Let's talk about the demise of this game

General Discussion
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Let me go ahead and speak on behalf of all of us, because i know how many of these sweaties in Irvine check this sub. You guys focus more on map creation, skins, and little aesthetics than you do the actual physics and mechanics of the game. I literally just played 3 matches at 3400sr where Brig was capable of 1v3ing 2 tanks and a healer. Do you understand the commentary that happens within your game about balance? Why does it take weeks to fix some of the most blatantly broken abilities? Why do you guys have a 48hr off season and commence new seasons with nothing but the same gameplay - and instead, have about 3-4 patches midway? Are you trying to stay afloat with players purchasing loot for skins they wish to covet? You guys have lost more than 23% of your player database within the last 6 months alone, have lost some of your top streamers so fast, and are continuously worrying about some storyline only to cater this game to either the top 1500 players (considering how many people actually regularly play this game vs. that of 2017) and have yet to figure out how to balance matchmaking, punishment, etc. We are all sitting here in second hand embarrassment as you throw away what couldve been a huge success but instead, are getting rinsed by these other AA titles and are making once again, a game that is at the bottom of Blizzard itself. Cheers to your hard work!

OH and before I forget, since I cant post images apparently. “Longtime overwatch semipros and streamers have now won more tournaments and made more money playing Fortnite and Realm Royale in weeks than they did playing Overwatch for years.” -Slasher

Look for us in the next issue of PCMag as we discuss the ups and mostly downs of this game. We hope Blizzard can revive itself…

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This alone is one of the big reasons why my friends and I stopped playing the game. But for every 1 Brid person who says she is blatantly OP with hardcore evidence, you’ll have 2 players who are Brid supporters that will tell you just go “git gud”. Overwatch is on its deathbed.

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I’d like a source for this, if you don’t mind

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Gotta say, for a hero that sucks at fighting multiple heroes at once, people seriously enjoy bending over and showing her their sessa. There is no excuse for Brigitte to win a 2v1 or a 3v1. That lies soley on the three people who ganged up and couldn’t kill one hero.

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I’m honestly not going to talk bad about this game, even though I disagree with most of the balancing for this game; have felt this way for awhile now.

I’ve sunk hundreds of hours into the game, I got my fun and monies worth. I honestly didn’t expect to be playing this game for as long as I did.

That all said, I feel like the balancing decisions for this game create heavy handed forced metas. Keep in mind, it doesn’t need to be this way, the balancing/dev teams don’t need to push a flavor of the season on us ever couple of seasons.

I also feel like they don’t know how to balance certain heroes and their kits; Ana, Mercy, Sombra being the core 3 examples.

I also feel like we have lived with BUGS for far too long.
If I go to a restaurant every week and order the Chocolate Shake, and I get a swirl of strawberry in it every week, eventually I want them to fix their shake machine and give me what I want. It can only go so long.

Hope that analogy didn’t make you too hungry for a shake.

Lastly, The Power Creep. Yes this is real, and I’ve made a thread awhile back explaining in FULL detail patch by patch how a Power Creep in multiple ways has grown in this game: Reworks, Buffs, additional heroes over-tuned. Also speed/mobility creep has entered the game as well.

This is all fine, but other heroes who were not designed for the Power Creep and Mobility Creep really show their disadvantages when they fall out of meta, so much so they become a liability to run for X amount of seasons. This isn’t good balance, this is sheer lazy and unimaginative.

Yeah I said it, and I’m not really ashamed to say it: The devs lack imagination for their own game. They lack imagination for balance, and they are slow to correct their mistakes. They STILL refuse to listen to PTR feedback, even though they have efforts built in for more transparency; they are HIGHLY selective of criticism.

The only real amazing great success to this game was the LFG system. This should have been in the game a year ago though, even Jeff said he was wrong to tell a designer NOT to put it in the game when it was brought to his attention.

This game, as incredible as it is, does have some serious leadership issues. The quality of gameplay is a hodgepodge of swinging Power Creeps, poor balancing, and slow fixes.

I’m not saying all this as someone who hates this game. I’m saying this as someone who has played this game since BETA and has poured hundreds of hours into it; and LOVED it!

