GOTY

this
use to play it at least five days a week until i just lost interest but i stopped playing a little after moira released so idk when exactly it truly went to shit

Launch Overwatch was unironically a good game and it was 100% downhill after they added """Competitive""" to a clearly casual FPS.

I'm also still of the opinion that they got complacent because the entire industry was patting them on the back that year, the game didn't have to recover from a shit launch like HotS did so all the game could do was either stagnate or get worse, and it unfortunately chose the latter.

Attached: when someone leaves a toxic comment on the forums.webm (664x1080, 2.88M)

>e-sport
And that's why the game went to shit. Blizzard should've focused on making it a fun casual shooter. If the game were e-sports worthy, a scene would've formed naturally, supported by its player base. Instead, Blizzard tried to force e-sports themselves and every aspect of the game suffered because of it.

My favorite era of the game was when finding groups became a thing. It encouraged voice chat, they would marvel at my stats. “wow user 10,000 hours as mercy you’re so cool”,
They would say to me.

JUST-elllgjh

>and that's why the game went to shit
user, you'd have to be blind not to see they were going to turn it into an e-sport. The initial months were literally just playtesting.

In 2005 I got my first internship at "Swingin' Ape Studios" that lasted literally two weeks before Blizzard bought the company and the intern program was cancelled.

I emailed Blizzard and CC'd my course administrator (studying game design) and they agreed with me completing the work placement part of my course at Blizzard.

By 2007 I was a full time employee but without an assigned project. I became somewhat of a utility player because if you study game design, unless you manage a project, your only job is to fill in gaps.

In 2006 there was this huge controversy that started with the WoW team and spread throughout the entire company. It sparked a massive debate. Basically; some people thought Naxxaramas should be a very difficult 40 man raid, while others thought it should be converted into 3-4 dungeons, with only the last two bosses being 40 mans. They went with the forty man raid because it was easier to implement and it started this shit storm. During this time if you said something like "I think our games should be challenging" you would be mocked and derided by other employees. They would tell you to join the Naxx team in unemployment.

TL;DR: over a decade a go Blizzard, as a company, had a choice between cow towing to the most vocal minority of players, or trusting their design team. They chose to defer to the mob and have been paying for it ever since.

>want to make a dumb casual game for EVERYONE™
>also want a massive esports scene

Would it even have be possible to make this work? People always blame Blizzard mishandling OE but I feel like the concept was flawed from the start

It had so much promise. It had a chance for a bright future. But Blizzard pissed it all down their legs.

youtube.com/watch?v=VytbSTFUKrs

League of legends figured it out. So yes it’s very possible. The problem is that you don’t cater to the esports people. Smash has also shown that even a casual party game can have a dedicated competitive scene. The difference seems to be that Nintendo is terrified of supporting their fans (I don’t blame them).

They were shit at banning cheaters, but they excelled at banning everyone else.

They're not terrified, they just don't give a shit, like when Samurai adding tribbing in Brawl just to fuck with compfags.

Oh it's more than possible. Smash Bros. made it by pure accident despite Nintendo trying for years to not encourage competitive play.

Blizzard was just incompetent with Overwatch

I think he means more that they forced the esport aspect way too hard instead of letting it form naturally. Everyone wants to make games that are easy to pickup and hard to master, but turning that into a healthy competitive scene needs to happen naturally.

Like does the Overwatch League even do anything anymore? Seems like there's still quite a few casual players for the game, but nobody cares about the competitive scene anymore.

Comp was actually fine until they lost their minds constantly trying to wipe out whatever meta cropped up, and eventually just kept shitting all over characters so much Tank meta just became ever present because they couldn't work around how they'd built their own game and a team working together as a single unit instead of crazy shit all over the place that'd make it good for spectators.

That was the biggest problem, they kept balancing around spectators and how things were going in casual and gold/plat and wondering why tank and deathball became a thing when pro players got a hold of it.

I did not read the entire post, I apologize.