So, as most people know, Overwatch is one of the most toxic games ever created at least in the past decade, but not for the reasons people may think. So, let’s talk about why.
Now, whenever people talk about Overwatch being toxic, they all say the same thing: the community is bad and ruins the game. Everyone in the entire playerbase seems to think that this is the case. But that’s not the real story of it. Of course, it’s not entirely wrong, but you’re mixing the cause and effect. Overwatch isn’t toxic because of the community. The community is toxic because of Overwatch.
At its very core, Overwatch is unintentionally built from the ground up to make every one of its players as angry as possible at every single moment during the game. And when the entire game is built to make you angry, then you tend to be an angrier player as a result. And that’s why the community is as toxic as it is.
That being said, let’s go over the biggest problems with the game’s heroes that make you angry every time you play it. Naturally, this isn’t a full list of every problem, but it’s complete enough to warrant an outlook on the problems with Overwatch’s characters.
So here are biggest problems with the heroes themselves.
- Heroes that can oneshot you the moment you turn around a corner or otherwise burst you down in less than a second.
- Heroes that can stun, hack, or otherwise make you unable to move or make use of your abilities.
- Heroes that are hyper-mobile and unnecessarily difficult to track your shots on.
- Heroes that can can become invincible for a long time or otherwise have an easy means to escape any danger.
- “Troll pick” heroes which have such terrible designs that you can unironically get banned for playing them in ranked.
Now, if we go sift through the entire roster and sort out every character that has at least one of these problems, then we can say that roughly 90% of the roster is problematic in at least one way (28 out of 31 heroes).
That’s right. 90% of the roster is poorly designed.
Furthermore, of those 28 characters, roughly 71% of them have more than one of those problems at the same time (20 out of 28 heroes).
Apart from the heroes, there are many problems within the core gameplay of Overwatch itself. The biggest problem being its time to kill (or TTK for short).
In any ability based game, the time to kill has to be low, but not so low that you die every time you get breathed on by the enemy. This balance of TTK is very important to any character-based game.
Make no mistake; a flawed TTK can single-handedly kill a game’s entire playerbase. Gigantic was killed and shut down due to an extremely high TTK, and Heroes of the Storm is hanging by a thread because of how poorly they handle tanks and their CC abilities.
So why does Overwatch have such a low TTK? The answer is that Blizzard believes Overwatch is a competitive first person shooter game. It isn’t. It’s an ability-based team game that just happens to also be an FPS and the game has suffered for so long either because Blizzard refuses to admit it, or just can’t be bothered to fix it due to a lack of caring.
The TTK of Overwatch almost solely makes the game as toxic as it is. One problem with Overwatch that I didn’t mention was how powerful ultimates are, to the point that every game depends on who can press Q at the right time. They are powerful because most of them have no wind-up time. When you play Pharah, the moment you press Q, the first enemy in front of you receives at least 5 rockets to the face, killing them instantly without having any chance to prepare for it, because you can’t prepare for something that has no wind-up time. But there’s a reason why ultimates have no wind-up time; the TTK.
If the ultimates in Overwatch actually had any wind-up time, then whoever is using it would be killed instantly by the first enemy that sees them because the TTK has no room for standing still to wind-up an ability. In Overwatch, if you aren’t moving for even a second, then you’re dead. That’s why Bastion is and always will be a troll pick. It’s also why McCree’s ultimate has always been either completely useless or completely broken.
So, now that you know why this game is toxic, I hope people will understand the underlying problems by thinking that the community is solely responsible for it. Yes, the community is super toxic but the game itself is at last partially blame for making them that way. And yes, I understand that some people are just jerks for no reason, but most people are not. And it doesn’t help that every time someone tries to have fun on these forums, they get their thread deleted and their account banned by Blizzard for making a “troll post”.
Sadly, I speak from personal experience when I say that. I have had my account banned several times just for trying to have fun on these forums.
Rest in peace, various humorous threads that have since been deleted. 