Mentions that OW2 was promised to have more frequent changes to make this game feel alive, the patches are taking too long and are ineffective.
On that topic of ineffective patches, Sojourn wasn’t nerfed because they were worried of gutting her in low level play, just to make her less oppressive in high elo. Which is a great mindset
First they nerfed her range on right click, her energy also disappears faster, headshots cap at 195. But they made Overclock charge up 20% faster and her regular damage was increased from 9 to 10, the compensation buffs were debatably stronger than the actual nerfs were.
Then the changes she did get afterwards, 6 to 7 seconds on slide, no more slow on E, being less accurate with primary fire. This change does nothing to stop her from destroying high elo games, but only makes her worse at low elo, these changes are the exact opposite of what they wanted to do.
They’ve expressed concern about how powerful one shots could potentially be in a 5v5 format, which is again, a smart concern. but Hog and Widow have been completely unchanged for way too long.
He agrees Genji needed to be nerfed, but he received nothing to make him better once the dps passive was changed, which was the reason listed as to why he was nerfed. Another case of their balancing Hypocrisy.
The speed we saw genji get nerfed was good. but we don’t see this same speed applied to most of the current meta heroes such as Soj, Hog, Widow, etc.
Section 2, Competitive:
New Ranked Mode is garbage.
Private Profiles should be shown in Competitive
We should have Rank icons underneath our hero icons in comp.
GM players should not have Plats on their team. There is one less player on each team yet the match maker is undoubtably worse.
Section 3, 5v5 and 6v6:
Having throwers or really bad players in OW2 is much worse than OW1 because they make up more of the server.
The same is true for balance.
1 tank limits playstyles and further accentuates the gap between the best heroes and the worst
Example: Junker Queen as a main tank, enables a lot of rock paper scissors gameplay as the only tank, but playing her as an off tank gives her so much flexibility and freedom, as well as increasing the diversity of Junker Queen comps.
Less freedom and diversity leads to the game getting boring even quicker.
If they put Reworked Orisa and Doom into 6v6, Overwatch 1 would’ve been better than OW2
Section 4, Shops:
He’s fine with the shops, he thinks the skins are a little pricey but as long as that money is put back into the game for content, pvp etc, it’s fine.
Section 5, PVE:
He’s not convinced PVE will be good after how they handled the launch of the game and how many failed promises with the balancing
I think I got everything, discuss any points you want to discuss.
Just because they don’t have to go through an update certification process doesn’t mean they can afford to just drop changes in without a decent amount of playtesting.
Maybe since he’s actually saying what the majority of forums think it won’t go down so badly.
Although I’m assuming people will actually watch the video/read the summary…
Yeah it’s not really as simple as someone sitting in their office reading reddit and clicking an undo button if a few issues start popping up. Just analyzing the trend to detect that an issue is significant/prevalent and even needs to be considered undone is itself going to be a multi-hour endeavor, and the process to undo something is also going to take time.
Only things I really disagree with (read the summary, didn’t watch) are private profiles & shop.
Private profiles exist for a reason. It defeats the purpose if you unblock them. In my experience, 9/10 when someone looks at your profile, it’s to be toxic. Perhaps there’s a reasonable compromise there, but I don’t think wholesale undoing private profiles in Comp is the right thing to do.
And I mostly only disagree on the shop in terms of magnitude. I don’t think it’s “a little pricey,” it’s very pricey, especially considering how hard it is to grind currency. The only thing even remotely reasonable in cost is the BP. Nearly everything else needs to be cut down by 50-67% in cost, or coin grinding needs to be substantially more rewarding
I’m almost positive you’ve never been involved in such a scenario because it’s absolutely not a 5 minute task. Nothing I’ve ever worked on in a software pipeline - even the most basic of tasks - is a 5 minute task.
I think you have a very optimistic and idealistic vision for what this process looks like.
