Blizzard alienating 99.9% of players to appease OWL?

General Discussion
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Blizzard should just give up on professional play now. Their overwatch league with hero bans lacks sporting integrity since they play a different game every week.

They have also given the vast majority of the player base the shaft by abdicating removing hero bans and no doubt leave the less capable players to contend with busted heroes for months just for the unwatchable OWL to only have to play said busted heroes every 2nd week.

The game has went downhill fast since the inception of OWL which is an absolute snorefest of a tournament.

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In other words, water is wet.

Yea, start of OWL was the start of decline of OW. Balance went to hell to appease viewers and make it look snazzy, all effort went into OWL instead of making more content for the game etc etc

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Should’ve just used Heroes of the Storm for their e-sport lmao

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Hero pools are being removed from all ranks below Masters+

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Blizzard are abdicating their responsibility as developers to the vast majority of the player base.

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The vast majority of the playerbase are not Masters+

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To balance their game.

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They are making balance changes. We just had a CC patch that addressed a long standing complaint. They aren’t fast rn because they have to work slower than they’d like due to both the ongoing global pandemic and work on OW2. OW2 is designed to appeal to the majority of players, not league.

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I don’t know if it’s alienating the community. I feel like they’ve been caving in to give what many asked for. Change their philosophy for better or worse.

I remember when many players and pros alike were asking for bans. Blizzard didn’t want player-pick bans, no one quite liked the Lock Out system in Elimination mode, and Blizzard doesn’t want a system players can use to target other specific players individually either. And all the custom experiment attempts by some Pros/GMs to test the ideas never quite worked out as they envisioned.

So, Blizzard ends up trying a pool thing, in an attempt to control or keep it away from toxic players or rhetorical memed metas (only banning heroes perceived as “annoying” even if the banned picks aren’t that good). No one seems quite satisfied with this because either their favorite or main hero is picked, their preferable choice for ban isn’t removed, or what they envisioned bans would do - didn’t or won’t happen the way they thought it would nor magically turn the game into a fun experience.

Now, we have a lot of players coming out to complain, give their “I told you so”, or scapegoating the esports aspect for this disconnect or dissatisfaction. Yet, since the inception of Overwatch, the community has always wanted, asked, demanded, and this occurs in other communities of others games, for more support by game developers and companies for tournaments and tournament organizations. Now, everyone thinks that if somehow if its not all based on some “grassroots” from the ground up esports, then its too fake, too corporate, a sign of desperation. Or its all a zero sum game and therefore any management and development funding and time for the game must be neglected.

I don’t really think its like that. I think everyone is quite mixed in their opinions, emotion and upset in what they want from their experience, and disconnected from whats been happening. But thats just my kneejerk take, im probably all wrong anyways.

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I believe the one thing this dev team has been consistent at is being inconsistent.

It took them a long to notice design decisions and nerfs especially global nerfs alienated a big part of the playerbase.

Around late 2019 til now to me it has been a “see what sticks” approach with how they implement ideas like bans.

It kept changing how they decided to do bans. Recently the last two months they kept changing their mind on how they wanted hero bans to work for league and ladder.

You can look at the upside being willing to take risks or the downside that they are being indecisive with the games direction.

For me it’s just a symptom to the way bigger issue for them to make a decision is this a hardcore competitive team shooter or a casual play how you want team shooter.

Imo they’ve been trying to cater to both and leaving both sides dissatisfied.

The pressure to maintain the league makes them slow or unable to react to the average playerbase problems with the game.

I don’t think they ever intentionally implemented anything in this game to alienate any of us.

I think first they were stubborn and then with OW 2 blind to the player feedback of this game.

Let us never forget if Jeff didn’t inquire about what was wrong with DF on here we could have gone even longer with all those bugs. I only played that version of Doom in Mystery Heroes even I experienced the bugs. I was stunned That this was breaking news to Jeff.

I think getting their team cut through the layoffs has hurt them in recognizing the persistent problems in Ow.

222 and tank nerfs alienated me from playing tank. But I can still have my fun in arcade with other modes.

Hope the game can rebound after OW 2. If not plenty of other good games out to play.

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Owl didn’t break the game. Mercy rework+ brig Moira broke the game.

If they had wanted to make owl the highest quality product, they would have leaned heavier into dive.

Dive is what made the game popular. And they removed it from the game.

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Bans are terrible, mostly for OWL players as it forces their work hours and hard earned work through the roof.

