Like all great games, they all must come to an end…brought about by its own demise.
What was once a fun, exciting, and competitive game full of choices, paths, numerous different ways to win with an ever-evolving goal towards balance, has turned into what socialism does to free and great countries: power creep pigeon holes people into predetermined paths and opportunities.
The game started out with the main goal of having EVERY hero viable for any circumstance with numerous challenges and counters with a design goal of ~50% pickrate for everything, Jeff and team eventually relented on this and eventually went public by declaring that some heroes are necessary most of the time, while most heroes only have niche playability.
The only thing that changes there is the eventual and ever-feared over compensation in the form of nerfs, reworks, buffs, and bugs. They simply can’t just leave sh*t alone; oh no…they overcompensate. So then we’re forced to play heroes in this heirarchy: #1 whatever is on the “Always play” list; #2 Whatever received the most ridiculous and unnecessary changes the latest patch introduced; #3 Whatever OWL is playing now (that last one is tongue-in-cheek, since nobody watches that garbage, anyways).
And now…NOW…NOW we’re forced to play in comp with people who are just really, really, really bad at DPS, but that’s how they queued and we can’t drop 1 tank to get a 3rd DPS to make up for the horridly stubborn DPS-queue.
I remember the days of GM’ing at SOE and listening to Jeff express his concerns over these very same cycles that ruin games. It seems, in either his age or desire to please the same corporate Gods he used to curse, player choice and “make of it what you will” determination is no longer part of his gamer mantra.
4 years…time to uninstall this garbage. Yet another Blizzard game down the drain. WoW, HotS, now OW.
