Getting Superb Value

Paraspark-1263 · November 14, 2018, 3:21am

I want to start this post by sincerely thanking the Blizz Overwatch team for all they have done and where the game is today. I feel the game is in the best spot it has ever been and feel like we are still a long ways off from the apex of the games golden age. Please know that just because there aren’t a ton of these “thank you” posts that there are tons of us out there that just don’t have the time to be super active on the forums. I have been working on this post since a few weeks before BlizzCon and wasn’t sure it was going to be totally needed. Now I think it is.

Scope of Post: What a great value this game is; List of frequently discussed issues; Why 99% of those are not a problem; Spitballing some suggestions

TL;DR = The game is in great shape, the developers contain many of the top 100 game developers in all of human history. People need to be more patient and trust that Blizz has a plan and is executing it well.

Great Value -

I purchased the game shortly before Ana was out and bought the CoolKids version for $60. Didn’t even realize it was special as from what I had seen the game was worth $60 and normally I am stingy and wouldn’t buy skins like that. I played with friends for a long time who all eventually left and around Season 9 I decided to go all-in and get serious about Competitive. The hours I have recorded mean I have paid pennies on the dollar per hour of entertainment. I played WoW thru Cata and loved it (and knew the value was high there as well). However, not even WoW can boast that kind of value for money. I say all of this so people who come here to complain or whine (i.e. "I PAID $60 I DEMAND BASTION BE BUFFED AND NEW MAPS EACH WEEK!) will step back and realize it is highly unlikely they can get anywhere near this value for money with other forms of entertainment. Some will say they have been dumping cash in for loot boxes and skins etc. so have a much larger total cost. To which I say THANK YOU for subsidising my gaming, just be aware nobody is making you do that and it is entirely possible to never buy loot boxes (sorry Blizz not trying to hurt your sales here) I still have 11k in-game-coin after this latest Halloween so your poor impulse control to patiently await getting your fav skin for free is not Blizzard’s fault.

Issues Frequently Debated -

Overall Balance
Brigitte
Mercy
Community Toxicity
Lack of Lore
Development Resource Usage

BALANCE = Objectively the game is more balanced than it has ever been. If you watched the OWWC closely you should be able to tell the comps used were very diverse and hardly homogenized. People flipped their lids over Brig because she caused the Dive Hegemony to be weakened. I understand people had tons of hours in on Tracers and Genjis and were pissed when they suddenly were countered (“BUT BRIG TAKES ZERO SKILL!” will address this in her section). However it was for the good of the game. Part of the issue around the complaints is that not everyone comes from a MOBA background. Other competitive FPS are VERY homogenized with each character basically being the same. MOBAs are obviously the opposite and there are hundreds if not thousands of different abilities in many of those games. So if you have played those you know the reason High Mobility heroes like Tracer is because in any team-based-combat game Movement is always going to be the most powerful ability/skill. In MOBAs you almost universally build some boots or movement item first etc. The reason is because a mildly talented player who puts in enough time to learn the maps and becomes comfortable at running across them as fast as possible will have a huge advantage over anyone else who does not. You can have the BFG and still a fast moving, lightly armored, pea-shooter wielding munchkin is going to dance circles around you till you are dead. Literally the only way to control those types of characters/items/abilities is with some form of CC. So that is why Brig had a stun: literally no other ability would counter a Tracer. But unless you play for the Shanghai Dragons you can and should switch to one of her counters.

Every game (and if you watched OWL you saw this) was 80% the same 6 heroes. People love to complain about “too much CC in this game!” Yet in reality there is very little. People say “stun lock” and have no idea what that means. One bash stun plus one knockback =/= stun lock (just like poor play =/= throwing and telling someone their pick is less than ideal =/= toxicity/griefing).

Here is where the term originated:

h t t p s:// w w w .youtube. com / watch?v=kmkhh7Dttlk

Here is the list of abilities that CC in League of Legends for example:

There are sooooooo many ability concepts that Overwatch can and probably will add as we go along. I knew 100% that they’d nerf Brig out of the gate because they introduced her at a ridiculous power level. That is Blizz’s fault but the Community then compounded it by also being extreme and ridiculous. Obviously they’d nerf her down (5 or 6 times at my last count) but ALSO they will add heroes and abilities to counter her too! And I was right, enter Daddy with “Go to your room young lady!” Ultimate. Ohhh and now we see Ashe will also have great play against Brig. Shocker for anyone not familiar with Battle Arena style games. So onto the Swedish Support!

