Seem like it doesn’t work. I suggest going full E-Sport.
Blizz did the opposite once (withheld Brig from S1S3) and everyone hated it, and I don’t recall them ever holding a patch specifically for OWL. Typically a patch has to be live for 2 weeks before it goes to OWL to ensure its stable.
It’s better to have the game be in sync with the most visible esports scene than out of sync and have them playing a different game from the rest of us.
Less events
same amount of events as always though? More actually if you count the mini-events. Unless you mean the volume of content in events, which was just getting exhausting honestly. It’s been one event since they reduced the number of skins, lets wait and see what HT and WW are like.
almost no lore
I’ll give you that one but it was bound to slow eventually and has literally NOTHING to do with the esports scene. Do you think Michael Chu makes the team schedules or something?
terrible balance changes
balance was always bad but now it’s mostly just slow. Certainly better than when they made Mercy the most broken character in history before OWL even debuted.
less communication,
Have you seen how dumb this place is? I wouldn’t talk to us either.
it’s almost like they pulled resources from the game
OW team has been hiring people, not firing them like most other Acti-Blizz teams.
had it not been forced into the pro scene.
There was a pro scene in beta. Blizz just took it up to the next level. The main thing they’re doing wrong is how bad they’re neglecting Contenders, OD and lower seed OWWC teams.
They forced 2-2-2 in order to have better balance. For instance, Rein was trash tier outside of goats, but you can’t buff him without making goats stronger. 2-2-2 allows you to balance easier without having to worry about comps like goats or triple dps.
It feels like a forced eSport because it is a forced eSport. Most games naturally transition into having an eSport scene whereas Blizzard decided to prematurely force an eSport scene and the game has suffered for it.
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Because it is a forced e-sport. I mean, this is the factual history of OWL. There was no grassroots, organic building up of any kind of pro scene.
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It’s silly…I suppose when the next balance patch comes out to address double barrier it’s goin to be because of OWL as well…
And when they added baptiste in middle of GOATS it was because of OWL…
Like we get it…you people don’t like the league…but it sounds silly when you blame everything that happens on it
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Original Starcraft became an eSport outside of Blizzard’s control. It became an eSport because it was an actual competitive game.
OWL is a whole different story – this was funded from the beginning with a broadcast team, stadiums, and paid teams. I can say “forced” is a strong word – but Activision/Blizzard definitely brute forced their way onto the scene with dollar bills, there’s really no question of that.
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The healthiest the game has ever been- yes.
Dive meta was ideal, it rewarded you for grinding high skill characters, unlike recent metas.
So are we just disregarding the whole year prior to OWL where there was a whole pro scene filled with tournaments and events or what
I genuinely saw threads when they put Baptiste’s kit up on the website, and later put him to PTR(?), and threads being made about:
“Blizzard just buffed GOATs!”
“Blizzard wants more GOATs by adding an AoE healer!”
and, honestly? That’s when I knew these forums served no purpose other than to read official Blizzard replies or have a simple discussion.
No one realizes that Balance isn’t always aimed at the META, like with Symmetra’s nerf- it’s not because she was META for the first time, it was because individual Sym’s did 40% more damage than prior to the bugfix.
A stale meta is not healthy.
People were getting really tired of dive, viewership plummet over time and it was hurting the esports scene.
You don’t have a top class tracer? Better buy one, otherwise you will lose and you will probably loose your job.
Being an esports athlete was an very unstable job till OWL came around.
Yes the schedule, the stress etc is burning out young people, but they made already improvements and esports as a whole will mature and get healthy
The people who claimed to be getting sick of dive likely never played a game against dive in their life.
The hero(es) with the highest skill ceilings in the game should be the ones played by the highest skill players in the game.
The fact that the best Tracer players in the world are now forced to play heroes like Reaper just doesn’t feel right.
Even if you don’t consider the fact that dive was such a high skill ceiling meta- it was still the most diverse meta we’ve ever had at the pro level.
Events and lore have nothing to do with the game being ready for the eSports scene. What do those have to do with pros?
Blizzard wants you to believe them, but lies about the intended design, the fact they began OWL from before even the release day, the biased nature of gameplay, their lack of host regions and “unique” approach to delivering service to a worldwide market.
Oh but I’m sure the entirely of development resources haven’t been shifted to the new OW sequel being rumored, just like they continue to produce new and engaging content that isn’t just recycled and reskinned mechanics, if even that.
I’m curious though, while 2-2-2 is about as extreme of a solution as possible to the problem of GOATS, how do you think they’ll solve the now much more complex problem of double bunker? Role queue should have been part of the design from the start, not introduced at the end of this game life cycle as a patch to balancing issue they created alongside the sheer disparity of tank and support characters.
If you really think about the way they have perpetuated their designs, you start to get a picture that Blizzard really doesn’t want to provide a good experience, or even a decent level of sportsmanship, they just want to turn your time into more profit.
That’s all OW was ever meant to be, equivalent to a Virtual Casino, but targeting an audience to young to play the slots or bet on actual sports.
