For me, there wasn’t a given point at which it suddenly became frustrating. Just slowly over time, I became more and more aware of the myriad problems this game has, and slowly over time, they became more and more inexcusable. Like, the first bad balance patch wasn’t a big deal. By the twentieth, though, I was pretty frustrated. Stuff like that. I definitely feel like the tipping point was around the start of 2018/late 2017, where the cons really began to outweigh the pros, but it wasn’t any single event that caused it.
It kinda sucks, which itself sucks because Overwatch has huge potential. Overwatch, currently, exists in a state of stagnation. It is not growing, and that lack of growth is potentially more harmful than decay because it leads to complacency on part of the developers–rather than seeing failure and feeling that they should correct course, they see “this is fine” and keep doing the same old same old.
To be more specific, balancing has been… atrocious. That’s an entire can of worms I don’t really want to open, but I think only one balance patch in the past year really struck me as more good than bad. Probably the biggest offender was the Support Balance Changes in August. Events have been overwhelmingly lackluster, ongoing issues with matchmaking, comp, cheaters, etc have gone mostly unaddressed, and developer silence is at an all-time high. Content release continues to be painfully lethargic, partially aggravated that most content release adds nothing to the core of Overwatch gameplay, and lore basically doesn’t exist outside of two mild additions per year.
They need to make big, meaningful, groundbreaking plays. I know that’s nebulous to say, but that’s because they have a tonne of options. For example, a campaign mode, or even just a generic dedicated PvE mode. That’d be huge. Adding new events would be another option.
Increasing content release rate would be another avenue to help with the game, particularly balance-neutral content like skins, maps, social features, game modes, and other miscellaneous items.
Also, just increasing developer engagement with the community. They need to communicate, they need to be utterly clear about what’s going on, they need to be specific. They need to not just say “we’re listening” but show that they actually are.