It's official. I also quit Overwatch

General Discussion
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If you don’t want to read this post, move along. This post is specifically for the devs. I feel they deserve to at least know why I, and others are leaving their game.

If you want an example of how to make a positive, productive reply to this topic:

Although sometimes I don’t always agree with RichC, I love him for his outstanding positivity. Instead of saying “good bye, no one cares about you”, he took time to make a positive counter post to mine and I appreciate that more than he could know.

This thread is about creating discussion around things that Overwatch can do to improve. Please stay on topic.

And thanks RichC <3

To be clear, I don’t want to quit playing Overwatch. I love the game but there are too many things working against it now.

I can’t justify spending so many hours in Overwatch because the amount of fun you get out of it is a joke compared to the amount of frustration you get.

I am going to move over to Paladins. Paladins isn’t perfect but they do SO many things better than Overwatch. I have already created a discussion around that game:

The biggest problem in Overwatch for me personally is: hero balance. Balance has ALWAYS been an issue since day 1.

2 years into the game and it is honestly worse that it ever was before. If you think the balance is fine, we clearly aren’t playing the same game with heroes like Bastion, Sombra, Doomfist, Mei, etc and there is no fixed patch schedule.

Then you have an insane amount of bugs. So many bugs that some heroes are almost not playable. Poor Rein.

Then you have toxicity, leavers, throwers, one tricks, etc. Competitive isn’t even playable anymore. I stopped playing Comp a few season ago. I only played enough games to place, and that was it. I haven’t even bothered with Season 10.

Then there are hundreds of little things that should exist but just don’t. Little things like; no new core game mode, not being able to see your team through walls, not being able to customize your HUD, not having a ready button for you and your group before launching the matchmaker, not being able to filter/favorite icons and cosmetics, cosmetics not being shared between platforms, no clan or guild system, no in game ways to find groups, no replays or better stats or match history, poor communication system, etc.

I could go on for a very long time about things the game needs, in fact, Ive made posts about that too:

Not to mention the very slow rate for the lore. In a game that is suppose to be all about the heroes, we still hardly know anything about the original 21 heroes.

The main reason I even looked into Overwatch was because I was drawn to the characters and the story… and in 2 years, the main story hasn’t even moved forward.

I will still follow Overwatch but I just can’t play it anymore. Again, to be clear, I WANT to play Overwatch but until some improvements are made on this game, I just can’t deal with it anymore.

Sadly, I am not the only person leaving. 7+ other friends that I normally play Overwatch with are also all moving over to Paladins. They are also frustrated with Overwatch for many of the exact same reasons as me.

So… devs read this post or not, I just feel like getting frustrated and leaving a message yelling about how I can’t play Overwatch anymore wasn’t very productive.

I feel that if I am going to stop playing the game, devs should at least know why and hopefully sometime in the future Overwatch could be improved upon and I could actually enjoy playing it again.

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I stopped playing a while back due to many reasons. One was the balance team and how slow they are. Simple things that should be fixed never do, and major problems stay around far to long.

I think the succsess called Mercy 2.0 ruined It for me. 6 months from blizzard saying it’s a success, but everyone was suffering due to this OP lazy rework. They finally delt with that disaster, but that doesn’t change a thing. They still take months to do one thing, and sometimes quality hurts a game.

If a game focuses to much on quality it will at some point fall behind a game with more quantity. That’s why balance is needed between these two and Overwatch leens more on the quality aspect, and even that is bad at times.

Now I just play Final Fantasy 14 leveling up and getting gear since I finished the story. Also, I got Hack.gu on steam, and that game is amazing. I remember it back from the good old PS2 days.

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Everything you said is 100% right.

I am spending my time with other games. Games that actually feel like games and when you play then you have fun.

It almost feels like Overwatch forgot how to have fun. Balance also has a huge part in that.

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I feel the same as the op. I WANT to play this game, but there’s just been to many issues that the devs either ignore or don’t realize they even exist. I’m not sure which one is worse.

A lack of training modes, tone-deaf balancing, and an HUD suck in “one player mode” since the games release has killed my enthusiasm for Overwatch. It’s been the Mercy fiasco that was the final nail in the coffin, however. “Success”, my booted foot.

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Again. I feel your pain and I echo you as well. My enthusiasm for Overwatch has also been killed.

It actually kinda makes me sad because Overwatch has the potential to be one of the greatest games ever.

