Overwatch the game is healthy

General Discussion
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Now, I like everyone else here really don’t want to use the word “unfun” here, but, just because a character is deemed “playable”, somewhat based on perspective, does not necessarily mean that the characters are fun to play.

I may or may not have created a game where there is a control point and all the heroes have the same kit and are ants that melee each other. I’d say this is a balanced game but I’ll admit it’s boring and it sucks.

Games are a form of entertainment. It should be entertaining or “fun”. Overwatch’s novelty is slowly fading for a lot of people.

All perspective, my dear friend.

This is hard to quantify. Queue times are based on numerous variables like the time of day and the day of the week to name a couple.

I’m not sure that this statement really separates Overwatch apart from many other games, to be frank.

Yes. Like most if not almost all. Assuming these other games in comparison are established games (been around for a couple of years etc.)

+1 for Overwatch.

This I no longer believe because of the weekly rotation. Weekly rotation limits my options and it just so happens every time I play it happens to be on the same rotation. So in my bubble, there’s the same arcade options every week. I’ll assume someone out there is in a similar position. Regardless having all of them available would be fantastic. It’d be even more fantastic if they didn’t recycle the same modes for over a year.

As a whole, this is true. However for us veterans who have been around since launch there aren’t enough “new” skins to keep us interested.

Similar to the arcade modes, recycled recycle recycled.
Rinse and repeat.

Absolutely. They respond to messages; however, I’m not sure they respond soon enough and to the right concerns (all perspective, I know).

I don’t find the game very fun to watch as it is to play. The casual player base is much greater than the player base who religiously watches OWL. It appears I’m not the only one as there are constant complaints that OWL is taking time and resources away from the game itself.

This all isn’t evidence that the game is dying; but, you’ll have to trust the community on this one.

The game is dying.

New comers find Overwatch fun, sure. But when they become veterans, they leave. There just simply isn’t enough new content etc. to keep the overturns interested. The hardest task is keeping the attention of a dedicated player base. Dedicated player bases determine the health of the game. You don’t want Overwatch to be a fad. Fads hold everyone’s attention for just enough time to make some revenue and create a buzz, but, a year after that, no one will care.

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Bastion, Torb, Sym, Junkrat, and Doomfist say hi. Also, Brigitte is pretty much unplayable outside of goats at this point.

Lol.

It takes me over 3 minutes in queue now sometimes just to get into a quick play match, of all things, and it’s often as backfill to a match that is instantly over, often before I even get to choose a hero. I have waited over 14 minutes across 6 or 7 queues to play for a total of maybe 30 seconds.

See my comment above. Also, quick play has become a joke, and when you do get to finally play a full match, it’s not even close to a good game. It’s either a steamroll because the other team isn’t trying and/or has throwers/leavers, or you get stomped because your team isn’t tring and/or has throwers/leavers.

A competitive ranked mode which is incredibly toxic and full of people who don’t want to play as a team in a team based game.

There is, but the majority of players don’t care about it.

Again, the majority of players don’t care about it. They only play it for the extra loot boxes during events, and during events, Arcade can often be even more toxic than comp.

And yet you just get duplicate after duplicate in your loot boxes.

Which amount to very little outside of a handful of cosmetics that you can only unlock during the time the event is going on. And you don’t even have to participate in the event or do any special challenges to get the cosmetics.

Not really. The dev response is very sporadic, and in their communications, they don’t really communicate much. A lot of it is just fluff.

Yes. A professional league which is forced down the players’ throats. A league that the game is now being solely balanced around. The devs are not interested in making the game good or fun for the majority of the people who play it anymore. They only care about making OWL more interesting to watch. The problem with them doing this…

…is that when you solely balance around the professional scene and start alienating the majority of your playerbase by making the game unfun for them, they’re not going to maintain an interest in an esport for a game that they don’t like playing anymore. And when the whole game is based around that esport which nobody is watching anymore because the game isn’t fun, people stop playing. And then the game starts dying.