With that in mind, it makes sense that one bad decision led to another, and left this community with a shallow, unfulfilling husk of a game tailored for the needs of the companies directing parties (Activision and Vivendi) over the consumers they only pretend to care about.
That’s why games with a smaller player base still host in more regions then Blizzard, why all but the top most players are ignored in this community, and why everything they have done since launch has barely even scratched the surface of the game, without ever actually improving the experience.
Shooter first… so long as the shooter has less latency…
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Always felt forced. Never need to allocate most of the resources towards it. That it exists, sure. But to put it all on it? Nah, you could put less money and flashiness and all that into it and make it work just as well without breaking the game.
Overwatch had professional tournaments since the start of beta, with no Blizzard involvement, from multiple different organizers, and some pretty massive tournaments at that. Just as an example, there were four Apex series with prizepools of about 200.000$ each.
In other words, no one “forced the game into the pro scene” as you put it, Blizzard just realized there’s enough interest there to make it a worthwhile investment and they went for it.
The game would have had a pro scene either way, and even now a pro scene outside the OWL-Contenders-Open Divison does exist, though it’s obviously not very big since most pros will prefer to focus on OWL, for obvious reasons.
That argument is honestly so stupid. 
No offense meant, but do you really think Overwatch League is costing Blizzard money instead of earning it? 
Do you even know how much the buy-in price for an OWL team is? This year it’s been 30-60 million. In other words, investors who wanted to own an OWL team had to pay up to 60 million dollars for the chance.
Let’s look at another thing. Where do you think Overwatch gets money for continued development?
There’s basically three sources of revenue:
- Game sales. This was obviously the biggest source of revenue originally. However when a game is 3 years old or more, you can’t really expect new sales numbers to be high enough to cover development and maintenance costs without another monetization scheme.
- Lootboxes. Everyone knows lootboxes present an insignificant source of income at this point. I don’t know of a single player that still buys them at this point, and it’s very obvious that they’re not profitable from the fact that Blizzard is slowly decreasing the number of cosmetics we get in events.
So if neither of those two is sufficient, it follows that the primary source of funding for Overwatch development has to be…
- Overwatch League. Just compare the numbers. From team slots alone, Overwatch League generated about $400 million. That’s staggering numbers, to generate that much from game and lootbox sales, they’d have to have sold A MILLION copies of the game or 20 million lootboxes this year. Ludicrous numbers. And yet it’s probably still considerably less than they pulled in with advertisement and sponsorship deals.
Overwatch League is obviously very profitable. But for the pro scene of the game to remain popular, the primary requirement is that the game itself remains popular. In other words, the relationship between Overwatch and OWL is symbiotic.
Overwatch League brings money to the game, which lets them invest more into development, which increases interest in the game, which increases interest in the League, which increases profits. If Blizzard decided to stop developing the game, OWL viewership would plummet below sustainable levels within a single season.
I constantly hear people claim that Overwatch doesn’t receive more content than it does because of OWL and it’s just… dumb. I’m sorry, I really can’t put it any nicer. For Overwatch League to do well, Overwatch has to do well and be popular, a game without a playerbase can’t have a big pro scene, therefore Overwatch League gives incentive for the developers to keep developing the game much longer than they would have otherwise.
Think of how many games with multiplayer and a single-purchase business model you know that stop receiving additional content as early as half a year after release, despite the game selling well, because it just doesn’t make sense to keep pouring in money for ever diminishing returns.
I could go on, but this is already way too long anyway. 
So let me just conclude with this:
There’s NO evidence that Overwatch is receiving less development because of Overwatch League, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. So can we stop making that claim with no evidence to support it?
It’s not about the highest skill ceiling who should be played, it’s also about teamplay. OW is not COD or CS:GO
OW has a lot more in common with a moba than you think. Teamplay can make heroes more viable and deny value of high skill heroes.
If a team has good teamplay they can do things most people don’t expect. Like Misfits tear to shreds a triple/quadtank comp in pro play with Widow+Tracer as core DPS. Their synergy allowed them to put on so much pressure that the defense will crack and they get an opening. This was not because Widow or Tracer has the highest skill ceiling, no it was because they knew how to play as a team and can pull of such a strategy.
A ban system would even widen the meta and allow for more team comps to be viable, like it does in other games
This is my issue as well. I am hoping they do something about this.
Recently we had 2 major feature expansions in Overwatch after basically 3 frickin years of void: Replay feature (which is absolutely great to have! players in other games are still waiting for this) and Role Queue (which is disputed, but in my opinion a big step in the right direction.
Replay feature has already existed in tournament client for the OWL. So it wasnt developed with the intention to give its non-pro players a tool for them to improve as players. It was developed for the OWL, and later released to the main client.
Role Queue was also developed for the OWL. Meta got so stale after Brigitte had been released (GOATS) that viewers got tired of watching it. So Blizzard first tried to overbuff DPS heroes in order to deal with the tankiness and sustainability of these comps, but in the end it didnt work. So they made the radical step to force 2-2-2 and disabled such comps as GOATS.
So, you could say that Blizzard developed their 2 biggest (and only?) feature expansions with the OWL in mind, not the main client and the normal playerbase.