yea
because you don’t want a more competitive game and still think its a surprise to flank as mccree and high noon 1 person
u ppl cant even communicate with ur team and ur like nah an addon shouldnt be able to tell someone they need to help their healers LUL
I have nothing against the software or its creators… Like anything automated… It’ll benefit people a great deal… but I’d rather just keep those doors closed… I hope you get me…
What’s interesting is that they allowed Deck Tracker in Hearthstone with the comment that “anything that you could do with a pen & paper is not a problem”.
Well Pursuit is no different, it takes pictures of the killing feed and give you an overview of who did what. If you have a friend next to you with a pen & paper you could do the same.
Makes no sense to me !
I understand that concern, and I honestly respect it. But if this game is to prosper as an esport, knowledge about how to play it properly as a team is valuable. The current pool of human coaches who can review/analyze the many games are currently too few, and the audience for OW is currently not converging on analysis sites like Winston’s Lab, or the few OW columns cropping up from professional esports teams (Team Dignitas is the only one that comes to mind for me).
So until the community understands issues like ult economy, communication, and why team compositions matter, apps like pusuit.gg is going to be important in raising the bar with regards to game knowledge within the community.
Pursuit was never meant to be the exclusive way of improving, it is simply a tool; much like how a coach would review a VOD submitted by a user, only automated post-game.
Pursuit, as a company, is automatically harvesting data from Overwatch with the express written plan (read their FAQ) of selling it back to the end users. In what world does Company #1 just let Company #2 do that with their product?
the semantics of what Pursuit might be or if it helps players etc isn’t the point, at all. Blizzard can’t let this slide or we would just quickly see even more companies looking to do the same thing. Pursuit will either need to reach a legal agreement with Blizzard or change the nature of their product.
I’m honestly surprised people did not see this coming from a mile away. When these sort of programs did not hit the ground as a full partner going “The Official Statistical Program of Overwatch” I knew it was just a mater of time before lawyers showed up at the door.
There are sites like OverwatchDojo that facilitates paid coaching between players and human coaches. I understand your concern, but there are currently organizations that does the same thing as pursuit.gg. It is currently free because it is in beta, and will eventually be a paid service. Eventually.
If Blizzard wants to exist in the OW data analysis and coaching space, they should go right ahead, announce their intent, modify their TOS to reflect that. But until they do, I think this relevant business space in OW, the player coaching and analysis side-business, should continue.
That argument, as with the others people have made, makes zero sense.
Erm, what? Having something tell you what to do as the game goes on, in a competitive environment, is not being competitive, but is cheating.
Yeah that’s not how any of this works…
There is no “If Blizzard…” they own everything about Overwatch lock stock and barrel. They can do whatever they please with the IP. If they want to legally back hand slap another company and just not have any automatic stat programs, so be it.
Even if they DO want a product like Pursuit offers they still can’t just let Pursuit do whatever they want as it sets a legal precedent. Where does the line get drawn? 2 companies reselling stat data? 5? 10? 40? What about taking all the player data and then repacking it and selling in bulk to yet another company. Is that ok? I mean you let them resell it to the player with no agreement so hey just sell it to someone else too right?
Yeah, no… Legal teams are under retainer just for issues of this nature.
And I say again – the demand for OW coaching and data analysis is here and now. Does Blizzard intend to be in this business space? Do they want to shut down Overbuff, Jayne, Dibz, OverwatchDojo, etc.?
You might think that Blizzard owns OW lock stock and barrel, but the reality is that Blizzard needs complementary businesses that help what they are doing, which is to run the OW game service, maintain it free of bugs, and run the OWL.
So the challenge for Blizzard is this – can they competently run all of it?
I heard Stylosa suggest that’s what Blizzard might be shooting for, but let’s be honest:
That’s completely ridiculous. Whatever their intentions behind banning Pursuit, it’s not in their interest in the slightest to try to strongarm potential competitors out of the market when they already have a massive competitive advantage (that being, you know, the actual game backend). All that does is tarnish their reputation, and in a big way.
Whatever their reasons for banning pursuit, it assuredly has nothing to do with them being ready to provide an alternative.
My point of view is that it is in Blizzard’s best interest to clarify what their core business is, so that a healthy ecosystem of businesses with Blizzard and OW at its center becomes possible. Coaching and data analysis is non-core.
All reputable businesses strives for this, so I don’t see why Blizzard shouldn’t do the same.
If they want to be big in esports then they either need to allow these programs are provide a system that does the same job themselves.
So what?
That doesn’t change anything about the legal issues in play here. They are not going to let a random company live harvest very valuable statistical data from Overwatch and then resell it to the end user. Period.
Well, at least not for free with out some sort of contract/agreement etc.
They current stat sites and VOD reviews etc get to do what they are doing with a gentleman’s sort of agreement from Blizzard. Blizzard sees those as a mix of fair use and I’m guessing good over all game promotion.
It’s still not a live stat harvesting program running concurrently with the game with the primary goal of taking the stats and selling the info back to the player.
Legal issue of this nature are not based off any sort of balance scale of what the end user wants…
right now, I really don’t think so. They need to streamline much more if that’s to be the case, in my opinion.
So to take off the speculation hat and put on the “pragmatic business sense” hat:
What Blizzard are doing is insanity. It’s such a mess of the Nth degree that you’d think they hired some folks from Equifax. Tools start coming out demonstrating a real need by the players for a particular kind of service. Those tools find traction in professional Overwatch teams, and what follows is a very long period of complete radio silence. Finally, out comes a blanket warning to everyone who participated, and an affirmation that the tool which players clearly have a need for and which Blizzard had no official stance on for weeks is now banned wholesale.
So you’ve got a company who refuses to exploit an economic hole to provide first-class service of their own, and refuses to allow others to exploit that hole, while simultaneously eroding their own partners confidence in them and degrading consumers’ confidence in the core of their own product and neglecting said consumers’ needs.
Regardless of what Blizzard’s rights or obligations are, their method of handling this is monumentally stupid.
And those who don’t have discord don’t get the luxury of VoD review from multiple people after games yet we don’t ban people for doing that.
Could it be at all possible that the way pursuit gathers information could be the same as visor does whilst not displaying it in game for you it’s still records the data from a coding point of view.
It would be easier for them to just out ban 3rd party software rather than dedicate resources to review each one and make a judgment call to whether or not it’s considered an advantage. Just a thought
It’s not a random company – pursuit.gg is partnered with Philadelphia Fusion.
And that’s a big problem, because if they don’t respond positively to end user demands, this game will sink, because –
Blizzard has a lot of explaining to do…