Id say it lost it’s direction when hard meta’s started to form, and the whole Tf2 counter swapping thing broke down.
And kind of reinforced the harder dived in the roles design and balance. Which then needed to be managed by the a system like roleque.
Ye truly open ques days were fun. But it was obvious it conflicted with how they wanted heroes to be designed and played.
Yeah, OG OW was truly an epitome of a decent implementation despite of the poor design imo.
I think conflicting design is better suited here, because it is clear they want to do the whole TF2 counter swap thing to build teams around pushing against key players and their set ups made to prompt them up.
But at the same time they gave players a lot of tools to directly keep you from having those open air fights like TF2 has where everyone is exposed to everyone else in a given LOS of map.
So kind can just stack a handfull of specific tanks to layer out what was suppose to keep them in check.
But at the same time riens big barrier, zarya’s bubbles, d.va’s and winston’s mobile area control and more. Are large part of the game and you really can’t just get rid of that to “solve” the issues.
The game still had way more soul though with end of match cards, player levels, public profiles, unique good looking rank icons, etc.
Just because a lot of player retention was scrubbed away for toxicity sake doesn’t mean everyone using them was toxic. They were in-game features I liked.
At least the gamble boxes were something to look forward to. The only thing you have to look forward to now is logging off.
Game exists only to drain player’s wallets, it needs no soul.
It lost after season 9 when garbage changes were made to core gameplay by card game Dev’s
Microsoft literally fired anyone that didn’t have to do with the shop, skins and monetization.
All that’s left is corporate zombies only there as a job to get paid and have zero passion whatsoever.
To people who don’t understand what Kaplan meant to this game.
Kaplan himself wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t just him that made it better, it was his team and the other people at Blizzard who all quit or got fired.
Kaplan had some opinions and views I didn’t agree with at all, such as his view that he didn’t care that lower ranks (like bronze-gold) were unbalanced and had no intention of ever having them be balanced because “you should strive to be at higher ranks”.
Basically “shut up and git gud”.
He wasn’t perfect but he had passion and was able to keep a lot.of.garbage out of the game interms of monetization and direction.
His balance was good until rq happened.
Going eSports route definitely did a lot of dmg.
It’s astounding that these scumbags actually were charging for new heroes during the first 10 seasons of “OW2”. It is so sad this game fell into the soulless monetization of today. All the passion, soul, care, it’s all gone.
Losing Jeff was the biggest detriment to this game imaginable after watching this whole video lol.
People stopped using end game cards, like if more then like three votes went through it was a miracle. Player levels still a thing and now have hero specific levels as well, public profiles were just abused by people to push people into heroes they currently don’t want to play, also like the rank icons are the same? like are talking about the portraits around your character?
Oh for sure. It’s an empty shell of what it was. Certainly unranked/ranked. If you just want to use the game assets to have fun it’s what it always was. But the core game is a mess, which tells you everything you need to know that after 11 seasons there really is no hope. They’re stringing everyone along for as long as possible. Most of the honest content creators are tiring of it now.