I’m watching OWL right now. That’s why I know that the player base would be much lower if OWL had never existed. OWL is great for this game and the only esport I’ve ever been interested in.
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This, but new teams this season paid 20-30 million dollars each for a spot. OWL is why a three-year-old FPS still attracts new players.
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It’s still resources spit in two, no matter how you look at it.
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It’s funny how you have some people saying that Overwatch is dying because it has no viewers on Twitch, yet OWL brings over 100k viewers to Overwatch on average, and it’s most likely the main reason why Blizzard is adding more developers to the Overwatch team, even after firing 800 people.
I get what you’re saying, but clearly OWL is important for the game, and there are always changes done solely for lower ranked players, such as reducing Reapers healing from 50% to 40% in the recent PTR patch.
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Sure , lets kill the only thing keeping OW alive
okay let me spell it out to you.
Game devs have literally none of the credentials needed to do what OWL need.
Concession planning, game scheduling, advertisement scheduling, commentating, spectating matches, analyzing teams, and negotiating contracts for players all have literally nothing in common with game developers credentials.
Idk how the forums cant get something as basic as that through their head, but there you go, ive spelled it out.
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Someday. 
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no, let me spell it out for you, read carefully -
any codebase is very carefully maintained by project leaders once they grow too large. this is to prevent consistency issues, this is to keep everything well documented
any change requires the project manager and the developers to have potentially weeks of meetings to discuss the implementation, the resources that will be required, etc
do you want proof of this? reference how jeff kaplan recently noted how they have people doing research for months on how hard it would be to implement role queue
the overwatch league has multiple features that require directly modfiying the codebase of the game to integrate certain features for the viewer experience. these are software features that directly integrate with the game, not your concession stands, not your game scheduling.
if you need examples of these features, reference the post i made that you replied to without reading
all of what you listed, concession planning etc, does not touch the codebase. to expect me to say that that would divert development resources is naive and silly. that makes no sense.
idk how someone can confuse something so basic, but there you go. spelled out
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What? Are you trying to say that each team paid Blizzard 20-30 million to get a spot in OWL? Do you have a source for this because I have a hard time believing this.
if you look at it that way, resources are split into like 10 directions with diablo, hearthstone, world of Warcraft, Warcraft 1-3, starcraft 1 and 2 and call of duty.
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they don’t need to develop code for the spectator feature, its done. the only reason they are currently changing is so the playerbase can use it. they are only changing it to give it to the regular players, who have all asked for it.
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I think OWL is good for the game, and we’re lucky to have it
And I don’t even watch it.
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You’re joking, I played 5 games tonight and GOATS was used against us every single time.
Anyone who says it’s not used below masters is full of it.
GOATS isn’t just unfun to go against, it’s boring.
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They’ve been constantly updating the PTR and a lot of heroes got tweaked here and there.
Even if OW wasn’t around these buffs/nerfs would still come because changing things up keeps the gameplay fresh.
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for the sake of not hindering the games development, i hope you’re correct in your assumptions. those being that the higher ups in the OWL don’t get any major additions to the tournament client greenlit that would require even more resources being drawn from the devs to get working. that they’re done with it and the league is going to be mostly static from here moving forward.
my assumption that i hope i am correct on is that they have their game engine so decoupled from the gameplay itself that they’re able to seperately maintain the features the OWL needs to operate vs what the developers need to make gameplay changes.
it’s interesting to think about how many hours of planning and programming that type of overhaul might have taken if the game engine was not built from the ground up for that in mind. 
judging by how limited tournament clients were in the past, i bet it wasn’t.
those hours programming could have been spent creating other features, but since they don’t fundamentally have only their own goals in team 4, they have to work on other features from time to time. i really wonder how much further along the game would be if they didn’t have to worry about the owl at all in the past. lol, maybe we’d have our map editor and mysterious new social feature. then again, considering colorblind mode was a biproduct of them having to get OWL team jersey colors being rendered ingame, i bet we wouldn’t have colorblind mode tho.
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They literally said it was pre launch of OWL and they only did it to get them (owl team)on their feet.
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Some people have assumed that the lack of updates is because they plan on releasing a HUGE Overwatch expansion at some point. Whether that’s true or not, idk, but it’s not going to be free.
I don’t think the plan is for expansions. The whole idea is you buy the box, you get the full game.
I think the quiet time was to do with the restructuring and uncertainty that goes with it. They know where they’re headed now with the increased team and a bit more certainty so this explains why they’ve been able to bring this massive patch and a whole lot more communication.
And those are all cool features I like, sooooo, seems good to me.
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OWL is the problem,the devs are just trying to buff and nerf characters for the pro players they dont care about regular players
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