It's safe to say this was a disappointing experience

Pacifist-21712 · May 12, 2020, 7:43pm

I do have a degree in computer science so I could apply… if I had any passion or hope left for the game… or if I lived on the other side of the planet… or didn’t give enough crap to be represented by a company that’s against human rights.

But holy crap what a trash argument. It’s not hard to listen to your pro players who you’re paying to play your trash game on what should be done about the balance, since they’re clearly struggling.

I could go on and on about where Blizzard failed but why would I, I already did.

From a competitive standpoint, this game is a failure

Unbelievable that the dev team changed their “balance philosophy” only 3.5 years after the game had been released, after all the big names in the community had moved onto other games, after some competition had arisen on the market. And surprise, the balance changes have been just as bad as ever.

The balance is horrible. Balance is focused on abilities, not on the characters’ primary weapons. Abilities in this game are so horribly designed they hard counter each other. Many of the heroes counter half of the cast just by existing. In terms of mechanical skill requirements, they’re all on different levels.

The power of an ability should scale with its mechanical skill requirements, arguing that some abilities require thinking therefore they can consistently provide way more value than an ability that’s very hard to pull off mechanically is invalid, because there isn’t a single ability that requires more thought than “should I or shouldn’t I?”

Ultimates. Most of them worth less than a cooldown ability of some other hero, which makes that ultimate useless or very situational. Some behave like a cooldown, other can be seen 1-2 times per 10 minutes, that’s another incosistency.

Hackers. We’re almost 4 years into this game and so far, there has been nothing radical done against cheaters. They’re constantly ruining high rank games, they’re getting reported, and nothing is happening.

Roles. Each role roster has at least 2 hybrid heroes, that completely defeats the purpose of having a strict 2/2/2 environment, or roles at all.

The amount of CC, shields and visual clutter in this game. Just no.

Overwatch 2 and its PvE mode won’t fix these issues. This game is only good for casual gameplay, 1-2 games after you come home from work/school/whatever for “fun.” Playing this game competitively is painful.

Therefore I advise that Quickplay is made the main game mode of this game, with Arcade following. Competitive is regarded as the least important mode, and OWL is scrapped, as it serves no real purpose for the game other than bringing money into certain company’s pockets. You had the chance to balance the game way better than you can yourselves with the incredible talent that currently participates in OWL.

And before you guys throw your “mUh SkILls ANd AiM” comments at me, allow me to tell you that I used to be a support main who mainly played Mercy.

“Rant” over.

also 'scuse my english, thanks

This game feels so BAD (Long post)

Hey there

Before I start, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I as a player have invested than 1500 hours in this game across multiple accounts since season 3. My main role is support, although I’ve been onetricking different DPS heroes each week (heroes like Bastion, Torbjörn, Symmetra… those who don’t quite fit the meta standards) during season 20 out of boredom.

Currently I’m hovering around the GM-Top500 border on Support, 2 wins away from GM on Damage and mid masters on Tank (implying Tank is my least played role). I just want to give my true opinions on why I feel like this game is not as good as it used to be.

Also, please, excuse my english as I’m not a native speaker.

Competitive

A chore for non-casual players

First of all, I’d like to start with the competitive mode, which is in my opinion the selling point of any shooter game on the market. Or at least it should be. I worry that this is not the case with Overwatch, otherwise the competitive mode would be treated a lot better by Blizzard.

Playing competitive most of the time feels like it matches me with incompetent people, who play competitive only for golden guns, or to just troll, or to just hack. It’s very rare I match with someone who’s willing to work for the win.

Due to the reasons mentioned above, for me personally, I need to win at least 2 games to make up for a lost game, due to how frustrating losses feel. Am I a sore loser? Who knows.

