Because heroes have very distinct identities for an online pvp game. So, people identify themselves with the heroes or just emotionally being invested in them.
Players can make very well-structured threads, explaining why certain heroes are influencing the game badly (mercy, sombra, hog (before nerfs) widow) and there’s never a discussion about this, nor a debate. All that happens is that mains of these heroes just come and insult the OPs and massively false flag, silencing opinions that criticize their favourite heroes. Nowhere, not in a single platform we have healthy discussions about heroes and their balances. (Some OPS also exaggerate problems with heroes too, not denying that).
For example, a healthy debate would look like this: (WE NEVER have these btw).
Person A, “I think Sombra’s identity is fun, but she creates too much annoyance while not being effective herself.”
Person B, “I understand, but the game should have an option like that. In some cases, the enemy is way too hard to infiltrate, and Sombra is good for that.”
Reality:
Person A, “I think Sombra’s identity is fun, but she creates too much annoyance while not being effective herself.”
Person B (with sombra portrait), “Lol, learn the game, scrub.”
Person C (with sombra portrait), “No, it’s just you can’t counter her. Here’s the encyclopedia page about how to counter Sombra.”
Person D, “How dare you, I just bought a skin on my waifu, and now you want me to quit? REPORT.”
My bud got banned twice (and unbanned after manual review) for Ana threads.
If we were able to provide meaningful discussion and good opposite points to each other, devs would have opinions to see and consider. But we never do. All we do is get emotionally invested in our favourite heroes and try to defend it at the cost of our dignity. As players, we just want our hero to be the top.
In other words, as a community, we fail to provide valid and constructive cases of debates that would be useful to take a look at.
In Fortnite, people discussed the change of shotguns and smg’s and talked about the game’s overall health. But in OW2, we defend 5v5 because we are dps mains. We don’t have collective thinking of improving our own game. Because Fortnite players care about the game being well-playable (and also tik tok dances). But we care about my main doing 9 damage instead of 8.
Just like Genshin impact. It’s impossible to argue with Genshin players for the exact same reasons. Because, “what do you mean nerf [insert genshin character name here]? Then why I bought 4 body pillows then! REPORT.”
Huge portion of OW players do not want balance or fair gameplay or healthy gaming environment. They want their favourite hero be OP or strong.
