I don’t disagree. But the fact is, it worked. I knew when they announced Overwatch, and articles talked about it at the time as well, that it was a bid to recoup from Titan.
When the OWL was announced, I told the wife: Watch, it’s to test the waters for an eventual CoD League, because no way Activision is risking the CoD franchise on testing the waters first.
Jeff may care about his players, but those above him like Kotich who actually control things do not. They cared about recouping Titan and testing a League concept.
But the thing is, the game design was fundamentally flawed.
The whole switching thing just went on the nerves of the people.
Unpopular opinion but I believe the 1 hero limit made it worse since if you want to use a hero for countering you can’t do that if someone else is using it.
Again, I agree. Which is why I stated about the Overwatch lightspeed development cycle versus most other Blizzard games. Overwatch moved too quickly from concept to launch. It needed the normal amount of Blizzard time for development and testing. It didn’t get it, and it shows in spades.
She’s not the most necessary hero (honestly on a lore level she’s near completely redundant) but, she’s also not terribly disruptive.
Most of the line up that’s been added since I got the game in November of 2016 have made the game worse for me. I wouldn’t say Ashe has done that.
Having a novel hero that fits a need and makes the game better is an ideal outcome but, if you aren’t going to hit that I’d rather have something generic that doesn’t mess things up.
I really dont think it is the majority that wants forced comps. We may never know. One thing seems true in my observation is that the game attracts all kinds of different players and I doubt that’s far off the mark from what the devs wanted.
Is the OW that players want different from what the devs want? Yes and no.
There are many players who want to play the game as if its your standard shooter and don’t care about team work or swapping. So to those people, yes.
But there are those who wanted to play the game as intended. The ones who are calling for role lock isn’t so they can just play heroes they want, but so they can play the game that they were promised initially. Which means games where you have tanks and healers working along side DPS as a team towards an objective. Instead of DPSWatch where you have 3 - 4 if not more people all playing DPS and losing game after game cause they have no other classes and are running to the point like lemmings.
The problem is more that the devs never really reinforced their position. The game was basically pulled in every direction at once, and rather than develop it in a way that conforms to the initial concept, they went with trying to appease everyone. Which obviously hasn’t worked and only made it much much much worse.
That said, it does seem like they’re taking steps to improve it, since Role Lock is more along the lines of pushing the game towards the original vision, rather than away.
ruleset forced Blizz to reconsider what they wanted for the game. It’s now much easier to spectate, but comes at the cost of the game being more restricted.
2/2/2 OWL rumors are spreading. We’ll see another wave of restriction again.
The only issue I have with this approach is that now that Offense and Defense DPS heroes have been merged, the DPS slots would have a ton of variety at their disposal. By comparison there are just two main tanks and just four main healers. And only 7 characters for each of those roles total.
If we also had SIXTEEN Healers and Tanks each, I - as a ~90% support player - wouldn’t mind a proper role queue at all. But as it is, I’d be locking myself down to ~20% of the available characters, which just makes it… boring? It should be 33% at most, and in fact some hybrid chars like Brigitte or Zenny should mean it’s >33%.
Since they started on the Overwatch League, the player experience went down. And you can probably tell by looking at the numbers who play regularly today. I can tell you this much. Less and less
Hammond falls into that same category. The devs loved Hammond and wanted to share him with the Overwatch community. Though he’s interesting, it doesn’t seem he was the best choice to increase role balance. Players needed a Main Tank and Hammond has such an extreme barrier of entry to that role it doesn’t satisfy the need.
All of this could be forgiven if they put out more heroes more frequently. However they don’t, even after claiming that they would. Hero balance is dependent on hero variety and Overwatch’s hero balance will probably be in rough shape until this is achieved.
ruleset forced Blizz to reconsider what they wanted for the game. It’s now much easier to spectate, but comes at the cost of the game being more restricted.