So I can say this, I was a GM for a game called Face of Mankind, for those who know what I mean, what’s up. However I will say this, I personally believe OW is messed up, no offense to the staff here. I know how it is, personally I know how it is with NDA’s and stuff, and I love the game, however I get it. You all were told about OW2, and people are just tired of it.
Now I will say this as a former CM, please don’t take hate out on the staff or the CM’s on the forums. Literally they either know info they know, but can’t share, or they know they know things aren’t going well ,but told to hold the line. I have held the position for both points, so I don’t know regarding overwatch, but if I may ask, don’t hate them too hard. they are just doing their job.
Don’t hate on the CM’s, they probably don’t know much more than us and are forbidden by company policy to share.
Don’t hate on the devs, they’re working hard to get this out the door under really trying circumstances and they’re also forbidden by company policy to share.
If you have to blame anyone in this process, blame Aaron, who promised increased communication and then retreated back into radio silence. He’s the game director, it’s his call.
Of course, they work very hard and I can tell they are passionate and talented. There’s only a very, very small section of team 4 which I’m a tad bitter about. Everyone else is extraordinary and should be proud be part of something that will be a cultural artefact 50 years from now.
Nope. He’s not getting the blame. He’s not the one I’m bitter about.
He sort of did meet his promise of monthly OW2 updates, even if they were very small and rarely qualified. He gets off on technicalities.
Let’s give him until April before we roast devs for the quality of information they shared with us regarding OW2. April is the latest where we’ll get a major info dump.
Let’s see the early build, and it’s balance state first. If everything is broken in the competitive-balance ecosystem, then the decision to go 5v5 and weaken defensive power was a silly call. It’ll be a nice “I told you so” as we see CC, healing, damage mitigation and more reinstated. Either that or all the fun flanker heroes get uber nerfed into a boring state.
Early builds of No Limit 6v6, Open Queue 6v6, and Role Queue 6v6 were broken as well, remember. It will likely be a couple months of clownshoe balancing because balance is hard and it takes top players months to find all the broken edge cases.
Not this time. They already know them: Zerg rush strats. They ran Mei + Winston + Discord which is unstoppable. Mei has outs to range, one shots and burst with wall + ice block. Together their beams cleave targets at 150 dps without discord. Add in a Lucio and they can delete supports, overwhelm the main tank and delete him by bubbling him and using wall to cut off support LOS (and the ones who do bypass LOS will get melted in a 1-3 seconds).
There is a serious peel issue with OW2, if the threshold is too low, then mindless Zerg strats will be meta and there’s too many to just nerf heroes into a garbage state.
First, we don’t know what’s changed since the grand finals.
Second, we have no clue what strats they’ll come up with after a detailed look at the heroes that might be more effective than what they threw together on the spot blind.
Third, balance is still gonna be bad and I expect a dozen changes or more between each stage for a the first couple or three.
They literally browse Reddit, browse Twitter, and according to where they are they approve posts on Twitter or post themselves.
It is one of the easiest and most lucrative jobs that exist cuz when an executive asks you about it you just screech about ENGAGEMENT or whatever and go back to reading Harry Potter fanfiction. Nobody cares, really.
They sift through feedback and general sentiment on forums like this and make it digestible for the dev team. And they try to be good representatives of the studio and humanize the company.
It’s a rough position, because they are basically human shields for the dev team and they have no real power of their own. That said, to soften your criticism of the game just to be nice or whatever would, in its own way, be dishonest and give a false impression of what player sentiment is, so I reject the notion that they need to be coddled or shielded from the truth in any way. If you are mad about the game, say so.
Obviously, it’s always wrong to be abusive. But that was true even without community managers, so I don’t see what changed.
You know that one Futurama gag where somebody says " “Executive” is a meaningless term given to people to make them feel better?" or something along those lines?
