Overwatch

[p1138]

Its way deeper than just OW2 sucking ass and removing/retconning shit. Overwatch 1 was already in a really bad spot before OW2 dropped.

The original Overwatch went neglected for years in favor of this sequel. The time between content updates was pretty big, and the quality of those updates were questionable at best. A lot of cosmetic only updates, new heroes typically fucked the game's balance rather than felt like needed additions.There was a LOT of powercreep that happened with hero buffs and new hero releases, stuns were more obnoxious, healers gained the ability to outheal any damage source with minimal effort instead of just when using an ultimate, tanks that could defend and attack at the same time became the norm, and much more. and the developers turned a blind eye to all of it.

The game became this really unfun bloated mess of everyone just sorta staring at each other through 4+ barriers farming chip damage until someone's one shot ultimate came up. The developers had a very "Mother Knows Best" attitude when it came to balancing it too, they did some of the most ineffective and pointless balance changes I've ever seen from a game, throwing it from bad meta to bad meta. All the way they were actually pretty open with how they'd mock the community for not knowing what it wants, deliberately ignore every piece of feedback given, and just generally kept mismanaging and neglecting the game. Constantly lying to its community throughout the whole thing.

Overwatch is honestly one of the most mismanaged game IPs in history, and the steam reviews it got are well deserved and were a long time coming. This isn't just a review bomb for recent events, yeah those recent events are in everyone's immediate memory, but Overwatch has been a laughingstock for much longer, this is just the first time people have had a real avenue to voice their feelings about the game. As soon as they stepped outside of the Blizzard echo chambers of their official forums or Reddit, they had to face what people really thought of the game.

For the perspective of regular gamers, yes Blizzard absolutely pulled a "mother knows best" attitude regarding how the balance the game. It was a fun game that became awful around 6 months after they launched the competitive mode. Why? Because everything they did for balance was purely to try and make it appealing to watch as an esport.

Too many characters off to the side in battles instead of following the main battle meant not knowing which camera view to use. DOTA/LoL don't have this issue due to most of everything happening in 3 spots outside of the odd instance of someone jungling.

Wanting to make sure everyone's ults go off all at once, so that way they'd get the flashiest moments(and again, easiest to get a view of on stream) if everything is just one big mess in a singular spot on any map.

Eliminating quick kills, because switching to a player's view only to have them end up in respawn 2 seconds later isn't entertaining. And of course the runback isn't either. So this means heals need to be effective, no wait snipes need to be less effective, but now the tanks can tank infinitely so we need tanks more effective oh now snipers are useless, and so on.

Not wanting static team builds was a major problem for them. As things usually turned into whatever the best 6v6 meta choice was, and then everyone not playing at the e-sport level trying to emulate it(and failing for a variety of reasons especially if not in a 6 stack) just further fueled community toxicity as far down as bronze. Unless you smurfed, playing whatever the top meta team is, is not going to help you if you're at bronze.

And remember, this was all to promote their stupid OWL e-sports bullshit, that they tried to emulate the NBA/NFL/etc. with "local teams" that after a year all consisted of people exported from Korea. So not only were they hoping to convince nerds who watch e-sports online to buy tickets to watch a local venue for some fucking reason, the local team likely didn't have players local to the country let alone city/area.

So you've got a game where 99% of the playerbase is disregarded, the game isn't balanced around a normal play experience, and the company focus is to sell sports merch and in person tickets, of course the whole thing was fucked even before covid happened. OW2 exists only due to the incessant crying about lootboxes(which were actually fine in OW1 as you could just play the damn game and earn some or eventually just buy the skins you wanted if you were into that), and a desperate need for better(even more predatory) monetization that wound up far worse than loot boxes ever were. Making enough actual PvE content to satisfy people who weren't interested in the competitive PvP side of the game was never going to happen since showing off skins in PvP and battlepasses are where the money is.

 

[moocow]

As of now, OW2 is the lowest rated Steam title of all time.

View attachment 5268093

It's a shell of its former self in every way possible.

Man, seeing Spacebase DF-9 there makes me sad. The game showed a lot of promise (and was doing pretty well in EA from my understanding) and then the developer just slapped a 1.0 on it mid-development, shipped it incomplete and washed his hands of it. It deserves its place on this list but god damn, talk about wasted potential.