BRIG = In the recent past easily the most whined about action by Blizz is obviously Brigitte. Full Disclosure: I like Brig, I have over a 100 hours on her and I agreed she launched way too powerful. However she is very balanced now and yet tilted people are STILL wanting her deleted/nerfed into a dumpster. The people typing/saying these things do NOT 98% of the time know wtf they are talking about. Instead they are parroting some talking points they have heard OTHERS spout since her release. This is because humans naturally look for excuses when they fail at something to “save face” or what not with a peer group. In fact it is VERY difficult and a constant struggle to criticize yourself accurately and effectively. So when Brig was released admittedly in an overtuned state I knew exactly where this was going (similar things happened in WoW and back to the friggin Atari I am sure). Nobody ever knows how to counter a new hero until they have been around a while. Same thing happened with Doom and if we could just wait a month or two after release we would have better data on what tweaks to make. In general though the FPS PvP online world hates hates HATES independent Supports with good survivability. So after Brig’s release a TON of people threw their hands up and said nothing could be done. Other, smarter, players went about finding her weaknesses and exploiting them. If you have not already read it this is a classic write-up about Scrubs and Gamers:

h t t p :// w w w .sirlin . net / articles/ playing-to-win

Here is another decent post about how some improve while others complain:

h t t p s : / / old. reddit . co m / r / Guiltygear/ comments/ 4jjz2a/ theory_of_improving_in_fighting_games/

Lets say you just got combo’d by Brig as Tracer. Should you watch the killcam to see how you were super out of position and can’t just blink past the shields, one-clip Mercy and Recall out like you used to? Naw, go to Team Chat with “&$@!ing Baguette! So stupid and OP. She ruined this WHOLE GAME. It would be ok if she took SKILL but she doesn’t. My 400 hours on Tracer are MEANINGLESS in the face of such TYRANNY! Blizz is tanking their whole game by catering to the casual losers instead of elite alpha pewpewers like me.” The “no skill” argument is falacious, as it is with Moira as it can APPEAR you are doing good with her when you are really just losing slower. Go watch the OWWC and see how many times a Brig player misses a Whip Shot and tell me again about how you don’t have to aim with her. In a world where guns exist it is asinine to complain about someone who only uses a melee weapon. There was a crazy Scottish badass who went ashore in WWII at Normandy with bagpipes and friggin claymore. Nobody would ever suggest he was OP by putting himself at a disadvantage like that.

When people whine about this they should know this is how they come off sounding:

h t t p s: / / i . r edd. it / 9 o 7 7z7ln756z .jpg

All of the talking points are basically the same and they ALL fail a simple logic test. If she TRULY was braindead and easy then why can’t other people pick her up and do those same things RIGHT BACK to you? They will shrug off this very salient question and pivot to “I don’t WANT to play her! She is UNFUN to play and UNFUN to play against!” Again, at least 50% of that statement is false (but pretty much all of it is wrong too). They will talk about how CC is ruining the game saying things like “Poor Rein! Just LOOK at the STATE he is in!! He gets slapped around and booped and now this TOO??” Never seeing the irony that apparently ALL of that other CC is ok but Brig, naw that is black magik and we need to burn her on a pyre. The reason she was so powerful at launch was because her CD on Bash was way too low. She could use it for Movement (the most powerful ability in an Arena remember). Now that she can’t do that she has to be careful about overextending in the same way that Rein does (who is still the best tank hands down). People were mad about the Grav-Dragon meta which was stupid but only VERY indirectly related to Brig. Nerf Hanzo the one doing the damage with his stupidly OP kit? Nope. Nerf Mercy who is boosting his damage constantly (including Dragon)? Nope. First lets nerf Brig 4 times and Zarya once and see where we are. This is one of my few criticisms of Blizz here. They were negligent in how she was released and then did a B- job of correcting the situation.

