Conflicted design (and thus OWL). It’s a casual game trying SO darn hard to be serious e-sports. That’s the core issue IMO. OW is such a confused game with its’ initial marketing heavily focusing on attracting casual audience (it’s no coincidence why OW is “my first FPS ever” to so many people, it’s no coincidence why heroes like Mercy and Winston were so heavily marketed) but then trying to force a super serious competitive scene. These environments just don’t mix. You can’t please both.
No freaking wonder this is the most split playerbase I’ve ever seen. They did great work on alienating their own audience.
And fyi, I’m not against top-down balancing but focus on OWL throws in a completely different curve ball because it’s something players can’t actually realistically achieve. Yet they make balance decisions based on it which is completely asinine (btw, a streamer who was involved in their super secret speshul discord admitted balance decision were made only to make playoffs more entertaining , the video is gone now, I wonder why). 99% of the playerbase simply can NOT do what they do: play in a consistent 6 stack against other consistent 6 stacks they can analyze beforehand.
Really, trying to cater to their precious OWL is behind many of their design choices. In fact I bet 2-2-2 wasn’t implemented because there’s too many people playing DPS. It’s because people in OWL kept running Goats. Also, why do you think they tried to give Moira that pathetic rework? Just to try and force her to be vIAbLe to 1% of the playerbase while ignoring what made her fun/useful to 99%.
(Also, I bet the leading decision behind 5v5 was to, again, make OWL more exciting by preventing double barrier. Sure, that might have had some preferable outcomes for tank players but I don’t for a sec believe these decisions were actually made to specifically benefit them.)