Frankly, I think that there is going to be a reasonable viewership for this season of OWL. Enough to guarantee that there will be one more season. However, if the game keeps going in the direction it’s going, and keeps being made less fun for the majority of players in the hopes of making the esport more entertaining to watch, interest in OWL is going to fizzle out and die in the third season, and then the game will die.

Instead of forcing an esport, they should have allowed the professional scene to happen naturally. If the game is competitive enough to be played at a professional level and be a good competitive game for professionals to play and people to have an interest in, the esports scene would have happened on its own regardless of how the game is balanced. TF2 had a really cool pro scene in its heyday, but the devs never balanced around that. Instead, the competitive scene for TF2 built around what existed in the game, and built rulesets that allowed for a fun and entertaining competitive game, while still allowing for the game keep its core and be fun for the majority of players.

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if you think this game is fine you have incredibly low standards.

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Overwatch is in a healthy state good joke op

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The game is not fine, the playerbase is fictional numbers, pretty sure the forums are more active.

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I wouldn’t say “regularly”

Which means they still have their fans, but they need to do something about their damn game.

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An overwhelming majority are considered weak or unbalanced. Theres a reason GOATs is a thing.

This I can agree with since they’ve essentially neutered every popular hero near the playable levels of F-tier heroes.

It took me two minutes max to find a game in High plat/Low Diamond. It takes around 6-7 today.

These aren’t all that impressive considering several games have achieved this as well. R6, TF2, etc. A lot of games have comp modes.

The only thing that actually functions in this game.

I wouldn’t say theres enough variation. A lot of them are just annoying.

The one thing I can give praise for is the art team. They are amazing at what they do. I have no real complaints aside from the fact that the growing roster of heroes means the less chance your main might get a legendary skin unless they up the skins per an event.

Last blue post was a month ago, and a developer video hasn’t been made for nearly 2 months.

The same league thats leeching off this game and killing off its casual playerbase.

The game is okay, but its only going to get worse unless theres some change drastic enough to fix everything mentioned above.

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I really like your responses. I’m glad you really got the point of the thread. So many others did not.

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  1. Most of the characters have always been in a playable state, that is why only a few have ever been completely reworked. The problem is that the same powerful characters haven’t really been touched at all and are everywhere, Genji and Tracer for example, while characters that are supposed to counter them now can’t function in that capacity due to nerf trains, ie Brig.
  2. Overly strong is completely subjective and actually is part of your statement of the first point.
  3. Que times shouldn’t really change much, it’s 6 people in roughly the same play range put together for each team, pretty simple even if there was only 1 million people playing or even a couple hundred thousand.
  4. qp is LOL, games are mostly filled with garbage players that all want to play widow/hanzo and get smashed multiple then leave because they get slaughtered and actually can’t play them but want to tell their team how meta dbl sniper is.
  5. Yep.
  6. Yep.
  7. Yep.
  8. Yep.
  9. Yep.
  10. Yep.
  11. Yep.

In that world the game is dying because players are moving on because they are unhappy about various things. Maybe it is that another popular character is used for the gay train. Maybe it is because almost every character that has been released in the almost 3 years of the game is female and it is getting old. Maybe it is that some heroes never get nerfed and make the game boring like Tracer and Genji. Maybe it is that OW is almost never on the front page of Twitch anymore because no one watches any games anymore and has moved on.

Whether you like it or not the game has seen better (more players) days. It is not aging particularly well, it does have it’s hardcore fans and i still play it for sure, but not nearly as much and tbh there isn’t much left here to see.

What lore will we get that will be exciting? Rein turns out to be gay? Tracers GF is a new playable character? Now of course i am kidding about this stuff but it has a kernel of truth to it because that is basically all we have gotten for REAL LORE in what…a year? 1 comic where S76 turned out to be gay and/or bisexual? The Ashe short?