Some people were also mistaking their own burn-out with Brig “ruining” their game. Part of it is that games change, especially one like Overwatch that is neither a MOBA, or a FPS or even a directly linked version of a combo of those. It truly is a unique almost totally new genre (and years from now you’ll be able to look back and see that it spawned a ton of imitators). So people DO have a ton of time in on characters like Tracer and Genji. And what they never realized is that it was that TIME spent practicing that made them good. As much as they like to suggest it is true very few players in the WHOLE WORLD can just pick up Brig and replicate what someone can do who has 50-100 hours on her. Blizz has experienced this before so I was a little surprised they released her the way they did and let history repeat itself. Now, even though she has already been nerfed several times (making her niche but useful) people keep repeating the same talking point bullcrap. She is VERY easy to kill imo, and if they nerf her again she won’t even be what we used to call a “pubstomp” champ. She will just be totally useless and anyone who dares take her will have a looooong line of ego-wounded asshats too happy to see you fall so they can teabag your virtual corpse. So please if someone could let me know when we are done nerfing Brig so I can buy her golden weapon? Not really going to do that just to have her dumpstered and never play her again . People built her abilities up in their own minds and could not get past the emotional responses from that first week they played against her.

The US World Cup team is a PRIME example of this self-limiting tendency. When I saw the interview with Zach before the OWWC I just knew they werne’t going to make it to the finals. Soooooooooo much trash talk and compounded it with “I hate GOATS, everyone hates GOATS, Brig is the worst please delete!” Which is an ok opinion to have but as a semi-pro hoping to be very pro a VERY hubristic stance. Playing to represent the USA and its hundreds of millions of people is apparently not incentive enough to take Brig seriously and not act like a toddler. I have never rooted against a US team in my life but not gonna lie when Zach was floundering on Volskya I did. Switching like 8976 times and still getting schooled by players he and the US coaching staff foolishly dismissed as inferior made a nice Schadenfreud Pie. Hopefully they learn and grow from the experience. In American Football there is a saying that in the NFL you never look past an opponent; that is, any team can beat you any given Sunday and the second you take that for granted you will lose. Now the US coaches are definitely 75% to blame as well because they obviously did not prepare the team well for the tournament and they made horrible decisions in game. Hydration should have been on Pharah showing how GOATS gets picked apart by her etc.

I do agree that GOATS is not an ideal comp meta (if you know about MOBAs you know it is all too easy to fall into a tank meta if they are too strong) but it is hardly set in stone. There are great counters and you just have to know what to switch to in what situations etc. They don’t stop with that though and instead whined “She is unfun to play tho!” which is hilarious to me because I don’t think I have ever NOT had a blast playing her. They said the same stuff about Moira too (too easy! no skill! she can kill half our team and heal hers AT THE SAME TIME!!!) and it wasn’t true then. I do not like characters like Tracer, or Genji or Zen even for my own personal playstyle. I almost always seek out and play a healer/support as that is what I enjoy.

Yet, when these same players were dominating the scene they said the things I am saying here. "Genji is not OP man, you try it then! Let’s see you get kills with a Nano-blade (i.e. ummm which mouse button should I click? :P). And yet, when they were dominating I would constantly tell people to deal with it. Anytime someone would be cluttering comms with bullcrap like “Great, they have a Tracer/Widow/McRee Smurf and we got this Throwing Torb!” I would let them know they are wrong. First, throwing =/= making sub-optimal choices. Actual throwing is bullcrap like trolling teammates with Mei’s wall, Symm’s old TP etc. where you are ACTIVELY working against your team. So Torb is fine, suck it up and move on. Secondly, those are not Smurfs lol. Some people can just aim better than you, again DEAL and move on.

I don’t like a LOT of characters in LOTS of games but I still play them all as much as I can stand. This does two things EVERY game I do this in mimimum:

Ups my overall game-sense and map knowledge. Gives me an idea of what each person playing FEELS like and what stressors/non-stressors are for that char. What are their CDs like and how long/far do their kits actually go? Not everybody does this to their own detriment. I am not good at Tracer but I played her enough so I would understand how to counter and/or position myself. Same thing with Widow; I am not into snipers in really any game even pure FPS. Yet, I play them enough to understand voice lines, animations (and cancels), scope feel, and most important to any support = Where to hide/stand so you don’t get one-shot. So honestly for some of these crybabies the game was going to be over about now anyway. They are burned out and just blaming it on Brig. Which is totally fine. Be done, go play something else because if you are going to get worked up emotionally every time the game changes you are going to leave eventually anyway. And here is a lot of latent hostility these people hold towards ALL Support/Healers in ANY game.

