Update: I’ve stopped playing this game for a while now, so some points may be out of date - but many of them still stand.
This is now the third most upvoted post of all time. Since it’s been published, someone has taken “Blizzard” out of the title of this post and not responded - and according to some, this thread was blacklisted from the top category for a while. If this thread gets deleted, I’ve got it saved and I’ll upload it as a video on the exact day under the same name.
Honestly, as a long-time member of this community, it feels like sometimes they don’t even care about the game anymore - and it’s disappointing. Think about these things.
Note: I’m not referring to the League, I’m referring to the game itself (as well as the Path to Pro, which is technically part of the League anyway).
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- The Overwatch World Cup’s production this year has been, well, for lack of a better word - terrible. The match between Finland and South Korea crashed halfway through (clips[DOT]twitch[DOT]tv/ConsiderateElegantWebKappaRoss), the English casters were placed in front of a Korean crowd, the World Cup wasn’t promoted at all (Just like the OWL playoffs), the overlapping ads and spectator bugs made viewing it a far worse experience in contrast to last year, they used a bilingual Overwatch League player (Ark) as the translator for the questions (seriously, do they suddenly not have enough money to afford one?) and the sound mixing resulted in a huge dropoff in quality for the World Cup this year.
– - The neglect of this game’s lore (Seriously, even Fortnite has been getting more lore than Overwatch for the last year). Even with the new animated short, it provides no new lore whatsoever.
– - Overwatch’s “Path to Pro” is a huge failure despite being heavily advertised as the only way to get into the Overwatch League (See ioStux’s comments on it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/8ydpiy/im_xl2_coach_iostux_i_walked_the_path_to_pro/)
– - The lacklustre Summer Games event which doesn’t give ANY new content besides a few skins (with no voice lines or new modes) despite Blizzard saying they’ll try to “perfect” the events in the future.
– - Players with disabilities still having NO improvements to their experiences of the game - deaf players have no option and the colourblind setting is still rubbish according to the well known Bastion streamer KolorBastion.
– - The Sombra changes being pushed to live despite most of the community detesting them vocally
– - The constantly failing re-works (like the Sombra changes, the 1000 Mercy reworks, the Bastion rework that made him effectively invulnerable with his heal and then neutered him to make him useless except in niches, and the Hanzo changes)
– - The servers constantly failing and the players being punished for it with SR losses (Is it really that hard to detect when a server fails?)
– - The devs spitting on people’s months of work on learning certain characters by changing them because they “don’t like how they are played” (see Sombra and The Head of the Balance team’s statement who I apparently can’t namedrop here or I’ll get silenced)
– - New CC abilities being introduced every 2-3 months that makes playing tanks a living nightmare (Try playing as Rein, the “primary” tank who is a decent all-around pick like how Mercy is the “primary” healer. If the enemy team have a Doomfist and a Brigitte, good luck having fun!) - https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/96owjz/this_is_overwatch_6_movement_abilities_in_under/ here’s a bonus link.
– - The devs caring more about lessening the impact of high-skill heroes and increasing the impact of low-skill heroes (Brigitte, turning Hanzo into a spray/pray character)
– - The lack of a replay system, an optimization patch (This game has been reported to be lagging on GTX 1080’s and i7s as of late on Reddit, which is ridiculous / EDIT: and the Finland v South Korea WORLD CUP match crashed) and in-game spectating for a game with as many resources and a huge dev team as it has is just sad. Even Paladins has a faster balancing rate.
– - Many bugs are still in the game such as the numerous Rein bugs (though Shatter has been fixed, the gargantuan amount of pin bugs are still present) https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/917s8w/its_a_hard_knock_life_for_us_reinhardt_bug/
– - Related to the previous point, projectiles still disappear after death. Nobody enjoys this feature and everyone’s been campaigning against if for as long as I can remember, yet there’s been no comment on it.
– - The devs rarely interacting with their playerbase by not responding to the largest threads (only commenting on threads like “Does Torbjorn sleep with slippers? XDDD”)
– - The rest of the world out of the US being shafted by the Overwatch League due to minimal representation and poor schedules (9 out of 11 teams being states of the US, and UK viewers having to stay up to 4 AM in the morning to watch matches)
– - 2CP maps such as Volskaya having the lowest popularity rates (see the dev map poll), yet not even having their core designs looked at or even commented on
– - The nonchalant timing of patches - Sideshow himself, an Overwatch League caster, had this to say:
https://twitter.com/SideshowGaming/status/1026149508307017733
"The timing of patches is my single largest gripe with the Overwatch scene. Narratives have been bulldozered in most major tournaments for the “idk adapt i guess” highway and it doesn’t have to be that way."
– - Blizzard’s balance team not being sure whether they want to exclusively listen to the casual playerbase (who rallied for the first Mercy change due to the “hide and rez” playstyle), the pros (who complained Mercy straight after) or themselves (See the Sombra changes) for balance.
– - (Credit to Zorek104) - No console specific balance, and the meta on console is far different than that of the PC community.
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As a person who has fully immersed themselves in this game for hundreds of hours, has been an avid viewer of both the Overwatch League and Contenders it’s sad to see the game in this state. There are also dozens of other things I could’ve mentioned, but I think I got quite a few here.
Prior to this patch, over the last few weeks I noticed that I stopped caring about the game less and less - I used to play this game almost every day when it released, now I haven’t played it for the last week or so. I’ve pretty much dropped it for a huge upcoming crossover game which I won’t mention, lest I be silenced (and I’m not the only person losing interest in this game - Ok, ok, let me get his straight 🤔).
Just look at the Overwatch subreddit! It used to be bustling with activity, but as a longtime viewer of it, it’s definitely declined in popularity these last few months. Even the last few top posts have been about players not enjoying Lucioball and Blizz needing to prioritise an optimisation patch.
I’m not sure what Overwatch needs right now. The reputation of it was already bad due to the CC hell meta, now it’s even worse due to the previous Hanzo meta. Is it a funding issue? Is it simply a lack of care? I don’t know.
But it needs to be fixed if Overwatch wants to retain a strong community over the years.