The Blizzard forums serves several functions many that go beyond providing feedback to the development team.
The General Discussion forums is the best place to provide feedback when you have concerns about the game. However it is important to understand that the best feedback that you can provide is to carefully identify what you are liking or not liking about the game, whether it be a specific hero, ability, map, game feature, or collectible item, and then to provide suggestions on what you like to see for that game element. The general discussion forums is also great for sharing content such as personal artwork, videos of your best highlights, or asking for help from the community on general gameplay advice.
The Competitive Discussion forum is the dedicated to everything about Competitive Overwatch including the competitive game mode, esport discussion, and developing key strategies to help others climb the ranks. Unfortunately, a lot of players use this forum to complain about the competitive mode. I personally feel like the forum should be renamed to the strategies discussion forum, and also have a separate and dedicated esports forum for discussion about Overwatch League and the other esport programs like Contenders and World Cup.
The PTR feedback forum is intended to provide your thoughts about upcoming features being tested on the Public Test Region server. There you can also find the patch notes for PTR patches. Also the PTR Bug Report forum is where you can report any possible issues involving the upcoming patch for Overwatch as you test it on the Public Test Region.
The Workshop Discussion forum is the newest category on the forums. Here you can share your latest custom game creations, ask questions about the Workshop Tools, and learn about them in helpful guides such as my Workshop Syntax Guide. The Story Discussion forum is the place to speculate and discuss about the stories, comics, and overall lore for the Overwatch franchise. Finally, there are three Looking for Group forums (one for each game platform) which is a great place to form long-lasting friendships with other players in order to have more consistent games of Overwatch.
Finally, there are the support forums. Technical Support and Bug Report. Use the technical support forum when you need assistance with getting your system to work with Overwatch and troubleshoot issues such as game crashes, internet disconnections, and hardware issues. Forum MVPs such as myself and Blizzard Customer Service is always monitoring this forum. If you ever encounter behavior that you don’t believe is intended for the game, such as passing through map boundaries or abilities not working as intended, report them in the Bug Report forum. Just remember that if you have an active issue that is affecting your ability to play, use the technical support forum first as the bug report forum is monitored by Blizzard’s Quality Assurance team, but often will not respond to specific threads unless they are investigating a highly-reported issue and need more information from users. Finally the announcement forum is sometimes used by Blizzard for specific news updates, but is not often used anymore since patch notes are now posted only on PlayOverwatch.com.
Overall the forums are the most central place for the community share and discuss Overwatch together, while feedback is also given here and the Community Managment team does collect that feedback to pass onto the devs, the forums is the community’s hub. I myself try to use the forums as my primary tool to help other players with the game, answering questions they have about the game and provide assistance to fix issues. I also use the forums to share my own love of Overwatch. I can only wish I could do more to help support our community.