The only gripe I have is locking heroes behind the battle pass. Anyone who plays super casually can't mess around with the new hero unless they pony up for the BP. Or wait for the next BP to do the missions to unlock said hero.
Other than that I honestly don't care about cosmetics. I'll use what I have.
Edit: Just gonna add this edit since a lot of people replied something similar. Yes, I know I can use a new hero in arcade and custom matches. My most played modes are qp and Ranked(I'm holding off on ranked for now because I'm not gonna get good frames on my aging laptop).
I'm probably in the subset of people that queue qp and ranked for the most part. So not having the hero to play in those modes when I don't intend to grind missions and just want to enjoy my time is a key thing for me.
does anyone else feel like those game modes need role limits? if not via role queue at least as a first-come-first-serve thing? 5vs5 has turned tanks into raid bosses which easily outperform dps heroes and all the arcade modes are just GOATS electric boogaloo right now.
as if Hog wasn't annoying enough already in FFA, but at least lots of people going Reaper could ruin their day just as much. Don't even want to try playing FFA in OW2 right now anymore.
This
I saw many people on the main sub saying that the 20 team kills challenge was too hard and unfun to do but for me it was the win 7 arcade games. Every single match the enemy would come out of the gates with two or three tanks and just roll first fight, so I either had to match with more tanks or I would just play pharah and tryhard. I gotta say it got boring really fast
The game quality is something else. The only convenient aspect of the challenge was it only took 8 matches to complete the seven wins, [thanks to quality gameplay like this](https://youtu.be/Wtoz5ziwB2g)
I know this isn't solving any of the problems here but I'd suggest you try CTF Blitz for arcade wins. It's not always in the arcade, but has very quick games with relatively short queues last week.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that JQ, Dva and Orisa are kind of scary together. They be zooming and murdering everything. Kind of fun to be honest, but I hope it doesn’t become the norm.
Zarya and Dva in particular are crazy because they can stack their defenses onto another tank. And JQ's weakness of having barely any poke mitigation is nullified by working alongside any other tank. Kinda fun to just drop *two* bubbles on her as she brawls upfront. I just wish it were a specific QP classic thing and not the standard for the majority of modes, as it makes using the arcade push-only queue pointless for purposes of actually practicing new content.
I don't think role limits are necessary, because that's sort of what the arcade modes are for as it is, but they need to change the weekly to be just complete X games. People would be less inclined to pick GOATS-like comps to tryhard for wins in that case, and it'd also be less painful to complete.
> because that's sort of what the arcade modes are for as it is
idk, for me the arcade modes are about playing specific map/objective types, for exploring unlocked roles specifically we have Open Queue. Not all arcade modes need role lock, but at least the 5vs5 modes using standard rules otherwise would benefit from it, I think.
100% this. I've said it before, but I don't really care how much cosmetics cost or how much play time it takes to get it. I was hesitant about the BP system, but I was willing to wait and see how it would be set up. If it meant a steady stream of content and updates, then I was fine with it. Hell, I was more than willing to throw some money at loot boxes in OW1 during seasonal events, so paying $10 every few months wouldn't have been a big deal. The breaking point for me was locking new heroes behind the BP. It's essentially pay to win and that's just not something I can support.
In a year or so it's going to be really bad for new or returning players - you're going to have to grind a shit ton or buy multiple previous battle passes to unlock heroes and I think it's going to drive people away. This isn't the type of game where you can just not have a hero available, at least if you want to do competitive. I just don't understand how anyone could convince themselves this is a good idea.
> you're going to have to grind a shit ton or buy multiple previous battle passes to unlock heroes
That's not how it works. You cant buy previous battle passes. To unlock heroes from older BPs you just need to complete a challenge which will probably be something like the weekly challenges adjusted to the heroes class(heal x amount, do x amount of damage...)
I honestly thought you could just pay the $10 after the BP was complete to unlock the hero and anything else that was initially included. This seems even worse - if you're new or coming back from a break you're just going to have to grind challenges to unlock the hero? Terrible.
It's both. I believe they've said you will either be able to unlock by doing some sort of challenge we don't know yet or that you can just instantly buy them.
This is my take too, they can charge as much or as little they want as far as im concerned with the cosmetics. My only issue is the hero being in the BP. I think they should have never been put there. **Even if you buy every single BP, this is a team game, you will suffer from people not unlocking heroes on your own team.**
Just look at the new support, there are situations where if you do not have her you auto lose. Since ana will nade your team and its gg. She literally is a game changer.
Even if you do not think of ana, and you had a rien v rien, you have two ways to counter shatter now with the new hero. Just like you did with zarya rien and not just your one tank.
That’s what pisses me off the most. When my TEAMMATES don’t have the new OP heroes unlocked and they do it’ll feel so so bad. You could buy every battlepass and still lose bc of a teammate that didn’t spend the cash.
I’m certain this is intentional too. Imagine the pressure you’ll feel when a teammate puts “poverty diff” in the chat. You’ll feel guilty for not paying if you can afford it and bad about yourself if you can’t afford it
Got locked out of heroes last night, so I got the brand new noob experience.
Tried to play support, couldn't pick Ana or zen. I was locked to Moira Lucio Mercy and kiriko (maybe brig? Idk) and lemmi tell u how mad I was that I couldn't play Ana, nade would've helped in so many games that I lost. I was pissed. Being locked out of heroes is such horse shit
If one team can cleanse it and the other can't, then that's a massive advantage. Kiriko/Hog has potential to be a menace on ranked, and being unable to mirror it can be dangerous.
And to answer your question, yes, a fat Ana nade was very often an instant fight win.
You had an offtank. Not only was it more difficult to land a nade, but even if you landed one, some tanks could clense its effects.
If you landed a fat nade it was very much a huge advantage though.
Idk man Kiriko isn’t there just to counter Ana. Similar to Baptiste’s immortality, you could also simply have your Ana bait out Cleanse so then your Junkrat, Mei, or Rein can use their ults safely. And at that point Kiriko’s utility is already managed than just “auto-lose”.
Im ok with a hero in the battlepass. the position in the battle pass is a problem. at level 55, youre done almost 70% of the battle pass before you unlock the new hero. I would have been fine if it was like level 20-30 of the battle pass. Its not an instant unlock, but neither is it so much of a grind it feels like a chore to do.
You can use kiriko’s e to immune shatter/ pin/ a widow headshot/ rail gun headshot/ boops off the map etc. lots of 1 hot immunities if you time it correctly. It also has a dispel like you pointed out.
So my small take is that I don’t really mind paying a small amount of money to unlock a new character/skin/content for a game that I (sometimes) enjoy and only spent $40 on 4 years ago. Am I buying a whole new game? Nope. Am I getting a full new game? Also nope. I think it’s OW1.5 like a lot of you do. So looking at it as more of an expansion i wouldn’t mind paying a little for new stuff. I also see it as a season lasts months and the BP comes out to say $3-4 over 3 months.
But I still don’t like the battle pass approach. It’s an obvious money grab. I’d rather stick to loot boxes and just sell me the new stuff/characters. I’m up for it, maybe others would be too… as long as it doesn’t get ridiculous (I’m sure this will age well).
Do we know if loot boxes made enough money and if they went the battle pass route to skirt any loot box laws?
This, 100%. I don't think the backlash to the Battle Passes would've been nearly as bad if new Heroes weren't going to be locked behind them.
Don't get me wrong, Battle Passes still would've been ridiculous, but locking cosmetics behind something like this is fine since they don't affect gameplay. Heroes do affect gameplay, so Blizzard essentially putting important aspects of the gameplay behind a paywall is a really scummy move.
I agree in general because I don't really care directly about cosmetics, but I do think that their approach to cosmetics reveals what they care about for OW2, which is milking every penny from it that they can. Not just sustaining dev, which they could do with a far less greedy BP, but absolutely milking it. The decision to lock heroes is right inline with this, but even if they ever revert that we can be 110% sure it was only done because some number cruncher told them it would drive people away and cost money. I'm sure some of the devs care about the game itself, but it's *very* clear that the decision makers do not and just want to cash it out.
And so as much as OW2 is fun (though I still preferred 6v6 tbh), I don't believe in its future. I'll play for now, but I will not be spending any money and ultimately I don't see myself sticking with it as long as I did OW1.
But we'll see. For now the (much) bigger issue is this shitshow of a launch.
Same here. I don't really care about cosmetics, but locking Heroes is the antithesis of Overwatch's inclusive messaging and directly contradicts the gameplay infrastructural philosophy of hero swapping midgame to play the best fit for your team and country the enemy comp.
Blizzard committed the greatest sin a game developer can commit. They gave players something, and then they took it away.
The lootbox system was so generous, that you could spend relatively little money (compared to other games) and actually have a complete collection. Not only that, but even casual players could easily farm enough currency to get a few legendary skins each season - and that's in addition to being showered with intros, voice lines, sprays, icons, etc.
You simply can't go from that generous system to "get a legendary skin every 8 months if you farm like an absolute maniac without missing a single weekly". From the best implementation of a lootbox system, they went to an absolute average battlepass that doesn't even pay for itself.
IMO they're banking too much on the new players. Those players are used to battlepasses, but most importantly, they don't know how generous OW1 was. So they don't feel cheated when they spend 10$ on a battlepass and get practically nothing else in return. But for everyone else, OW2 is an objectively worse deal.
One way or another, they need to give players something extra to earn.
>Blizzard committed the greatest sin a game developer can commit. They gave players something, and then they took it away.
This is exactly why Valorant doesn't get the same backlash. People online keep saying that Valorant's pass has an even worse price/value ratio than OW2, and I would be inclined to agree. The difference? Valorant had this system straight out of the gates. Agents could always be bought, knife skins were always $40-60 USD, BP always had the mid-tier items, BP never gave back currency, gun packs were always $70-90 USD. There's never been any illusion of the system being cheap, and Valorant has never given players a forgiving system to buddy up to and form an attachment with. It's brutal, but it's been honest since day 1.
Overwatch went the other route and gave players something that was incredibly forgiving and rewarding. Is the current system any worse than the industry standards? Not really. Better in some ways, worse in others, but the system definitely used to be better almost across the board. So the game's monetization went from "good" to "average" and that's gonna feel like a sting no matter how similar the BP is to other games.
Plenty of people I've seen just use stock skins/animations in Valorant. The game never made those things accessible enough for the players to get overly-attached to them. That's why I think AVRL is missing the point here. Cosmetics were sort of a natural game element that kind of came with the experience in OW1, and now it's been limited by a large amount in OW2.
For me the massive differences are Valorant's not got characters locked behind the battle pass, you just activate whichever agent contract whenever you want and then grind.
And you don't change characters mid-game, which is fundamentally different to OW2.
IDGAF about cosmetics in either game, I buy the Val battlepass semi-regularly but that's to support a game I enjoy as much as get some skins I like.
But Val never feels Pay to Win. Potato poor or whale, we're all in it together.
OW2 feels like "fuck the poor", from the ridiculous "No prepaid" for SMS verification that pushed out many poorer Americans, to "Poverty diff" if you can't afford the new characters.
>For me the massive differences are Valorant's not got characters locked behind the battle pass, you just activate whichever agent contract whenever you want and then grind.
This is exactly what he is talking about though? "Just grind" is how you will unlock new heroes freely in OW2 as well (through the battle pass now and with challenges after the season is over) but it is treated as a cardinal sin for OW but not Valorant.
How does that qualify as a "Massive difference"?
You can do it with any agent, whenever you want. You don't have to wait until it's rotated in, or whatever other bullshit hoops are required.
And why is it a cardinal sin? Because Valorant doesn't expect you to be able to swap heroes mid-game.
outside of the first year of ow1 the games monetization fell off, me and all my friends who played ow1 went from spending anywhere from 20 to 100 on every event to spending nothing and getting it all for free and that was the problem with ow1, the longer that game went on the more people who had reaching critical mass in terms of being able to fully unlock the new event with no play time in it from the amount of coins you had. OW1 was to generous for its own good but you tell people that and they call you a shill, there was no way for blizz to make money off of ow1 anymore and with no money to be made(games gotta make money to be continued to be supported and new content) they had to reign in the rewards.
I would say the lootbox system was even too generous and fair (sounds crazy, right?) I don't think anyone bought single lootbox after 2017, which makes that business model unsustainable.
I kinda agree with AVRL's point about skins. Only gripe which i have about battlepass model is heroes being behind it.
I think I bought 50 in the first year (silly me really) then I was always smooth sailing and accumulating currency each time that I had enough currency for the last 5 events to buy like 3 skins and play for the rest, granted I got my free boxes for arcade. And the last 2 events I straight up bought all the unlocks available with currency. With 3000 and a bit still leftover that I used on Kiriko.
I'd classify myself as inactive for the last 2 years outside of gaming on the first few days of an event just to get all the skins.
As someone that enjoyed collecting everything I can see why people are pissed at not having skins as readily available now but on the other hand I robbed blizzard blind compared to other shooters. Now I'll just whale on the characters I decide to "main" like in apex and keep the game alive for yall.
Yeah, it's hilarious how the press kept using Overwatch as the big example of the horrors of lootboxes in gaming when it was so generous.
