Ususally game features inflate and bloat with time, and rules slack. But not OW. Take the fun (and type of insta queue competitive flex) people are used to and prune it away.
It’s almost like they’re not being clear about all their motives. We get the ‘we want whats best for you’ mantra. But they’re not reminding us that ‘whats best for us is best for you’.
And the two big examples here are:
Catering to hardcore players, 1%/OWL type competition over the after-work gamers.
Failure to address the integrity of ladder systems.
For me 1. wreaks of MBA-like thinking - numbers show us how to save OWL and make cash, and 2. wreaks of TECH thinking.
The reason for 2. is that reduced context-switching is much easier to track, score, allocate queues for, and matchmake. When they don’t have a clue how to code a ladder, but they know what you’re going to play (lol no more choice) and where you’re going to play it (lol no more choice), they can better budget their lousy matchmaking - instead of re-engineering it.
I’m willing to argue that even diamond goats was counterable by a non-goats diamond team. Because it was. You still didn’t see goats in diamond.
People are quick to jump on people for picking an “off-meta” hero, even though meta barely matters until you start getting high into masters.
Literally play what you want / are good at and you’ll climb. If you’re where you belong, you will stay there until you fix your mistakes.
People complaining about meta’s being boring and lasting forever were the top level of players. Double shield has been the only meta comp I’ve seen ran in my rank.
The game’s philosophy was “switch heroes to adapt with the situation.”
Hero pools make more complex situations that actually require you to swap and adapt. Compare that to what we have currently where you can just main the single strongest hero non-stop and gain an easy 1000 SR.
Precisely because you can’t be guaranteed to do the same strategy over and over again, you’ll have to actually change things up when presented with a new roadblock, much like the devs intended at launch.
Though it is not confirmed, it’s very likely that hero pools will focus more on banning the meta picks than the non-meta ones, like they’re doing in OWL.
That’s entirely possible.
It’s also entirely possible that a ton of people will come back to play the game now that it’s been changed, just like what happened with Role Queue. Only time will tell which side outweighs the other.
And they’ve made it clear that they’re dramatically changing “the way” things will be balanced in the future.