Why the Game is Dying

General Discussion
1

Interactions on numerous other posts made it clear to myself this needs to be said-

50 million bought the game. There are 5 million monthly logins, which we know is plagued with smurfs and bots. The game is dying whether you want accept that fact or not.

And in general one of the primary causes is largely agreed upon throughout the entire community- there is not enough new content. So many other games and their devs are churning out seemingly infinite amounts of new content, keeping players interested and entertained. This is not a contentious or disagreed upon position as a reason on why the game is dying.

But this next part is. In fact I fully expect full on rage and tilt from the majority of those who interact with this post.

STOP BALANCING THE GAME AROUND YOUR E-SPORT AND <1% OF THE PLAYERBASE

This is the skeleton in the closet, the elephant in the room, the blaring horn, the cold, hard, ugly reality of what is killing this game.

70% of Overwatch’s players are Silver-Plat. 15% are in Bronze. If the metal ranks compose 85% of the playerbase, then this means the vast majority of those who pick up the game, will generally remain unaffected by how the devs balance the game.

And over time, they will get sick of getting farmed by Junkrats combos, D.Va Bombs, Doomfists, Genji’s, Hog Hooks, Bastions, etc. Because what is problematic for 85% of the playerbase is never actually addressed. So they just quit.

I can’t count the number of friends (yes I can, 4), who I introduced to OW and they left within a month. They got sick of getting farmed by Bastion/Junkrat/Hog and never seeing changes to these heroes.

Now vets like myself and many of you know that with enough time and practice, paired with a willingness to improve and a few good friends, many low rank issues and heroes are neutralized and not a problem, even for players within that rank.

But the issue is that players aren’t playing long enough to learn this. They play 5 matches in a row vs a Doomfist and quit. Then the patch comes out and they’re confused why Doomfist got a buff, then they uninstall.

ALL of this goes back to corporate greed. They chose to balance around an E-Sport and for GM streamers, expecting to cash in on these facets. However in ignoring the vast majority of the player base, they lost 45 million players and 1,000% of their potential player base. Now the game is hanging by a thread.

They believe they can save the game with a sequel. Why is going down to 1 tank? Well one of the major reasons (if you listen to Blizzard Devs) isn’t queue times. It’s so their E-Sport is faster paced, more entertaining, and more easily understood with less clutter to follow. They don’t care about your queue times! :rofl:

They have spent 5 years balancing around an E-Sport and running this playerbase into the ground.

45 million didn’t just quit because of the lack of content. They didn’t just quit because they didn’t like the game. This is the cold, hard, ugly truth that links the missing pieces together as to why this game is suffering.

STOP BALANCING AROUND <1%

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Sir, this is Overwatch.

Balance per se isn’t the problem, the main issue is that progressively for many the problems outweigh the pleasures. Too much CC, and too many mechanics that feel “unfair” to everyone. And this isn’t just for instance anti-turret nonsense, its also getting irritated at hypermobility, etc. which is never really addressed. The lack of any effort to make people understand the game is a team game and not just about your individual fun. The lack of effort to begin to use simple tools to detect and punish Smurfs/boosters etc. The relaxed MMR on QP, and too many sales and account giveaways… it all adds up. Yes, content is an issue, but many left before that due to slow response on issues. Priority Pass has only made this worse.

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Imo the game should definitely be balanced around GM/Top500, NOT OWL.

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It’s honestly funny that people think 6 randos could play in any way like a team that lives together lol.

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There are a lot of things wrong but one of the main ones is not enough content or real developer interaction. They tell us things every few weeks/months/years. Things that may or may not end up being true. They have free reign to lie or miss lead us.

But the other issue is too many game modes. While it’s nice to have more game modes and all that. It is always a problem with a multiplayer only game. Splitting up your player base amongst more game que’s degrades the quality and quantity of players the match maker has to work with.

Very quickly you get game modes no one even plays any more because the wait time is so bad. Same reason they combined region servers and other things. All to try and save que times by compromising on connection speed and fair matches.

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This game focus too much around team work. Which while is a good aspect of the game, since it involves strategy and corporation, not everybody is grouping. Also, there are some heroes that just have too much impact on their own and requires the enemy team to tackle it down with teamwork.