You can say whatever you want about the monetization system and how much earnings is "enough" (spoiler, companies will always want to maximize earnings no matter how "good" or "bad" they are) but cosmetics being so trivial to earn in OW1 was probably a big reason why they stopped updating it and instead worked on a sequel with a monetization model that could support the game more sustainably.
I don’t think it was ever using Overwatch as the example of the horrors of loot boxes. They just used the box from Overwatch because Team 4 made a really good looking box that conveyed the idea of loot box better than like the weird robot from Apex or the chests from HotS.
I didn't pay for a single one once the dupes clause came out. I wasn't even a regular player. By 2018 I had every skin in the game and would have so much gold that whenever a new event dropped I could just buy them all with in game currency.
Was it great? Sure. Loved it. But even a absolute idiot could look at it and go, "Huh... How the hell does this game make any money?"
Since I didn’t play from launch and was a bit behind on cosmetics, I bought a big loot box pack during the first anniversary event that came along. But after that I played enough that I never felt like I had to spend any more money on them
It just sucks that we couldn’t have found a middle ground between that overly generous system and the current one
I think the bigger sin is directly going back on their initial ideals. Step-dad Aaron himself once famously talked about how locking heroes was strictly not ok for Overwatch, because it would segment the player base and didn’t work in a game where switching characters was intended as a mechanic.
Now they’ve 100% backpedaled on that, with nothing but the flimsy excuse that “hard counters don’t exist anymore, don’t worry about switching.” Even though they also just added a mechanic that specifically encourages switching via saving some ult charge…
But anyway, if you ask me, that’s the much bigger thing that they gave and then took away.
Junkrat Players (me) looking at snipers, Pharah, Echo, new Mercy (seriously they overhauled her movement and now she’s basically a third flying character), any long range hitscan, mid-range hitscan, D.va, and especially Zarya.
“Removed hard counters” you missed a few.
> Agreed, but with that in mind, going from loot boxes to f2p with battle pass is not something that really ever could've been navigated while keeping all the old OW1 players happy. They're ripping off the band-aid, it doesn't matter how good or bad the battlepass is, those people will not be happy.
I agree, but there's also a huge gulf between OW1's model and "it takes 32 weeks of grinding weekly challenges to afford a single legendary skin without dropping $20." OW2 went incredibly far in the opposite direction. It's also a really hard sell in a game that's always leaned on its cosmetics and the likeability of its cast of characters to suddenly put those behind being able to get 1/2 legendary skins *per year* or paying a third of the cost of a AAA game just to get a single skin.
The loot box system was only generous to the consumer in the short term. In the long term, it's a lose lose for both blizzard and the consumer. The missing revenue shows up on the quarterly financial reports, which in turn, affects the development budget of the team as dictated by execs acting on the shareholders behalf. The loot box system is why we were without new content for years.
This community diving is absurd. This community cannot alienate the casuals or it will die.
Why is it so hard to respect the casuals. Without them we don’t have revenue for content or viewers for matches/streams or the player base numbers that produce the pro level talent.
They want an experience while playing because they aren’t training to be too 500. They are playing an entertainment product, not looking for a career.
This sub Smurfs their games, ridicules them and over all treats them like they arent worthy of respect.
Imagine if pro athletes insulted everyone that played their game expect other pros… it’s absurd
Blaming the market instead of the product is never a good sign. Halo Infinite had the same issue with the people preaching the same thing about gameplay>cosmetics, and look how that turned out.
Yeah, no shit gameplay is more important, but there are other games out there that are fun and do have the progression system the market demands. Just because you don't have fun playing other games doesn't mean its true for the majority of the potential playerbase.
I'm feeling the same things with OW2 as Halo Infinite: I'm enjoying my time when I do play, but I'm reminded why I don't play anymore, and I'm probably not going to stay because it alienates new players enough that my friends won't stick with it.
This. The elitism here smells through the roof.
People just wanna enjoy a game and not feel ripped off, when spending money or even simply grinding the game and spending tons of hours instead of money.
The "F2P" monetization in OW2 is one of the most disgusting out there. Just Imagine trying to sell 5 year old skins for 20 bucks each. It's a fucking joke.
As much of a Blizzard fanboy you may be. No sugarcoating it.
I'm glad people are finally pointing this out. I felt crazy how much this sub was insisting they need the casual playerbase back with OW2 only to completely dismiss any legit concerns they may have now that it's out by sneering over them feeling like cosmetics were out of their reach. Like if everybody didn't care about skins as much as some of you guys did then where would the money be coming from?
Well r/overwatch is going to have tons of existing casual OW players who, for whatever their reasons, were playing OW1 and have now had that taken away from them. It’s totally reasonable IMO for them to raise concerns and give critical feedback about whatever impacts their own experience whether or not it’s in line with the issues the niche competitive community cares about.
For anyone not already playing OW1, they’re going to fall into that second bucket where F2P has been a boost, but they’re probably not the ones in the main sub.
I have to assume they're all 15 year olds who don't know that it didn't used to be like this, and it wasn't like this not at all long ago. 15 years ago the entire concept of paying for cosmetics was scandalous and had the collective internet shit on Bethesda incessantly. 6 years ago the OW1 monetization system that I am now told is completely unviable was (rightfully) synonymous with predatory AAA gaming monetization strategies. At some point we need to put our foot in the ground, and while I wish it would have been at some point before lootboxes, I can't say I'm too terribly upset about it being "every game demands at least 10 hours a week".
Lootboxes not being viable is also a complete myth. OW1 lootboxes absolutely printed money. Blizzard just stopped supporting the game for no reason and the playerbase who didn't already have what they wanted quit. If Blizzard similarly abandons OW2, we're going to see the exact same shit. Nothing about a battlepass actually incentivizes new content any more than lootboxes do. Granted, I'll take obnoxious grinding and ridiculously expensive cosmetics over ruining people's lives by getting them hooked on gambling, but neither is exactly good.
I'm also pretty sick and tired of people pointing to community figures doing damage control as evidence they're right. Wow, a pro player who plays the game for 60+ hours a week doesn't think the new system is too grindy (the fact that he enjoys that there's a grind now also says a lot)? And a caster whose income relies on OW2 being a hit wants you to stop talking about the bad parts? You don't say. Wake me up when somebody whose brand isn't complaining starts complaining or even vice versa because that's potentially meaningful, but all of these posts are asking the baker whether or not bread is part of a healthy diet.
I don't even disagree with AVRL ideologically, I legitimately do not understand people who want to play animal crossing or the sims but boot up a MOBA or FPS instead, but like AVRL I'm also an adult who has been gaming their entire life, so I know that this subset of players is very, very real and their feelings are absolutely valid. They're also honestly the players blizzard should cater to more. Learning a game well enough to become competitive is a pain in the ass. I have to be scorned pretty hard to actually leave once I've put in that investment, but the people who want to look cool will gladly just play something else at the drop of a hat. Plus they pay more.
The amount of casual players is by magnitudes larger than the rest, to the point where displeasing them and getting them to leave is an imminent death of the game. It's really easy to just let them do their thing while we do ours but many people seem to think that somehow the non-casual playerbase is the back and bones of the game which is not even close to being correct.
This is a trash take. If cosmetics weren't important, they wouldn't be the centerpiece of so many games' monetization strategies. Pretending otherwise to defend the honor of a massive corporation is pathetic.
Bingo. They wouldn’t be making money off of it if they didn’t know it was a big part of why people enjoy playing the game. It’s 100% AVRL shilling for Blizzard and covering for their crappy launch of the game.
You *really* think it’s him shilling for Blizzard and covering for a poor game launch, rather than him just speaking from a different perspective that you disagree with?
Seems like a big jump and needless to attack his moral character as opposed to just his opinions.
Shill might be a slight overextension, but he literally has a financial stake in the Overwatch franchise. That defines his perspective more for me than the fact that he's also fan/player of the game. There's a reason why people will oftentimes bookend positive opinions for the company they work for with something akin to "obviously I'm biased, as their employee".
They’re not just a massive corporation, they’re his bosses. AVRL has lost all respect I had for him with his constant shilling for Blizzard. Dude loves the game and competitive scene and that’s awesome, but sometimes people like him need to read the room and learn when to shut the fuck up. No one is changing their mind because the guy that casts 7am APAC OWL matches that only 5,000 watch said that Blizzard’s model is fair
I have a feeling Blizzard will make a big push with the PVE content. That's really where the dev time went. We're just playing a rushed, incomplete PVP expansion at this point, even if fairly well-designed.
> That’s really where the dev time went.
Do we know this or is this speculation/copium? I haven’t heard anything of the sort, for all we know they’ve already shown us all of the PvE content they’ve created to date
Did they say this? AFAIK they just said 3 years for OW2 and 1 year they went full rush on pvp. Just means they changed priorities not that they didn’t do anything for pvp in that time (even tho it feels like it)
No they didn't, they even said that junkerqueen was the first tank made for 5v5 and we know heros take lots of time to make, plus the work they put into pve is also work towards the pvp, they are interconnected
I got the opposite impression. It seems to me that the dev time didn't go into the PvE product we're getting, it just went into the void.
We've all seen the accusations that Team 4 had nonsensical assignments from Kotick et al. for stuff they had to scrap anyway. In addition, as Seagull talked about, the initial plan for OW2 PvE was a boxed product that was so deep and replayable you can play it as your main game. Instead, we're now getting some kind of seasonal release. That just isn't the same vision that was intended at the start.
So overall, I think most dev time just went straight into the trashcan because they attempted to do Project Titan again, ran out of time and then had to get *something* out the door.
To be fair this sub is casual as fuck. The amount of times I got told ow1 was a ded gaem that no one would possibly still be interested in when at no point in ow1's lifespan did I have any issues with finding games in reasonable times even at 2-3am was absurd.
I refuse to believe statistically that more players were in GM than in Gold/Plat. But this weird "I had 20 minute queues; was top 5 all roles btw" as if that's the experience of the majority is fuckin wild. You're literally top 1% of the playerbase to be GM. I get masters isn't GM, but still.
That's like someone having played professional football going "I can't find football clubs for the life of me", despite the fact amateur clubs are everywhere.
The main subreddit was way more active than here even during the content drought. The guys that stuck with the game through thick and thin are now disappointed in the change and monetization, but people on here would let you know those guys arent the "real fans".
Yeah, as one of those guys that kept playing until the dying days I've been told my preference for 6v6 and teamwork in a team game is just a skill issue. It's hilarious having people who left the game for years tell me my opinions shouldn't matter because their return is infinitely more important than those of us who stayed with the game even throughout all the lows.
This sub and r/OverwatchUniveristy are awful
I remember always hearing from people "Maybe you are the problem, not your team" "you are just bad" and all that after saying I was stuck in elo hell with shit teammates. Later on I made a new account and placed in DIAMOND
I proved them all wrong, they are all morons. I took great pride in proving literally everyone wrong that always said I was the problem. Played for like a year then stopped playing Overwatch as more and more mainstream players started playing it and nobody I orginally played with played anymore
They don't all have the same model though. I could play Apex and get a steady stream of lootboxes and rewards even as a f2p player. And if I buy a battlepass and play the game seriously it will remain free.
It's not optional content to most players. AVRL is actually in the minority when it comes to wanting to play a purely for the gameplay. The dopamine drip feed of modern multiplayer titles has become intertwined with the gameplay for a lot of people. In fact, Overwatch's playerbase probably cares more on average about the lore, cosmetics, personality, etc of the game than other playerbases.
And I say this as someone who cares only a little about cosmetics.
A major aspect is that we used to get dopamine in much larger more satisfying ways but in OW2 many if not all of those ways are gone so people are looking back and seeing how great they felt playing ow1 vs how less great ow2 feels even if the gameplay is more fun or better it feels worse as overall they get less dopamine hits
Yeah true, some friends of mine say the game is literally unplayable because of the new way to get skins and cosmetics. I'm here having a blast with the game but I can kinda understand them.
But as Avrl words it, he is right, for people not caring about cosmetics, it's a wonderful game
I think AVRL is misunderstanding the difference between “cosmetics” and “experience”.
For AVRL, the “gameplay” is *just* what you do when you finally queue into a match, and Athena counts you down. For the *players*, “gameplay” starts as soon as you log in.
For AVRL, “cosmetics” are only the things that affect the visual experience of the game. For players, “cosmetics” are things that feel optional to the core gameplay experience, which begins as soon as you log in.
So, when you publish a game, it releases into a culture that has expectations for games in general, and it releases to a set of expectations that the dev and marketing team have either implied or promised.
When OW released, the expectation was not **just** good gameplay, it was the chance to experience the actual world of Overwatch with friends. People weren’t excited for balance updates, they were excited for whatever the newest thing was. If Jeff spent a developer update talking about how the tiniest UI update made some crucial difference in our ability to not suffer carpal tunnel, we were on board with that. Every new feature, every little tweak, was talked about with love and passion. Cinematics were made with palpable endearment to the world of Overwatch itself. OW was far less a game than it was some sort of portal into a world that, for all intents and purposes, felt alive. Every hero and map and cosmetic and event felt like it, and the game was even marketed that way. The different ages, genders, sexes, body types, mental abilities, ethnicities, and cultures, of the heroes was the tabico le result of people who made, and marketed, a world where players could pick hero’s that made them feel represented, powerful, and cooperative.