 

[FatalTater]

I do not like the new maps.
I do not like the darkness of Blizzard World. It's weird.
I want loot boxes back.

I've been playing this game since Ana was new. I'm now going to go shake my cane at passersby and yell at clouds. Proabably about loot boxes, because fuck that battle pass shit.

 

[Inside your walls]

I was reading through the comments on YongYea's video (which is how I learned about this because lol at actually playing and keeping up with this game), and you guys might find some of them insightful.
View attachment 5329884

After seeing user Pleshie's comment about PharMercy shit, I decided to check the lead writer for OW2

>He's one of those

And there is some credence to him pushing/being biased for the Pharmercy pairing too

>TFW the pairing you like will get scrapped because the writer is a massive
LGTBBQ+ ally and yurifag for Walmart version of TF2 Medic x Soldier

Why are yurifags like this?

 

[whogoesthere]

Any white man still playing this game should be shot, and his family strangled. No exceptions.

 

[Tanner Glass]

I played OW a bunch of years ago when it had a free weekend on steam, and while it wasn't really my thing, I thought it had a pretty invested player base that liked it. I just saw mention of this in the community happenings thread and I do not have time to read through 144 pages to find out why the audience turned on it so hard. This seems like a really overblown reaction to retconning some character's ages, can I get a tl;dr on what caused the community to turn on this game so hard?
View attachment 5329895View attachment 5329897

The audience didn't really "turn" on Overwatch, more like they gave up on it.

@Rion had a really good summary, but I think it's still somehow even worse than that. Overwatch 1, at it's absolute best, was a fun game that needed a lot of work. The pieces were there and Blizzard still had enough of a reputation to sell people on a dream and a whole bunch of people bought into it, but it never actually materialized.

Overwatch 1 (the initial release) was supposed to be the "start" of the game. There were supposed to be massive updates (which TF2 had set a standard for) - new modes, new heroes, new events, single player content, story content videos, constant patching/updates and almost none of that happened to this day. It was a $40 game (with $60 versions) that also had lootboxes and FOMO.

The meta evolved and OW had a major glaring problem - it was not well designed. The game centered around hero switching and as a result some heroes were extremely poorly designed as to not be "too powerful". The roster was too big and you had huge redundancies and "low tier" characters on certain maps and modes (aka Torb on Attack). The game was structured in a way where you really wanted a tank (preferably Rein) and a healer (preferably Mercy) but neither role was required or any fun to play as. You could quite literally lose a 20-30 minute match because no one wanted to tank/heal or was willing to do it and was dogshit at it. Any character on your team that was in "use" could not be reused - so if someone was playing Mercy and didn't want to switch, good luck and tough break. It wasn't just tanks/heals either - a lot of powerful heroes have "hard counters" that should be switched to, but if no one wants to play Widow because the other team has a Pharrah - hope you like eating rockets all fucking round.

This was never fixed and turned OW into a kind of fun shooter into an extremely toxic one because the game never married the concept of "playing the game to have fun" and "playing the game to win" - they could not exist together. Winning often meant playing roles or characters you didn't want to in a playstyle you didn't want to. Literal years went by and Blizzard kept overpromising and underdelivering until they had the absolute balls to announce a sequel to a game that could arguably be called "incomplete". The stuff that was supposed to be in OW1 (single player, story, new modes, new events) was now shifted to OW2.

During the time - Blizzard were just absolute cunts about it. OW balancing was complete garbage and the best idea they had was to force players into Tank/Healer/DPS roles - which meant that you would often have to wait in line to play a shitty aggravating game. It was some times faster to join a game as a healer, throw that game, then use your "priority" queue to queue as DPS. Competitive was also complete cancer as well with Blizzard trying their absolute hardest to have a full on sports league just for OW and the game having an extremely unfun and strict meta for huge periods at a time.

OW2 launched and is still, hilariously, feature incomplete. The most recent announcement was "All that single player stuff we've been talking about? We're not going to do it. We actually stopped even trying it a few years ago but didn't tell anyone until now".

