If you think they aren’t then you might as well quit now.
OWL is the future and it is the best way to actually improve the game going forward.
Why you would want the terrible mess the MMing is opposed to actually playing Overwatch I don’t know.
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Down with OWL! I knew it’d be bad news since it was first announced!
How much less would you say?
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I enjoyed it. AND this is the best season for me yet.
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Blizzard has been locking behind paywalls since November 2016 tho?
Thing is what do they do with the stage then lol
Blizzcon maybe? It is in September but ticket are going to on sale soon.
Game basically died for me after OWL.
Cosmetics this summer are so meh. No big changes, and a lot of people are not impressed with Hammond. Also, no new cinematics for a long time.
Lore is going nowhere, though the new writer gives me a hunch more “progressive” things will be added, call it intuition.
You do realize that OWL is over right? It doesn’t restart until next year.
I don’t think people appreciate enough that OWL was teaching players how to play the game. I noticed tons of better games happening while OWL was going on, where players communicated more and went for more genuine strategies rather than just picking heroes and hoping to play their best individual performance. I saw tons of people not even talk about strategy yet lining themselves up in defensive positions that OWL players had taken, I saw abilities and ultimates being used much more wisely, and in general more people were eager to play to win rather than just play until they lost hope.
On top of that OWL made Overwatch relevant for months in the media, attracting new players, reeling in the ones that were lost, and maintaining those that were continuing to play.
And none of this came “at the expense” of Overwatch. The folks that manage and run the OWL are not the same people that make your skins, plan your events, or balance the game. No resources were wasted on the OWL that would have been spent somewhere on the main game, unless you want to find some alternate timeline where Blizzard had some other OWL-equivalent idea that they devoted millions of dollars towards.
Even the idea that it messed up the balance of the game is funny, you really can pin the blame of anything onto OWL. The game was going to be balanced as it has been regardless of where the pros were playing, it’s not like the pros were just going to not be noticed without OWL. The only thing OWL did was highlight how busted Mercy was right after her rework, but even that would have been noticed eventually. I don’t see anywhere else where the game was balanced “specifically for the pros,” except maybe the change to Widowmaker, which was honestly a needed nerf for the ranks where it mattered most.
I wish any other game that I played had this much commitment to its pro play scene. I wish Smash Bros. had huge, season-long tournaments that were available to watch for free, with commentators replaying games to breakdown what happened, with resources to make everything spectator friendly and easier to digest, with in-game support and interactions from the fans. This is such a cool thing Overwatch has and I think the people who don’t like it have every right to not like it, but don’t need to decry it as some crippling flaw for the game. No one is forcing you to participate in OWL, unless you really consider some in-game promotions to be forceful.
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you do realise literally nobody from the dev team works on the OWL team right? they are 2 different divisions.
OWL did nothing to the game.
they balance around pro and casual feedback. CASUAL more than anything
Pros didn’t ask to replace scatter arrow, casuals did.
Pros didn’t ask for genji and tracer nerfs, casuals did.
Pros didn’t ask for a character like Brig, casuals did.
Pros didn’t say that snipers are too strong, casuals did.
Literally almost every significant change that has brought turmoil to the forums, has been what casuals asked for, and it never works out, because casuals don’t understand balance.
Please. stop whining.
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Overwatch has maintained the same monthly development speed since launch, well before the League was even conceptualized.
I really wish people would stop trying to use this argument is if it were valid.
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Idk man… The world cup has been a snooze fest except for matches between countries with with owl players. Russia, Finland, and SK has been steam rolling the rest of the competition it’s not even fun to watch.
OWL needs his own client and balance changes. There are 40 million players besides that 100 advertising space considered as “Pro OWL players”. Its no secret that there are changes made because OWL players or OWL itself wanted it yet the changes affected the esport 1 month or 2 after the patch came live.
The OWL and the Dev team are 2 separate team so they dont affect things like lore. Its a 6-6 month rotation between Esports and lore development (We’ve got new cinematic on Gamescom last year first).
But prioritizing an OWL ending event with 2 skins which are paywalled for half of the world because we didnt had a chance to get tokens over an ingame event
They asked the pros who needs to be nerfed or changed. Most of them said Mercy and Tracer. Boom! Mercy rework alongside 15 nerfs so far and a ridicolously huge Tracer nerf to her Pulse Bomb. And no one asked for a character like Brig.
I bet Sombra will be reworked as soon as shes being played in OWL. As you can see in forums no one comes with real stats in the states of Sombra. Who wants Sombra change comes with Fitzy and Danteh, Contra-Sombra change comes with Contenders. Everyone of the casuals brings the opinions of the pros down to forums and spams it until its gonna be changed
Look at the Overwatch League page in the game.
They just structured it to make room for 4 new teams.,
Teams that Blizzard made over $100 Million on for businesses like Cox to invest in being team owners.
OWL is not going away anytime soon.
the more i hear people blaming owl for balance the more i remember how many people just like to blame easy targets for things they don’t like
hell, if owl is to blame for balance then i’m grateful for it because the game’s balance in a much better state
All Star is NOT OWL
All Star marks the end of an OWL season. Its part of OWL too.
Minimum $20 million each for what is now, ~16ish teams? Blizz can no longer go back on that without screwing the entirety of Activision-Blizzard and having enormous ripple effects on the entire industry. Quite frankly, Blizz is financially obligated to no longer consider people who dislike OWL as part of the the target demographic for the game.
And for the record, I really don’t like how they’ve tyrannized the pro scene and deliberately killed off third party support.
I liked the league and I disagree.