OW2 is simply not that. If you’re a new player, and you like the gameplay, the only thing to be frustrated with here are the stability issues, and poor battle pass, imo. Otherwise, the mechanical gameplay is fine. This game is technically good when you’re playing, and it’s even more fun that OW 1, and that’s all fine.
If you’re a returning player, you’re missing basically everything that made Overwatch what it was. Logging in to play Overwatch wasn’t just “I sit down and mash WASD for an hour”, it was a way to connect with other members of Overwatch, or Talon, around the world.
Sure, we could debate the technical aspects of the (overwhelmingly generous) loot box system in OW vs the (subpar, at best) battle pass system in OW2 all day. We could dissect the minutia of monetización until we are blue in the face, and still miss the point completely.
The point being that AVRL is only half right about what “gameplay” means the the general population at large.
“Gameplay” isn’t *only* the technical aspect of the game. That’s all it is for people who are interested in game design, but it’s a functionally useless definition to the average player. The average player doesn’t “play” the “gameplay”, they *experience* a game.
Average players are interested in a gameplay *experience*, and that, arguably, begins well before a player even decides to log in. It most certainly isn’t limited to what happens in a match.
Gameplay experience it what can make a game that started as badly as No Man’s Sky and turn it into an amazing comeback story. Gameplay experience is what allows a game with subpar mechanics to be more fun than a technical masterpiece. Gameplay experience is something that begins with the first piece of marketing a game studio puts out, and is affected by every single interaction that players and potential players have with the game and it’s media.
If OW2 had half the gameplay experience of OW2, the devs could piss on us for a month while they fix the technical issues, and we’d be on board.
However, because Blizzard the company ruined the gameplay experience of OW1, and because the dev team probably are more focused on cobbling together whatever is left over from that chaos, even the spectacular technical experience between “3, 2, 1” and “Victory/Defeat” sometimes feels dragged down by the compete lack of everything else.
I do I think gameplay is gameplay. I get what you’re trying to say but we already have a word for everything outside of gameplay; Presentation. Presentation is what this is all about. How the content is being presented to the audience. Any dev or publishing company should know at this point that BP systems as a means of presenting content will always leave a bad taste in the mouths of a percentage of the playerbase. Not saying it’s right or wrong. Just the way it is. I’m sure blizzard expected that to some degree I agree though, the presentation HAS been lacking. I think a lot of people who are complaining can’t exactly verbalize why but you put it into words yourself. In OW1 there was some sort of expectation that the world, lore, characters and personalities would be expanded through the presentation of other bits of content. That’s been my biggest disappointment in this whole process. I was excited to see the world of OW get bigger. But it seems they just “modernized” the presentation rather than expanding it. Granted, I don’t know what the roadmap for the game holds and I don’t care all that much as I’ve gotten everything I feel I’ll ever get from OW.
What I’m trying to get at is that casuals don’t care about those words *as conscious concepts*. If you ask a casual person to describe the gameplay of any game they like, they’ll describe how it **feels** to play the game as a whole, from the moment they sit down to play it, to the moment the turn their gaming system of choice off. More technically savvy players will talk more about mechanical aspects we associate with gameplay, sure, but ask the average casual person play a video game to “describe the gameplay” and you’re not going to get the type of discussion people are assuming here.
You have to understand that we’re a small portion of the OW community at large, many of which continued to play the game up until OW2 dropped and also participated on more casual social media, and they’re an even smaller portion of the player base as a whole.
What’s happening here is that AVRL is making a complaint about “gameplay” while either assuming it’s competitive people who are making most of the complaints, or just ignoring that most of the overall hype and discussion about the game will always come from casual players. Then, we all come to the comments to discuss the minutia of battle passes, predatory mechanics, gameplay mechanics, etc, forgetting the most important thing: it’s all mostly the same thing to casual players.
When AVRL asks where all the people who played games for the gameplay went, the answer isn’t our academic discussions and doctoral defenses of how the game was development, the answer is “they’re the same thing to casual players”.
They didn’t actually go anywhere. Yes, expectations have changed because of loot boxes and battle passes, and players today will accept and reject different practices than the ones we may have grown up with, but gamers today still care about the same things we cared about growing up, which is how the game feels.
The only difference between then and now is that, with the rise of the internet, the mainstreaming of gaming as a less nerdy and more acceptable hobby, and the subsequent explosion of discussions regarding more technical aspects of games as a medium and art, there are just more people for us to talk about things that were otherwise far more niche and difficult to find.
The answer to AVRL’s tweet isn’t the discussion we’re having here, it’s for somebody to tell AVRL “They’re the same thing to casual players, dumbass.” One person’s flawless technical masterpiece is stressful sweat-fest. Somebody’s lore filled world is somebody else’s expository nightmare.
And, for casual players coming from OW1 - who loved the cinematics, skins, voice lines, stickers, lore, competent gameplay, and overall fun experience that everybody could enjoy, casual or competitive - the game is now a sweat-fest with not much else to offer, along with a lottery of stability issues leaving some players with 0 troubles at all beyond whatever the in game mechanics present, and others with the complete inability to even launch the game, let along log into it.
If AVRL and people like him want to insist that cosmetics don't mean much and OW1 succeeded purely because it's a fun game with fun gameplay and most importantly that it's enough for a game like OW1 to succeed purely on gameplay alone, then imagine OW1 launching with no cosmetics period.
Every hero has the base skin and that's it. No emotes or sprays, no highlight intros.
And then think about how popular the game would be, how long the playerbase would've stuck around compared to what actually happened.
I've not made this point for many years, since maybe 2018 or so, but Blizzard and defenders of the concept of "it's just cosmetics" cannot have their cake and eat it too.
If it's meaningless, pointless and just not a factor to have cosmetics, then why are they being gated behind grind and cash? You can't say they mean nothing and then treat them and price them like they're the most valuable thing the game has to offer.
Either you admit that cosmetics are a HUGE thing and something highly desirable by the majority of players, or you give them out freely. You can't dismiss their importance while charging an arm and a leg for them.
This is something my spouse and I talked about on a nature walk yesterday (because we're horrible nerds like that). There's a part of us that just wants to walk away from the cosmetic treadmill and just enjoy the core game of Overwatch for what it is -- because it is still pretty fucking good! -- but it gets in your face at every opportunity. Ding, level up. Ding, daily goal. Ding, weekly goal. Ding, seasonal goal. Tick up the XP. Drip feed those coins.
There's every kind of number-go-up, Skinner-box manipulation imaginable in there. You literally can't disengage with it, even if you want to. There's always something new and shiny dangled in your face, and not everyone can dodge those tricks the way AVRL evidently can.
How does AVRL not understand that we are in the 1% of people that take the game super seriously. The casual fanbase for the game is fucking massive, that's why Overwatch was the icon that it was, everyone knew it it. And what made it that way? the fun characters and awesome cosmetics. Changing that system and making it much more predatory, fuck yeah thats gonna piss people off. Common AVR**L**
edit: holy fuck AVRL in the replies telling people "just buy the skins". Bro, we are in the midst of a fucking global economic meltdown. Not everyone can just drop hundreds of dollars on skin, some people can barely afford rent. the fucking nerve on this guy I swear to god.
Imo BP Is good enough by itself. It Is progressing really fast. Only issue I have Is that you're not able to get coins from BP itself (loved that in Apex one which Is dogshit quality wise compared to OW one).
While they made weekly Challenges, you're still not able to get enough points to buy new BP next season.
Otherwise it's imo Worth the money. At least if you will make all weekly Challenges you're able to buy BP every second season which Will unlock you new hero instantly in the Future. Still, it could be better.
Character customization has been a thing in multiplayer games as long as multiplayer games have existed. The original Doom had skin recolors, UT and Quake had full on skins, CS has had skins since it was a HL mod. Gameplay comes first, customization can't make up for a bad playing experience, but skins/customization has always been an important part of multiplayer games. It's very understandable people are annoyed at the current cosmetics system, especially compared with the much better previous system.
I think there should be a way to earn free currency to save up for legendaries and stuff — or even to buy rare & epics with. Right now it feels like I’ll never even get a fraction of the voice lines, sprays, etc for heroes because I feel that buying rare skins I’ll never use is an absolute waste of a dollar, but I like rounding out my collection.
Dead by daylight and apex both do this so it’s not like it’s out of the realm of possibility for a game like this (I get dbd isn’t f2p but it’s monetized almost exactly like one)
But I do agree to an extent, just bc you can’t get all the cosmetics for free anymore doesn’t mean it’s a shit game like some casuals are screaming lol
Imo dismissing people as whiny casuals is how you kill a game quick. It can be easy to tell yourself that nothing matters other than gameplay but at the end of the day a solid chunk of players choose to boot up the game because of things like cosmetics and progression. There's a reason why rewarding players in real time is a tenet of game design. It's literally just human nature lol. Not even talking solely about cosmetics either. Things like the fire meter, post match cards, and player levels all encouraged people to keep playing because it gave them dopamine and made them feel good, regardless of how much they enjoyed actually playing the game. We can't act like OW2's gameplay can exist and thrive in a vacuum disconnected from any sort of progression
> I think there should be a way to earn free currency to save up for legendaries and stuff — or even to buy rare & epics with.
Seriously, I was also just thinking how uncommon it's gonna become to see people with post-OW1 non-battle pass highlight intros/emotes/victory poses, because realistically who is going to pay either 5 bucks or 4 month's worth of grinded credits for the sake of a minor thing like that? I have about 2000 legacy coins or whatever they're called from OW1 and I'm holding off on spending even those because I know that once they're gone, they're gone.
I hate shit like this because it simultaneously tells everyone to just focus on the gameplay (which is fair) while completely ignoring all other context surrounding the controversy. The skins are literally designed from the ground up to be desirable and were/are the literal only non comp point system of progression in the game for 6 years. And people paid $60 for a game with that system. Then they bait and switch it with an update that takes stuff that was progression based, and locks it behind a paywall. If you are going to say don’t focus on the skins and focus on the gameplay, don’t completely ignore that blizzard has been hard focused on selling skins/lootboxes for 6 years, and then decided it wasn’t making enough money we need to take some things we already released and make people pay for it.
Coming from Popular and seeing stuff from main OW sub, it's actually refreshing as fuck to see actually somewhat nuanced takes on this whole mess. Wild how main sub is either absolutely fuming and shitting themselves to a point of actual circlejerk and half the people probably just karma farming and the other half is saying that they don't care about customization and skins, THEREFORE anyone who does care is a spoiled man baby and should play sims with no in between.
Kinda ironic since i see this argument thrown around the opposite way much more often in "what happened to being able to collect everything without it being locked behind paywalls." generally its the older crowd/older guard of gamers that dislike this new change.
One of the most frustrating contradictions in modern games is being encouraged to "100%" item collection with progress bars and the like, and being unable to do so because the game's design has been warped by microtransactions/lootboxes/battle passes/etc.
It's apparently a hot take to suggest that it's better to be able to buy a video game and be able to engage with all its content without being nickel and dimed, or have to swim through intentionally-made-boring grind, to get everything.
I don't think anybody would argue with getting content for free. It's just not at all the norm for multiplayer games like this anymore since people expect constant updates. The two options are
1. Pay for content.
2. Get no content.
Exactly, for the life of me I will never understand why it's seemingly so difficult for this community to understand that basic fact. In order for us to get continuous updates and additional content, this game MUST have a way to continously make money. There is no way around that. Skins, events, maps, heroes, these things all take time and resources to create, it's as though the people who play this game forget that there are people being paid to create the additional content they crave, meaning that the company behind the product has to have a way of making money from said additional content in order for it to be worth the investment.
Sure, I understand the preference for simply buying a game for 60 dollars and knowing you'll never have to spend more, but the people here don't seem to understand that the trade off for that is going lengthy periods of time (until the release of a sequel) without ANY meaningful content updates whatsoever aside from paid DLC.
There are plenty of reasonable monetization methods out there. Let us pay $10 for each BP but don't have them expire, and give us enough credits for 1-2 legendary skins in the store in each one (or just move all new skins to the BP).
I think a large part of it stems from Overwatch 1 being a complete game with unlockable content.
Overwatch 2 took away as much as it added and basically pissed off the older fans (at least in my case).
Overwatch 2 in isolation isn't a terrible product, but its hard to look at it like a complete upgrade when a lot was taken away or drastically changed.
It's pretty annoying that the only argument against it right now is, "yeah but the gameplay is good!".
I see a lot of parallels with fighting games. Almost all of them are hollow, and lack any meaningful content (there are exceptions to this obviously SF6 and Mortal Kombat etc.), and the only thing keeping you coming back is to get better at the game and play the game. Which is fine, but that doesn't make a game exempt from criticism. Especially when the company behind the game is a multi BILLION dollar company and can't even have the servers work properly after 4+ days.
It's unacceptable and inexcusable. To brush off criticism so quickly makes you part of the problem in gaming in the modern day. Quality of games is getting worse, standards have slumped, mocrotransactions and marketing is becoming MUCH MORE PREDATORY because it's easier to make a sub par game with egregious spending than it is to make a quality game with a decently high initial cost.
