We can all agree that Overwatch is an imperfect game

The percentage point of the audience that’s actually interested in watching OWL gets catered to more than the other 99% that just play the game.

Balance is slow, and misdirected.

Lack of any sense of progression.

No fov sliders, no customizable hud, no dark mode, no avoid map slot, macros banned so cant fix accessibility issues yourself, no incentivization, no reverts to poor nerfs or buffs, tank lynchpin caused by rq.

Mine are:

  1. Whiny playerbase
  2. a developer who balances mostly for appeasement
  3. not enough Tetris. Jk it’s actually because snipers are the kingpin DPS.
  1. The concept of hero counters is all over the place. Some heroes are exceedingly difficult to counter (ex. Tracer, Doomfist, etc), while others are easily countered by basically the entire roster (ex. Zenyatta, Pharah, etc)

  2. Balance is a joke. The word has no official definition in OW, means something different to each person, and is essentially meaningless as a whole. Is it generally related to potential KDA? is it related to pick rate? to win rate? to the meta at the time? what is it? how does half of he community deem a hero balanced, and the other half imbalanced?

  3. The game has become a mockery of skill of any kind.
    Mechanical skill - oh you’ve spent 10 years getting good at mechanical aim? We’ll gladly make those 10 years a complete waste for you by introducing some new heroes who don’t have to aim at all, and who will perform just as well as you or better. Because we’d like to introduce some new paying customers into the mix, and we want to give them a leg up. It’s alright though, you can feel free to express your anger on the forums that the devs won’t read for 5 years.
    Positioning skill - oh you want to play a hero who isn’t very mobile? No problem! you just have to spend hundreds of hours learning how to position yourself on every corner of every map to ensure your safety. Oh you want to play a mobile hero? Alright then nevermind all that. If you somehow even manage to get caught in a bad position just press this short cooldown button, that’s all.

  1. people are not suitably rewarded for outstanding contributions to winning, nor are they suitably punished for incredibly substandard performances (if you hop on Widow and do diddly squat, you should not gain nearly as many points as others who did more for a win, or if you lose, you should lose considerably more points). In any sports or professional organization in the world, star performers are rewarded even if they’re on a poor team.

  2. remove MMR from matchmaking and just randomly pair people according to SR range. The 50/50 chance of winning thing is stupid, and penalizes people who work hard to improve.

  3. Blizzard said they were going to make more aggressive and more frequent changes (yet another failed/forgotten commitment), keeping what worked, and quickly discarding what didn’t. They haven’t. They should. What a concept.

  1. Balance.
  2. Balance.
  3. Balance.

Do they all seem like the same reason? They’re not.

Allow me to elaborate:

1. The developers cater to what the pros and popular streamers say, rather than what they do. This inherently introduces bias into the system and often injects one-sided, skewed perceptions into balance changes. It leads to the (mis)identification of issues that have no objective evidence to substantiate their existence and motivates goals that do not need to and should not exist. Mercy’s rework is a prime example of this.

2. Because the developers are only capable of undertaking a finite set of goals, misidentified issues and pointless goals detract from valid goals that should be priority. These faux-issues draw attention away from objectively necessary changes and divide the attention of the developers such to the point that, when combined with what only be explained by downright incompetence, the developers are embarrassingly clueless to the state of their own game. Less than two months ago, Jeff Kaplan said this:

…Completely unaware of the fact that a community-made Bastion megathread detailing Bastion’s issues has been around since July of 2018, and it was locked due to reaching the maximum 20000 replies back in November of 2019:
💔 Bastion ISN’T being forgotten, he’s being ignored

On top of that, Bastion is the only hero in the history of Overwatch to obtain a 0% pickrate in Grandmaster for a month, and yet this was not enough for the developers to start “working on Bastion changes”.

Bastion is not the only character to fall victim of this, although he is the most extreme example. Pharah, Sombra, Symmetra, Torbjorn, Mei, Reaper, and Junkrat have all fallen victim to this before for extended periods or are currently victims of it now.

3. The goals that the developers do undertake, valid or otherwise, are poorly executed. This isn’t really something that needs to be elaborated on, simply because there is no shortage of examples to think of, but I’ll provide a few regardless. Every single rework except for Lucio 2.0, Torbjorn 2.0, and Symmetra 2.0 backfired in one way or another. Bastion’s rework made him a must-pick for a week, and then dumpstered him to a worse place than he was before his rework for the next three years. D.Va’s reworks each alienated a lot of her players. Symmetra mains today wish Symmetra 3.0 never happened. Mercy’s rework killed off literally half of her playerbase and coined the first and only meta to ever be named after a single character (Moth Meta). Hanzo’s and Junkrat’s reworks both made them overpowered for several months, and the subsequent changes to Junkrat made him more inconsistent than he was prior to his rework. Roadhog’s rework sent him on a roller coaster between insanely overpowered and cripplingly underpowered before finally landing him in a decent position that slowly decayed to obsolescence. The Overwatch developers, to put it plainly, just don’t know what they’re doing.