[[[Late Breaking EDIT: So rumor is Bash going through shields is dead on the PTR. So is Brig effectively, I won’t be buying her golden weapon as I feared and never playing her again in Comp unless there is an especially oppressive Tracer I guess. I am disappointed of course, these nerfs by drips and drabs is excruciating. Hasn’t even been in the game 9 months and she is already trash tier now. She is the weakest healer so just a giant liability for her team. If they were going to do this they should have done it much sooner. Imagine if in late 2016 they had nerfed Tracer to only one Blink, then a month later increased her Recall CD to 10 sec etc. In addition in today’s patch there was another nerf disguised as a “bug fix” about the cancel on Whip Shot. The silver-lining being that apparently her shield is supposed to block Shatter tho has never ever done so, they claim it is fixed. So counting ALL power reductions for her we are at 7 nerfs, 8 if the no-bash-thru-shield happens. Literally the most nerfed in the history of the game. I am not quitting the game, never was, but I am definitely pissed that Blizz has done this in such a slow fashion which helped me keep wasting my time playing a hero they apparently never intended to be viable instead of mastering my Ana or Zen. Meanwhile Doom got bug fixes that buffed him and his nerf is VERY minor. Still no nerf for Hanzo the Wunderkind. Support players get crapped on again; can’t say I am shocked, just sad that hate wins again. Moira, Ana and Lucio will be my go to picks because I don’t play Mercy but I am expecting mostly one of those 3 with Mercy in all comp games going forward (I mean who would take one without a gun when literally all of the others have a gun?). Truly sad that they invested so much Lore into Brig as well now that she won’t be used. If I were her chief creator/developer I’d feel my time had been wasted as well. Next time Blizz makes any Paladin-like character in a game I don’t think I will trust them enough to play it lol. Fool me once etc.]]]

MERCY = She has been a staple of the game since launch and that is fine but her players have been the target of so much vitriol. DPS mains are usally fine with Supports like Mercy, that is why that archetype is in many games (I have nothing against those who enjoy playing it, I did for large portions of my life as well). Same with Zen, both characters who have a LOT more upside than Brig when played by skilled people. The reason DPS elitist ego-cases are fine with those is because the vast majority of the damage they add to their team gets counted on a DPS character’s score. I guarantee you if all of the extra damage that Discord enabled was counted on Zen’s scorecard there would be similar forum riots about it. Same thing with Mercy’s damage boost. Unless you are basically pocketing them they will hate on your skill level. If you give a Support too much independence like a Moira with a decent escape ability there will be whining. Never mind that if you are getting 4 golds with her every match you are most likely still losing because you aren’t playing her to maximize value. When you create a Paladin-esque Healer (basically any high-armored support with average-ish heals and good survivability) that can’t be assassinated by any and all flankers then the chants of “DELETE HER!” will echo on the forums until the servers go dark.

So while I was glad that Mercy got a bit of a healing nerf because she was almost still a must-pick I tend to stand with my fellow Support players wanting to play their favorite in a semi-usable fashion. If DPS players had their way though the Supports would all be VERY homogenized and only doing two things: Buff their damage and heal their wounds from their terribad positioning. Overall the most recent Support Balance patch was very successful and if this new tweak on Mercy back up a notch is the last one it will be one of the best balance patches in any game I have ever seen. To say though that being a Mercy OTP takes zero skill is just flat out wrong. She has a bullseye on her back all game and has to be a master at Guardian Angel EVERY time it is off CD. Knowing who to boost when and when to heal and when to let someone die is much harder to learn than how to Flick shots. Thinking that Aim is the end-all be-all of Team Battle Arena games is seriously hubristic and I can only hope it is because they are mostly FPS players who don’t have the experience to know better. The LAST thing that Blizz should do though is listen to these folks. There are TONS of FPS out there with very homogenized characters and where Aim is 90% the only skill valued. Go play those if that is what you want. Similar to how if you want tons of PvE content in Overwatch you should go do that elsewhere. There are TONS of those games already, please stop trying to make Overwatch generic and the same. Mercy players are good, if they are Diamond or GM or whatever they deserve that rank just as much as you.