And I’ve always sung my praise for this game, which has landed me as a more popular forum user, but I’m also not a fanboy. I have my opinions and healthy criticism. And this criticism, comes from a perspective of caring about the game. Not hating on it.

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You summed it up beautifully!

I hate it when Blizzard lapdogs try to deflect genuine criticism with “lul if u hate the game so much, then leave”. Like you, I’m tired of Blizzard being extremely ham-fisted and horrible with their balance changes. Feedback blatantly ignored.

Like, Mercy’s rework is the biggest proof one needs that they don’t give a snap about player feedback. If they cared for the opinions of actual Mercy players, we never would have had a stupidly OP and broken and horribly unbalanced rework that still plagues this game. EVEN after 10 goddddamn nerfs!

A lot of of us here love Overwatch. And it’s really painful to watch the dev team throw it all away with a severe lack of maps, game modes and content, swifter balance changes, and acknowledging feedback. The dev team would rather pour more resources into their garbage league than actually fix the game.

And it’s heartbreaking. Overwatch had a lot of potential. :/

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aaaaand, I want to stop you right there.

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I’ll just say, blizzard usually has a record on pretty much every other game of transferring or firing the major problem that is causing the game to rot. It’s been 2 years and yet the problem is still around… It took them a little over 1 year to bring back avoid a player the RIGHT way when it was suggested since week one it was removed. Their are many other things that could also be easily implemented like turning off queuing with premades and turn off backfilling, but no, let’s keep the headaches in game…

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This kind of behavior is the symptom of the times we live in. People these days have such poor/immature communication skills. They see everything in a polarized ME vs YOU mentality, instead of a more healthier dialog of … US vs The Problem mentality.

Weird times we are living in.

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Thank you.

Yes, they’re only still maintaining “viewership” when there are OWL games on. The numbers, the streamers, the peak viewers…it all speaks for itself. We all see it. I shouldn’t have to name some of the top players from seasons1-4 who stopped streaming the game or simply moved onto other games. Take Bird for example, Poke, Calvin, DaFran etc. And look at the SR values now compared to the past. It’s unbelievable. Even the new maps they introduce, their highly hated Anubis and plain 2cp maps where the game simply cannot register the character’s own hitbox touching “the point” and creating a contesting play. There have been times where I dash as Tracer onto a point or respawn as Lucio, you name it, and I’m not only on the point, but I’ve made it almost across it and the “Defeat” is on my screen.

Do NOT force me to show all the videos on how Junkrat’s nades slightly track and enforce a larger impact when landing next to a hero. The fact that that is still an issue is mindblowing as well. Pay attention next time you’re playing against a Junk. Let me know how fast the nades explode and which ones tend to continue to bounce to reach you.

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I don’t think the devs know what to do about Junkrat either, buff him one way and he’s OP till plat, nerf him a bit an you can’t play him competitively past silver :man_shrugging:

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Hence why they just throw out the flavor of the season(s)…
This is obvious the formula that the unimaginative dev team is following, I’m just wondering who else is going to catch onto it (I’m sure those who have played the game since launch are going to be more keen to seeing it than others who are newer to the game).

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See the problem is I’m not here, nor are many of the other posters, talking to players in your skill tier. There is a reason you’re silver. You are a lot more of a casual player probably or simply dont know Overwatch on a competitive level. I’m not trying to be rude, but there is a reason I posted about my 3400sr game. Look at the bell curve of where players sit on the SR tiers. A ton of us know about the 2800-3100 hell. I’m here to give others in the majority pool and those that have witnessed this game for more than the last year, change and become less and less playable and enjoyable.

I’ve been playing FPS games at a high level, CS 1.6 to be exact, and I have friends now who are amazing hitscan players, who play MOBA’s etc. and just leave games and discuss with me how terrible some of the abilities are for these heroes. They introduce Wrecking ball. Like, you’re kidding me right? They are more and more catering to this “omg a hamster” age group and I’m sorry, low SR tier because these individuals don’t have the competitive mindset of people like me who want to win, cooperate, and know more than 2 heroes. There is no reason Brig should be able to swing that fast, that far, and stun and just eliminate ults like that. Doomfist too - one shotting after a punch? Dashing and immediately killing a 200hp hero?