2 Likes
  1. Power creep (as a result of their “buff the solution instead of nerfing the problem” mentality)
  2. Lack of Communication.
  3. Complete disregard for the opinions of 97% of the player base (Unless that opinion is also in line with the pros).
1 Like
  1. Balanced done around owl but not around matches, but what the players want
  2. Slow balance
  3. Hanzo
    screw hanzo
1 Like
  1. OWL
  2. Some of the heroes are just really badly designed
  3. Devs don’t know how to balance the game

I forgot this one too
screw Hanzo

1 Like
  1. Lack of new content. I love the characters and want to see new ones, but it feels like nothing ever happens with the game. Like ever. Although I must admit, dem devs been trying to get things spicier in 2020

  2. Not as serious, but not enough Kaplan/dev communication. Like it doesn’t have to be serious content every time, but I’d love to see a regular monthly dev update. Just talking about stuff, the last month, and what he can mention about the next month. It’d be easier to announce things in the context of whether they will happen within a month, and it could be a cool way for him to engage fans and maybe mention the devs opinion of issues

  3. Not enough WoW crossover skins. As I play WoW, I can’t help but imagine more crossover skins. They already have Magni, Illidan, Tyrande, and Blackhand I think. Respectable… but Lich King Rein, Sylvanas Ashe, and maybe even Tol’Jun Junkrat and Jaina Mercy would be nice as well.

  • The worst report system i’ve seen, get somebody you don’t like banned by spamming the system, yeah that’s great.

  • Their balance is really only directed at OWL, and not using a “Trickle Down Balance” method, look the method up, a video was made by Uncle Dane that explains how TF2 is balanced. Balance is never influenced by the people who actually bought the game.

  • No new content until OW2, the reason i bought the game was because TF2 was stagnating for me, and this DLCish crud wait is really hurting the game, atleast for me.

  • MMR system is entirely based on team effort, not individual effort.

  • Balance is also being shown as catering the DPS role.

  • The Overwatch 2 stuff i’ve lost faith in, i’m not really excited about it anymore, i’m more hopeful for the Pokemon DLC than OW2.

i could go on for decades on why Overwatch is not a great game, but these are my main reasons why it isn’t perfect.

Yeah I will always say the larger problem with OW was the lack of foresight by introducing Genji and Tracer. They spawned all the problems

1 Like

There was nothing really wrong with tracers design that couldnt be handled by a couple of tweaks.

Genji tho - he was just overloaded from the start.

  1. The unrealistic, moneygrabbing monetization schemes behind the investor bubble that is OWL, which puts the game, actiblizzion, and the entire industry at massive risk

  2. People having zero sense of balance or strategy, such thinking that character/role favoritism actually exists or that OWL ruins balance, when it’s the other way around. This translates to people blaming everything for a loss except the fact that no one is coherently pushing more than once a game.

  3. The devs being so slow, indecisive, and uncommunicative that it pisses literally everyone off. FWIW I definitely place some blame on Actiblizzion corporate for interference. There’s zero reason to have a battlenet wide social system.

No game is perfect, there will always be someone who doesn’t like it.

Every game is imperfect. Its mainly just finding the right game where you feel its tolerable.

Lack of major changes after 2-2-2.

The only notable change that they did was make Brig to be more of a primary healer than a tankhybrid. They however didn’t do much for the DPS that already had strong selfsustain and tankiness to fill in the gap for post-GOATS.

Primarily, there is an out of jointedness between OWL and ladder. The game is increasingly balanced from a top down view, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, however, it runs counter to the game’s original design philosophy. OW is an incredibly casual shooter, and the reasoning is because it’s not just a shooter. So, likewise, the OWL focus is itself out of joint from the games dominant geographic of casual players. I also feel the focus on ‘what is fun to watch’ over what’s actually fun has been troublesome too.

There is also just too little content. 2/2/2 feel a pain for tanks and supports due to lack of options, while a pain to dps due to ridiculous long queue times. The lack of options also discourages DPS players from playing other roles. Additionally, those roles themselves are becoming increasingly rigid, with hybrid heroes in decline while standardised (generic) designs become more prevalent, likewise discouraging people from playing other roles.

Last but not least, there’s no such thing as a perfect game. Like all art forms, the worth of a game is subjective to the individual.

The thing is she was too sandboxy in a game with very clear restrictions per role so that should have been obvious