TOXICITY = Every single time an opponent in mid-match has complained about Brig (cuz I am not even having to work hard as they are super tilted) I tell them to switch to her and do it right back to me if it is so easy. I already don’t get outplayed by many Brigs but never has someone taken up that challenge and shoved those words back down her lovely Swedish throat. So that is my only suggested change to Brig: Add an entry to her hero notes about a hidden Passive called “To The Ground!” with the F1 text for her abilites reading “Automatically tilts any narcissitic or emotional man-child into a frothing state of self-destruction.” Cuz that is what I will be farming in the meantime: tears. I actively use her in specific scenarios and ways hoping it actually DOES tilt/frazzle an opponent in a key role. I have seen it happen enough and continue to try and improve my ability to replicate it. I don’t doubt many of you have similar experiences, Rein play for example is all about “assert your dominance” and similar psych games. That is not what causes toxicity though. The Endorsement system was a great move and definitely helps from what I have seen. It just needs some minor tweaks but maintaining a level 3 or 4 is very very easy unless you are a total jerk. The LFG system has also greatly helped. It is now easier than ever to get out of the ELO basement if you have a $20 mic. The lack of stats being exposed to the player, while a good experiment at the game’s launch is now the cause of a lot of toxic behavior. With private profiles (another thing that did not ruin the game despite the more forum tantrums) Blizz should feel free to expose nearly all stats to a player and let them keep parts private or all public at their discretion.

Overall though Toxicity is MUCH lower here than any other major competitive game I have ever played. I think I have only run into a few true hard-throwers/griefers. I have only been trolled hard once by a teammate in comp by taking my preferred hero, using Mei wall to block me constantly etc. etc. MOBAs are probably the worst, although I don’t play console so who knows about those kids. There are just so many players it can sometimes feel like Blizz isn’t trying to put a dent in the jerks that do exist. Millions of players though literally require a mostly automated system like the Report system. It is sad that it is occassionally used against an innocent target but by and large 90% of it is good reports censuring toxic players. People complain and say “Blizz just doesn’t care anymore, if they ever did! all they care about is OWL and screw the regular players.” Just…no, sorry but no. I guarantee the team members at Blizz that work on Overwatch literally care more about the game than any of us and certainly more than the whiners. It is not only their livelihood with which they support their families and communities it is a work of their art that they carved into this world with loooooong hours few of us can even fathom. I work in IT and I would never want to be a coder for a game company. I can make waaaaaaaay more in the financial industry with WAAAAY better hours. So the “Devs” and people like Kaplan care a whole lot. Guys like Kaplan could have walked away from gaming YEARS ago and lived super comfortably as some of the richest people on the planet. This is another reason that YouTubers and Streamers alike need to step back and reasses themselves. Stylosa makes great videos that I nearly always enjoy but his latest (again with Brig bashing ← dad joke) contains a frequent comment about how he dislikes the “It is ready when it is ready” philosophy of Blizzard’s. Valve does the same thing. People get super pissed if a promised feature/expansion doesn’t come out when promised. This naturally creates downward pressure from management onto the actual Devs to work crazy stupid “crunch time” hours to meet the promised date. This burns them out faster, weakens the quality of the game and overall is just not morally ok.

LACK OF LORE = This one definitely had been getting to me for awhile but after this latest BlizzCon I think I have a decent theory around why it is this way. Obviously Chu and his bards can spin out content fast if they wanted to. However, they seem to be slow-walking the progress forward of the timeline so they can use it to launch new heroes and maps. So while I would watch a TV show every week about Overwatch I get why the Lore progression is slow. Adding new heroes to the game takes time. It is MUCH easier to balance a 2D game like LoL with tons of heroes than it is a 3D like Overwatch (not even SMITE is as complex). It is a new thing they are doing and slow and steady wins the race. I wouldn’t mind more past/prequel content though like a comic series about the whole Omnic Wars (ala Clone Wars) despite what YourOverwatch and UnitLost seem to think. My second guess is that they are building towards a narrative climax similar to Avengers: Civil War. Takes a few years to get there though and like WoW once the Dark Portal is opened and conquered it is kinda downhill from there (I did enjoy Wrath tho). What the community CAN and should do though is start pumping out tons of Fan Fic to fill the demand.

