I recently came back to Overwatch after having quit due to the end of Overwatch 1.
It’s been an interesting experience, a lot of things feel better, and a lot of things feel worse, but I still enjoy the game just about as much as I used to.
One of my favorite things to work towards in OW1 was golden guns for your favorite heroes, which would take a while of placing for each role and playing games each season to make sure you get as many points at the end of the season as possible, and it would take you at least three to five seasons if you were an average player.
However, apparently OW2 decided that the time commitment of playing 10 placement matches for every role every season over a long period of time was not enough. Instead of being a test of dedication and patience, I guess it’s now more of a trial to see how much you’re willing to put yourself through for something shiny.
In case you didn’t know, the current system awards absolutely no competitive points at the end of a season. The base system is 10 points for winning a comp game, and 5 points for a draw (which is relatively rare). A golden gun costs 3,000 competitive points, which means you would have to win (not play, but WIN) 300 games of competitive (usually around 10-15 minutes per game) to get one. With an average 50% win rate as is expected, you would have to play at least 600 games of competitive for a single golden gun.
But don’t fret! There’s another convoluted, time-sucking system stapled on top of the base one! This is the Competitive Progress system, which grants you 3 progress for a win, and 1 progress for a loss. After you’ve accumulated 30 progress, you earn 100 competitive points. For reference, an average 50% win rate would require 20 games of competitive to fill this progress meter, which results in 1/30th of a golden gun. Got it?
Playing these 20 games with that average 50% win rate would also give you 100 competitive points from the base reward system, so every 20 games, on average, you should get 1/15th of a golden gun. Therefore, you need to play 300 games of competitive OW2 to get a single golden gun, and no amount of patience will change that.
If competitive games are 10 minutes on average, which is very generous as they can commonly be more than that with lengthy overtimes, this would require, on average, 3,000 minutes, or 50 hours, of you playing strictly competitive games of OW2. This does not include queue times, this does not include quick play or aim training practice, or anything else that’s relevant for spending this much time on this game.
The main thing that irritates me about this new system isn’t necessarily the amount of time it takes, at least not on its own. Technically, I’ve already been playing like this requirement was a thing anyways. I have 100 hours total in competitive play, and I have two golden guns. The main issue is just how grinding and demanding it feels with no easier options or freedom. You want a golden gun? Then you’d best start spending every moment of your free time queued up for competitive. Previously, it felt more free, where you could greatly accelerate the process by playing more than just your placement matches, but you would eventually get there anyways. Now there is only one method towards competitive points. Not skill, not patience, not passion, not dedication. Just grinding and devoting all your time to competitive. It encourages a very unhealthy mindset, of competitive being the required baseline for the full Overwatch experience, and the only one that’s therefore worth any time. It also makes it a lot easier to tilt when you’re forcing yourself into playing as many games in a row as you can stand. This can easily lead to losing streaks, which you would then be encouraged to beat yourself up about because losing is more than 50% slower than winning matches. The closer to your goal you get, the more you tilt and lose, which makes you further away.
I guess Overwatch just prefers people to hate quick play, have no other games they like playing, or have any other passions whatsoever, so they can be confined to just grinding and becoming increasingly upset at themselves and their teammates. It’s really jarring to me.
That was the thing I was shocked by the most when I came back to Overwatch. Quick play and arcade were just never played. Every career profile I looked at would show almost all time played was in Competitive. I don’t think I ever saw someone’s career profile look like that in OW1. Sure, comp could’ve been their top most played, but not by a gigantic margin, because people always played quick play to warm up or to wind down. But now, I don’t even think people bother to warm up first, they just get on and queue up for competitive. It’s sad, frankly. The Overwatch community has always been on the toxic side, sure, but we were more diverse before. Plenty of people almost exclusively played quick play because they only wanted to play Overwatch to chill out and have fun. But at this point, both because of the dev decisions and the natural progression of the community’s attitudes, everything is hyper competitive. People will accuse each other of throwing in quick play. People seriously make the argument that Overwatch is exclusively a competitive and serious game, even in Quick Play. It’s just… so sad. I still love this game and I probably always will, if not for the game itself then the characters, the story, and the friends I’ve made because of it. It just doesn’t feel like we have as much freedom as before, and there’s only one way to play, and one way to be. I’m tired, and I don’t want to have to grind for hours upon hours instead of just… having fun. Isn’t that the whole point of playing games? Maybe not anymore.