Why Stadium Failed

General Discussion
1

Stadium was supposed to be a fun game mode where you get different abilities for heroes. At the beginning, it was like that, now it seems like the abilities have turned to a competitive side and therefore affected the player base.

I don’t enjoy competitive as much as I do unranked, and when you nerf any hero in stadium it felt as if the fun was being taken away because you wanted it to be fair. Beginning stadium was all about fun, there was no care I felt for different abilities a hero had because either way you could counter them. And at some points, countering wasn’t that big of a deal because it was all fun and giggles.

When it was moved to the competitive side, I felt as though that was when stadium decreased, as not everyone enjoys competitive and then the nerfs came for the different abilities, so it wasn’t fun anymore, and even in unranked it felt like you needed to win.

The number of heroes in Overwatch is 57, while in stadium its 33. You have people who potentially don’t play any of those 33 heroes in stadium, and every season is a suspenseful enjoyment of seeing a new hero get added. A problem that you did was add new heroes into stadium when people most likely prefer their old ones. I do love jetpack cat, but I feel as though she could’ve been replaced by Illari, Baptiste, even Lifeweaver. Same goes with Wuyang I felt he was still a pretty new character when stadium introduced him. The tanks are pretty well rounded except for Hazard as he could’ve been replaced with Wrecking ball or Roadhog. The DPS is where it most came to play, I would’ve preferred to see a little extra, like Symmetra, Hanzo, Widowmaker, Sombra, all the older heroes rather than the newer ones like Freja and Vendetta. Thought I am forgetting when exactly stadium released and with that when the different heroes released.

If you gave the people the heroes they really love, I bet stadium would’ve done a lot better (not that the newer ones aren’t lovable). I’m also surprised to see it below mystery heroes as stadium has queues from 2 to 10 minutes sometimes.

Thank you for reading my rant. I don’t know when the different heroes released as I don’t keep track of that much, but I hope you can understand where I came from when I said older heroes rather than newer heroes.

2

There is a reason why more or less really whacky things are kept to PvE rather than PvP. Competition is the main aspect of PvP. Doing silly things and having fun is difficult when there is a loser and a winner. The winner is generally having fun abusing the other player losing. The losing player is not having fun because they are getting beaten back.

It starts fun because no one cares to get better to optimize the system to learn to improve. When people do the skill gaps start forming. Winning/Losing becomes more defined.

The more OW stays out the more I am convinced they need a game akin to Helldivers 2. A large co-op game that focuses less on PvP OW and more on the unique experience you can get with a completely new focus and not being restricted to the same game engine as PvP.

3

I originally felt like Stadium was supposed to be a Testing Grounds of sorts, where they could test the bounds of new abilities, if there was interest in applying it to base game, and fix any bugs that might come with it before it was released into base game. Kind of along the lines of a permanent Junkenstein mode.

Instead, it was a MOBA with a power fantasy that just became “make the most broken build you can and break the game”. Even if they came out and said “Don’t take this too seriously, it’s just supposed to be a silly, goofy, fun time mode”, a certain sect of players would inevitably try to break the game and dominate the battlefield. That’s always where this was headed.

I believe the reason they implemented the Ranked version of it was because they knew the regular mode was not going to have a sustainable player base. They’d split the base initially, but Ranked modes always have a sustainable base that has a hard percentage floor that never dips below (in this case it seems like 3% is that floor).

I do and I 100% agree that they should have prioritized the original Overwatch cast before the newer heroes, but once they added Freja in the second season or so, I knew it wasn’t going to happen. Putting Jetpack Cat in Stadium immediately was a death knell for anyone wanting the older heroes. Sure, there are a lot of ideas you can come up with right off the dome for what JPC could do in stadium, and coming up with similar ideas for Illari, Baptiste, or Lifeweaver might take more time, but did JPC REALLY deserve to be immediately put in Stadium before the other three? Like I get deprioritizing certain heroes due to limited kits (ex: Widow… how much can you really change about her kit while keeping her identity AND not making her too overtuned?) but come on.

4

Stadium failed cause it wasnt ow it was its own thing but most ppl who want to play ow want to play ow. Stadium felt like hey we didnt do pve so heres this.