DEVELOPMENT RESOURCE USAGE = This one is hard to understand for me because I just don’t get why people think they are entitled to additional free content after the game has been out for 2 years (and they HAVE received new free content). Making OWL was ALWAYS a thing and if not immediately today will eventually help subsidise the game for the rest of us plebes. I personally was thinking the OWL success was kind of a coin toss until they announced the new teams. Way more than I would have expected and tons of cash (with double the franchise fees) from serious and solid players in sports as well as esports. Again, Blizz is doing something new here that hasn’t been done before. They are trying to get to a place where each team lives in their city and reps them. This is one of the things that makes regular sports so popular. If Blizz pulls it off it will not only be a huge sea change in esports but it will continue to not only subsidise our own gaming but will inject our favorite hobby into the mainstream. The new Replay system is an amazing achievement on its own as well.

People don’t necessarily know enough about gaming engines and software development to realize that to take us to this new amazing height Blizz has had to re-invent, re-code and just re-build a ton of things other engines already had done (but they are antiquated and have drawbacks in other areas). So while people can ignore my opinion about the Competitive scene since I am not a GM or OWL or even a Streamer (though this is weird because nobody would suggest Bill Belichek doesn’t know tons about the NFL despite having never played in it) I am a software, data and networking expert. Even though I tread precariously close to the “appeal to authority” fallacy I just argued against please take my word for it that Blizz’s code is smooth like butter. Some have heard that you can’t just take a skin-making artist and have them fix Shatter bugs etc. It is even more deep than that though where if you have two developers of equal talent (never happens) you can’t take a project from Dev A and slide it over to Dev B with zero impact. During the dark ages of dev we judged developers based on how many lines of code they turned out. Even a non-coder should be able to understand why that was a ridiculous metric.

Blizz is not perfect but if a giant alien head descended from the clouds and demanded to see our best gaming devs with a loud “SHOW US WHAT YOU GOT!!!” I would vote for Blizz to be our rep every single time.

Conclusion and Suggestions -

I have been playing Blizz games since the first Warcraft (still have the manual) and have never been disappointed by the quality of their product. The value for money has never made me uninstall and snap a disc in half. However, since they are mortal and do make mistakes I just want to toss out a few things they could do and kind of rank them in order of what I think their difficulty-to-implement would be (still a guess).

Their are lies, damn lies and statistics. But seriously, now that we have Private Profiles and things like Visor are banned (totally understand this call) please give us as many stats about our individual games as possible. My Brig stats are all messed up because of COURSE they have trended downwards but how have I been doing since the last nerf? Was I as good as I think I was in that last match? I commend Blizz for attempting to make people feel better by not shoving their failure in their face constantly. As a hardcore gamer I like that stuff but I get it isn’t for everyone. Now though the Medal System has backfired and needs to be reworked.
The POTG system. Zarya, Ana and many other characters deserve this algorithm to be reworked if you are going to ever make playing Tank or Support as demanded as Damage. Possible idea would be to have four cards of potential POTGs voted on by everyone to see which is played.
Death cam should probably not show ulti level and if it is a Dva bomb I want to see it from the bomb perspective, same with tire, Symm turrets etc etc. Show me how I died so I can learn from it.
LFG system seems like it was rushed out to me which is fine to be honest. We needed it badly at the time it came and has largely been awesome. Few QoL tweaks though: When someone is booted from a group do not let them rejoin unless invited. By default keep the listings sorted by type if I have clicked that column to sort that way instead of making me do it everytime. Change the icons; nobody knows what the blue box is until I tell them. The yellow icon is okay-ish but wouldn’t hurt to put the actual letters “LFG” on it or some such.
Allow roles to be unlocked in the middle of a match. Maybe even only as an option if you have a leaver. Otherwise it totally screws the backfill player.
I understand at higher ranks nobody uses LFG and that is why they want Role Queue (I personally would not but I am not them). So it should be possible to build one into LFG where a Master can Role Queue as say a Main Tank. Listings on their LFG would show how many openings for each slot there is (will be long list of Tanks and Supports needed obviously lol) so if a DPS main wants to just get a game in and not wait they can choose maybe an Off Tank role. I think you would have to role-lock these though and that is where I am not such a huge fan. Blizz hasn’t done this already because when you canabalize your own users in one queue into many queues it kills games off frequently.
Test out a Role Queue option in Arcade.
Test out a Draft/Ban option in Arcade (possibly maps as well).
Increase the number of Friends List slots by a factor of 10.
Enable us to change our hero skin more than just once at the beginning of the match.
Even if someone is logged into the Mobile app 24/7 please show me when they last played Overwatch so I can delete them.
Create more Player Icons. Not sure why this doesn’t happen almost weekly. Should be able to buy these with in-game-coins as well.
Do not release anymore Damage heroes until there are 4 new Supports and 4 new Tanks. They will still be vastly outnumbered by Damage heroes.
Come up with some new rewards for Comp points; possibilities = Player Icons, Voice Lines, Emotes and other weapon re-skins (diamond, matte black, hot pink etc.)
Instead of forcing people to buy a whole new account (and lose all their cosmetics) just to get an SR reset maybe allow them once every year or 18 months to pay $20 for a reset. I would buy this. I will steadily continue to climb but my blase attitude about comp at launch has definitely prolonged that process. People are already sorta doing it so should be able to pick up some cash I should think. Since it would be super popular out of the gate maybe limit it via a lottery for each season. X number get to purchase it, if they don’t within 24 hours goes down list. They can’t purchase again for long time anyway so after a season or three should be stabalized.

