I personally wouldn’t because I’d honestely take that beating with a smile knowing that I atleast made it to a level where I can meet the actual best players in game, but I guess too many people didn’t find it fun at that level.
but they also made changes to the ladder to reflect the play in OWL, but not actually being able to form a full team.
it just seems counterintuitive if they were supposed to promote OWL like that to me.
when in fact the biggest part of this game revolves around teamwork.
it’s just a confusing thing to me why they didn’t allow for stacking.
Yeah, I can’t remember specifically. I think more than 3 OWL players from the same team or just OWL players in general aren’t allowed to stack
Playercams are fine for presenting the mechanical skill and decision making for that one player we’re watching. The problem is that they’re are an awful way to present all the moving parts that make up a team game.
They need to improve the floating cam viewing experience.
I never recall saying throwing was competitive 
Throwing just has a different form now. Like finding out your GM tank is actually a GM Mercy 1 trick who cant tank for their life.
Or, both tanks going offtank when the other team has 1 or 2 shields.
This could just as easily happen in no role lock.
it’s not limited to owl players, it’s all players at the highest ranks on ladder.
you could potentially stack with smurfs i suppose to get to the highest rank i suppose a lot easier if this limitation didn’t exist.
but that doesn’t mean it can’t still be done,
so i generally don’t see the point of it anyways.
It’s almost like, throwing is throwing?
And it isnt dependent on how restricted you are, there will always be a way?
I’m refering to a specific rule for OWL players before the 2 stack limit.
A mercy filling in as tank because no one is tanking isn’t throwing, that’s trying to make something work. If there were other people who could play a better Rein and didn’t because they’d rather play something else then that’s on them. Can’t blame the mercy player for trying.
What you don’t get in 2-2-2 is suddenly your healers or tanks switching off their roles to DPS.
ah, but i think it might stem from that rule, if owl players aren’t allowed to stack it would be unfair to owl players if their opposition was allowed to i suppose,
and here we are.
I think anyone who argues about ‘casual’ and ‘pro’ already lost the argument.
I’d argue that this is exactly the reason why this game is too casual to be an esport. But first you need to realize that casual doesn’t equate to wrong or bad. Casual means that people don’t care about about the most effective way to play for the least amount of effort, which is what competitive essentially is. Furthermore an awful lot in this game also incentivizes the casual mentality, from hero and map designs to gamemodes. You can’t expect people at low levels to play the game like the pros do when you have supports that do better as DPS because of their inherent design… and this is just one example.
A game can only work as an esport if the whole playerbase plays the game similarly, otherwise it just alienates the playerbase.
It’s not that people don’t care about what’s wrong or bad, it’s just that people are just wrong in their assumptions of wrong and bad. It’s a player problem rather than a game problem. There are a lot of ways to learn what’s the right thing but the playerbase generally don’t like the idea that there are people who know better than them, especially if it’s their peers.
The game itself is competitive, the playerbase might not be.
And that’s exactly why the game isn’t very competitive. A competitive game doesn’t attract such a large casual playerbase to beign with.
A game can be competitive at different levels. Basketball down the street might not be casual but Basketball in clubs and the pro league is another story.
Blizzard wanted this game to be only played by 6 stacks…that’s the original design because this game is so heavy on teamwork. I think that says enough about what this game was meant to be.
Casuals on their own could never find 5 people to play whenever they want to play.
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The ‘right thing’ constantly shifts. Deliberately.
Furthermore, different heroes work to different degrees at different ranks where ability on movement or hardware capabilities are different. So it’s not that people aren’t trying to be effective when they pick Bastion on defence or to make pirate ship, it’s that they’ve seen it be effective and hard to play against and expect it to be good.
They don’t play Tracer at low ranks in spite of getting farmed by smurfs, because they very quickly realise they’re bad at her.
All this is in the stats.
People are competitive, that’s why they’re so damn toxic.
That’s why this idea of ‘casuals’ is just wrong, absolutely and fundamentally wrong.
Yeah, all these things were intended even during Beta. People just assume it’s casual because of a couple of changes made and a rather sensible decision to not launch the game with competitive live.
Basketball (and most other conventional sports) are also designed in such ways that there’s only really one way to play.
Overwatch isn’t. Like I said, there are supports that are designed in such ways that some supports or tanks are better DPS than actual DPS at low levels for example. Half of the cast has some get out of jail card that you don’t need to care about positioning at all at low levels. Etc…There’s just way too much in this game that you can get away with at low levels of play that are a no-go at higher levels and this isn’t just because of the playerbase, but because of the game itself.
There just isn’t a learning curve in this game. It just changes drastically at some points in the rankings and these points even differ between heroes.
Let’s be honest, they didn’t even know themselves what they wanted this game to be. They also intended this game to be originally centered around constantly switching to counter. They didn’t even launch with a competitive mode and had to revamp the ranking system shortly after it got implemented. Tanks have fundamental design issues for a PvP game. They added both very casual-friendly and unfriendly heroes to the game down the road. Hell, this game was originally supposed to be an MMO.
It’s clear that they’re just throwing all that they find cool at a wall and see what sticks.
I don’t find strategies with different lineups in conventional sports that different from different strategies in OWL.
There are “rules” in terms of when you want to defend and attack, how to look for openings and punish bad plays and bad positioning.
In games like CS there is no natural learning curve either, it’s all made up by players as time went by and the different ranks became more defined in terms of what they can and can’t do. Regardless of that most players who play CS, even at low ranks know what’s up because they follow the pro scene. It’s one of the reasons why starting to play CS as a new player can be very intimidating because the amount of things you have to learn is so much and people will shout at you for not knowing things that they believe are basic.