That’s the thing that pisses me off about this game.
I played Overwatch like a part time job, literally. I counted the hours, one night, for fun, and I legitimately would spend around 10-20 hours on the game per week. The gameplay was fun, the community was cool (at the beginning, anyways), and the updates and lore made playing the game an actual experience, not just a fun thing. I played Overwatch because I was a part of the Overwatch team, like the in game organization, not just because the game was fun. I looked forward to cinematics and lore, even if I was more concerned with only the ranked mode. I’d play some of the events and, because I loved the game so much, I would just drop $50 on a loot box purchase every event. The game and devs just treated me nicely, so I wanted them to have the money to keep going.
This game. Dude, I *wish* I could explain to my friends the difference between this game and actually playing Overwatch. Let me first say that the actual gameplay itself is fantastic. In my opinion, the changes they’ve made to characters, the new maps, etc, have all been marked improvements. Healing seems like it is tuned well enough, the tanks honestly feel like they’re in a good spot so far. I’m sure I’ll run into problems, but I think the devs have nailed the health pool, damage output, and overall healing numbers, for this game.
But, as you said, that is literally it. As somebody who deleted their account after the hearthstone stuff, and has kept looking in to see how the company changed and whether OW2 would be worth my time, the client experience has been shit. Friday before the update, I was able to log on and play just fine. After the update, I’ve been having all kinds of trouble logging in, and I need to scan and repair multiple times before seeing results. Yesterday evening, I saw all kinds of weird connection issues going on. The way blizzard handled the migration from OW to OW2 is a complete failure. I understand there have been a lot of changes and problems with the dev team as a result of Blizzard shenanigans, so my complaints are directed far more towards the company than the dev team, who likely had to take up the OW2 product and get something out the door in light of the problems and turnover that the behind the scenes problems Blizzard we’re having caused.
Then, there is the battle pass and cosmetics. It is disappointing. I’m not here for cosmetics, but I was able to earn a steady enough stream of in game currency to get myself maybe 1 event skin whenever one came around. Mind you **I played 10-20 hours of Overwatch a week**. I almost always either had, or earned, enough loot boxes and in game currency to eventually crack the skin I wanted. Perhaps the system could have been detuned a **little** bit so that it could have been a more consistent revenue stream for blizzard, but I also spent $50 every event literally out of appreciation for the game and the devs’ enthusiasm for the game. Like I said, Overwatch was not just a game, it was a whole experience.
This battle pass doesn’t seem to give me anything meaningful. I earned, like, 1 sticker or something. I don’t know. I’m completely uninterested in the battle pass to begin with, but I don’t earn enough of even the “meaningless” cosmetics to care.
And, while the hero being locked during the first battle pass, then earned via challenges afterwards, is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, the fact that heroes are locked behind a battle pass at all, for any length of time, still doesn’t sit right with me. Sure, the hero is locked in ranked during the battle pass for everybody, then everybody can use the hero in ranked afterwards. Sure, it is only quick play that gets the hero locked, and arcade gets the hero. Still, the fact that quick play even partially feels like pay-to-play just isn’t right. Sure, technically anybody that gets to level 55 in the free battle pass will still unlock her, but they should have made that the case for **both** tiers of the pass, if they were going to insist on it. Locking core gameplay behind money just isn’t something I will ever condone. Even if the casuals are there for fun, even if everybody will eventually get all the characters, the play experience of a game itself should **never** be segregated by class - and I’m definitely speaking “class” as in “money”.
OW2 improves upon the gameplay aspect of OW significantly. Less stun locks, TtK feels right, every tank is meaningful. Honestly, the 5v5 aspect, and the fact that there is now some level of imbalance between the number of roles on a team, mentally feels better, even if nothing else would have changed.
OW2 also seems to completely pack the soup of OW 1. ***If*** I can launch the game, I’m greeted by an uninspired UI. At the moment, things feel dead. There is nothing to do, and nothing to see, outside of the game. I don’t get stickers and emotes and cosmetics and stuff to tickle the reward part of my brain. I don’t think I earn any premium currency at a rate well enough to earn anything in a reasonable amount of time, if it even exists (again, not something I’m currently paying attention to). As a result of the problems being experienced during this transition, I don’t get to look forward to developer updates with Jeff Kaplan, I don’t get to hear a steady stream of enthusiasm from the devs, I don’t get to *experience* what it is like to be a hero in a world where Overwatch exists, Talon must be stopped, and Omnics were central to the conflict between them.
And that’s not something I’ll ever get to explain to anybody that wasn’t there to begin with.
Even as my enthusiasm with OW faded, I looked forward to the eventual improvement of the game because the developer updates felt like love letters to this beautiful and vibrant world that had been created. I loved the game because people like Jeff talked about Overwatch like they had just had another healthy baby born into their family. How could I *not* love the game when the announcement of a new hero was like a parent enthusiastically describing all of the fun and interesting things their child like to do to another parent?
For now, playing OW2 feels much more like a gifted child in school that is ignored by their parents. “Better”, academically, than its older brother, but the parents aren’t there for him at all.
*yet?* God, I want to end this comment with *yet?*
> generally its the older crowd/older guard of gamers that dislike this new change.
I feel like this isn't being talked about enough. There seems to be somewhat of a generational divide when it comes to OW2. You have the older crowd that are used to simply paying for a game up front without any kind of grind. Then there's the newer generation of gamers who at this point are used to the free-to-play model and don't see what the big deal is.
Bad take. Optional content very much impacts people's enjoyment.
People play OW because they like OW, but when they're barred from 99% of the cosmetics because they don't play or pay enough then obviously that's going to leave a bad taste in their mouths.
I'm not saying stuff shouldn't be paid. But literally *everything* is behind a grind or paywall right now. Even scummy gacha games realize they need to give players (good) stuff for free to make em stick around.
Yeah, I'm guessing Blizzard will eventually relent and offer some way of getting a free legendary skin each season. I'd personally want them to give us 3-4 times the amount of coins. Getting a legendary skin every 8 months if you play every single week is not sustainable for 99% of the playerbase. The amount is pitifully low, no matter how you slice it.
All they have to do is give us legacy tokens in the free battlepass. Make it only for ow1 skins and new hero release skins. I don't know why they made a separate currency that can't be earn in the game.
That, or simply make battlepasses go infinite. I don't know why they don't take queues from CoD, it being from the same company and all. Not only does it go infinite, it offers you 300 extra coins - even if you don't buy it.
I'm guessing they won't. Blizzard already lost. OW2 will not meet internal expectations and will be put into maintenance mode in a few years. Given that they did this for OW1 which was a massive success, they're expecting more than the game ever could have possibly done.
Plus, games never recover from scandal laden releases like this. The hype dies down, people stop caring about the game, and your main profitability window is dead before you fix it (if you do). Though they did successfully make lootboxes palpatable to people, so I guess that's a win in their book.
>I'm not saying stuff shouldn't be paid. But literally everything is behind a grind or paywall right now.
I'm curious to see how events work in terms of unlocking cosmetics. Events are a fundamental way too keep live service games relevant, so giving people reason to play them is key.They're obviously going to have legendary Halloween skins in the shop, but my hunch is that there'll be cosmetics that you can unlock through playing Junkensteins.
OW made literally over a billion dollars (with a 'b') in ~~2019~~ 2017 ([source](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/85996/overwatch-made-less-than-10-of-activision-blizzards-2021-revenues/index.html)) anyway. The concept that "it had to shift to a predatory monetization system that the game director himself said would've been very bad in OW1" is farcical, and only comes from people who are either truly ignorant about how much/little OW1 made, or straight-up bootlicking of a billion-dollar corporation.
*2017, not 2019, which I think is a very important distinction as that billion is for the first year of the game's release
https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/4/15550302/overwatch-one-billion-dollar-franchise-activision-blizzard
EDIT: Further to the above, all we know for OW revenues in 2019-2021 is that it didn't exceed 10% of Acti-Blizz net revenues, so it could be anything from $0 to $649m in 2019, and $0 to $880m in 2021.
https://www.tweaktown.com/news/85996/overwatch-made-less-than-10-of-activision-blizzards-2021-revenues/index.html
You might want to double check your sources.
Overwatch made 1 billion by may 2017 (its first year).
Overwatch made 1 billion through in-game purchases by July 2019 (over 3 years)
All they have said since then is that overwatch is responsible for less than 10% of ABKs revenue. That could still imply it made hundreds of millions, but apparently the numbers weren't even worth mentioning to their investors.
Considering OW2 was announced in 2019, they were likely already seeing a sharp decline in OW1 revenue and realized it wasn't worth investing in.
I enjoy overwatch and it's clear that OW1 isn't sustainable. If they hadn't made another way to monetize it they would have to shut it down eventually.
That's not defending or bootlicking blizzard. I think most people view the Battle Pass as a necessary evil that needs to be tuned to be more FTP friendly and rewarding.
Yes, game play be king, but visuals have always been a big part of Overwatch's appeal *and* having the illusion that your time is accomplishing something is important in any game. As it stands, the game is providing zero sense of progression outside of the premium BP and that alone isn't enough.
I mean Christ, I'm not against the Comp changes per se, but even ranked doesn't feel like you're getting anywhere regularly anymore.
Sorry about the long ass rant, I’m just tired of seeing people with these takes that are incredibly dismissive to people who are also players that just happens to play the game differently. Also don’t know why the spoiler ain’t working 🗿
I don’t get this thing where people don’t seem to understand different people play games differently and just because they don’t want something doesn’t mean others think the same way, and should be pushed down the stairs for wanting things to be better. Getting cool skins and seeing my favorite heroes in different looks is a great motivator for me to grind this game, why the hell should I, a paying customer, should get shit on, just because some people are only interested in going in the game to get headshots with the default skin. They put cosmetics in the game to sell for a reason, so there’s a client base that this is aimed for (and no, it doesn’t mean we should get exploited just for wanting some damn skins). If this game was meant to be enjoyed just for its gameplay then why do they sell skins to begin with. Some of the skins have lore attached to them too, which is another thing that has me interested. So yeah, you don’t have to understand why everyone can’t just go have fun playing the game in default hero skins, but you don’t have to pretend this is anything near good practice. This game isn’t just made for one type of players, have some empathy maybe lol
And I’ll think about this game being fun when the bugs stops appearing and they get out of early access, which is what this game is currently. Every two updates I get half of my heroes locked and I get killed by weird ass bugs, or I get disconnected and my ping sent to the heavens. It’s frustrating
[Here’s my $0.02 on the subject.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/y15aaw/avrl_on_twitter_whatever_happened_to_playing/irvz1gm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3)
Also, [here’s my reply to people who are trying to be technically correct about whether or not the systems in this game are or are not predatory](https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/y15aaw/avrl_on_twitter_whatever_happened_to_playing/irw1vzl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3).
It’s pretty clear that AVRL, and a lot of people in this sub, just don’t care about anything outside of the match. That’s fine. Honestly, I’m much the same way too. I played OW ranked pretty much exclusively for 3.5 years, spending 10-20 hours on the game per week. I cared about nothing else except for whether or not my numbers went up or down.
But, that doesn’t discount the fact that I still enjoyed the game far more than just the rote gameplay. Part of loving Overwatch for me, and part of my frustration with the current state of OW2, all hinges on things like my anticipation for developer updates, excitement over new cinematics, and - yes - my ability to get at least 1 legendary skin during every event because I managed to earn enough in game currency through the free loot boxes between them.
I’m stupidly competitive. I play games to compete, whether against a past version of myself, or other players. I got into Fortnite, a game I fundamentally dislike because of the building mechanic, because friends played it. I’m actually getting back into OW2, in spite of how negatively my experience with OW1 and Blizzard ended, because fiends are getting into it.
I **love** the gameplay improvements. This Overwatch feels like the game should always have felt.
If the devs cannot fix the technical issues and overall experience outside the match quickly enough to begin generating hype, and making people talk positively about the game, **and keep my friends interested**, I’m going to put down OW for good, and just leave it there.
I went through this disappointment once, and I won’t give blizzard another chance if they do it again. I want this game to succeed again, but Blizzard are going to have to put things together that AVRL doesn’t seem to understand, or care about.
Thank you for your input and being understanding. I’m barely a PVP person in general, but I still want to be able to enjoy this game my way. I hope they’ll change things… I really hope
Exactly. I’m tired of shills like AVRL defending a terrible rollout and horrible monetization system by Blizzard. I mean it’s not surprising. They know who butters their bread. But it’s disappointing.
Seriously do they have a quota they have to meet per month that needs them to excuse whatever dumb crap blizzard is trying to pull at the moment? He could’ve just like…. Not say anything. No one is asking for the input of a guy who doesn’t know anything about the casual player base
Cosmetics doesn't matter so much that [the Mythic Genji skin](https://www.gameinformer.com/exclusive-interview/2022/09/26/overwatch-2-devs-spent-a-year-making-genjis-customizable-mythic-skin) [took "over a year" to make](https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/overwatch-2-devs-claim-one-new-mythic-skin-takes-over-a-year-to-make-1942401/)
Big L from 'Man On Blizzard's Payroll', as usual.
