Blizzard needs to stop with this EA style progression.
The general idea is “grind for this hero or open your wallet.” Skill no longer defines you as a player (especially with tanks who wanna play comp with Mauga as meta) - instead its your playtime and your wallet.
EA did this exact same thing with all of their titles, not exactly locking up every single character behind a paywall with no key but your money, but giving the alternative of a crazy grind as well.
So my point is Blizzard is just as bad as EA and I stand by it.
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Agreed, I also hate how Bizzard keeps blatantly lying to us, by claiming that they grindwall/paywall heroes so that: “new players won’t feel overwhelmed”.
When the only reason they locked heroes is to sell the $20 “Complete Hero Collection” to new players. 
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It’s a cognitive void over there. The studio went from innovative games that disrupted the industry, to bootlegging monetization schemes of competitors. And delivering too little, too late, with obviously egregious tech and dark patterns.
They sit around on the “other games are doing it” complacency.
And they actually expect paychecks?
Way to direct your team down from AAA to w/e the industry term is for garbage.
ft. worst reviewed title ever.
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Community complained that new players were overwhelmed with no direction. They’re not lying by saying that’s the reason. You can disagree without accusing people of lying.
Hero’s should be free for everyone.
New players should have an option to unlock all characters or get to pick lets say 3 hero’s in each class.
OW1 didn’t have this issue because they thought before releasing something.
Hero difficulty scale. Where did it go?
Why did I pick up OW1 when it released and go hmm easy character okay I’ll try this at first.
It’s a downgraded game that encourages this horrid mindset with some delusional reasoning for bad design and greed. These problems had a solution but those got deleted so.
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Well you’re standing behind a really lopsided comparison lol.
I stopped trying to unlock the legends in Apex because the grind to obtain the legends is so astronomically high. Just one would take weeks of grinding and nonstop play. (And I don’t even like the game enough to play it.)
Edit: from a Reddit post (which is anecdotal) it’ll take about 30 hours (1.5 hours per level) to unlock a single Legend.
By comparison, I think I only need LW and Mauga, I could get Mauga knocked out by the end of the season and if I actually felt like obtaining LW I could get it knocked out in an evening. And that’s the free path (and in a game I enjoy).
To suggest the two games (companies) are on the same plane is asinine. You can make the case that it’s greedy to some degree, but 35 (passive) wins and some practice mode time is EZPZ.
While this is true, the community-requested solution to this issue was for Blizzard to add proper tutorials, which is… not what we got
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Other games are actually doing it a lot more fairly.
Like ya fortnite has battlepass but it lets you earn it back with grind, with other games it’s either give me money or time with this game it’s give me both it’s pathetic they are even allowed to do this lawfully.
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Technically the battlepass is grindable for OW if you do the weeklies for like 6 months, but Valorant makes the full battlepass completely unattainable unless you pay money.
Well, according to the recent talk svb had with Jared, they’re looking into having new heroes available to everyone in the future.
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I still remember people crying in the forums about how the BP was going to be a “grind” and you can literally finish it way easier than any other out there in the market.
It is a grind, it takes 200+ games.
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Blizzard is lying, because they knows that brand new players who buy the “$20 Complete Hero Collection” will be “overwhelmed”, but they don’t care because they got an extra $20 from them.
If Blizzard actually cared about helping new players that are “overwhelmed”, they would create comprehensive tutorials for each hero.
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They spent 5 years making half a game, a shop and a BP. have some consideration for all the hard work it took to make this happen lol seriously though it’s gonna take them another 5 just to add a proper tutorial
As someone who at the moment splits time between both Blizzard (World of Warcraft and a small amount of Overwatch) and EA (SWTOR) games, I can certainly see the similarities.
And considering the news reports about how regulators around the world are not particularly pleased with certain aspects of the battle pass system and have threatened to draft legislation about those aspects, seems like OP is not alone in this matter.
Right… that’s why they sell the heroes to them. “Pay us and we’ll let you be as overwhelmed as you want.”
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Well yeah. Why would someone pay to unlock the heroes if they weren’t ready to try them? Also reduces smurfing, so I’m ok with it.
You really think it helps guide them?
Oh, to be young and naive.
No. It’s a pay to not grind mechanic. Has nothing to do with ensuring someone is ready. It is quite literally an excuse to validate more microtransactions.
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Yes, EA make you grind a substantial amount more - I don’t deny that. But my point - now I can provide the context and I think you’ll agree is that nobody has any place to praise Blizzard for their game model and also criticize EA - given the fact OW is following a version of EA games that is extremely similar to some of their more generous titles?
You won’t find a highly successful game today which is literally pay to win. There’s no wonder why EA games fail every single time now and Blizzard is recording their lowest play counts on OW2.
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I don’t think it was a big guidance help. I also don’t think there’s any way to design a meaningful tutorial for this game, because even many people who have been playing for years don’t know how to play it. I really think the bigger reason was to deter smurfs now that the game is F2P.