Hi. I’ve been playing Overwatch since October of 2016 during the first Junkenstein event and have enjoyed playing its various heroes and maps for a while. Although I have had fun with Overwatch I have witnessed a decline in community health and game popularity since its release. Many have said that the game is heading in the wrong direction and that the community has reached a level of toxicity that they see unreversable in the current game’s status. The truth in the matter is that this statement is backed by evidence that can be found in the game itself and developer decisions with balancing and reworks seen… questionable by some players.
Most of these decisions seem to change character gameplay architypes drastically to better fit with the game’s “meta” in hopes to see more playtime with these characters. While the intentions are good willed I believe the developers are focusing on the wrong aspects of the game to change. As an example the character “Reaper” was buffed to have a cancellable wraith form, something the developers spoke against in the past, but was added to make the character more usable against characters with stuns and to add mobility to chase down other characters with mobility. The problem with this change is that, while the change did make Reaper more usable in the metagame, it doesn’t mean that the mechanic change feels fair.
The main problem with the game of Overwatch is that many of its mechanics don’t feel fair to fight against and don’t feel rewarding to use. As an example the character “McCree” has a stun mechanic that lets him expose other characters to being headshot or right clicked at close range for a brief couple seconds of time. To the player that just got killed by this you don’t feel as if you could have done anything differently in the situation as you couldn’t fight back against McCree while being stunned. As the player that played McCree it doesn’t feel like you deserved the kill as you know that the person you killed couldn’t fight back against you and so it feels free, not deserved. Mechanics like stuns, forcibly moving another player (like a boop or a hook), and invincibility mechanics feel more irritating to die to than they are fun to use. This is known as a negativity bias where the punishment outweighs the reward and is bad for both the community of the game (as players will usually direct this anger at teammates or at others) and the game itself. (as players leave for games that feel more rewarding to play and can understand the reason why they lost)
What Overwatch needs is to replace these mechanics with abilities that feel fair, that the enemy player can avoid if they are skilled enough raising the skill ceiling for both parties involved. Knowing that you could’ve done something differently in a situation instead of knowing that you were stunned and couldn’t do anything or couldn’t kill someone because they made themselves invincible is what Overwatch needs. Overwatch needs to feel fair so that we can remove our negativity bias and help both the game and the community simultaneously.
If a developer ever sees this I hope they understand that removing stuns, invincibility, and forceful movement mechanics from the game altogether is will fix the community and improve the overall opinions of the game in a positive aspect. Thank you for your time, I hope that Overwatch can become that game deserves to be instead of the game that people says it will be.