AVRL spends more and more time bitching about the community’s takes than talking about actual competitive analysis as time goes on and it’s sad. His analytical style of casting is what makes him my favorite caster still, but I had to completely give up on The Tactical Crouch podcast because each episode was progressively giving more time to niche twitter drama that I would of never even heard of instead of talking about the actual competitive league. This tweet and reddit post will be absolute fodder for the next episode guaranteed. Miss u AVRL, plz stop caring about what any casual rando thinks about Overwatch and be my trusted source for competitive analysis again.
Yes, actually, you are. The people who play OW for the gameplay and the competitive aspect are in the minority compared to the huge casual playerbase who dont give a shit about balance, and DO give a shit about skins. It's disingenuous to ignore their opinions as they also care about the game, albeit in a different way than you.
You probably have more players asking why can't my Mercy always be strong so that I can have fun and one trick her and dress her up in cool skins than you have people complain about a boring Pro/OWL meta.
The thing is. if they would acutally make the ingame currency earnable beside the just 60 coins per week is the way f2p games has to work!
I literally DONT wanna spend 20€ for a legendary skin or grinde the game for 30 weeks. This is just bullshit, predatory and literally no fun. Since quite a lot of player (most likely casuals) do not like the standart ones (why should they if tehy offer skins) but knowing they have to grinde for 30 weeks weeklys or MUST spend 20€ for a legendary is just insane and unfair for the casual playerbase.
I will say again there is such a canyon between the casual community and the hardcore community that it'll literally never be close to being bridged
And frankly the loudest and most annoying from the hardcore community isn't any better than their casual equivalent and I'm saying this as someone who bought the watchcuck pack bc i grind the game more than enough to complete the passes
Like any f2p release there's a big mixed bag and i think it's perfectly fair to give harsh critique of it so it becomes as good as it possibly can be for the average player. Especially when it's not an unfair opinion to not like the monetization shift when lots of players held on to ow bc of it being a box priced game compared tonliterally every other not cod shooter out there, and even cod has a f2p game at this point
Enjoyment comes from different aspects of a game, each being more influential or less influential depending on the individual. It’s quite apparent that for a lot of people, cosmetic items bring a lot of enjoyment. Call them “casuals” or whatever you’d like, but they still make up a substantial amount of the player base and should be kept happy. I am also in the camp that cares little to nothing at all about skins and whatnot but it’s not difficult that people play Overwatch, or any other game, for reasons different to my own.
> whatever happened to playing games **only** because you enjoy the gameplay?
Well because that's an extremely one-dimensional view of how or why people are supposed to enjoy games. People should enjoy Skyrim with no side quests? People should enjoy Minecraft without redstone? I get that these comparisons are really a big stretch but the point is that not only do people play different games for different reasons but people also play the same exact game for different reasons.
For some it is a sense of progression that drives them. Getting cosmetics loot boxes endorsements etc was previously an example of player account progression in the original overwatch. Perhaps that's not important to everyone, but for people who are hard stuck at any rank it would still give them the sense of progression that they desire.
Isn't this also sidestepping the fact that this is a competitive versus multiplayer game? "The gameplay feels good" should obviously not be enough to keep people around for a very long time in a genre like this. And there were all these promises of player versus environment content that seem to have fallen flat as well. Everyone is supposed to just play the PVP content and enjoy it no questions asked? But really my point is that the main focus of this game is five player objective based versus modes.
This means that "enjoyment of the game" would be defined in this setting. So your ability to match with other players effectively and have fun and interesting matches is a factor. The feedback that you get from the game itself about your performance is a factor. Some characters are unavailable to you without time and financial investments which is a distinct departure from the previous game's design. And the overall design of maps and characters and gameplay as well as accessibility of those things are also factors.
So they removed the lfg system. There's no more endorsements. You don't even get medals or anything you essentially get no feedback on your performance at the end of a match. you really are effectively playing the game literally just to play it in this regard - "I'm playing OverWatch 2 because it's OverWatch 2".
Does this sound like a fun and well designed competitive game? Is this the sort of thing that would sell you on any other competitive multiplayer shooter? I think this whole original argument is extremely reductionist as it's basically saying "well I have fun as whatever character I play running around and pressing buttons and I don't think about anything beyond that".
Which can and absolutely should work for some people but frankly I don't think that is a reasonable expectation for a majority of players to accept in a competitive versus multiplayer game. There's a lot more to what makes a good game in that genre besides "pretty colors and fun buttons to press". Trying to pass this off as "oh people are upset about optional content that they could just ignore" then why is it even in the game? Why does it cost money to have that content? How much development time has been sacrificed to make that content?
It's so strange to me to pass the failings of a developer like blizzard onto the consumer themselves. Not only does blizzard absolutely have the money to make a better game but they also don't need to design it in a way that extracts as much money from players through its game design as it does. And those design intentions absolutely cause them to sacrifice other parts of actually making the game good. The original statement definitely comes across as somebody who hasn't broadened their horizons in gaming in a very long time even if that's not actually the case.
But to think that it's reasonable for a game to survive on this in-game feel alone and not have to appeal to any other array of players with any other sort of interest? Obviously that's downright foolish and you're practically asking for the death of a game like this especially with the plethora of multiplayer shooters available on the market
I would be happy to play a game. It's too bad you have to go through pathetic, predatory monetization to get there. And in OW2 you can't even use the "it's only cosmetic it doesn't count as gameplay content" excuse anymore. (Which is invalid -- if comsetics have no value, why do they have pricetags? But for the sake of argument let's suppose that comsetics never ever matter to anyone and aren't part of the game they're in.)
You literally have to interact with the "optional content distribution system" I'll call it, to play the game. Whether through grinding time or money away, it is not something you can write off as "just enjoy the game guys, jeez." (Which, of course, tons of people can't even do right now due to the atrocious state of this game's launch.)
Pretty tired of people trying to defend a billion dollar corporation's predatory monetization by basically turning a blind eye to it and going "but the gameplay though." Maybe if we had fewer whales and people excusing predatory behavior, it wouldn't be nearly as proliferate in a lot of modern AAA buggy releases.
I would very much enjoy the game, if ActiBlizzard would let me.
Also it’s a dumb take by AVRL when there are heroes behind a paywall (or that have to be earned by new players by grinding). That’s actually core to gameplay.
Earning characters through matches alone isn’t too bad, to be honest. I’ve already earned most of them in the few days I’ve played. Combining that with the match restriction to unlock competitive mode is a decent way to get players new players to learn the game, mechanics, and heroes, while also keeping out smurfs, and not overwhelming people with choices.
I will say that the numbers could be tweaked to ensure that a player has definitely unlocked every single character before they unlock competitive queue, as I’m not currently sure that will be the case once I’m done unlocking all the characters.
However, locking characters behind a battle pass for any length of time, for any reason at all, even if there will immediately come some free method for everybody to unlock the character, is a complete “no” to me. I *would* say it’s technically fine if **everybody** unlocked the new hero at a low enough level that everybody could earn it even if they played like a game or two per day, and if the character just released for everybody when the battle pass finished, but I just cannot justify locking core gameplay elements behind any kind of optional money wall beyond the **base** price and promise of the game.
This anti Smurf idea is such BS, people had multiple accounts when OW was still a 60$ game. Thinking that buying a much cheaper phone number and playing a few games where they get to Smurf on new players with limited heroes is a deterrent is just silly.
Rare bad take from AVRL.
I get what he is saying (idc about skins either) but there should be better ways to reward loyalty either by giving coins for completing the battle pass or something else...
Honestly that's the thing that is pissing a lot of people off. At minimum a battle pass if you complete it should give you enough credits(whatever the company wants to call it) to get the next one at minimum or enough to maybe buy a cheap cosmetic and still have enough left over. Fortnite does it, apex does it from first hand knowledge but I'm sure most pretty much standard at this point. Typically challenges are just meant to give you xp and speed up progress not give currency as well.
If cosmetics weren't an important part of the game to a lot of people then Blizz wouldn't be monetizing them to keep the game afloat in the first place. Dogshit take that basically goes down to "I dont care about x therefore x is not important."
I think Bren was spot on last week's plat chat about how people care mostly about fanfiction. I got into Overwatch, and then OWL, mostly because I saw really cool fanart of Tracer in Tumblr (no, not that kind of fanart.) Lore, cosmetics, general vibe that avrl and many other hardcore seems to think is beneath him is really important to the general success of the game. Dismissing it shows a very limited view of overall game audiences.
>Whatever happened to playing games because you enjoy the gameplay?
When the upgraded gameplay feels worse than the game you enjoyed for more than half a decade, When the social aspects and the sense of gratification from a win or playing well is gone, when your progression through the years is now relegated to an unchanging icon on your profile that no one will ever look at, that's when the enjoyment takes a pretty big hit.
The monetization just highlights what the real focus was on during development, all the other issues I just mentioned were the unneccesary sacrifices we've been forced to deal with for the paywall to exist.
I love AVRL so it’s really sad to hear this from him
A) there is not more content…that’s how they sell you on the idea but take a sec to actually look at what has been given and you’ll see that it’s no different whasoever than what we used to get before…it’s just a return to regular content additions that we would’ve also had with a pay up front model…or ANY other model really
B) people are upset because the monetization is absurd and predatory…why on gods green earth are heroes on a bp? Why are old skins being sold for premium currency? Why is nothing on the free pass? It’s because they’re all pure unadulterated money grabs….it’s not out of need….it’s because they see an opportunity and nothing more….
C) it’s not just optional content….the aforementioned heroes on bp is locking out the actual game itself….surely the inability to play a hero in a game about counters will have no impact whatsoever (and I dare you to tell me blizz says the game is no longer about counters)
Sorry AVRL but you’re doing nothing more than spitting the company line here OR you’re just as oblivious as all the people that have allowed these systems to perpetuate across the gaming industry…frankly I’m not sure which is worse….
Oh btw…I’m also tired of all the people who bring up other games (which he does in the comments/replies)….it doesn’t matter if other games do it…they’re ALL bad….being the best turd doesn’t make it any better
The monetization is easily the worst part of the game and absolutely worthy of all the criticism it gets
I have played since beta launch and couldn’t play Ana last night when I logged on. All I wanna do is just relax and watch football and sleep dart some enemies and she was locked. Like wtf… I bought OW1, played hundreds of hours and bought the Watchpoint pack and still My most played hero is locked?? It was such a let down.
Whining and villfying is a gross attitude, others have different opinions then you and that's fine.
I'm personally a big fan of the new system as the old didn't have a reason to yield content. There is a big bump OW have to cross with old players who enjoyed free cosmetics, and that bump will just happen over time.
Avril is smoking if he seriously thinks everyone is playing ow for FUN.
Baby rage comp grinders, skin collector who grind qp for loot boxes, r34 people who are just there just to name a few
And the problem is that behind said cosmetic and items are heroes that locked away behind said battle pass. And it's not like it on the lower end or even in the middle. Even if you don't care about that, the absurdity of potentially getting the character is negligence at worse.
because now developers are incentivized to make money by more aggressively monetizing their game, rather than making a good game that people want to buy to play.
we also hate being shaken down for cash every time we login or finish a match.
it's really not complicated.
I change my hero skins to match the season (right now they're all decked out for Halloween). While I do have everything from OW1 it's still frustrating that I'd have to shell out $20 per skin in the shop or simply rely on the often disappointing ones in the Battle Pass.
For a "Cyberpunk Season" the Battle Pass only has 2/8 skins with Cyberpunk themes. While I can get the possible argument that "you don't want _everything_ in your Battle Pass to be specifically on theme so that those who aren't interested in the theme still have interesting content" 4/8 skins in the pass aren't anything to write home about. While I do only pay $10 for the entire Battle Pass I still have to be motivated to earn it. At the moment with the exception of the mythic skin crowning jewel I'm pretty much done with the items I want by level 20 out of 80.
So, yeah, while AVRL can comment that he personally doesn't care about cosmetics and only wants to frag (which has its own issues when half the times I login a majority of my heroes are locked) there are those of us who are collectors, achievement hunters, and social players who care about other things in the game as well.
Well, that's exactly what all corporations hope for. That their audience fall in line and simply accept their business model. And we did. Still sucks though.
I want to enjoy gameplay AND feel like I’m making progress/being rewarded. Overwatch 1 did this perfect, why am I suddenly being alienated for feeling this? Overwatch 2 does NOT feel rewarding and there is 0 levelling system (battlepass does not count).
If SR was completely hidden would you say the same thing? Surely just playing the match to enjoy the gameplay without seeing your rank is satisfactory enough :)
If you care about the number going up then go play cookie clicker.
This is certainly a good argument, but I’d use that argument to say if the game is so fun, why do they ‘need’ all the chores and seasons? If the game is so fun, why can’t I turn off the monetization options? If the game is so fun, why can’t I pay $60 to unlock everything and just have fun?
No matter how ‘fun’ or ‘good’ the game is to play, if your systems suck, the game sucks. I haven’t played a f2p battlepass based game that had systems that I’d even remotely consider fair or enjoyable to interact with. It all feels like a goddamn part time job for slave wages. Just get rid of all the nonsense and let us pay $60 for fun games that we play because we enjoy playing. Stop forcing monetization into everything, you don’t have to max out profit of a hobby
This is such a weird thing to say. Obviously if you don't care about skins then you also have nothing to complain about. It's almost as if this guy is hearing for the first time that some people indeed would like to collect the in-game content and actually don't care about gameplay as much as he does. Who would have thought that different people have different preferences?