Since encouraging players to be competitive is impossible, we could at least not encourage those players to play competitive. We can start with removing the reward system for golden guns. This idea was even endorsed by Jeff Kaplan himself, stating:

“I wish we would’ve never added any cosmetic items to Competitive. I think the people playing Competitive should only be there because they really care about playing in Competitive mode, and they want to rise through the tiers – that’s who I think belongs in Competitive.”
https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/1900/jeff-kaplan-regrets-the-way-his-team-has-incentivized-competitive-play

Instead, introduce mastery levels for each hero, where the golden guns can be a reward for completing the hero’s achievements and reaching a certain goal.

Reporting

How a single voice doesn’t matter

Thanks to the automated system, a certain amount of reports is required to take action against a player who isn’t behaving well. What if you don’t reach that amount? Well, have fun meeting this player some time in the near future, because those reports aren’t going anywhere.

No matter the reason you’re reporting someone, if there aren’t enough reports, action is not taken, and the player is free to get away with bad behaviour.

While we’re at this topic, we should take at CS:GO’s way of handling reports. If you aren’t familiar with that, there is a system (funnily enough called “Overwatch”) that allows you to download a replay of a reported player’s match and review their actions in that game. At the end of the replay, the reviewer is asked if there’s anything the reported player did wrong in the form of a poll.

I imagine for Overwatch, there should also be voice chat and message chat included in the replays, so we can see all the reasons they were reported for.

Toxicity

How it’s (not) treated

It baffles me that after almost 4 years, players are still free to use discriminatory slurs in the chat without any punishment. We can’t fully eliminate discrimination, but letting slurs go through unnoticed certainly does not help minimize it. And to think this whole topic was the cause of the Endorsement system… So much work for nothing.

Rainbow Six: Siege filters out slurs. Overwatch should too.

Cheating

Can this game have a proper anti cheat please

Anyone who plays around GM or higher will tell you that cheaters are in fact very, very common. And it seems like Blizzard doesn’t care. In the last developer update, we heard about some alterations to the anti-cheat system coming soon.

4 years into the game, cheaters are being addressed. Great.

It seems like everything that’s a large issue is always addressed late . Too late, players are frustrated and some have already left.

Smurfing

How Blizzard makes money

You had to expect this little section here. How is smurfing still not punishable is beyond me. Smurfing is essentially cheating, except it can’t be played around.

I’m sure those price cuts to Overwatch had to be made because a lot of players were leaving at that time but really, the last thing this game needs is more smurfs and cheaters.

Hero balance

How the heroes are (im)balanced

Blizzard definitely has a lot of trouble balancing the game and it’s pretty obvious by all the “shortcuts” they took instead of properly balancing the heroes. Role queue , Map pools , Hero pools , all of those could have been avoided with great balancing. Since you took the game in this direction, you have shown that you have no idea how to balance the game.

The ideology of having hard-counters contributes the most to this mess, as well as having hybrid heroes within a forced role line-up. Brigitte, Wrecking Ball, Doomfist, Mei, D.va , Roadhog, Zarya, Zenyatta, Baptiste … None of those heroes any one role in the game, they’re hybrids.

All three roles need massive overhauls to their heroes, especially heroes who are hybrids. A hero of a certain role should never be able to substitute for a hero of another role . What is the purpose of having heroes labeled by a role if they can all do the same thing?

Roles are imbalanced. The role that decides the outcome of a match is Tank. If your tanks aren’t actually playing tanks (again, useless hybrids), your team has a much greater chance to lose than the opposing team.

I’m pretty confident with this statement; the Damage role matters the least. Right now, the game is in a state where you, as a Damage hero, have to wait for your team to engage so you can start with your own things.

Oh I can’t wait to talk about this one. The way Blizzard addresses issues is laughable. Remember when Orisa/Roadhog was meta? What was the main issue players had with Orisa back then? Oh, it was Halt! Too bad that part was addressed after a rework and a handful of nerfs to parts that were quite irrelevant. Oh I forgot Sigma was released in the meantime.

Stop releasing OVERPOWERED heroes. Brigitte, Sigma… Meta defining heroes, who took way too long to be balanced. It’s a great marketing strategy but come on… balance them properly before releasing them into competitive.

