 ranking systems it is much easier because you can just rely on the self balancing nature of a ranking system (if a player is too high he will lose more often and lose more points per game if he/she loses to a lower opponent). Some part of me wants to favor this simplicity and lose all other rules because of how well it works in complex games like chess. And more rules cause the self balancing aspects of the ranking system to fail due to each rule exerting its own force on the rank. It is more possible for multiple forces to cause amplified rubberbanding on a players rank making them shoot up and down farther. And the abundance of rubberbanded players make games less balanced as well. And none of this even takes into account the variance in players skills from game to game. Ive had players come into games pissed and ready to lose right off the bat. Ive seen the same players called gods and trash within one or two games of eachother.

jeff should hire this guy PogChamp

I think these are really interesting ideas. It should be interesting to explore the effect of some of these if they're ever implemented into the system.

I personally kind of like the first idea, but not exactly for the reasons you posted. I think having a clan-esque system could be the framework for different communities inside Overwatch. Having that familiarity with people you more or less enjoy being around would (I hope) help the overall community morale. I think it would spark tension between different groups and increase competition. I would hope it gives people a sense of identity while playing the game.

Pro players don't really use the grouping system for mainly 2 reasons as far as I know. 1. You don't get a lot of SR when you group with a full team. 2. Having a team full of pros vs randoms doesn't help you improve. There is a gigantic difference between professional overwatch and competitive overwatch. You can kind of hear the difference if you're listing to the comms in a proffesional team then compare it to a normal competitive comm. Granted every team is different in the way they communicate, but I think that gets the message across

The second idea seems a little more hopeful to me. I'm no game designer so I can't really offer solid/helpful feedback on the game design, but it seems like it would be a little overwhelming. The game was intended to be team oriented, so taking away from that would seem to take away from the purpose of the game. I'm not really sure on a solution for this.

The third idea seems like the same thing as the avoid a player option but in reverse. I thought the avoid a player option was a good thing, but I can see how it would be abused. I think one solution is to have the avoid a player option be more complex. Instead of relying on just your choice to avoid that player, perhaps have it so that player has to have a negative rating for your option to take effect.
For example, lets say you have a Sombra only player, that plays pretty frequently. A lot of people who have played with that player noticed that the Sombra isn't helping the team in anyway, so they leave negative feed back on the player. This new matchmaking system would take that negative feedback and give this player a negative (bad) rating in regards to team quality. Thus if you were to avoid this player, it would take effect because this person has a negative rating. On the flipside, if a person has a good rating, but you choose to avoid this player. It has less of an impact.

These are just my ideas haha, thanks for posting :)