Twice or three times over, really. The “balancing” for OW2 launch honestly left a lot to be desired.
They need to be pushing experimentals and aggressively gathering player feedback. They need to prioritize experimentals for Supports and also prioritize Support player feedback for those experimentals. They need to push experimentals on how to improve Push, and on how they could re-implement 2CP or at least re-use the maps in some fashion.
This “every half season” balancing with paltry communication between ain’t gonna fly
is it really sinking tho? i mean how do you know no one is playing. the queue times are pretty short and its not in a bad spot twitch wise (yea twitch is dumb but )
unless anyone has some sort of official metrics you cant say that its losing popularity
There are elements which the community does contribute, but ultimately, the issue is with the developers.
Players are of course going to have limited information (and Blizzard doesn’t share much), and they’re going to be biased as to what they will and won’t complain about. That said, they can and will tell you what they don’t like. It’s the responsibility of the developers to parse through this information and synthesize it with raw stats to determine the best course of action—not the player’s responsibility.
The developers have even stated they don’t want specific player solutions to problems, just for players to voice their frustrations. The problem therein, though, is that requires the developers to be judicious, decisive, responsive, and accommodating. Players can contribute insofar as they can attempt to moderate their takes and be understanding of exogenous factors that may be influencing their experiences, but again, at the end of the day, it’s not their responsibility. It’s Blizzard’s.
While we may not have official metrics, there were a couple different websites that have estimated by the end of Oct. OW2 had already lost 20% (5Mil players) of the new players that Blizzard was so proud to tout the numbers of (25 Million). A third website estimates that based off queue times and a couple other metrics they believe OW2 only has a concurrent active user base of ~176k at most. If I find my sources, I’ll edit this post.
I couldn’t find the source on the 20% drop, but there are thousands of sites claiming that OW2 actually reached 35 mil, which ~if~ that was the case, going by the player count from the source above, would mean they have lost ~30-40%
My concern always with 3rd party sites is they’re often not using substantially better info than what the common schmuck like me or you has.
That being said, I’d be interested to see the sources. I think most people know that 25 million number from Blizzard is heavily spun corporate PR—it likely includes players who logged in once then bailed, and doesn’t discriminate between legit accounts and smurfs. It’s tough to say, IMO, how many people actually are engaging with OW2, especially since we have to make the overly generous assumption that matchmaking standards are the same over time—and as GreyFalcon might tell you (I see him typing there), that’s a pretty steep assumption.
What’s ahead is streamers/pros having mental breakdowns malding about how bad matchmaker quality/speed is in Comp.
Followed by the devs not doing anything about it until mid january, where they are probably going to do sledgehammer nerfs and steroid buffs, to get more Support players.
What are your queue times that makes you say this?
What region/platform/modes are you queueing for?
Last night my estimated queues were 4/1/1 for US East QP, and I wasn’t even waiting 4 minutes for tank, it was more like 1-2 minutes. Tank was much longer right after Ramattra came out, but they’ve relaxed the past couple days.
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