Sometimes it feels like the devs don’t even play their own games

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We keep seeing them take the advice of the exact same pool of “high profile players” for balancing, even when the players in question don’t play the hero they’re talking about. They might even want to see that hero nerfed into the ground, just because they don’t like them… AND BLIZZARD TAKES THEIR ADVICE ON BALANCING.

Blizz needs to start seeking a dialogue with the top players of whatever hero they have on the menu for balancing, instead of asking (if you’ll pardon the generalization) the same 4 Genji mains every time.

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Don’t worry we will be here when you decide to come back. Take your time figure your self out.

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An update to the practice range to include hitboxes that aren’t tank-sized ,have flying heroes and bots that have actual mobility would be nice ,but if you want to practice just go to QP or custom games ,that’s the best practice you’ll ever get (aside from comp ,but I don’t think anybody wants you practicing there)

That’s a bit of an exaggeration.
,balancing has definitely gotten much better since day 1 ,and they’ve sped up on the updates In the last few months.

What does this even mean ?

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I kind of feel the same, complete with FFXIV being my go-to, I dabble in OW to get a FPS fix every now and again. I tried TF2… but it’s not the game I played before.

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I can assure you, that no “high profile players” (if you refer to pros or very skilled ones) asked for faceroll heroes like Moira and Brigitte. And the consequent destruction of the two most fun heroes in the game and their playstyle - the flankers.
That is 100% on the dev team.

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While I like OW competitive more, if I cared about my sanity I would go to paladins.

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Two examples immediately come to mind.

Remember the Ana meta? Her nade at the time DOUBLED all healing, so she was able to keep tanks alive forever.

The devs didn’t think to nerf the healing bonus until they had already nerfed every other aspect of Ana’s kit, trying to figure out what was wrong by beating Ana with the nerf bat until she stopped moving. They nerfed her gun, her ult, even every other stat in the nade (burst damage/healing values, splash radius, effect duration). They even nerfed and reworked the tanks Ana was too good at keeping alive, not realizing that their seeming immortality was only a symptom of the problem.

It wasn’t until the nade’s “healing buff” effect got nerfed that Ana and her tanks stopped being obnoxiously oppressive… But by then, she had been nerfed into the ground.

The tanks she synergized with were screwed with so badly that there were megathreads for months, raging over the drastic change in playstyle. In an attempt to address the problem created by Ana, they turned Dva from a sturdy defensive peel tank to a glass cannon brawler. To make matters even worse, this playstyle change (which amounts to adding another dive tank to the game) helped pave the way for the hated dive meta.

Then there’s the Mercy rework. Blizzard made that monstrosity on the word of a few heavily skewed anecdotes that never bothered to learn proper counterplay. They did not consult top Mercy players when making such a drastic departure from her classic kit. They did not consider that their broken SR system was the culprit behind creating counterproductive playstyles, and how those playstyles would go away if players didn’t have an SR incentive to do it. They actually fixed the SR exploit a week before the rework, but they never gave it a chance to weed out the bad actors among the Mercy population.

As soon as the rework hit the PTR, mercy players started waving red flags covered in neon “danger” signs. They posted thread after thread after thread saying the same thing: “this rework is OPAF. If it goes live, mercy will take over the meta.”

People dismissed them, and accused them of “just wanting ez win multirez” back. The only PTR adjustments were made on the word of non-Mercy players complaining about battle mercy.

What no one seemed to realize (despite constant posts from Mercy mains trying to explain) was that Mercy 2.0 was only “fine” in the hands of the mythical passive, hide-n-rez Mercy who’d rather not partipate in fights. The reality was that there were a lot of agressive Mercy mains out there that already used tempo rezzing as their standard playstyle. The rework that was supposed to get Mercies to start tempo rezzing… only served to supercharge the ones who already did that into unstoppable monsters.

Over half a year later, and everything the Mercy players prophesied has come to pass. She became the queen of a meta, a suffocating must-pick that had to be consecutively nerfed FOR HALF A YEAR until her new abilities became a chore to use.

The top Mercy players in the world have made videos about what’s gone wrong, and many Mercy fans are either writhing in unhappiness or have just lost all faith in the devs and left the game. And what happens when the remaining Mercy fans complain? Their threads are deleted by the mods and redirected to a megathread created to quarantine them.