The balance changes that are made in general nowadays are mostly irrelevant. So many small little changes so we can “enjoy” the same meta but weaker.

Buffing counters to get rid of a meta also doesn’t work, because most of the time, the counters become a part of the meta. Remember Mei during Goats? There was a quite popular version of Goats that included Mei after she received buffs…

New Content

Where is it?

All the content we were and will be supposed to get will be released all at once with Overwatch 2. And that’s trash. If you choose to not put out new content, sure, but do something that makes up for it. In our case and how competitive is right now, much larger and more radical patches should be issued. Band-aid fixes won’t do anything to keep players from turning their backs on you.

Summary

Didn’t want to read the whole thing, huh…

Competitive feels like trash

Griefers, hackers, smurfs and toxic players aren’t dealt with. Reporting is useless

The game and its heroes are not being balanced, only small band-aid fixes are applied.

No new content leaves an empty void which isn’t good for long-time players.

Here's my feedback

I’ll start with that I haven’t played the game since the end of… what season was the previous one? 20? I can’t even remember… Whatever. I quit after 17 seasons and achieving top500 , and here’s why.

There are so many players who have raised many different concerns about hero/map balance, with a handful that are quite popular at any given time across all skill levels. Even if the big personalities of this game talk about some pretty obvious balance issue, we hear nothing from you. Absolute silence.

The game can go months and months without that issue being addressed, and the players have no idea whether you’re aware of it or not, whether you’re taking any action to resolve that issue or not, whether you care… or not. Players like me feel absolutely miserable because it seems like you don’t care about something we love so much.

This nice package also comes with painfully slow balance, even after faster patches were promised some time ago. After what felt like an eternity we get a balance patch, that most of the time doesn’t address any problems, or it does the least it can against the issue. Taking this much time to put out a good, heavy balance patch would be fine, but you take way too much time to take small steps towards solving an issue. That’s simply not healthy for competitive.

While I’m at the topic of balance, the experimental mode seems to not actually be used to experiment. All changes that have been put on the experimental mode were are the same as if they were put on PTR back in the days when we didn’t have experimental. The only changes on there that could be considered an experiment is the 1-3-2 change, but that one was so poorly executed on the hero balance side… It was such a wonderful attempt at reducing the queue times, but all was lost once we saw those patch notes. I’ve posted about a possible 1-4-1 experiment here, if you care.

Oh I accidentally mentioned queue times a little sooner than I initially intended, oh whatever. 1-3-2 was executed poorly and thus didn’t work, so where are other attempts at solving the problem of high queue times? Will we ever see heroes from the damage category moved to the other 2 roles in order to reduce queue times, at least as an experiment? Will we ever see a new iteration of role queue, or a rollback to open queue? I sincerely hope there is something happening behind the scenes regarding this issue, but once again, the player base isn’t informed about anything.

Is there ever going to be said anything about the amount of smurf accounts in this game? Smurfs don’t only ruin low ranked experience, there is a much greater difference between a 4k player playing against a 4.5k player on a smurf than there’s between a 3.5k player playing against a 4k player, as the skill requirements in order to climb rise exponentially.

And cheaters? Will we ever see some radical moves towards that issue? They are so common in 4k+ games, I wouldn’t be able to count the amount of cheaters on just one hand after playing 10 games. Valorant’s AC is working more than well (of course, a perfect AC will never exist, as it’s impossible to create), and they’re paying out hackers who manage to get through their AC. Take some notes.

I don’t want to wait for OW2 for you guys to tell me after all the waiting that none of this was addressed. I don’t want to wait for OW2 with any of these issues in general. I want to be sure, because I’m willing to invest my own time and money into the game and grind the F out of it. It all lies in the communication with the players, and there’s currently none except the few random posts from Jeff, who seems to be the only person on the OW team who somewhat cares.

TED talk over. Excuse my english as it’s not my first language.

If you feel like I’ve missed anything, feel free to point it out.