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There’s a style of online game called a “Hero Shooter.” Think Overwatch, Team Fortress 2, or my recent time sink, Marvel Rivals. For the uninitiated, the gameplay loop is two teams of six fight each other for an objective. Either domination of a region, escorting a vehicle, or a combination of the two.
Now anytime you lose a match, the first thing you should examine is what your own performance looked like. What mistakes did you make? What could you have improved? Then you think about the other team and consider what they did better. Then, and only then, do you start putting that in the context of the rest of your team’s performance. That’s a legitimate part of the analysis process. If your Spider-Man kept pushing behind enemy lines and immediately dying, that’s a factor.
Large parts of the community, however, like to go to that last part first and point their grubby little fingers at either the “trash team” or a specific scapegoat without considering all possibilities. And as a support player, holy crap, do we get disproportionately shat on.
But outside of gaming this speaks to an existential intellectual machination. It’s a window into the way we think collectively as people.
In a modern hero shooter, there are archetypal roles divided across, typically, three broad categories. DPS —a name derived from “damage per second”— is the main source of, obviously, damage. Their primary intent is to take down members of the other team. Tanks are there to absorb damage and control the field by making space for the rest of the team to move onto the point they need to capture. Support provides healing for the rest of the team, provides buffs and nerfs where appropriate, and makes other strategic choices around battlefield management.
There’s also different sub-categories within those broad archetypes. A shield tank vs a mobile tank have different playstyles and perform different functions within their broader goal. Your team loses, ostensibly, when it can’t do its various jobs better than the other team, and that can look like a variety of things.
When a support is unable to do the healing part of their job it’s really really obvious. Often way moreso than other roles. Supports are also way more difficult to compensate for if they’re underperforming.
Conflict arises when someone feels like they are prevented from doing their job because a teammate isn’t fulfilling their expectations. And that’s not necessarily unreasonable. This is a team-based game. The team has to work.
Here’s the problem.
Support comes with a lot of complications that vary based on the composition and behaviors of the rest of the team. The team depends on support. Support depends on the team. And if you’re not receiving healing, it’s not, necessarily maliciousness or incompetence from the healer.
It’s far more common just can’t get to you.
And that looks like a lot of different things depending on map and team comp.
There are actual physical limitations on healing in terms of amount, frequency, and distance. Different healers have different shapes and methodologies of healing. Some have AOE’s. Some are single point. And each healer has a whole host of different abilities with cooldowns they have to manage for optimal performance.
You also have considerations on things like line of sight, hierarchies of attention (who’s on the point, who isn’t), and about a thousand other smaller variables.
If a support is getting dived on the backlines the whole match and fighting for their life just to survive, they’re not going to be able to heal you. As a Lord tier Rocket Raccoon I can take down most mobile tanks if I need to because of the damage on his shotgun. Time I spend doing that, however, is time I’m not healing. So a lot of my match time is spent constantly balancing those two elements, and sometimes things can get a little out of hand.
Then there’s the good ol’ support adage “I can’t heal you when I’m dead.”
So if you, as a non-support, aren’t getting healing, any of the above things could be going wrong (and some of them might be your fault). Solving this issue requires understanding what the underlying problem is, and that requires a more comprehensive view of the battlefield. That’s why team communication is so important. When a support says “this is why I can’t do my job,” the rest of the team should adjust around this issue.
Guess what rarely happens?
Instead of being part of the fix, there’s simply blame passed around. Oh, your numbers aren’t high enough. Oh, I never got heals, therefore there were no heals to be had the whole match.
Or almost worse, sometimes someone tries the three heal fix.
Now this I have to elaborate on. Because these games have something called a “meta.” Basically, the default team comp or combination of characters for certain situations. The default team composition is two tank, two DPS, two support. If you want to shift off that meta, you have to make additional considerations. Three tanks, for example, might mean one of the tanks needs a higher damage output and one of the supports might need to slightly favor damage over healing. A one support composition means that support will have to “heal-bot,” and the rest of the team will need to adjust their patterns accordingly. A three support composition can absolutely work, but the parameters are narrow and require additional communication. Paradoxically, “not enough healing” is typically not one of those parameters.
There are two possible pieces of logic that are happening here. The first is: there’s not enough healing ergo I need to switch to provide more of it. The second is: these supports are not good enough at their job ergo I need to take that job thereby forcing one of the supports to switch to another role. Neither path of logic acknowledges the possible complexities of the situation or, more importantly, actually addresses the above mentioned problems that lead to a lack of healing.
But this isn’t just a Marvel Rivals problem or even a video game problem. This logic and approach to problem solving is a reflection of a mindset that pre-exists. One informs the other, so what might happen if you were able to break that cycle apart at the seams?
What might wait for us on the other side of that logical loop?
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