So people have hated OW for a very long time.

 

[doodoocaca]

I can't get over how bad the writing is now. Yeah, removing the organic stuff between genji and mercy so you can shoehorn really, really, really bad forced lesbo flirting is one thing, but Kiriko's entire characterization is weeb manic pixie dream girl cringe, with a side of "Oh, pharah chan, I don't lose." Also "febreeze brings relief" and "can't changetheworld[the voice actress had a mouthfull of crackers] by following all the rules".

See her on her bike!

Faggy Fabio™ who is totally gaysexual but sexless and was roomates with The Exceptional Indian Autist (Who literally says behold my exceptionality) is the dumbest shit. College and they couldn't even flirt? Really? His entire kit sucked at launch, and even now, the crux of it is giving some random idiot the means to pull anyone on his team to himself. This doesn't mean helping people from spawn, no, it means annoying the ever loving piss out of divers or trolling people. In what way is running from a fight better than winning it? Egyptian grandma throwing her piss grenade actually does shit. Of course you can't criticize WifeLeaver, though, because he's gay. But Pan. Also he only hits on Baptiste.

At least he didn't stick his dick in Symmetra.

Now Illari is this Peruvian cunt who's really, really obviously Echo's original idea of a support who has a silhouette that isn't distinct from Ana at range, insanely fucking overpowered, clearly pay to win, written by idiots, voiced by idiots, and the random jibberish mumbling I get from her sounds like some bitchy latina about to take off her flipflop.

Also her fucking concept art had a line from her thigh go into her crotch in the most obvious not obvious cameltoe for thirst generation.

You ain't foolin' nobody, Blizz.

Overwatch had something organic, it had some old, established, warm relationships going on and even real regrets for things going wrong. It was Diverse™ but didn't feel forced or fake. Shit happened, real shit, but they didn't have a chance to explore it yet.

Then Bobby Kotick did his shit and Jeff left.
Now, the Chinese lady in an antarctic coat is actually fat but somehow in special forces, random heroes are gay, Muh Shipping, Kiriko and Weaver are the worst characters ever, Illari's pay to win and a thirst trap with a pencil eraser clit, and youtubers regularly give better balance advice for free than Blizzard ever acts on.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

There are some pretty good summaries here but I noticed both @Rion and @Tanner Glass also forgot another huge issue that Overwatch's balance presented beyond shitty map design and shitty hero design:

Overwatch had some of the worst match making decisions of all time. If you were solo queing it wasn't as bad. However playing with friends was a quick way to either get fucked or not have anyone to play with.

For those not in the know: In order to que with your friends you all have to be in the same MMR range. For example, if you're brand new and in bronze, you probably can't play in any kind of ranked play with your friend in platinum. You're just not allowed to que. This always seemed weird for me, because coming from Starcraft 2, we had team games and anyone of any MMR level could play in any team. Each team would just get its own MMR. So if I (low masters) were to play with my best friends (Sliverish and Goldish) we would play our placements and based on performance it would generate our team's league.

If at a later date, one of my friends stopped playing, and we became a duo rather than a trio, or if we replaced him and because a different trio, we'd have to go through our placements again and get assigned a new MMR.

Overwatch did not do this at all. Your team was required to be within the same MMR range. To compound issues, MMR gain wasn't consistent. DPS gained and lost at a different rate than healers who gained and lost at a different rate than tanks. So in theory if you had a particularly bad night as a DPS when all your friends were on point, it was completely possible that you could lose your ability to que with friends if they out paced you.

And that's just the MMR side of things.

If we look at how matches were made it gets even more stupid. Because Overwatch is afraid of alienating solo players, the game prioritizes looking parties that are the same size (meaning if you're in a 3-man premade, it will try to put you in a game with another 3-man premade). I assume this was done because there was this idealic "e-sports dream" that if you played really well, you as a solo player could climb the ranks to e-celeb status.

In reality what this meant was that if you were a team of 6 silvers and you were premade and you were looking for a match, if OW couldn't find a team of 6 silvers premade for you to go against at that moment, it would look in higher leagues. It was incredibly common for silver rank premades just trying to play with friends to end up playing against players of a much higher skill level than them because OW matched on party status rather than player skill.

