I have to say I’ve never seen a community like OWs.
Its not especially bad or good. Its just interesting. I like to dub it the Competitive Timmy mindset. Something that is rare in other communities, but OW seems to be a siren call for players who don’t competitive values but seem to want to approach a game “competitively”.
My closest comparison is Magic The Gathering Commander players. But specifically not your average Commander player who knows Commander isn’t a competitive game mode so their objective isn’t to “win” Commander but instead to have fun with friends. No, OverWatch players have more common with players who want to “win” Commander.
This mentality doesn’t have much in common with players who take games that weren’t intended to be competitive and make them competitive, like Smash Bro players of Team Fortress 2 players. The MTG “win” commander players specially choose commander because they know nobody else is trying to win, so they feel good at the game by default and its always circumstance beyond there control fault when they lose.
This behavior is considered cringe in the MTG community but in OW its wildly accepted at all levels of play. I partly blame Blizzard because OW was designed for mass appeal, to lure in all playstyles, and the game is not designed to remind you that you have fundamental skills you lack like other competitive FPS’s or strategy games or even other RPG’s. Its really easy in OW to wrap yourself in a bubble around 2-3 heroes and convince yourself that your good at the game.
You can see this in how players rationalize how they lose. In OW1 you had team comps, OP heroes, and unfair “synergies”. When role que was first introduced it was again team comps, OP heroes, and unfair synergies, but now you can add the layer of “well my support/dps/tank aren’t doing their jobs”. I think what OverWatch did, over any other competitive shooter or fighting game or whatever, is have too good of match making. Players are so shielded from the absolute terror of playing against there betters and have no earthly clue why they lose. This is not the case in any other competitive game. Only League of Legends compares in the gap of playstyles between bronze to gold, plat to diamond, and gm levels.
And even worse OW players are absolutely convinced their version of OW is the competitive obe. QP players insist that QP is dead serious. Quick Play. And its not laughed at. Bronze - Plat think there as a competitive as Diamond - GM. And even worse, everyone thinks queuing up for Comp Solo Que is actually competitive overwatch. Again I blame Blizzard because they never encouraged or introduced 5v5 (or 6v6) team ratings. They did nothing to push players away from solo que as the primary lenses of competitive experience it shows.
OW players are resentful of those better at the game. This is only community that resents its esports scene. The only community that complains about smurfs. The only community that despises GM players. Despises stacks. Widow mains, genji mains, tracer mains, all hated. Its absolutely backward but this resentment is real.
But even funnier is the weird meta logic in this game. DPS mains complain about double shields. From Bronze to GM. OW2 removes the extra tank, no more x2 500 health shields to shoot at… and then exact same players complain about literally exploding. I literally can’t make this up. Players thought that removing shields would not increase the time to kill. As if 1k of damage would magically go into the ether. Or my second favorite thing, players complaining about overwatch being a moba, insisting that blizzard force the game to be more FPS… promptly gets 5v5, more FPS gameplay and becomes the only FPS playerbase to legitimately complain about snipers. This is the same genre with games like Apex legends and Fortnite.
This game is played by Timmy’s. And its not bronze level or gold level players. Its all the way up the ladder and its funny to watch. Like its almost as if we as a community has adapted the mindset of players who only wanna play an RTS with a 15 minute no rush rule. And then we decided that is the real competitive version of the game. Psychologist need to study overwatch before blizzard abandons it, because this is a good case study.