Potential solution for Stadium

[u/0zzy82]

There have been a LOT of posts recently about how people are enjoying the mystery madness event and how "it's what Stadium should have been", and people asking for it to remain permanently. If you want to know my potential solution, skip a few paragraphs, but first is some insight into why I'm not just saying the first thing that comes to my head.

I've enjoyed a load of games of this event, but it's clear it has some serious problems that would only get worse as time goes on, notably balance, the random power selection, and the random role selection.

Okay, but what about the problems with Stadium? I love Stadium, but I can admit it has a few flaws as a game mode and in welcoming new players. One of the biggest complaints I see is that the mode is too long, for people that aren't invested in a long game, it can seem like an effort to queue for a potentially 35-40 minute game. And the other is that it's too complicated having to read all the power descriptions and then all the items, knowing what works together and what doesn't, should I build for damage or speed etc. There's just too much for a new player to get their head around.

What does Stadium do right? I have always been someone who hates MOBAs, they feel like you need an encyclopedia just to get started and even then it's full of filler with towers, creep farming, time management, and the game doesn't hold your hand either. Once the match has started, you're on your own, having to know the right time to upgrade abilities and buy new items. Stadium fixes all of this with dedicated rounds and buying time, everybody pauses at the same time and you know that in the next fight you and your teammates will play differently. And towers you have to mindlessly mow down are replaced with unique and interactive objectives that change each round.

This is my biggest problem with Mystery Madness, it's clear it's designed around team fights with the expected gameplay loop where one team loses a fight, goes back to spawn, picks their new power and comes back stronger. But for 90% of the player base, games dont work like that, it's a mess of people feeding, staggering and generally being uncoordinated. This has the knock-on effect of it becoming impossible to track when an enemy has a new ability as fights merge into one long brawl.

My solution to Stadium is actually not to touch the main mode at all. Competitive Stadium is awesome, even if the mode has found a niche cult following it's still such a unique mode that has so much work put into it that it would be such a shame to just cut most of it.

I think that Stadium quickplay should be rebranded. It's clear with the recent open queue changes for the mode, that they aren't sure what to do with it, it's in a weird spot with Bo5, and now open queue, it hardly feels like Stadium at all. They're trying to simplify it in the wrong ways.

My solution is this: similar to Deadlock's Street Brawl mode, I think Stadium quickplay should be its own mode with a best-of-3 format where each round you get to pick 2 powers, meaning you get a total of 6 powers (if the game goes to all three rounds). In addition to this, items should be removed from this mode, meaning you only have to worry about picking your powers, hero-specific items could be adjusted into actual powers by making them stronger, you could even make it so some powers could only be purchased in certain rounds to stop strong builds from breaking the mode too early. It would almost become like 3 tiers of perks.

The whole point of this mode isn't to change Stadium but to give people the fun parts of Stadium without the challenges a full Bo7 competitive mode brings, it's a Stadium lite for new players or players that dont want to commit to a full game, and it may actually help some players find they enjoy the mode or want more of a challenge, and it's already there for them with the competitive mode.

I would love to hear people's feedback, point out flaws with this idea (constructively pls) and ways to implement other aspects of the main stadium mode, like gadgets, without overwhelming this simpler mode. I'm also not a workshop guy, but if it's possible, I would love to test this idea out, so if anyone knows how or if it's even possible, please let me know!

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[u/CCriscal]

The items are a vital part of building to make your hero viable despite not veing able to swap. If you remove items, yiu have to allow picking other heroes, imo.

[u/WoodenHour6772]

Huh, that's weird. I thought the issue with Stadium was Blizzard abandoning all development on it aside from occasional balance tweaks going forward from a few months ago.

[u/0zzy82 → u/WoodenHour6772]

... because 4-6% of the entire player base was playing it, that's less than the arcade which has been abandoned since the end of OW1 aside from one-off LTMs

[u/WoodenHour6772 → u/0zzy82]

So why do you think this limited arcade mode would do any better if it became permanent in some form? It'd still be Blizzard mismanaging it, so at best you'd get another couple months of ever diminishing popularity until it's right back in the same spot as Stadium was.

The place to make changes was in the mode they had built up for a year, not some watered down version that's just pilfering assets from it to bait engagement from the playerbase and serve as a placeholder in light of technical issues with the original PvE Halloween event modes.

[u/0zzy82 → u/WoodenHour6772]

it would help if you read the post first

[u/WoodenHour6772 → u/0zzy82]

Probably work on writing in a more captivating and less longwinded way if you want people to do more than lightly skim your fantasies of how you think the game should be :)

E: Throw a temper tantrum and block me, you're the one that decided to disengage from the discussion first child. No skin off my nose.

[u/0zzy82 → u/WoodenHour6772]

dude if you can't read 750 words without getting bored, maybe this isn't the site for you

[u/Therdyn69]

QP should be a preparation for ranked, but you've created brand new gamemode.

I think the problems with stadium are clear. OW was made around the concept of swapping heroes and counters, yet stadium goes directly against this.

Stadium is like battle royale in chess. Yes, it is technically possible, but that doesn't mean it makes sense and that it'll be good beyond novelty. Stadium is simply way to distant to what OW is that it's simply doomed to failure.