In a 6v6 team game, it was assumed that it was completely unreasonable for an enemy team to use teamwork if your team was premade, so rather than putting 6 similarly skilled solo players in a match against a full pre-made and letting them work together, OW assumed the premade would be good enough to play against another higher ranked premade.

So if you wanted to play at all with your friends, you had to be in the same narrow MMR window, remain in that narrow MMR window, and you better not play with a full party, otherwise you're fucked.

For my group, I run a discord of about 60 people, and I'd say probably half of them own Overwatch. It is very easy for us to get a full group and the result between the terrible Matchmaking, Party Balance, and then gameplay balance is that no one has a good time and no one wants to play OW anymore. Especially not now that we can just play Battlebit instead and have a much better time.

 

[doodoocaca]

Remember group finder and spending 20 minutes listening to 12 year olds mumble and mouth breathe into the mic trying to find the best possible person for a given role and never play a few years ago? Thank fuck that shit's gone.

There's little to nothing done in-game to explain timing, positioning, corners, and who is supposed to do what or not. People expect tanks to protect them, not go fuck with the other team while a handy wall could be of use. The budget's there to make scenarios to explain this and even use ML to coach players, but there's no talent, and a third party that tried to do ML based off of a recording or live play of your game got legal threats!

The game exists to sell skins for $20 and fleece its existing pile of old assets until it finally dies with a whimper. Blizzard is a shell of what it once was with all the talent long gone and replaced with hacks. It's fucking depressing.

 

[Inside your walls]

I can't get over how bad the writing is now. Yeah, removing the organic stuff between genji and mercy so you can shoehorn really, really, really bad forced lesbo flirting is one thing

The pairing between Korra/Asami, Princess Bubblegum/Marceline and recent Adora/Catra from new She-ra, has brain rotted an entire generation of media consuming Californian >writers.

Why have a tender story between a cyborg dude and female doctor that rescued him (a pairing we don't really see in media), with small organic but sweet interactions that eventually lead up to them getting together through a story
or comic, when we can just have 5857668th lesboslop butch/feminine pairing where the butch's personality is the dreaded "disaster lesbian" and feminine's personality is "caretaker/mommy gf but she's also sarcastic/bitchy towards dudes".

It's all so tiresome.

 

[Dr. Ricearoni]

The pairing between Korra/Asami, Princess Bubblegum/Marceline and recent Adora/Catra from new She-ra, has brain rotted an entire generation of media consuming Californian >writers.

Why have a tender story between a cyborg dude and female doctor that rescued him (a pairing we don't really see in media), with small organic but sweet interactions that eventually lead up to them getting together through a story
or comic, when we can just have 5857668th lesboslop butch/feminine pairing where the butch's personality is the dreaded "disaster lesbian" and feminine's personality is "caretaker/mommy gf but she's also sarcastic/bitchy towards dudes".

It's all so tiresome.

I'm still not over Bubblegum/Marceline. I stopped watching the show well before they usurped Finn and Jake as the main characters and their shitty love story still pisses me off. Especially that scene where it's revealed some dumb shirt they got one another had more sentimental value than a toy from the adoptive father who literally drove himself insane to save her life. Sorry for getting off topic I just really hate lesbians.

 

[Pizdec]

Overwatch is honestly one of the most mismanaged game IPs in history, and the steam reviews it got are well deserved and were a long time coming. This isn't just a review bomb for recent events, yeah those recent events are in everyone's immediate memory, but Overwatch has been a laughingstock for much longer, this is just the first time people have had a real avenue to voice their feelings about the game. As soon as they stepped outside of the Blizzard echo chambers of their official forums or Reddit, they had to face what people really thought of the game.

The best part is knowing Gabe Newell is getting his rocks off to those negative reviews. He's never had to be held to anyone's standards and yet still comes out on top. There's nothing more gratifying then watching your competition be forced to stare at years of feedback on your site because they're desperate for new players, and coincidently it has a way to leave reviews.

It's been ten fucking years, and now we see what Gabe meant in the form of Blizzard putting Overwatch 2 on Steam.

