DISCLAIMER: This thread is not intended as means to attack anybody on the Overwatch Team. I’m just here trying to do my best to give some light on some of the issues regarding Overwatch & the OW Forums.
As a lot of us have seen, there’s quite a lot of issues around in the game, as well as on the forums. The most notable of these on the forums is toxicity. But a lot of these issues really shouldn’t be happening; at least not nearly to the extent that it happens right now. And I’m no stranger to this either; I’ve had my share of being toxic as well.
To list off some of these issues, either in-game or on the forums:
- Bastion. Are those players going to get some form of update regarding Bastion soon? I believe a lot of us can agree that Bastion is the worst character in the game, and Bastion definitely needs a lot of help. No character should ever have a thread that has 16,000 replies, yet nothing heard from the Overwatch Team.
- Mercy. It’s known that she is getting buffed next patch; but I think some form of update on where she’s projected to be going would be greatly appreciated. Even more so considering that there’s more Mercy threads on this forum than most other heroes combined (such that I literally turned it into a meme). Not to mention that the actual feedback megathread is not only out of date (since she was nerfed in July as well), but said feedback thread also just keeps getting locked due to the mass amount of flags that it gets.
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- Note to Mercy players: I’m not talking about the “fun” factor here regarding Mercy. Fun is a matter of opinion no matter which way you look at it. Therefore, please do NOT turn this thread into a discussion on Mercy’s current state, or on how Mercy is not “fun”. Also Mass Rez is not coming back either. To prevent this thread from becoming derailed into such a topic, any post regarding the aforementioned bits on Mercy will be flagged; you’ve been warned!
- Updates in general. Yeah, I’m aware; Sony/MS have certifications for patches, and Blizzard wants to keep all platforms within the same patch area. But this doesn’t invalidate the point that updates are not frequent enough. It’s even harder to get hyped for events as well, since nothing really new is added (sans Archives Event) and because the skins are revealed BEFORE the event (kind of ruins the surprise, y’know?).
- No subtitles for people who cant hear or have some difficulty hearing. Suggestions for these even date back to launch, yet even to this day they’re still not in the game (Uprising doesn’t count in this case).
- The AI mode has been ignored ever since Sombra came out. Not much to say on this one; not even half of the characters have AI’s available for them.
- Issues pertaining specifically to the Console platforms. Yeah, there’s a lot more issues than you think. The lack of developer communication regarding this makes the matter worse. To give some food for thought, how much time passed this year between two responses pertaining to different issues regarding OW on the Console platforms? The answer to that is about 8 months (from January 18th to September 11th of this year). That is, to put simply, way too much time between said two responses (and those are the only two responses that Console Players have gotten here on the OW forums this year). Since there are so many things I can list regarding this alone, I’ll just take the time to instead redirect you to this thread explaining the issues in-depth in order to prevent this issue from lasting too long. Feel free to read through it at your leisure.
- Issues pertaining specifically to just PC. Though I can’t speak as well for this one, if any of you want to add something regarding this, feel free to quote this part and respond with your said issue. (I’ll add important ones of course!)
- And I could go on and on; but I think this is enough. This is just to name off some of the issues.
So how can we resolve, or at least, mitigate a lot of these issues to an extent?
It’s more simple than you think; and as you’ve noticed, most of the issues have something in common. Blizzard, I believe most of us can agree that you guys could increase your communication with us here on the forums a little more. Developer updates are all fine and dandy, but the fact there’s only an average of 1 developer update to the OW Playerbase per month is not good. That bit is a good indication that there’s quite a detachment from us, the OW Playerbase, and you guys, the Overwatch Team.
I believe weekly community updates, especially here on the forums, would be a great thing to improve the overall attachment between us, the OW Forum community, and you guys, the Overwatch Team. Sustained communication will surely help the amount of controversial issues go down. Even if it might not be something that the community wants, if there’s at least communication explaining why something can or can’t happen, it can surely help mitigate some of the controversial issues, even if just to an extent.
Using that, I’d like to make a couple comparisons from my own experiences given the above 2 paragraphs.
- The first one is a comparison that I can make from my admin experience on DN (before NAS hit the owner with a C&D order). We had announcements in on the main site, as well as on the forums, telling our userbase what was happening with these cases. Though some users still had a pretty negative attitude, most people were easily able to understand that we were doing our jobs to the best of our abilities, especially given that our positions were purely volunteer based (yeah, we were not paid to do it).
- With the second one, I’m literally able to reference a Minecraft Server, of all things. Even despite the CosmicPVP Factions server (yes, that’s the Minecraft server I’m referring to) being 4.5 years old now, they still post updates weekly, as well as mention big highlights during that week across the server (raids, big faction wars, etc.). It’s again, able to help keep attachment between the users and the staff that helps maintain the server.
It’s known that not all toxicity can be mitigated. No multiplayer game these days can possibly do that. But taking some simple steps can help narrow out some of it. And more sustained communication with us can surely do just that.