Basic Character Tweaks that I am not married to but I would definitely take to a dance:

Hanzo: Make Dragon MUCH more translucent like you did with Coalescence.
Junkrat: Bring trap in line with other forms of CC (You can Moira Fade out of Grav but not this trap??)
Mei: Have her ult and primary fire to put out Torb Lava as well as Ashe DoT effects.
Soldier: Allow him to throw his heal circle.
Sombra: Hacked targets need a more visible effect. Either make her Trans glow less or have some more HP.
Orisa: She deserves more health or armor. She has a tiny pool of both in comparison to Dva for example despite being entirely metal.
Rein: Gotta reduce some of his damage, touching anything else in his kit will dumpster him but he is obviously only bad in like 2 scenarios.

Super Cool Stretch Goals That Would Blow Us Away:

Create/Test an Arcade mode where a 7th person plays as Athena as a battlefield-general type and gets to drop supplies and other goodies to teammates as well as direct their movements with intel and prompts. I would love this and I hope the Starcraft players would too but not sure tbh.
Start making and taking Polls on things people have mentioned they want. Maybe Role Queue isn’t that popular but maybe it is like 90% of M and GM players want it. Maybe a Garbage Tier to punish frequent Trolls (similar to LoL’s) would be welcomed where they only play comp with other Trolls. What map is the least liked? Which is favored? How can you tweak the weaker map to be more like the better one? Would people be ok with 2 heroes being released at once (or more) even if it causes an enormous chaotic and unstable meta (I personally would not but who knows)? Do people really want an in-game Guild System? What things would people want to buy with in-game-coins and comp-points (could be Guild things here too)? DO THESE POLLS IN THE CLIENT NOT ON THESE FORUMS.
Create a Netflix/Amazon/VOD Television show with animation. It would be bad as a Live Action deal so thank goodness they never made one of those for WoW, phew!
Allow grouped people to go into the Training Arena together to test things (pretty sure this isn’t a thing currently)
Create combo Emotes. Like say Dva buys her half and Lucio his half and if they both hit it they do some cool emote together. Tons of possibilities and these would be RIDICULOUSLY popular so can charge in-game-coins, comp-points or even cold hard cash for them.
Off-Season Tournaments: During the break between Comp Seasons have tourneys for each rank. You can either join as a group or solo and get placed together. Entrance fee = comp points and Rewards = the usual sprays, icons etc. or even just loot boxes. Have them play a double-elim style with max 3 games pre-scheduled. Entrance fee keeps folks from not showing up etc.
Better Tutorial about Comp for newbies. Quick Play is kinda weird sometimes as you can get rolled the entire Junkertown map just to hold at the end for “Victory” lol. So have some mode or experience that people can see and interact with before having to learn it the hard way.
Unexpected Event: Similar to the Plague Outbreak in WoW have something where only in QP actual Dragons or Zombies come for EVERYBODY or even like King Kong etc.

If you read this far I greatly appreciate your time and attention. Thanks for considering my opinions with an open mind and interest in making this already exceptional game even better. Believe in Blizz, they are human and make mobile games sometimes but by a wide margin they make some of the greatest games in history.