 

[doodoocaca]

The pairing between Korra/Asami, Princess Bubblegum/Marceline and recent Adora/Catra from new She-ra, has brain rotted an entire generation of media consuming Californian >writers.

Why have a tender story between a cyborg dude and female doctor that rescued him (a pairing we don't really see in media), with small organic but sweet interactions that eventually lead up to them getting together through a story
or comic, when we can just have 5857668th lesboslop butch/feminine pairing where the butch's personality is the dreaded "disaster lesbian" and feminine's personality is "caretaker/mommy gf but she's also sarcastic/bitchy towards dudes".

It's all so tiresome.

Alright, fuck it, let's pozload my negholep.

Has there actually been a good gay or lesbian romance in popular culture yet? Not "tee hee validity!" or REPRESENTATION!!!one, not some unhealthy shit wrongly seen as healthy, actual love? Ever?

Fucking shit already.

Mercy's a funny, interesting character even with what little characterization she has who can play off of anyone, but Pharah's this paper thin mix of Egyptian and native American (lol) who's got a little bit of pilot cockiness but is otherwise not even a good dyke.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Alright, fuck it, let's pozload my negholep.

Has there actually been a good gay or lesbian romance in popular culture yet? Not "tee hee validity!" or REPRESENTATION!!!one, not some unhealthy shit wrongly seen as healthy, actual love? Ever?

Fucking shit already.

Mercy's a funny, interesting character even with what little characterization she has who can play off of anyone, but Pharah's this paper thin mix of Egyptian and native American (lol) who's got a little bit of pilot cockiness but is otherwise not even a good dyke.

Lesbian relationships in media are, funnily enough, extremely misogynistic. It's not just the cooming factor, it is the idea that a woman getting dicked violates and corrupts her, while lesbians are inherently pure because no dick is involved.

Of course real life statistics invalidates that idea, putting two mentally ill women together usually ends with them beating the shit of one another.

 

[p1138]

The meta evolved and OW had a major glaring problem - it was not well designed. The game centered around hero switching and as a result some heroes were extremely poorly designed as to not be "too powerful". The roster was too big and you had huge redundancies and "low tier" characters on certain maps and modes (aka Torb on Attack). The game was structured in a way where you really wanted a tank (preferably Rein) and a healer (preferably Mercy) but neither role was required or any fun to play as. You could quite literally lose a 20-30 minute match because no one wanted to tank/heal or was willing to do it and was dogshit at it. Any character on your team that was in "use" could not be reused - so if someone was playing Mercy and didn't want to switch, good luck and tough break. It wasn't just tanks/heals either - a lot of powerful heroes have "hard counters" that should be switched to, but if no one wants to play Widow because the other team has a Pharrah - hope you like eating rockets all fucking round.

Don't forget, that was another aspect of trying to balance the game to be an astroturfed esport. Originally there was no restriction so you could play a goofy team of 6 torbjorns, or 6 reins or whatever you wanted. Triple mercy and triple bastion? wtf not, who cares. But like you pointed out the problem, that also meant YOU could switch from whatever you were doing to another mercy who was actually doing their job, and at times the shitty mercy player might get the hint and switch to something else instead. But no, blizzard knows best and took that away, because it wouldn't make for good esports broadcasting.

Overwatch did not do this at all. Your team was required to be within the same MMR range. To compound issues, MMR gain wasn't consistent. DPS gained and lost at a different rate than healers who gained and lost at a different rate than tanks. So in theory if you had a particularly bad night as a DPS when all your friends were on point, it was completely possible that you could lose your ability to que with friends if they out paced you.

Yet another part of the disaster of blizzard trying to astroturf overwatch into being a damned e-sport. I ran into the same thing with my friend groups. I want to say the initial MMR range was only 500 and then they so graciously expanded it to 1000? You could be playing with your friends for 3 days, then day 4... nope get fucked you're just not allowed to queue anymore. wtf? And then the comparative MMR shit they did instead of just doing it based off of W/L... you and your team could be doing amazing, someone on the team gains +50, you gain +5, and now you can't queue anymore. Even their placement matches were idiotic, because they didn't have penalties for people just dropping game for months, so instead of getting a loss where it would have been a small loss, it became a massive loss for YOU since you stayed in the game.

