First of all, this will be a long post and I’m by no means a great player so no deep analysis here, just my personal view on the brief history of OW and its present state.
I started playing OW during open beta and even though I had no history of great interest in competitive FPS games I pretty much fell in love instantly. During the first two years the game became even better, and even though balance passes came at a glacial pace, the focus being 100% on the enjoyment of the average player. Not that every chance was perfect, far from it, but at least I always felt that the devs were trying to address the issues, such as Mercy’s original Ult, in ways that made the game more interesting and fun even if they did err and stumble, a lot. But because the devs were really invested in making the game better I could very well tolerate the hiccups.
Then during the first Heroes of the Storm cross-promotion (Oni Genji skin) I dipped into the MOBA genre. Didn’t particularly care about the game untill the second cross-promotion (Police DVa skin) when something just clicked or maybe I was just slightly burned out from too much OW, but I started getting more and more into HotS. Even back then HotS was memed being dead game, just for the record. Around the same time I started playing the devs were busy trying to force esports into the game. Balance was mainly dictated by the needs of pros in HGC. Fortunately HGC got canned and the game was once again focused around the more manageable Master and Grand Master tiers. And while the playerbase is probably lower that it was a few years ago, it’s overall in more healthy state and very much alive. Alive enough at least to be memed as being dead game still.
So imagine my surprise when I came briefly back to OW during the archive/anniversary events and browsed through 6 months of patch notes. Huge nerfs and buffs to otherwise balanced characters. You see, in HotS hero balance is usually tweaked in small increments, by changing few numbers around 5% up or down. Usually this is enough. And hardly ever anything was drastically changed if a hero was otherwise performing ok, maybe some occasional tweaks to underperforming talents to mix things up. Several reworks too, some better received than others. In OW changes were tens of percents at times, but the usual bottom tier was still bottom tier with barely any chance. The worst thing being that many of the changes seemed to be just for the sake of change or to direct the meta to a predetermined direction. In addition, forums had become inflammed and toxic, even by MOBA standards.
Looking back how OW was when I left, the current OW looks like something that is slowly and persistently being milked dry of everything that made the game good originally by the select OWL beneficiaries and streamers in their secret Discord channel at the expense of regular players untill there is nothing left but another game ruined by forced esports scene.
Ironically, if HotS is a dead game that is surprsingly vivacious, OW at the moment is exceptionally dead for a game that is supposed to be full of life. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.