Single smurf widow on havana will require teamwork to address. Even though the smurf widow doesn’t even need teamwork herself to be oppressive. Which to me doesn’t seem fair.

If you’re tank, you could try and distract the widow as ball. But you will need to make sure to not get focused by the enemy and die. Tanks are probably the best at taking out the widow. So if your tank doesn’t know how to take down the widow, it’s pretty much gg as support. The same oppressiveness holds true with any other high skill high reward DPS heroes like Tracer, doomfist, hanzo etc. Most of them will wreak havoc to your team all by themselves and requires teamwork to address.

Bastion is an odd one because even though it’s weak, with some teamwork, he can be oppressive on lower ranks. And by teamwork, it’s just your rien holding his shield up. That’s a lot easier to do than your whole team needing to try and counter the bastion bunker. Again, I don’t think bastion needs a nerf but it’s just one of those synergise that just seems to work in lower elos.

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Has it ever crossed your mind the lack of independent heroes in the game is so that their E-Sport isn’t broken?

If everyone could provide high value and had a hero that independently carry in their class, regardless of their team, that would be the eternal OWL meta.

And when you examine heroes like Ball, Tracer and Bap within OWL, they are dominant due to the lack of teamwork necessary for high value impactful interactions from them.

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I’m aware of that and that’s why this game will forever always be tilting experience for solo queuers. But you can’t deny that there are certain heroes and roles that just have greater solo carry potential than others. For tanks, that would be hammond. For DPS, that would be tracer. For support, that would be baptiste or ana. But I’d argue that even though bap/ana can “carry”, this carry potential is still a lot less than tanks or dps. But sadly it needs to be like this for the trifeca (tank, dps, support) to synergise and stay balanced.

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It’s funny when they increase the cooldown on a Zarya bubble because players with near perfect synergy and chemistry are “too oppressive” at 8 seconds, but “balanced” at 10.

It’s funny how a single ability like “Widow grapple” is deemed to OP and has it’s cooldown jacked up, because an OWL player is hook-shotting enemies out of spawn and escaping dives with it.

It’s funny how OWLand GM players complain about Bap lamp, and then tell metal ranks to “just git gud, shoot the Riptire”.

It’s funny that people accept balances that are derived from professional teams with near perfect synergy and defend the devs choice balance around <1% of the playerbase who will never have that sort of chemistry or benefit from their changes.

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You really dislike riptire, right? lol

I don’t blame you, as a Mercy main riptire is almost always a death sentence to me xD

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You cannot balance around bad players.

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Contrarily so. I love Lamp. Lamp I love.

So when GM players whine about it, I like to use the argument they always make to metal rank players. Whether that’s a Riptire, Torb turret, or Rat Trap, they always say the same thing “gIt GuUd! JuSt ShOoT iT”.

Funny how they can’t apply the same logic to lamp…:roll_eyes:

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Also should mention that OWL basically killed the player run/small tournament scene. You know what would have been better then OWL? Guild vs Guild. Actual involvement in your player community.

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And balancing around good ones is part of the causation of 45 million quitting the game.

You tell me what is more insane-

Continuing to balance around their E-Sport and hemorrhaging players?

OR

Trying to balance around the average player, something they have never done.

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the content draught is real tho, and communications are always nil. i do think that is a major problem with this game. of course they have this lawsuit now but that is no excuse to ignore your fanbase right?

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You cannot balance around the top players either (as now)

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The game is dying because they are ignoring so they can focus on the sequel.

Easy answer, took like 8 seconds to type.

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I do agree with your sentiment a lot which is why I made that post about smooth value curves, not heroes that become broken in gm (tracer/D.va) and are trash if you are new to PC gaming.

The weird skill curves in this game for many heroes make it very noob unfriendly.

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Yeah. Any random top500 players cant win a 6 stack from a owl team. Its impossible. How they expect us to enjoy a game balanced for the 0,001 of the playerbase its out of my comprehension. How they made this a competirive game so rushed, when the game was so horribly balanced at the start and the lack of rules, tanks and healers was so blatant. Like, ok, you make this a competirive game from the start, and we, the playerbase dont even have guilds yet. How . How can they do everything so bad.

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yawn … Another one of these.

1 Like