In reality what this meant was that if you were a team of 6 silvers and you were premade and you were looking for a match, if OW couldn't find a team of 6 silvers premade for you to go against at that moment, it would look in higher leagues. It was incredibly common for silver rank premades just trying to play with friends to end up playing against players of a much higher skill level than them because OW matched on party status rather than player skill.

Yeah, when the optimum scenario for "fun" was to make sure you didn't have a full team, that should have been a massive sign there was a problem. But no... everyone involved in the development of the game was pushing the shitty esports angle.

What was hilarious in hindsight about the esports aspect of OW1, is that right at the launch of the game there were people setting up tournaments, leagues, tons of people streaming the game, youtube videos discussing map and character strategies. Then blizzard dropped OWL on top of the game and basically killed what was a fairly decent grassroots scene that had been developing. It's even more hilarious since they managed to kill the existing starcraft/starcraft 2 esports scene as well with how badly they handled starcraft 2's updates over the years, and they've even tried turning WoW PvP arena into a damn esport at times. Heroes of the storm hilariously failed as an esport(they tried doing college leagues for it), because it was too different(the different maps and some dynamic changes during gameplay) for the LoL/DOTA players but because it was a bad esport was actually fun to play on occasion casually while encountering none of the salty try-hards you would get in other MOBA games.

All the esports push for OW1 did was create one of the most actually toxic game communities I've ever seen. You could be playing in silver, as whatever the top tournament meta team was, be losing, switch to a DPS you do better on, and have a teammate get mad and spend the rest of the game cussing you out and jumping off the map to throw just to spite you, as if whatever the tournament meta was would mean anything to a low tier group of random players matchmade on a team. And blizzard never took a serious look at what the fuck they were doing to even attempt to understand why it turned out the way it did. TF2 has been mentioned in this thread, yes people expected OW1 to become a more modern TF2 equivalent but that shit never happened because any of the "fun" stuff added to TF2 never would have been allowed in comp in OW1.

edit: And more of Blizzard trying to astroturf shit into being an esport? Would you believe they tried it with Diablo 4 team PvP?

You can see the venue is damn near empty, here's some pictures from the crowd showing just how empty it is. https://imgur.com/a/kgYS6o3

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

It's even more hilarious since they managed to kill the existing starcraft/starcraft 2 esports scene as well with how badly they handled starcraft 2's updates over the years

I could go on and on about Starcraft. The entirety of 2012 we had zero balance updates despite Terran not being able to save enough money to build an army that could beat Infestor/Broodlord and Protoss literally just not having units that could beat it.

Blizzard's answer in 2013 was to give Protoss really boring long range siege options (I don't play Terran, iirc they got better harassment options or something?), but Blizzard further fucked this by thinking, "You know what would make the RTS game where managing economy even better? If Zerg had the ability to spawn unlimited free units."

By the time we got Legacy of The Void, the game was so fucked and Blizzard was so eager to turn SC2 into League of Legends (which it never could be), they completely redesigned the economy and changed everything. The game was not better for it. We lost Huskystarcraft, Day9, Apollo, DjWheat, Itmejp all at the start. We still had Tasteless and Artosis, but the big personalities keeping things going were Totalbiscuit and iNcontroL. Then Totalbiscuit died. Then iNcontroL died a year later.

We still had European tournaments like Dreamhack, but in Korea SC2 was on life support thanks to (ironically) Life's match rigging scandals and KeSPA pulling the plug in an overreaction. In America, where things were already hard, Blizzard had bought MLG, and stopped booking tournaments in stadiums and instead opted for WCG in which we traded arenas with hundreds or thousands of spectators and an open bracket where unknowns could climb a latter into the pro leagues for a tightly controlled studio with a dozenish live spectators, no energy, and no chance to progress in a Korean controlled world.

Sorry I know this is only tangentially related, but coming from SC2 and being heavily invested in its e-sports a decade ago, watching them handle Overwatch was equally unsurprising and disappointing. Social and Cultural issues aside, they were speed running the execution of a promising franchise and set record time for it because Blizzard has never gotten over DoTA 2, and they resent that they aren't Riot Games and League of Legends.