Blizzard, I’m local. If you want to really sit down and discuss with me before I publish the statistics,articles, and comments from the people who made this game at the top viewership on Twitch - go ahead. But I’m going to make sure others understand and read what the community is talking about that all of you tend to just overlook.

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Yugioh has been doing that for decades, I’ll let you know when I’m ready to claim that Overwatch does the same thing but right now the lines between intentional cyclical balance and unconventional seesaw balance are too blurry for me to claim that its the latter.

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Let me start by saying Blizzard has been mostly successful in reviving an entire genre and they deserve every inch of respect for giving us a very ambitious Overwatch. This is Blizzard we’re talking about, let’s not forget what they’re capable of. I believe this is Blizzard’s first attempt at a first person shooter, and they’ve made quite a debut of it.

That being said, I think the game is mostly pretty good but I have 2 beefs with Overwatch that have never gone away since I began playing the beta.

  1. There are not enough heroes for a game that revolves around it’s heroes. Overwatch has about as many characters to play as say, Mortal Kombat, and that’s a bad thing for a MOBA. League of Legends by comparison, has more support characters, or tank characters, than the entire roster of Overwatch combined. There’s endless replayability to be had there, this is why League of Legends has maintained its enormous popularity despite having only 2 maps.

  2. Character movement in-game feels unnatural and rough, which contributes greatly to positioning errors and more importantly, makes aiming just that much harder. The aiming part is only further compounded if you’re using a controller instead of a mouse. It feels as though I’m controlling a character from an MMO inside of a first person shooter and it has always felt different. Bad different.

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Sorry, I’ve never seen a Brig 1v3 or even 1v2 anyone.

She really isn’t that hard of a hero to deal with at higher Elos. I get it, at lower ranks she is tough because she doesn’t miss while you do.

That’s rough.

But at higher ranks she has a capped potential damage compared to other heroes. Hell Lucio can outburst damage her doing 215 damage if he lands all headshots in less than one second. Brig is capped at her 155 in that same timeframe. The higher rank you go the less damage potential she has compared to other heroes and even other supports (other than Moira who suffers the same fate as Brig).

Even Mercy can deal more damage than Brig in 1 seconds time without cooldowns meaning that gap increases with each second beyond the first.

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Well, that just sums it up right there. And that is where the game could possibly be unbalanced but not in terms of heroes. I am speaking in terms of player base. If some people are stuck in bronze/silver/gold then it’s a very big problem. You’re also forgetting QP/Casual part of the game where it’s even more of a nightmare to fight her.

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It’s literally the same problem as old Sym. She didn’t miss, you could and often did. People hated Sym for the very same reason they hate Brig.

She has waaay less DPS output than old Sym did, but has a Stun and more Burst potential. But both suffer from not being able to compete with the damage output of other characters since they could take advantage of headshots.

I think the easy fix for this is to make Brig require “Aim” with her Melee a bit more and allow it to hit the Crit box. This way she could “Keep up” with heroes at higher ranks, but could also miss her attacks like every other hero in the game (other than Rein).

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And if they implemented this kind of action I would jump for joy and return to OW.

I’m also not sure that reworking Sym was the right thing to do. I mean yes clicking and holding down a button for 3 seconds wasn’t that hard, but you also had to have a lot of battle sense in order to position her correctly. I’m not saying that we should revert back to that but I am also not agreeing with how they implemented her new rework. Before I left OW I tried the new Sym and I found it to be boring and uninteresting.

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I think the main issue that comes with my easy fix is how the game registers “melee” in general. All quick melee in the game is very forgiving. I can, and have, killed multiple people with my Melee who were standing next to each other.

Her primary attack is just melee with 5 more damage and a larger hitbox.

The game in general handles melee attacks oddly (Rein and Doomfist for example). So I imagine my “fix” would require complete changes to the core system that processes one model impacting another in a more precise manner. Especially since character models “hurtboxes” are much larger than they visibly appear and every attack other than hitscan have a much larger “hitbox” that they visually appear.

My favorite example is Pharah’s thighs. They are mechanically 50% larger than the eyes make one believe.