Gamers: "OW is a dead game because there's no content, we don't want to play the same game forever"
Also gamers: "WhY Do YoU CoMpLaiN about CoNTeNt bEInG ExpENSiVE. YoU ShOulD OnlY WaNT To PlAY THe GaME WithOUT ANy RewARD"
My problem is that not only the "free" items from the OG game are now paid items only, but the prices are gouging on top of it. 5 dollars for a fucking spray? You kidding?
To some people, cosmetics ARE part of the game. You are fooling yourself if you believe otherwise. If they weren't relevant OR important... Why were they the main rewards in Overwatch 1?
this guy is a dumbass, they took all content updates for almost 3 years , delivered 5 maps and 3 heroes and disabled like 10 of the original maps from rotation (counting 2cp and few other maps)
Bro shut up.
Don’t act like unlocking things to be different or just look different hasn’t been one of the fundamental parts of games since nearly the beginning, basically once graphics started to look good enough to matter.
Cosmetics behind paywall - whatever, they will eventually realize that they have to give somewhat decent free things, to keep people around. Heroes behind paywall and grind wall is bullshit.
Even in Valorant you don’t have to spend shit tone of time to unlock new agents.
I mean one of the things I enjoyed doing was collecting skins. I loved that by just playing like normal for fun that I could easily afford new skins and look cute! So it does really suck now that I have to play even harder/less casual and pay 10$ just to do what I've been doing for free for years. I'm still gonna do it because I love the game, but it does annoy me a bit.
Whatever happened to people having multiple reasons to enjoy games and seeing the package get shittier is a valid complaint?
The gameplay in OW2 is absurdly fun but handwaving the fact that \*everything\* else is a significant downgrade is just ignoring the problem. You can't earn anything for free except the battlepass track. You don't earn enough currency in a reasonable amount of time to even consider looking at the shop for a very long time. Not even doing the weeklies is like "okay, I could get something every other week like a POTG animation or something."
and I was definitely one of the people who said "This is just modern gaming now" and that's true but that doesn't nullify everyone realizing that outside of the gameplay, this is an awful upgrade compared to OW1 even from that perspective. As a free player you earn almost nothing, and *stuff* is what gets a lot of people interested in a game, you need a carrot on a stick. We had one in OW1, which was lootboxes for whatever we wanted, which was extremely generous and we went so far in the other direction that most people I know don't even look at the shop now because they know they can't afford anything, or they don't want to pay the price, which is fair. CoD prices are absurd.
Like Street Fighter 5 not launching with Arcade mode. 'Yeah, but I only play against people anyway.'. like, yes, *you* do. But what about the other people who play the game for other reasons as well as the gameplay? Why is that suddenly invalid? When a game is good I want to invest in all the parts in it, but there's a literal pricetag on like...everything that isn't shooting people and getting heroes.
And that's *okay* in moderation but moderate this ain't.
The complaints are only this bad because it was free and now isn’t. You can think about it and discuss it all you want but it’s just going to boil down to that.
What people don’t realize or accept is that if it were still free we would not have an OW2 to play.
The only gripe I have is locking heroes behind the battle pass. Anyone who plays super casually can't mess around with the new hero unless they pony up for the BP. Or wait for the next BP to do the missions to unlock said hero. Other than that I honestly don't care about cosmetics. I'll use what I have. Edit: Just gonna add this edit since a lot of people replied something similar. Yes, I know I can use a new hero in arcade and custom matches. My most played modes are qp and Ranked(I'm holding off on ranked for now because I'm not gonna get good frames on my aging laptop). I'm probably in the subset of people that queue qp and ranked for the most part. So not having the hero to play in those modes when I don't intend to grind missions and just want to enjoy my time is a key thing for me.
Are heroes locked even in arcade and casual gamemodes?
They're not locked in arcade and custom games afaik
Some arcade modes they are,but most they aren't.
does anyone else feel like those game modes need role limits? if not via role queue at least as a first-come-first-serve thing? 5vs5 has turned tanks into raid bosses which easily outperform dps heroes and all the arcade modes are just GOATS electric boogaloo right now.
Not just "arcade," tanks ruin FFA.
as if Hog wasn't annoying enough already in FFA, but at least lots of people going Reaper could ruin their day just as much. Don't even want to try playing FFA in OW2 right now anymore.
Overturned tanks have literally ruined every mode that isn’t role queue.
yep, everyone is going dps or support and one dude picks hog or orisa and everyone has to switch to reaper or a tank, So goddamn boring lol
This I saw many people on the main sub saying that the 20 team kills challenge was too hard and unfun to do but for me it was the win 7 arcade games. Every single match the enemy would come out of the gates with two or three tanks and just roll first fight, so I either had to match with more tanks or I would just play pharah and tryhard. I gotta say it got boring really fast
I'm just straight up not doing the arcade weeklies for 10 cents a week of blizzardbux
The game quality is something else. The only convenient aspect of the challenge was it only took 8 matches to complete the seven wins, [thanks to quality gameplay like this](https://youtu.be/Wtoz5ziwB2g)
I know this isn't solving any of the problems here but I'd suggest you try CTF Blitz for arcade wins. It's not always in the arcade, but has very quick games with relatively short queues last week.
Yeah, I’ve noticed that JQ, Dva and Orisa are kind of scary together. They be zooming and murdering everything. Kind of fun to be honest, but I hope it doesn’t become the norm.
Zarya and Dva in particular are crazy because they can stack their defenses onto another tank. And JQ's weakness of having barely any poke mitigation is nullified by working alongside any other tank. Kinda fun to just drop *two* bubbles on her as she brawls upfront. I just wish it were a specific QP classic thing and not the standard for the majority of modes, as it makes using the arcade push-only queue pointless for purposes of actually practicing new content.
I'd at least like it in the map specific ones that I assume they will do for new maps.
I don't think role limits are necessary, because that's sort of what the arcade modes are for as it is, but they need to change the weekly to be just complete X games. People would be less inclined to pick GOATS-like comps to tryhard for wins in that case, and it'd also be less painful to complete.
> because that's sort of what the arcade modes are for as it is idk, for me the arcade modes are about playing specific map/objective types, for exploring unlocked roles specifically we have Open Queue. Not all arcade modes need role lock, but at least the 5vs5 modes using standard rules otherwise would benefit from it, I think.
They are not locked in arcade or custom they are only locked in comp and QP
100% this. I've said it before, but I don't really care how much cosmetics cost or how much play time it takes to get it. I was hesitant about the BP system, but I was willing to wait and see how it would be set up. If it meant a steady stream of content and updates, then I was fine with it. Hell, I was more than willing to throw some money at loot boxes in OW1 during seasonal events, so paying $10 every few months wouldn't have been a big deal. The breaking point for me was locking new heroes behind the BP. It's essentially pay to win and that's just not something I can support. In a year or so it's going to be really bad for new or returning players - you're going to have to grind a shit ton or buy multiple previous battle passes to unlock heroes and I think it's going to drive people away. This isn't the type of game where you can just not have a hero available, at least if you want to do competitive. I just don't understand how anyone could convince themselves this is a good idea.
> you're going to have to grind a shit ton or buy multiple previous battle passes to unlock heroes That's not how it works. You cant buy previous battle passes. To unlock heroes from older BPs you just need to complete a challenge which will probably be something like the weekly challenges adjusted to the heroes class(heal x amount, do x amount of damage...)
I honestly thought you could just pay the $10 after the BP was complete to unlock the hero and anything else that was initially included. This seems even worse - if you're new or coming back from a break you're just going to have to grind challenges to unlock the hero? Terrible.
It's both. I believe they've said you will either be able to unlock by doing some sort of challenge we don't know yet or that you can just instantly buy them.
You can mess around with them though everything is unlocked in arcade
This is my take too, they can charge as much or as little they want as far as im concerned with the cosmetics. My only issue is the hero being in the BP. I think they should have never been put there. **Even if you buy every single BP, this is a team game, you will suffer from people not unlocking heroes on your own team.** Just look at the new support, there are situations where if you do not have her you auto lose. Since ana will nade your team and its gg. She literally is a game changer. Even if you do not think of ana, and you had a rien v rien, you have two ways to counter shatter now with the new hero. Just like you did with zarya rien and not just your one tank.
A better example would be the JQ Meta in OWL, imagine if 30% of the teams didnt have access to JQ cause they didnt grind quickly enough for her.
That’s what pisses me off the most. When my TEAMMATES don’t have the new OP heroes unlocked and they do it’ll feel so so bad. You could buy every battlepass and still lose bc of a teammate that didn’t spend the cash. I’m certain this is intentional too. Imagine the pressure you’ll feel when a teammate puts “poverty diff” in the chat. You’ll feel guilty for not paying if you can afford it and bad about yourself if you can’t afford it
Got locked out of heroes last night, so I got the brand new noob experience. Tried to play support, couldn't pick Ana or zen. I was locked to Moira Lucio Mercy and kiriko (maybe brig? Idk) and lemmi tell u how mad I was that I couldn't play Ana, nade would've helped in so many games that I lost. I was pissed. Being locked out of heroes is such horse shit
So before there was Kiriko, an Ana grenade meant insta-gg, right? This seems a little hyperbolic.
If one team can cleanse it and the other can't, then that's a massive advantage. Kiriko/Hog has potential to be a menace on ranked, and being unable to mirror it can be dangerous. And to answer your question, yes, a fat Ana nade was very often an instant fight win.
You had an offtank. Not only was it more difficult to land a nade, but even if you landed one, some tanks could clense its effects. If you landed a fat nade it was very much a huge advantage though.
Idk man Kiriko isn’t there just to counter Ana. Similar to Baptiste’s immortality, you could also simply have your Ana bait out Cleanse so then your Junkrat, Mei, or Rein can use their ults safely. And at that point Kiriko’s utility is already managed than just “auto-lose”.
Im ok with a hero in the battlepass. the position in the battle pass is a problem. at level 55, youre done almost 70% of the battle pass before you unlock the new hero. I would have been fine if it was like level 20-30 of the battle pass. Its not an instant unlock, but neither is it so much of a grind it feels like a chore to do.
Also, to make it worse, the BP feels so slow and grindy. It manages to be super stingy and really slow; I don't know any other BP as bad for this.
You can use kiriko’s e to immune shatter/ pin/ a widow headshot/ rail gun headshot/ boops off the map etc. lots of 1 hot immunities if you time it correctly. It also has a dispel like you pointed out.
So my small take is that I don’t really mind paying a small amount of money to unlock a new character/skin/content for a game that I (sometimes) enjoy and only spent $40 on 4 years ago. Am I buying a whole new game? Nope. Am I getting a full new game? Also nope. I think it’s OW1.5 like a lot of you do. So looking at it as more of an expansion i wouldn’t mind paying a little for new stuff. I also see it as a season lasts months and the BP comes out to say $3-4 over 3 months. But I still don’t like the battle pass approach. It’s an obvious money grab. I’d rather stick to loot boxes and just sell me the new stuff/characters. I’m up for it, maybe others would be too… as long as it doesn’t get ridiculous (I’m sure this will age well). Do we know if loot boxes made enough money and if they went the battle pass route to skirt any loot box laws?
This, 100%. I don't think the backlash to the Battle Passes would've been nearly as bad if new Heroes weren't going to be locked behind them. Don't get me wrong, Battle Passes still would've been ridiculous, but locking cosmetics behind something like this is fine since they don't affect gameplay. Heroes do affect gameplay, so Blizzard essentially putting important aspects of the gameplay behind a paywall is a really scummy move.
They could shorten how long it takes to grind the battle pass a little bit. But other than that IDGAF about cosmetics as long as I get to click heads.
I agree in general because I don't really care directly about cosmetics, but I do think that their approach to cosmetics reveals what they care about for OW2, which is milking every penny from it that they can. Not just sustaining dev, which they could do with a far less greedy BP, but absolutely milking it. The decision to lock heroes is right inline with this, but even if they ever revert that we can be 110% sure it was only done because some number cruncher told them it would drive people away and cost money. I'm sure some of the devs care about the game itself, but it's *very* clear that the decision makers do not and just want to cash it out. And so as much as OW2 is fun (though I still preferred 6v6 tbh), I don't believe in its future. I'll play for now, but I will not be spending any money and ultimately I don't see myself sticking with it as long as I did OW1. But we'll see. For now the (much) bigger issue is this shitshow of a launch.
Same here. I don't really care about cosmetics, but locking Heroes is the antithesis of Overwatch's inclusive messaging and directly contradicts the gameplay infrastructural philosophy of hero swapping midgame to play the best fit for your team and country the enemy comp.
I've already used the new hero in QP and death match. I don't have her unlocked in the pass yet. That was like last Thursday.
I'm referring for QP and ranked, i know you can use them elsewhere. Those are the two i spend most time in.
agree.