The irony is that League of Legends isn't even good and if it weren't free most people would realize Riot is as sleezy if not more so than EA Games is. Making a better product should have been easy, especially with how much people liked Overwatch's roster. They just fucked it all up.

 

[p1138]

I could go on and on about Starcraft. The entirety of 2012 we had zero balance updates despite Terran not being able to save enough money to build an army that could beat Infestor/Broodlord and Protoss literally just not having units that could beat it.

Blizzard's answer in 2013 was to give Protoss really boring long range siege options (I don't play Terran, iirc they got better harassment options or something?), but Blizzard further fucked this by thinking, "You know what would make the RTS game where managing economy even better? If Zerg had the ability to spawn unlimited free units."

By the time we got Legacy of The Void, the game was so fucked and Blizzard was so eager to turn SC2 into League of Legends (which it never could be), they completely redesigned the economy and changed everything. The game was not better for it. We lost Huskystarcraft, Day9, Apollo, DjWheat, Itmejp all at the start. We still had Tasteless and Artosis, but the big personalities keeping things going were Totalbiscuit and iNcontroL. Then Totalbiscuit died. Then iNcontroL died a year later.

We still had European tournaments like Dreamhack, but in Korea SC2 was on life support thanks to (ironically) Life's match rigging scandals and KeSPA pulling the plug in an overreaction. In America, where things were already hard, Blizzard had bought MLG, and stopped booking tournaments in stadiums and instead opted for WCG in which we traded arenas with hundreds or thousands of spectators and an open bracket where unknowns could climb a latter into the pro leagues for a tightly controlled studio with a dozenish live spectators, no energy, and no chance to progress in a Korean controlled world.

Sorry I know this is only tangentially related, but coming from SC2 and being heavily invested in its e-sports a decade ago, watching them handle Overwatch was equally unsurprising and disappointing. Social and Cultural issues aside, they were speed running the execution of a promising franchise and set record time for it because Blizzard has never gotten over DoTA 2, and they resent that they aren't Riot Games and League of Legends.

The irony is that League of Legends isn't even good and if it weren't free most people would realize Riot is as sleezy if not more so than EA Games is. Making a better product should have been easy, especially with how much people liked Overwatch's roster. They just fucked it all up.

Yeah it's a tangent but it's still Blizzard managing to kill a game for the same reason just in a different way. I'm sure if it were possible they'd have tried to make Diablo 3 into an esport as well(even though the death of that game was uniquely different due to the RMAH). Considering damn near every blizzard game has been a failure since they launched world of warcraft, it makes you wonder how Overwatch 1 managed to be as good/popular it was at the start.

 

[The Fair Lady]

Gency was constantly shoved down your throat so I can’t say I’m upset they removed their interactions. Not that the Pharmercy retconning is any better, mind you. Canon ships are the last thing this game needs but the butthurt has been fun to watch.

 

[Abbadon's Gate]

Gency was constantly shoved down your throat so I can’t say I’m upset they removed their interactions.

I always felt like Pharmercy was way more prevalent due to seeing them in 100% of matches early on. Its like the ultimate no-kill strategy. You play the character that goes up high and has some of the best mobility in the game and unlimited explosives with knock back that really punishes newer players and attach a heal/damage bot to her that never goes away.

Meanwhile Genji has one of the higher skill caps and doesn't get to go nearly as high up.

 

[The Fair Lady]

I always felt like Pharmercy was way more prevalent due to seeing them in 100% of matches early on. Its like the ultimate no-kill strategy. You play the character that goes up high and has some of the best mobility in the game and unlimited explosives with knock back that really punishes newer players and attach a heal/damage bot to her that never goes away.

Meanwhile Genji has one of the higher skill caps and doesn't get to go nearly as high up.

Wasn’t really talking from a gameplay standpoint but yes, the Pharmercy strategy has been and always will be annoying. Something I also find funny is that their “Keep the skies clear for me,” and “Let’s keep the skies clear together,” lines in the original game were apparently supposed to go together, but the devs never fixed it. Unless that was intentional to keep pushing the Gency agenda, who knows.