Late edit: yet another balancing scandal is how they handled Hanzo. After his rework, he was doing so much damage with storm arrow that he got ult way too quickly. The meta turned into “spam grav-dragons.”

But instead of nerfing the very obvious root of the problem - hanzo now does way too much damage because of his new storm arrow - the heroes who synergized with the overpowered hero were sacrificed first. Zarya’s ult was nerfed, and Mercy’s damage boost got disqualified from boosting Hanzo’s ult (and dva’s ult, for some reason). It was only after the devs nerfed things that were previously already balanced and did not need nerfs, was blizz willling to even try to nerf Hanzo.

When a hero is overpowered in Overwatch, the devs don’t simply fix the problem. They use the heroes around the op pick as whipping boys first, leaving them scarred and damged long after the actual problem gets their due.

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Cool story bro. Cya in game.

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It’s been waaaay too long since the ana thing ,balancing has improved since then ,it’s not perfect now ,not even close ,but it’s certainly much better than launch.

Remember Mcsnipe and Mcfanthehammer ? 150 bodyshot widowmaker ? ledge dash and 8 second dragonblade genji ?

And again ,I REALLY want to know what you mean by

I’ve seen you repeat it before in other threads ,but you’ve never explained what you mean by this.

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Look at other games and their multi-player modes. Now look at Overwatch.

Notice how the other games add things to their HUD when you’re playing with other people?

They add a team status bar.

They give you a way to identify individual teammates though walls (often by way of friendly wall hacks)

The chevrons above your teammates heads show up on the sides of your screen when they leave your field of vision.

All of these help you keep track of, coordinate with, and work around your team.

Many will even have a sound que for when a teammate dies or is incapacitated.

None of these things are even options in Overwatch. The HUD treats you as though you don’t have teammates at all… Hence, “single player mode HUD”.

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Im just waiting for this thread to be closed. I mean, some one above said the forbidden name in the forums, so this thread is going to be closed and redirected to said massgrave.

But its sad that it is really like that. Blizzard shuts up complaints since they dont want to admit they did something wrong. The chinese guy and DaddyJeff dont seem to have the balls to do it and post a video “Hey, we are sorry. Mistakes were made, the game took turns in directions that werent intended. We are trying to fix that, we are sorry and its gonna take us some time to fix the problems”.

Right now, you can see that there is no course set for the game. Is it for casuals? Is it for pros? Does it use FPS mechanics? Does it use MOBA mechanics? Nobody knows. But as long as the money keeps rolling in, nobody will ask these questions at the BlizzHQ. And when the money stops rolling in, the DevTeam resources get cut short and Blizz thinks about the next big game they can make.

Seriously, what happened? At the beginning, I was completely against Overwatch. I thought it was TF2 with a heavy pricetag. FF 4 seasons and I played the game for the first time after buying it for cheap. Played 300hrs, the first 100 were so much fun, all the new heroes, tactics, stuff you never saw before. 100-200, I got deeper into it, practiced aiming, flickshots, ability management, how-to-tank and more. Was still fun, but I was destined to reach Plat in comp. 200-300, Im in Plat now, new heroes came out, something something no heckin balance at all somethin, lost interest.

Nowadyays I play the game just for the daily XP grin so I can get my silver border before one of my friends and from time to time some comp with the squad. But we resort to other games to really realax and/or have fun. OW doesnt cut it, its a dying game. I give it 2 more years before it becomes irrelevant.

o7

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Good for you, always play the one you enjoy the most. There is no reason to stay when you no longer enjoying the game. Its understandable.

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I agree. But it’s just sad because I still want to enjoy Overwatch.

I just hope that some day down the road they realize what is happening and address some of the big issues the game has.

Personally I don’t think Moira is THAT bad, but Brigitte just totally destroys the game. I understand why people get upset with Moira too though.

However, in both of those cases, I feel like even though they are super easy heroes, they can still be balanced.

IMO, if you are going to put a star rating system on heroes, mastering any hero that is 1 star should be less effective on the match outcome than mastering a 3 star…

But Im not in charge so lets just keep Mercy the number 1 support forever I guess.

smh

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I wouldn’t expect too much. It’s one of the reason people are quitting.

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You have a point. That is pretty much the reason why I just can’t play anymore. So many core things just get outright ignored.

Its funny because they always claim they try to have good communication with the community but not on the things that actually matter.

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