I’ve seen a lot of people recently make some argument along the lines of “You say OW2 meta is bad because of counterswapping, don’t you remember how bad double shield, goats, etc. was in OW1” and here is why that is pure stupidity.
In Overwatch 1, you actually had to be a high rank for the meta to matter. People always bring up how bad the dreaded GOATs was for the game, but the thing is that Goats was only ever must pick in Masters and GM, which is less than 4% of the ranked ladder. Below Platinum, which was still over half the ladder, you would basically never see it. This is not to say that brigitte or the open queue format weren’t a problem in the lower ranks, just that the boogeyman GOATs wasn’t. Considering less than half the playerbase is even playing comp, that means that less than 2% of the whole playerbase was experiencing this problem, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect the balance of a casual game like overwatch to fall apart at the top levels of play, it’s a good ideal thing to have it be balanced but fairly low priority
Meanwhile in the Overwatch 2 tank counter swap metagame, silver players in QUICKPLAY are executing the exact same counter rollouts as GM players. Look at tank pickrates by rank, they’re almost identical now except that heroes like ball and doomfist get left out of the lower rank counter rotations. It is a simple flowchart. If d.va then beams, if winston then tankbuster, if ball then stuns, and so forth. It does not require the cooperation of an entire team, just 1 tank, so it’s accessible in any skill bracket even without comms. Of course the dps players can step in with their own tank counters to make it even worse, but just the tank doing so is enough for the entire tank role to be unplayably miserable.
In Overwatch 1 metagames were bad but very niche, in Overwatch 2 if I made a new account today and loaded into arcade team deathmatch to play tank I’ll be counterswapped by the time our team gets 3 kills.