You are trying to copy free to play model from Fortnite or other similar games, but they do balance updates MUCH more frequently, that’s why it’s more joyful to play competitively. But if you are going to make 3 heroes nerf per 2 months, and not even touch Sojoroun, for example, simply because “you don’t know how to nerf her without ruining her”, then the game will be unplayable competitively very soon.
Before copying other companies, at least try to copy their good things as well, please. Not just the greedy parts.
They have already said they plan to have their mid-season balance patch during the 5th week of each season (in the case of Season 1, in the middle of the Halloween event). It didn’t happen this time due to some complications on their end, which could have been a number of factors. The new lead hero designer made this tweet during a Q&A (which was transcribed in this formerly-pinned forum thread (Question #10)): https://twitter.com/GW_Alec/status/1586072031547621376
If I had to guess, the issues on their end were either related to some backend changes they made to help resolve the server issues in the first week of deployment, or they already planned to lump the OWL cosmetics/shop changes in with the balance patch and realized they’d be removing OWL content during the OWL playoffs/Grand Finals, which happened to land on the 5th week of the battle pass season.
Regardless, going forward, the cadence for balance patches should be more regularly released every 1st and 5th week of the season instead of the 7th week.
That’s the biggest reason why OW1 lost most of the players. They didn’t learn the lesson.
Even so, that’s insanely late. Players don’t wait 1-2 months just to fix trivial things like a simple number you can even edit yourself on Custom Games.
OW went down in views from consistent 120-200k to 35k. If that won’t motivate them to reconsider what they do with the game, then nothing helps. Reapper monke meta, just imagine…broken sj, just because of owl with how much, 20k viewership? C’mon blizzard!