Meanwhile no one on ladder suffers nearly, at any point in time.

No it has gone downhill fast from mostly none OWL changes, like Brig, Moth Mercy ETC, that was none pro changes that ruined the game beyond belief and the whining was rank wide, role wide and universally agreed as devastating.

Without e-sports level balancing, your competetive PvP game, is guaranteed dead on arrival or soon after, not one game prove this wrong.

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I don’t know why people complain about top-level balancing. 90% of the things that are balanced at the top are going to be balanced for lower levels.

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E-sports = potentially lots of money
ActivisionBlizzard = Excessive love of money above all else

Basically we as consumers aren’t worth enough for the money hungry grubs at ActivisionBlizzard. It’s been like that for years now. Blizzard was once a reliable company that had an integrity that meant they stood for making good games that they and fans alike would love to play. Which has given us both classics and even lay the foundation of its own genre (MOBA).

Blizzard now is basically a puppet on a string, dancing to what ever tune ActivisionBlizzard say they should dance to.

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Dude…seriously don’t embarrass yourself.
Blizz never was fast. Goats…Valkyrie god mode mercy… There has been plenty of times with the game broken for months, even almost a year, and there was NO covid when that happened.
The fanboys excuse of staying at home is not available this time. Hhaaha

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Hero bans have shafted OWL arguably more than everyone else.

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What you implicitly mean is nothing but a normal business lifecycle, and you can say it about almost any other business: they start as small startups of enthusiasts, open to risk and free to experiment, but after a certain number of years into success and rapid growth they turn into a corporation, most often a very conservative at that.

A textbook example is “Steve Ballmer’s era Microsoft”. In IT alone there are plenty more examples, from IBM to Google. And gaming industry is not an exception, it’s a business like any other and follows the same evolutionary patterns. The only question is if the business in question can reform and change their old ways and habits, to have a second wind.

Look at the story of BioWare’s life, their rise above others with Baldur’s Gate, Neverwinter Nights, entering the golden age with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age: Origins and the first Mass Effect, the end of the apogee with Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3 (the original ending of which sparked much controversy), and then questionable Dragon Age: Inquisition (DA2 already had much criticism), and a total disaster with Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem.

VALVe is another textbook example, hitting the jackpot with Half-Life series, success with Team Fortress series, Portal, Left 4 Dead, Counter Strike, at some point they got used so much to the never-ending flow of revenue from Steam, they just rested on laurels: why bother making games when you can just release hats/skins? And for a lengthy period there was nothing but that. Artifact was late to the market the same way Heroes of the Storms was. Same thing with Dota Underlords – there were already plenty of clones of the Dota Autochess mod. Alyx, I am not sure how well she did, something tells me it was not a landslide victory.

Companies are a living organism, they grow and evolve, new blood comes to replace the old founders and their visions. Sometimes management gets too much fixated on profits and their decisions have a drastic reflection on the game, but they stubbornly believe it’s not their fault, but the developers’. Sometimes overzealous directors pollute their games with modern social agenda and politics of societies they live in, which is met with sharp criticism which they refuse to accept.

It’s life. The only thing we as customers can do is to vote with our wallets. Just hope Blizz will improve and OW2 won’t be ideal, but noticeably better.

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Nah closer to maybe 40%.

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You weren’t here for 2016 Summer Games Loot box debacle were you? They clearly implemented a system they knew they went against their advertising, they knew we wouldn’t like, and then tried to paint it as the community just being unreasonable rather than them implementing and unreasonably cash grabbing event. Then they tried to sweep it all under the rug by attempting a stealth change to their advertisement page. They knew it would alienate people, but they deemed it acceptable since they knew they could rake in cash by exploiting the gamble mechanics that were in place at the time.

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It all startet in WoW WotLK and made an absurd turn in Cataclysm. They tried to cater to everyone and ended up catering to the minority and so they went down from 12.5milion subs down to around 2milion in the west at best.
Over 10 years have passed and they still didnt learn their lesson that it is impossible to cater to everyone and make everyone happy so instead make the majority happy. Well thats what a Company with brain would do but not Blizzard, no they went full “tryhard” to cater to everyone and ended up dissatisfying everyone, even those who play BFA arent happy at all. It seems like they dont know what a “core audience” is. At least they dont know anymore what it means. They had a core audience in Vanilla/TBC and the game skyrocketed, then in mid WotLK they kinda banned it and then the game nose dived, especially in WoD LUL

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