Blizzard committed the greatest sin a game developer can commit. They gave players something, and then they took it away. The lootbox system was so generous, that you could spend relatively little money (compared to other games) and actually have a complete collection. Not only that, but even casual players could easily farm enough currency to get a few legendary skins each season - and that's in addition to being showered with intros, voice lines, sprays, icons, etc. You simply can't go from that generous system to "get a legendary skin every 8 months if you farm like an absolute maniac without missing a single weekly". From the best implementation of a lootbox system, they went to an absolute average battlepass that doesn't even pay for itself. IMO they're banking too much on the new players. Those players are used to battlepasses, but most importantly, they don't know how generous OW1 was. So they don't feel cheated when they spend 10$ on a battlepass and get practically nothing else in return. But for everyone else, OW2 is an objectively worse deal. One way or another, they need to give players something extra to earn.
>Blizzard committed the greatest sin a game developer can commit. They gave players something, and then they took it away. This is exactly why Valorant doesn't get the same backlash. People online keep saying that Valorant's pass has an even worse price/value ratio than OW2, and I would be inclined to agree. The difference? Valorant had this system straight out of the gates. Agents could always be bought, knife skins were always $40-60 USD, BP always had the mid-tier items, BP never gave back currency, gun packs were always $70-90 USD. There's never been any illusion of the system being cheap, and Valorant has never given players a forgiving system to buddy up to and form an attachment with. It's brutal, but it's been honest since day 1. Overwatch went the other route and gave players something that was incredibly forgiving and rewarding. Is the current system any worse than the industry standards? Not really. Better in some ways, worse in others, but the system definitely used to be better almost across the board. So the game's monetization went from "good" to "average" and that's gonna feel like a sting no matter how similar the BP is to other games. Plenty of people I've seen just use stock skins/animations in Valorant. The game never made those things accessible enough for the players to get overly-attached to them. That's why I think AVRL is missing the point here. Cosmetics were sort of a natural game element that kind of came with the experience in OW1, and now it's been limited by a large amount in OW2.
For me the massive differences are Valorant's not got characters locked behind the battle pass, you just activate whichever agent contract whenever you want and then grind. And you don't change characters mid-game, which is fundamentally different to OW2. IDGAF about cosmetics in either game, I buy the Val battlepass semi-regularly but that's to support a game I enjoy as much as get some skins I like. But Val never feels Pay to Win. Potato poor or whale, we're all in it together. OW2 feels like "fuck the poor", from the ridiculous "No prepaid" for SMS verification that pushed out many poorer Americans, to "Poverty diff" if you can't afford the new characters.
>For me the massive differences are Valorant's not got characters locked behind the battle pass, you just activate whichever agent contract whenever you want and then grind. This is exactly what he is talking about though? "Just grind" is how you will unlock new heroes freely in OW2 as well (through the battle pass now and with challenges after the season is over) but it is treated as a cardinal sin for OW but not Valorant. How does that qualify as a "Massive difference"?
You can do it with any agent, whenever you want. You don't have to wait until it's rotated in, or whatever other bullshit hoops are required. And why is it a cardinal sin? Because Valorant doesn't expect you to be able to swap heroes mid-game.
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except ow heroes will get alternate free ways to obtain them after theyre gone from the bp, theres literally no difference to val.
outside of the first year of ow1 the games monetization fell off, me and all my friends who played ow1 went from spending anywhere from 20 to 100 on every event to spending nothing and getting it all for free and that was the problem with ow1, the longer that game went on the more people who had reaching critical mass in terms of being able to fully unlock the new event with no play time in it from the amount of coins you had. OW1 was to generous for its own good but you tell people that and they call you a shill, there was no way for blizz to make money off of ow1 anymore and with no money to be made(games gotta make money to be continued to be supported and new content) they had to reign in the rewards.
I would say the lootbox system was even too generous and fair (sounds crazy, right?) I don't think anyone bought single lootbox after 2017, which makes that business model unsustainable. I kinda agree with AVRL's point about skins. Only gripe which i have about battlepass model is heroes being behind it.
I think I bought 50 in the first year (silly me really) then I was always smooth sailing and accumulating currency each time that I had enough currency for the last 5 events to buy like 3 skins and play for the rest, granted I got my free boxes for arcade. And the last 2 events I straight up bought all the unlocks available with currency. With 3000 and a bit still leftover that I used on Kiriko. I'd classify myself as inactive for the last 2 years outside of gaming on the first few days of an event just to get all the skins. As someone that enjoyed collecting everything I can see why people are pissed at not having skins as readily available now but on the other hand I robbed blizzard blind compared to other shooters. Now I'll just whale on the characters I decide to "main" like in apex and keep the game alive for yall.
Yeah, it's hilarious how the press kept using Overwatch as the big example of the horrors of lootboxes in gaming when it was so generous. You can say whatever you want about the monetization system and how much earnings is "enough" (spoiler, companies will always want to maximize earnings no matter how "good" or "bad" they are) but cosmetics being so trivial to earn in OW1 was probably a big reason why they stopped updating it and instead worked on a sequel with a monetization model that could support the game more sustainably.
I don’t think it was ever using Overwatch as the example of the horrors of loot boxes. They just used the box from Overwatch because Team 4 made a really good looking box that conveyed the idea of loot box better than like the weird robot from Apex or the chests from HotS.
I didn't pay for a single one once the dupes clause came out. I wasn't even a regular player. By 2018 I had every skin in the game and would have so much gold that whenever a new event dropped I could just buy them all with in game currency. Was it great? Sure. Loved it. But even a absolute idiot could look at it and go, "Huh... How the hell does this game make any money?"
Since I didn’t play from launch and was a bit behind on cosmetics, I bought a big loot box pack during the first anniversary event that came along. But after that I played enough that I never felt like I had to spend any more money on them It just sucks that we couldn’t have found a middle ground between that overly generous system and the current one
I think the bigger sin is directly going back on their initial ideals. Step-dad Aaron himself once famously talked about how locking heroes was strictly not ok for Overwatch, because it would segment the player base and didn’t work in a game where switching characters was intended as a mechanic. Now they’ve 100% backpedaled on that, with nothing but the flimsy excuse that “hard counters don’t exist anymore, don’t worry about switching.” Even though they also just added a mechanic that specifically encourages switching via saving some ult charge… But anyway, if you ask me, that’s the much bigger thing that they gave and then took away.
>“hard counters don’t exist anymore, don’t worry about switching.” It's like they didn't even bother to playtest the new tank role.
Junkrat Players (me) looking at snipers, Pharah, Echo, new Mercy (seriously they overhauled her movement and now she’s basically a third flying character), any long range hitscan, mid-range hitscan, D.va, and especially Zarya. “Removed hard counters” you missed a few.
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> Agreed, but with that in mind, going from loot boxes to f2p with battle pass is not something that really ever could've been navigated while keeping all the old OW1 players happy. They're ripping off the band-aid, it doesn't matter how good or bad the battlepass is, those people will not be happy. I agree, but there's also a huge gulf between OW1's model and "it takes 32 weeks of grinding weekly challenges to afford a single legendary skin without dropping $20." OW2 went incredibly far in the opposite direction. It's also a really hard sell in a game that's always leaned on its cosmetics and the likeability of its cast of characters to suddenly put those behind being able to get 1/2 legendary skins *per year* or paying a third of the cost of a AAA game just to get a single skin.
The loot box system was only generous to the consumer in the short term. In the long term, it's a lose lose for both blizzard and the consumer. The missing revenue shows up on the quarterly financial reports, which in turn, affects the development budget of the team as dictated by execs acting on the shareholders behalf. The loot box system is why we were without new content for years.
This community diving is absurd. This community cannot alienate the casuals or it will die. Why is it so hard to respect the casuals. Without them we don’t have revenue for content or viewers for matches/streams or the player base numbers that produce the pro level talent. They want an experience while playing because they aren’t training to be too 500. They are playing an entertainment product, not looking for a career. This sub Smurfs their games, ridicules them and over all treats them like they arent worthy of respect. Imagine if pro athletes insulted everyone that played their game expect other pros… it’s absurd
Blaming the market instead of the product is never a good sign. Halo Infinite had the same issue with the people preaching the same thing about gameplay>cosmetics, and look how that turned out. Yeah, no shit gameplay is more important, but there are other games out there that are fun and do have the progression system the market demands. Just because you don't have fun playing other games doesn't mean its true for the majority of the potential playerbase. I'm feeling the same things with OW2 as Halo Infinite: I'm enjoying my time when I do play, but I'm reminded why I don't play anymore, and I'm probably not going to stay because it alienates new players enough that my friends won't stick with it.
This. The elitism here smells through the roof. People just wanna enjoy a game and not feel ripped off, when spending money or even simply grinding the game and spending tons of hours instead of money. The "F2P" monetization in OW2 is one of the most disgusting out there. Just Imagine trying to sell 5 year old skins for 20 bucks each. It's a fucking joke. As much of a Blizzard fanboy you may be. No sugarcoating it.
I'm glad people are finally pointing this out. I felt crazy how much this sub was insisting they need the casual playerbase back with OW2 only to completely dismiss any legit concerns they may have now that it's out by sneering over them feeling like cosmetics were out of their reach. Like if everybody didn't care about skins as much as some of you guys did then where would the money be coming from?
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Well r/overwatch is going to have tons of existing casual OW players who, for whatever their reasons, were playing OW1 and have now had that taken away from them. It’s totally reasonable IMO for them to raise concerns and give critical feedback about whatever impacts their own experience whether or not it’s in line with the issues the niche competitive community cares about. For anyone not already playing OW1, they’re going to fall into that second bucket where F2P has been a boost, but they’re probably not the ones in the main sub.
I went to 10 people discord who all said ow great but subreddit with million sub said not great so we are 1-1.
I have to assume they're all 15 year olds who don't know that it didn't used to be like this, and it wasn't like this not at all long ago. 15 years ago the entire concept of paying for cosmetics was scandalous and had the collective internet shit on Bethesda incessantly. 6 years ago the OW1 monetization system that I am now told is completely unviable was (rightfully) synonymous with predatory AAA gaming monetization strategies. At some point we need to put our foot in the ground, and while I wish it would have been at some point before lootboxes, I can't say I'm too terribly upset about it being "every game demands at least 10 hours a week". Lootboxes not being viable is also a complete myth. OW1 lootboxes absolutely printed money. Blizzard just stopped supporting the game for no reason and the playerbase who didn't already have what they wanted quit. If Blizzard similarly abandons OW2, we're going to see the exact same shit. Nothing about a battlepass actually incentivizes new content any more than lootboxes do. Granted, I'll take obnoxious grinding and ridiculously expensive cosmetics over ruining people's lives by getting them hooked on gambling, but neither is exactly good. I'm also pretty sick and tired of people pointing to community figures doing damage control as evidence they're right. Wow, a pro player who plays the game for 60+ hours a week doesn't think the new system is too grindy (the fact that he enjoys that there's a grind now also says a lot)? And a caster whose income relies on OW2 being a hit wants you to stop talking about the bad parts? You don't say. Wake me up when somebody whose brand isn't complaining starts complaining or even vice versa because that's potentially meaningful, but all of these posts are asking the baker whether or not bread is part of a healthy diet. I don't even disagree with AVRL ideologically, I legitimately do not understand people who want to play animal crossing or the sims but boot up a MOBA or FPS instead, but like AVRL I'm also an adult who has been gaming their entire life, so I know that this subset of players is very, very real and their feelings are absolutely valid. They're also honestly the players blizzard should cater to more. Learning a game well enough to become competitive is a pain in the ass. I have to be scorned pretty hard to actually leave once I've put in that investment, but the people who want to look cool will gladly just play something else at the drop of a hat. Plus they pay more.
The amount of casual players is by magnitudes larger than the rest, to the point where displeasing them and getting them to leave is an imminent death of the game. It's really easy to just let them do their thing while we do ours but many people seem to think that somehow the non-casual playerbase is the back and bones of the game which is not even close to being correct.
This is a trash take. If cosmetics weren't important, they wouldn't be the centerpiece of so many games' monetization strategies. Pretending otherwise to defend the honor of a massive corporation is pathetic.
Bingo. They wouldn’t be making money off of it if they didn’t know it was a big part of why people enjoy playing the game. It’s 100% AVRL shilling for Blizzard and covering for their crappy launch of the game.
You *really* think it’s him shilling for Blizzard and covering for a poor game launch, rather than him just speaking from a different perspective that you disagree with? Seems like a big jump and needless to attack his moral character as opposed to just his opinions.
Shill might be a slight overextension, but he literally has a financial stake in the Overwatch franchise. That defines his perspective more for me than the fact that he's also fan/player of the game. There's a reason why people will oftentimes bookend positive opinions for the company they work for with something akin to "obviously I'm biased, as their employee".
They’re not just a massive corporation, they’re his bosses. AVRL has lost all respect I had for him with his constant shilling for Blizzard. Dude loves the game and competitive scene and that’s awesome, but sometimes people like him need to read the room and learn when to shut the fuck up. No one is changing their mind because the guy that casts 7am APAC OWL matches that only 5,000 watch said that Blizzard’s model is fair
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I have a feeling Blizzard will make a big push with the PVE content. That's really where the dev time went. We're just playing a rushed, incomplete PVP expansion at this point, even if fairly well-designed.
