It’s more like a feedback loop. Everybody has their dissatisfaction with the game, but usually, if you sit down and ask individual people what they think the problem is, they’ll all have their own specific answers.
Then someone makes a popular video on Youtube and everyone goes, “Aha! Yes! That’s the problem right there!”
This is also seen with political demagogues who garner support by blaming one specific scapegoat on problems. Movies make kids violent, rock and roll makes kids violent, games make kids violent, rap makes kids violent, and comic books make kids gay. People are quickly ready to believe that all of the problems come from that one source, because they want to do SOMETHING about it.
A new map you are going to play once every 50 match cause there are to much now, and you can’t choose what to play. Even a map type pool can solve this without split to much the playerbase (and have higher queque times).
“What’s up everyone this is Jeff from OW team and Genji with new patch have 3 dashes on 55 meters without recharging. Also Tracer have + 500 HP. I hope you enjoy. Thank you.”
I think it’s too late, they’ve taken too many dumps down the player’s back to redeem themselves, the Diablo Immortal dump should be a clear indication on how far away from their players Blizzard really is.
Everything is run by Activision, and Activision only speaks in dollar signs. And currently, E-Sports is the hot potato in terms in investments in the gaming world. An analysis by Forbes estimates a value of $900M by 2018, and that’s a LOT of money. You can practically hear the dripping sound of Activision, drooling over the potential. That’s why everything in Blizzard these days evolve around E-Sports, and why Activision is forcing down E-Sports on everyone, even if it means loosing their integrity in the process.
In some way, I hope they fail miserably and are forced to do changes, unfortunately, the failures of the management often means lay-off for those poor people who only did what the management told them to.
I really don’t think going free to play is the answer, heck with all the sales and free weekens OW is nearly there. I mean 12 bucks for the game not too long ago. Yes being free will bring in more players but more than likely they will be even more toxic than ever.
There will also be a huge upswing of smurfs and trolls as banning will have no real meaning any more unless you really care about your cosmetics and rank. Which lets be honest there are even trolls now who don’t care if their accounts get banned or not.
Never mind the fact OW doesn’t put out nearly enough content to keep the F2P economy alive. 5-10 skins every couple months during an even isn’t exactly a great way to push people into buying loot boxes. Never mind that in my opinion of those skins only a handful are any good. Anything below Legendary is usually just a lazy pallet swap.
When OW goes F2P it will be the true sign of the end imo. A last minute cash grab before it goes under.
There’s a big flaw in a team based game when all it takes is for one person on your team to not try or care and that results in an easy loss for your team.
I know for a fact alot of people are not playing much now. The events are the same now, nothing new. My friends list composed of WoW / OW and HOTS players went from 50+ active 4-5 months ago… to seeing 2-3 online playing during a weekend.
Map bans/ Hero bans are the next step I feel. Its a competitive feature in this day of age for many other games. If you’re “forcing” your game to be an e-sport atleast use what works in other e-sports and run with it.
Forcing a rein or dva or mcree or moira ban only helps the meta by making other people play more then one thing. Not to mention how bad it is for support players who are new to only learn something like moira or brig. Those classes teach you 0 game awareness and entice you to focus more on dmg then supporting a team.
Yes, OW has fundamental problems. The problem with those are that they are part of the game design, so in order to address all of them you would need to release Overwatch 2!
So you can only fix or tone down some, but not all of those at the same time!
Several design decisions such as the addition of Brigitte, Mercy rework and Hog nerfs paved way for the game to have boring, stale metas and gradually lowering player counts. Frankly those type of ideas are the ones you get strange looks by your co-workers when you suggest it at a brainstorming session.
Yeah, Blizzard. Nerf the only character that has a fighting chance against dive, and then get surprised when dive is completely perpetuated as the only comp.
Yeah, Blizzard. Give instant rez every 30 seconds. Give even more rez every 1 minute or so. Also give more rezzes during the ult duration.
-devs are SOO SLOW with progress…like how long does it take to f*ckin balance mercy 2.0 which was so blatantly op it’s absolutely embarrassing that it took them over 8 months to fix that…
-devs need to stop this silence bullsh*t, you’re pushing your players away. Give us hope, give us something to look forward to. Being so silent about everything is kind of rude honestly
But I’m pretty sure that they are 100% all e-sports now and don’t care about us so this games playerbase is going downhill very fast which will bite them in the a** later. So be it
Why was Brigitte added in the first place? Two reasons:
Blizzard/people were fed up with the dive meta, so they wanted to see and force a new one
People, normally supports, were fed up with getting r*ped by good Genjis and Tracers in the backline.
So instead of nerfing down the heroes which were the root cause for the problems, which e.g. would mean removing Genji’s ridiculous reflect and tone down the efficiency of Tracers deflect, Blizzard didn’t want to admit with a nerf that those hero abilities are quite the problem.
So they made Brigitte, who could just erase those two. She was a bandaid to those problems, but not a resolution, instead turned out to be a big problem by herself, because she performed just to good against anything which was in her effective range.
And that’s the problem with Overwatch: Blizzard so far has been adressing the symptoms, but not the problems like ridiculous hero abilties, too much CC in the game, too powerful ultimates and so on. But addressing those finally, once and for all would in reality mean that you would need something like Overwatch 2.0.