So what really killed OW as a whole? Was it the fact that no content was dropped much after they put in the system of RQ/2-2-2. All 2-2-2 did was stop GOATS which was pretty amazing and instead of doing the job of buffing DPS they decided to limited tanks.
When that wasn’t working they decided to gut them to the ground just because the possibility of a Tank Hero to be a bruiser is not practical. Yeah Ball was a pain but even I thought there was no reason to really nerf him this far. Then they drop the Earthshatter buff which nukes DPS at close range to Reinhardt.
Really, just make up your mind if Tank Heroes are going to be good or bad, rather they will be a bruisers or not. We really need more content to drag people back.
Matchmaking in QP Classic feels like it’s you versus the same people/smurfs. You mostly do the stomping or get stomped there is no constant standard anymore. Where did the matchmaking go?
you can’t really pin point it to one thing, its just a mix of terrible balance changes, awful regurgitated content and 2-2-2 causing an exodus with people who don’t want to spend 50 mins in queue.
All of those pretty much drove the players away in waves.
Everybody has their own biased opinion as why the game is dying.
The truth is, (imo), the game is over 6 years old. Of course the player base is not going to be as large as when it was released.
And between that time there has been several huge popular FPS games that have come out that have stole a large chunk of the player base. Especially that those games are free to play.
And on top of that blizzard has had its share of internal problems.
But hopefully Overwatch 2 is a big refresher and will make the game feel fresh again.
As if they would just keep the gameplay the same, by just adding new maps and heroes, it would only be a temporary Band-Aid to the game feeling stale as it currently does.
There are a lot of troublesome game design choices currently in OW 1, that the developers have talked about trying to fix for the sequel.
Game has plenty of untouched content….like just from heroes alone people only touch like somewhere between 1-5 of them….or the content is the very things that annoy people
It’s a combination of things….but as I said before the one thing that I believe attributes to it the most is that people are very selfish/inflexible:
Nobody really treats it like a team game…
people only want very specific play styles….
constantly blame others….
ruin matches (be it cheating, smurfing, throwing, toxicity)
I doubt that there’s very few people out there that would say the game isnt fun if played properly
No….much like all good things over time - people suck the fun out of everything
What you just described is why this game is furiously frustrating.
Too much reliance on teammates to have impact or win matches.
And I’m not saying not to have team play because every FPS game that features two teams, the team with the best team play usually win matches.
The problem with OverWatch is that it has little to no carry potential.
And carry potential is what makes games fun.
Because when a player feels they are having an impact and actually doing something is when you feel you are having the most fun in a game.
If a game denies you of that Joy then the game is not going to me too much fun most of the time.
That’s why there is so much blame on teammates even you lose because OverWatch doesn’t really give you that power of being able to carry once in awhile.
The only way you can carry in this game (as a DPS for example) is if you are heavily pocketed by your supports and getting space from a tank. Like having a mercy attached to you and also having dva matrix in front of you protecting you.
I don’t know about you but “furiously frustrating” sounds to me like something that will definitely get people to stop playing something….
And I want to stress that I’m just talking about what people do directly……cause indirectly it also leads to stuff like queue times….and annoying metas…matchmaking issues …… etc….it’s behind like everything really
nerfing of the tank category over and over and over…
unbalanced MM
2CP horror…
I would say in that order. 222 like some people would say only show us the issue I stated in 2. It speak volumes when people would rather wait 20+ minutes for a 10 minute game than to play tank…
Sigma and Echo happened during Role Queues drop. It was Role Queue itself that killed the game. The content drought didn’t 100% truly begin until Apr2020. By then RQ had been in the game for a while, and it was negatively received by the vast majority, 5v5 is next to be negatively received. No one likes restrictions of any kind. The illusion that people were playing with no tanks or heals every game and it was always 5 DPS 1 heal is just that: an illusion.
Here’s a post from 2018 predicting how Brig 1.0 would lead to the eventual death of OW. I wasn’t 100% accurate and my thoughts on balance and meta were a little uninformed at the time, but I got the key points right, .i.e. game going on life support within two years with patches being balance and cosmetics only, hero releases discontinued, and Blizz focusing on new IPs to recoup their losses (though I didn’t expect it to be OW2).
But the ones that stick out are things OW hasn’t had that most late 90s FPS games have.
Strong community support and mod tools. 2022 and your FPS doesn’t have scoreboard, clan/guild, map editor, gun & skin editor, and other basic mods that keeps your base engaged when you have a content drought.
The indecision of casual party game or hardcore FPS team shooter.
This is the day 1 problem that has grown over time with Owl as the devs try to patch in mechanics for both pleasing nobody with the state of the game.
Piggybacking off of that I decision is competitive that is a single player ranking system forced into a Team game. It plays nothing like Owl leaving players with inconsistent matchmaker that makes the ladder experience as random as qp except you get awarded fake points that aren’t an indicator of skill level at times.
So we’ve gone from 6 unlimited team combination to 1 hero limit, to more limited 222, and now 5 heroes is supposed to be the way the game is meant to be played.
No game, from Checkers to the most popular games on the market, can keep a large playerbase if you are constantly changing the rules of how your game is played.
the mismanagement of the ranked experience as a whole, which encourages you to be toxic when you get put into games with diamond tanks as a 3700 player, or trolls/1 tricks, smurfs running rampant, broken gamemodes (like Hanamura), and OW balancing lacking integrity on all levels due to OW team insisting on catering both to casuals and pros. To this day, you hear stuff like “Mercy takes skill”, “Rein takes skill” when really after 5 years that this game has been out, these heroes, the difference between a Diamond and a GM Rein or Mercy aren’t huge because long-term, skill differentiation can be ONLY aim-based (watch any other successful FPS for proof). People can read positioning guides, who is the correct Resurrect and DMG boost target and after 5 years of game, everyone knows that stuff. But Blizzard insists on there being heroes with extremely low skill ceiling but infinite reward (Mercy, Zen, Brig, Orisa, etc.) which ruins the fun for everyone really.
Team reliant game based around solo players, q times, stale metas, bad development, internal company issues, bad cybersport model. I can keep this list going, but those are just the main reason.
Anyone just going off on RQ is delusional for one thing, but it no question had an impact. Numerous problems though contributed:
unwillingness to nerf hypermobility, leading to
bad kit designs like Moira and Brig
too much CC in the game as well
allowing GOATS to run a full year
Ball (yes, he is high skill and also bad for OW)
numerous bad design changes to existing kits
DLC characters that in 3/4 cases were too good for input and do too many things at the same time or better than existing characters
Lack of content
Lack of communication
Arrogance in not listening to the community including pros, top 500, streamer and the rest
forced eSport too soon
lack of education of players on the actual game
lack of an in-game clan system
not allowing in a team game, people to form stacks past a point
absurdly biased moderation and reporting tools
starving the game while teasing another
driving away notable streamers
All from a GOTY for 2016 that was good enough to become a world phenomena and they managed to make just about every wrong decision you can make to the point 2018, two years after launch they were going to have to essentially start over… insane.