Locking heroes–especially in a game like Overwatch–is the death of Overwatch for me. They could have done literally anything else, even lock maps. I might have even considered a pay-to-play per month WoW subscription model, if it was reasonable.
I signed up the very first day of closed beta in July 2015, and as a day one fan of the game who’s stuck through it all these years, I am absolutely appalled at Blizzard right now.
They PROMISED they wouldn’t do this–maps and heroes were to be open to all forever.
It is completely disgusting that not only is Overwatch 2’s competitive integrity being damaged by locking heroes behind grind and paywalls, Overwatch 1 is being deleted in its entirety. The least that could have been done is to have kept Overwatch 1 as a legacy live service.
I will be voting with my dollar and not supporting the Overwatch franchise or Blizzard from here on. Or Activision Blizzard. Or Microsoft Gaming.
This is particularly painful to me, as I was looking forward to paying full price for the PvE expansion, and to 5v5 (which I slightly prefer).
I feed exactly the same and will probably not buy Overwatch 2… And since it will be unbalanced and Overwatch 1 will be deleted… i guess i just won’t be playing anymore. This means i will lose the game i paid for. Disgusted by Blizzard taking this decision. Would like my money back.
Suit yourself. Diablo 4, Modern Warfare 2 and Starfield look lit. Boycotting entire companies just because the Overwatch team is incompetent doesn’t do anything.
Sure it does. It does everything–it’s not the Overwatch team making these decisions it’s the scumbag executives up high. That’s why Jeff left. That’s why Geoff left. It’s the Overwatch team I feel the worst for. They spent years of their lives on this project only to have their baby killed.
And, no offence, but Diablo 4 and MW2 aren’t exactly a loss to me… and I’ve never even heard of Starfield.
Geoff left because he was bad at his job. He couldn’t balance a game properly to save his life.
Execs may have made the call for F2P. They have nothing to do with the team at Blizzard releasing problematic heroes, overtuning certain heroes and nerfing/reworking others into the ground.
This game has been on the decline ever since they added Brigitte. It’s not a sudden thing just because they decided to lock future heroes.
I understand this is a new account and you haven’t been around for long. But the reason locked heroes aren’t fine in a game like Overwatch boils down to that it’s a game of real time mid match counters. Unlike League / Valorant / Apex / whatever, where hero selection happens only before the match commences.
It’s a bit difficult to find now, but you can go back to old articles (Eurogamer - “Blizzard: why we won’t sell Overwatch heroes”, June 2016) and dev updates (Youtube - " Developer Update | Popular Community Topics", Dev 2015) alluding to and describing how locking heroes in a game like Overwatch is bad. The devs and community openly discussed this back in the day and reached a firm conclusion.
Edit: here’s another one… RockPaperShotgun “Overwatch Game Designer on Blizzard’s FPS”, Oct 2015.
Pip: Do you know which business model you’re going with yet?
Geoff: We haven’t really decided exactly what it’s going to be. There’s a lot of benefits to all the different business models and there’s a lot of things to weigh. Especially with our game - there’s a lot of challenges. The good news from a Blizzard standpoint is we have so many different games that are in all these different business models from Hearthstone and Heroes’s free to play model to Diablo’s box model and WoW’s subscription so we have a little of everything to look at. In some ways it’s making the problem easier to research and making us take more time to make sure we get it right. The bottom line is we want to make sure whatever you come up with is the best for the game and our players. Something like hero swapping we want to make sure is very available and there’s not any blockers for that so that’s the big thing.
Since when did I say I’d uninstall and delete my Blizzard account? Don’t put words in my mouth. I will vote with my dollar.
I admire anyone with the guts to delete their account on principle. But I won’t be deleting my account or self-revoking my right to play the game I purchased. I will stop monetarily supporting Blizzard. I will probably lose a lot of my enthusiasm for the series, and probably not play much from hereforth.
All of this is off topic to this thread, but I understand the general resentment towards the Overwatch team for balancing decisions. Decisions that were to an extent driven by executive pressure for an e-sports league behind the scenes… but again, off topic here.
I disagree. Geoff has never shown signs of giving up just because he’s made some unpopular decisions before; he’s rolled with the punches.
I think Geoff left for one of two reasons:
A) His work doing hero and gameplay design is largely finished on OW2 PvE. Which I think is dubious, given the expansion is unreleased and doesn’t have a launch date.
B) Because he was told he had to completely homogenise the entire roster of OW1 heroes for OW2 PvP over the next couple years, in line with strategic objectives to make Overwatch 2 more like other market PVP FPS. And no one likes killing their babies after years of endless work–so he left.
…well it’s happening so are you also leaving the forums? (as being on the forums supports them by giving us more people to talk to and to stay engaged with their game)…
Please kindly go troll another thread. You are putting words in my mouth that I have not said, and I have already addressed all of that, read my other posts.
Has this been confirmed at all? I thought it was the case based on the leaks but after the BP reveal and the blog, there was no mention about locking players out. It only said for the first 2 weeks after the hero release.
