OWL is the problem as I’m not in OWL therefore if it’s the problem its not my fault.
That’s really the basics of this line of thought.
While Overwatch being dead is sort of a meme by this point, it does have problems. Some are our fault but others 100% are not.
The recycled events for example are a problem that is not our fault. Toxic behavior however is almost 100% our fault. Like Blizzard can and have made efforts to stop it but the sheer amount of toxic people in the community make this really hard.
People complain that they want to play DPS but never get to or always get too many DPS heroes. That is our fault for not treating a team game as a team. Stuff like R6 Siege doesn’t have this problem anywhere near as much and their dev’s are way worse than ours, so at least part of that problem is our fault.
Oh, I wholly agree. I apologize if my reply seemed a rebuttal; I intended it only as analysis by which to further discussion – put simply, that ambiguity, more so than competitiveness, fosters negativity. The more ambiguity in the road to higher SRs, of the idiosyncrasies of each stratum and how widely those characteristics will extend, and how one performed, and what instances of underperformance were especially damaging, etc., the more one reflexively seeks out delineation: “what are my real abilities”, and, all to often on the way to that answer or shortly thereafter, “who is to blame for my falling short of my real abilities”? You see the same thing in MMOs, in physical sports, in group tasks even in the workplace.
I think that at the basis of this lies that the community is just too varied. They tried to attract people from way too much and too differing genres with this game. Plus the devs only made it worse with their balancing, showing that they don’t even know themselves what they want this game to be.
You can even see it in the awful amount of conflicting complaints. One person says that the game’s becoming another CoD copy, while the next says it’ becoming too Moba-esque.
They tried to make this game be everything at once and as a result it basically ended up with an identity crisis.
I’ll admit that I only really play two other games with competitive scenes, Splatoon and Super Smash Bros, but I haven’t noticed anything like this in either community. I mean there are references in Smash community to tension between the two sides but I’ve not actually noticed it. Admittedly Sakurai and them all are quite good at pleasing both sides.
Overwatch has objectively one of the worst balance teams to have ever worked on a Triple-A title. Painfully slow balance cycles. No communication with the community. Extremely questionable balance decisions that do not reflect community feedback. Wasting the resources of the PTR and not using it to actively test balance changes.
Overwatch has objectively one of the worst and laziest coding teams to have ever worked on a Triple-A title. Their idea of fixing Reinhardt’s buggy charge? Don’t actually fix it, make the hitbox inaccurately larger! Their idea of fixing Genji’s ledge boost? Don’t actually fix it, just make the game rubberband the player back to the ledge after takeoff!
Overwatch has objectively one of the most inactive storywriting departments to have ever worked on a Triple-A title. We only get 2 or 3 comics and animated shorts per year at best, the Archives event once per year, and more recently a PDF lore entry that could have been written by your average Wattpad fanfic author. What the heck is the writing team actually doing most of the time?
Overwatch had so much potential, but it’s been squandered.
I respectfully disagree. Focus did go into OWL and not enough effort was made into reducing community toxicity. The various actions or inactions made through Overwatch’s or OWL’s development contributed to increasing amounts of community toxicity over time, from frustrations on various things not being addressed satisfactorily or at all. It took two years for an LFG system to arrive, by which time it was too late.
We still have the god awful matchmaking and skill rating algorithm in competitive play for ranks between bronze until the start of diamond, but even then matchmaking can be a bit hit and miss from diamond onwards. Mercy’s rework was the worst rework they ever did, and still is to date. Communication until recently has been dropping considerably. I don’t think we even get developer update videos anymore, instead we get random interviews with certain content creators or streamers, some of which the community may not want to support or simply watch.
Oh another “I have no argument but from what I see, game is dead” thread.
It’s no more entertaining.
Can you go on Apex or some other “non dead game” and never come back ? Will be better for you, and for everyone else.
If you don’t like beans, you don’t go to the consumer associations to tell people that beans don’t taste good. You just eat something else and you leave people that like it alone.
Let’s get something straight:
Overwatch isn’t a very good game.
A lot of people like to take this weird stance like “Overwatch was perfect, much too perfect to be put into the hands of mere mortals like us. We destroyed it with our in-fighting, unwillingness to cooperate with strangers, and bad balance decisions.”
The hard pill to swallow is that the base design of the game is just bad. The whole game is built around the premise of strangers being willing to cooperate and take very different, very crucial roles in a team. Now I don’t have any qualifications in game design, but having interacted with other people before, I can already tell you that this is a bad idea. My hunch is that Overwatch League was always the end goal, which is why the game plays so much like a team sport. The concept works perfectly in OWL, but in a ladder situation? I think it barely works at all.
I think the reasons for the actual success of the game are:
People were nostalgic for the early days of TF2.
The art team did, and continue to do, a stellar job. I would say they are responsible for the majority of sales.
The publicity was good.
The game didn’t have a competitive mode to begin with, so felt much more fun and lighthearted back in the beta/early release.
People say the game is dead, or the community killed the game, or make posts like the OP’s…but the reality is that the game has always been half-baked.
Because they balance according to them. Before you even think of disagreeing, tell me what other reason is there to keep Sombra the way she is despite every statistic showing that she is f tier on the ladder?
Their idea of fixing sym teleporter allowing enemies to get into teams spawn? Disable her teleporter from working in spawn. Their idea of fixing the shadow step and teleporter bug on ledges that have existed for 3 years and 8 months respectively? Nothing at all. Their idea of a Public Test Server? Use it as a preview of what is to come. The name is damn misleading
AFAIK For Honor was nearly killed by the combination of pro gamers, esports and playerbase dividing movements. And just the new DLC’s the faster development and the 2 weeks of free giveaways helped it become more than alive again (im playing FH every day).
It just sounds like the future of OW to me.
But i agree on that the OW community has its great share on the games current state.
Every game gets the community it deserves. In addition to Monstree’s points, this game’s design encourages toxicity in it’s half assed overall character design; it’s like some characters have hard counters while others dont.
And don’t get me started on the entire ultimate system, which they designed in such a way as to completely counter their ‘constant character switching’ philosophy.
No, the community didn’t kill overwatch. The devs killed overwatch in their hubris.
Finally. Some quality responses and people posting off of thinking; rather than SJW’s doing their typical screeching from their precious “safe-space” being analyzed and called out for being what it truly is (and was) all along.