Meanwhile a game that frequently had 150k viewers on twitch struggles now to get 20k views, even if you think that is anecdotal evidence and i would agree, it is pointing to a shift away from the game. Very clearly. Will OW die out, probably not, hell games last for decades on a rabid fanbase, but the playerbase is DEFINITELY smaller. So people say it is dying and they aren’t wrong, but that is just another way of saying it is getting much smaller until only the hardcore lovers of it are left. How many will that be? Who know’s? 500k? 1mill? 2 mill?

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Your definition of regularly needs a double checking. I rarely ever see messages and responses from developers, and developer videos are becoming increasingly rare.

They are far worse at interacting and communicating with their player base on their own forums compared to Riot, who have many active devs and even a Dev Corner that players can participate in to communicate with the devs. I hate Riot as a company, but they are much more active with the community than the Overwatch devs are.

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I wish I had said this, so true…

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It’s not inherently bad no, and is intended to keep the game fresh, which is laudable. But many of the decisions Blizzard have made, rather than keeping the game fresh, have just pushed people away from the game.

Blizzard haven’t shown a lot of insight into what the people playing their game want, and are paying for it in declining interest and numbers.

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THe questions is, does it matter if it’s only a million? FWIW, worst case its at half its playerbase. Also, OWL viewing is a specious benchmark for judging OW popularity at best because honestly most players are there to have fun, and don’t consider watching an eSport, even OW, as “fun”… it’s the weakest measure of how a game is doing. BR games are getting their second wind by adopting more OW like mechanics, but what may occur is as people tire of the simple play of BR games they discover OW which has more depth.

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This right here
[20 char]

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The game is definitely dying, but its so low that no one notices it.

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Where would I look to find this information?

I looked at the Quarterly results for the third quarter in 2018 which seems to be the latest posted results.

I don’t seem to be able to find any info regarding falling player numbers.

The only thing it seems to say about OW actually is about the positive outlook it has given the OWL that has expanded its teams.

I can see stock is down for ActiBlizz but given the loss of Destiny IP and being sued by Sweden it makes sense they’d have a bad upcoming quarter.

Obviously I’m no expert at combing through these reports so if I’m missing something then I’d appreciate it if you could help me out.

Cheers

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I wasn’t specifically talking about OWL watching on twitch, i was talking about general viewing of players like Kephri on their channels. Like i said it is anecdotal evidence and sure you can say it is unimportant but when a game goes from 150k viewers a day from all the twitch channels down to below 20 or even 15k that is a SIZABLE drop. And while it is obviously not a 1 for 1, it shows that peoples interest has dropped considerably.

As far as your statement it’s at half it’s playerbase, both yours and my example are guesses at most, however what is true and cannot be disputed is the trajectory of the playerbase and THAT is what is important.

Yes, Apex Legends is adopting some things that are Overwatch “like” but no BR game is like OW simply by design. I personally have never played a BR game, they don’t interest me much but that type of play is what is the problem with QP. OW requires thought to play as it is a game of counter, not a game of team deathmatch with an objective to push. Unfortunately a large portion of the playerbase are stuck in team deathmatch mode and unable to understand what counter means or even team play means, therefore we get wild swings in the game with characters and seemingly unending nerfs while others remain untouched…unfortunately.

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People are looking at three things 1) their own lack of interest while forgetting new players come in daily, not just smurfs/alts, 2) OWL viewership or twitch doesn’t indicate health of a game nearly like they would have you believe, and 3) Slightly longer queue times mean millions must have had abandoned the game, right?

Maybe it’s really a simple thing…

What I think is that people haven’t abandoned the game, but they are no longer playing it as the only game, and split their time among it and others. This is perfectly natural and fine. OWl spiked up, went down thanks to GOATS, etc, and is now rebounding with expansion teams and viewership is trending upwards from what someone else said. Internet Kidz rank everything on twitch viewership, which is fallacious thinking.

And let’s not forget the inner turmoil at Blizzard, which undoubtedly is affecting their production as well…

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“life support” That’s overwatch if the devs dont start listening to constructive player criticism.

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  • There’s a workable custom game mode.

I certainly do not agree with that.

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