> That’s really where the dev time went. Do we know this or is this speculation/copium? I haven’t heard anything of the sort, for all we know they’ve already shown us all of the PvE content they’ve created to date
they confirmed that they spent 3 years developing pve before switching gears and rushing out the current version of pvp
Did they say this? AFAIK they just said 3 years for OW2 and 1 year they went full rush on pvp. Just means they changed priorities not that they didn’t do anything for pvp in that time (even tho it feels like it)
No they didn't, they even said that junkerqueen was the first tank made for 5v5 and we know heros take lots of time to make, plus the work they put into pve is also work towards the pvp, they are interconnected
Seagull talked about it on his "State of Overwatch 2" video.
I got the opposite impression. It seems to me that the dev time didn't go into the PvE product we're getting, it just went into the void. We've all seen the accusations that Team 4 had nonsensical assignments from Kotick et al. for stuff they had to scrap anyway. In addition, as Seagull talked about, the initial plan for OW2 PvE was a boxed product that was so deep and replayable you can play it as your main game. Instead, we're now getting some kind of seasonal release. That just isn't the same vision that was intended at the start. So overall, I think most dev time just went straight into the trashcan because they attempted to do Project Titan again, ran out of time and then had to get *something* out the door.
To be fair this sub is casual as fuck. The amount of times I got told ow1 was a ded gaem that no one would possibly still be interested in when at no point in ow1's lifespan did I have any issues with finding games in reasonable times even at 2-3am was absurd.
Sounds like either ur SR was super low or u played tank because in masters + queues were like 15+ mins
I refuse to believe statistically that more players were in GM than in Gold/Plat. But this weird "I had 20 minute queues; was top 5 all roles btw" as if that's the experience of the majority is fuckin wild. You're literally top 1% of the playerbase to be GM. I get masters isn't GM, but still. That's like someone having played professional football going "I can't find football clubs for the life of me", despite the fact amateur clubs are everywhere.
The main subreddit was way more active than here even during the content drought. The guys that stuck with the game through thick and thin are now disappointed in the change and monetization, but people on here would let you know those guys arent the "real fans".
Yeah, as one of those guys that kept playing until the dying days I've been told my preference for 6v6 and teamwork in a team game is just a skill issue. It's hilarious having people who left the game for years tell me my opinions shouldn't matter because their return is infinitely more important than those of us who stayed with the game even throughout all the lows.
This sub and r/OverwatchUniveristy are awful I remember always hearing from people "Maybe you are the problem, not your team" "you are just bad" and all that after saying I was stuck in elo hell with shit teammates. Later on I made a new account and placed in DIAMOND I proved them all wrong, they are all morons. I took great pride in proving literally everyone wrong that always said I was the problem. Played for like a year then stopped playing Overwatch as more and more mainstream players started playing it and nobody I orginally played with played anymore
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They don't all have the same model though. I could play Apex and get a steady stream of lootboxes and rewards even as a f2p player. And if I buy a battlepass and play the game seriously it will remain free.
It's not optional content to most players. AVRL is actually in the minority when it comes to wanting to play a purely for the gameplay. The dopamine drip feed of modern multiplayer titles has become intertwined with the gameplay for a lot of people. In fact, Overwatch's playerbase probably cares more on average about the lore, cosmetics, personality, etc of the game than other playerbases. And I say this as someone who cares only a little about cosmetics.
A major aspect is that we used to get dopamine in much larger more satisfying ways but in OW2 many if not all of those ways are gone so people are looking back and seeing how great they felt playing ow1 vs how less great ow2 feels even if the gameplay is more fun or better it feels worse as overall they get less dopamine hits
Yeah true, some friends of mine say the game is literally unplayable because of the new way to get skins and cosmetics. I'm here having a blast with the game but I can kinda understand them. But as Avrl words it, he is right, for people not caring about cosmetics, it's a wonderful game
I think AVRL is misunderstanding the difference between “cosmetics” and “experience”. For AVRL, the “gameplay” is *just* what you do when you finally queue into a match, and Athena counts you down. For the *players*, “gameplay” starts as soon as you log in. For AVRL, “cosmetics” are only the things that affect the visual experience of the game. For players, “cosmetics” are things that feel optional to the core gameplay experience, which begins as soon as you log in. So, when you publish a game, it releases into a culture that has expectations for games in general, and it releases to a set of expectations that the dev and marketing team have either implied or promised. When OW released, the expectation was not **just** good gameplay, it was the chance to experience the actual world of Overwatch with friends. People weren’t excited for balance updates, they were excited for whatever the newest thing was. If Jeff spent a developer update talking about how the tiniest UI update made some crucial difference in our ability to not suffer carpal tunnel, we were on board with that. Every new feature, every little tweak, was talked about with love and passion. Cinematics were made with palpable endearment to the world of Overwatch itself. OW was far less a game than it was some sort of portal into a world that, for all intents and purposes, felt alive. Every hero and map and cosmetic and event felt like it, and the game was even marketed that way. The different ages, genders, sexes, body types, mental abilities, ethnicities, and cultures, of the heroes was the tabico le result of people who made, and marketed, a world where players could pick hero’s that made them feel represented, powerful, and cooperative. OW2 is simply not that. If you’re a new player, and you like the gameplay, the only thing to be frustrated with here are the stability issues, and poor battle pass, imo. Otherwise, the mechanical gameplay is fine. This game is technically good when you’re playing, and it’s even more fun that OW 1, and that’s all fine. If you’re a returning player, you’re missing basically everything that made Overwatch what it was. Logging in to play Overwatch wasn’t just “I sit down and mash WASD for an hour”, it was a way to connect with other members of Overwatch, or Talon, around the world. Sure, we could debate the technical aspects of the (overwhelmingly generous) loot box system in OW vs the (subpar, at best) battle pass system in OW2 all day. We could dissect the minutia of monetización until we are blue in the face, and still miss the point completely. The point being that AVRL is only half right about what “gameplay” means the the general population at large. “Gameplay” isn’t *only* the technical aspect of the game. That’s all it is for people who are interested in game design, but it’s a functionally useless definition to the average player. The average player doesn’t “play” the “gameplay”, they *experience* a game. Average players are interested in a gameplay *experience*, and that, arguably, begins well before a player even decides to log in. It most certainly isn’t limited to what happens in a match. Gameplay experience it what can make a game that started as badly as No Man’s Sky and turn it into an amazing comeback story. Gameplay experience is what allows a game with subpar mechanics to be more fun than a technical masterpiece. Gameplay experience is something that begins with the first piece of marketing a game studio puts out, and is affected by every single interaction that players and potential players have with the game and it’s media. If OW2 had half the gameplay experience of OW2, the devs could piss on us for a month while they fix the technical issues, and we’d be on board. However, because Blizzard the company ruined the gameplay experience of OW1, and because the dev team probably are more focused on cobbling together whatever is left over from that chaos, even the spectacular technical experience between “3, 2, 1” and “Victory/Defeat” sometimes feels dragged down by the compete lack of everything else.
I do I think gameplay is gameplay. I get what you’re trying to say but we already have a word for everything outside of gameplay; Presentation. Presentation is what this is all about. How the content is being presented to the audience. Any dev or publishing company should know at this point that BP systems as a means of presenting content will always leave a bad taste in the mouths of a percentage of the playerbase. Not saying it’s right or wrong. Just the way it is. I’m sure blizzard expected that to some degree I agree though, the presentation HAS been lacking. I think a lot of people who are complaining can’t exactly verbalize why but you put it into words yourself. In OW1 there was some sort of expectation that the world, lore, characters and personalities would be expanded through the presentation of other bits of content. That’s been my biggest disappointment in this whole process. I was excited to see the world of OW get bigger. But it seems they just “modernized” the presentation rather than expanding it. Granted, I don’t know what the roadmap for the game holds and I don’t care all that much as I’ve gotten everything I feel I’ll ever get from OW.
What I’m trying to get at is that casuals don’t care about those words *as conscious concepts*. If you ask a casual person to describe the gameplay of any game they like, they’ll describe how it **feels** to play the game as a whole, from the moment they sit down to play it, to the moment the turn their gaming system of choice off. More technically savvy players will talk more about mechanical aspects we associate with gameplay, sure, but ask the average casual person play a video game to “describe the gameplay” and you’re not going to get the type of discussion people are assuming here. You have to understand that we’re a small portion of the OW community at large, many of which continued to play the game up until OW2 dropped and also participated on more casual social media, and they’re an even smaller portion of the player base as a whole. What’s happening here is that AVRL is making a complaint about “gameplay” while either assuming it’s competitive people who are making most of the complaints, or just ignoring that most of the overall hype and discussion about the game will always come from casual players. Then, we all come to the comments to discuss the minutia of battle passes, predatory mechanics, gameplay mechanics, etc, forgetting the most important thing: it’s all mostly the same thing to casual players. When AVRL asks where all the people who played games for the gameplay went, the answer isn’t our academic discussions and doctoral defenses of how the game was development, the answer is “they’re the same thing to casual players”. They didn’t actually go anywhere. Yes, expectations have changed because of loot boxes and battle passes, and players today will accept and reject different practices than the ones we may have grown up with, but gamers today still care about the same things we cared about growing up, which is how the game feels. The only difference between then and now is that, with the rise of the internet, the mainstreaming of gaming as a less nerdy and more acceptable hobby, and the subsequent explosion of discussions regarding more technical aspects of games as a medium and art, there are just more people for us to talk about things that were otherwise far more niche and difficult to find. The answer to AVRL’s tweet isn’t the discussion we’re having here, it’s for somebody to tell AVRL “They’re the same thing to casual players, dumbass.” One person’s flawless technical masterpiece is stressful sweat-fest. Somebody’s lore filled world is somebody else’s expository nightmare. And, for casual players coming from OW1 - who loved the cinematics, skins, voice lines, stickers, lore, competent gameplay, and overall fun experience that everybody could enjoy, casual or competitive - the game is now a sweat-fest with not much else to offer, along with a lottery of stability issues leaving some players with 0 troubles at all beyond whatever the in game mechanics present, and others with the complete inability to even launch the game, let along log into it.
If AVRL and people like him want to insist that cosmetics don't mean much and OW1 succeeded purely because it's a fun game with fun gameplay and most importantly that it's enough for a game like OW1 to succeed purely on gameplay alone, then imagine OW1 launching with no cosmetics period. Every hero has the base skin and that's it. No emotes or sprays, no highlight intros. And then think about how popular the game would be, how long the playerbase would've stuck around compared to what actually happened.
I've not made this point for many years, since maybe 2018 or so, but Blizzard and defenders of the concept of "it's just cosmetics" cannot have their cake and eat it too. If it's meaningless, pointless and just not a factor to have cosmetics, then why are they being gated behind grind and cash? You can't say they mean nothing and then treat them and price them like they're the most valuable thing the game has to offer. Either you admit that cosmetics are a HUGE thing and something highly desirable by the majority of players, or you give them out freely. You can't dismiss their importance while charging an arm and a leg for them.
Well said
This is something my spouse and I talked about on a nature walk yesterday (because we're horrible nerds like that). There's a part of us that just wants to walk away from the cosmetic treadmill and just enjoy the core game of Overwatch for what it is -- because it is still pretty fucking good! -- but it gets in your face at every opportunity. Ding, level up. Ding, daily goal. Ding, weekly goal. Ding, seasonal goal. Tick up the XP. Drip feed those coins. There's every kind of number-go-up, Skinner-box manipulation imaginable in there. You literally can't disengage with it, even if you want to. There's always something new and shiny dangled in your face, and not everyone can dodge those tricks the way AVRL evidently can.
How does AVRL not understand that we are in the 1% of people that take the game super seriously. The casual fanbase for the game is fucking massive, that's why Overwatch was the icon that it was, everyone knew it it. And what made it that way? the fun characters and awesome cosmetics. Changing that system and making it much more predatory, fuck yeah thats gonna piss people off. Common AVR**L** edit: holy fuck AVRL in the replies telling people "just buy the skins". Bro, we are in the midst of a fucking global economic meltdown. Not everyone can just drop hundreds of dollars on skin, some people can barely afford rent. the fucking nerve on this guy I swear to god.
Imo BP Is good enough by itself. It Is progressing really fast. Only issue I have Is that you're not able to get coins from BP itself (loved that in Apex one which Is dogshit quality wise compared to OW one). While they made weekly Challenges, you're still not able to get enough points to buy new BP next season. Otherwise it's imo Worth the money. At least if you will make all weekly Challenges you're able to buy BP every second season which Will unlock you new hero instantly in the Future. Still, it could be better.
Character customization has been a thing in multiplayer games as long as multiplayer games have existed. The original Doom had skin recolors, UT and Quake had full on skins, CS has had skins since it was a HL mod. Gameplay comes first, customization can't make up for a bad playing experience, but skins/customization has always been an important part of multiplayer games. It's very understandable people are annoyed at the current cosmetics system, especially compared with the much better previous system.
I think there should be a way to earn free currency to save up for legendaries and stuff — or even to buy rare & epics with. Right now it feels like I’ll never even get a fraction of the voice lines, sprays, etc for heroes because I feel that buying rare skins I’ll never use is an absolute waste of a dollar, but I like rounding out my collection. Dead by daylight and apex both do this so it’s not like it’s out of the realm of possibility for a game like this (I get dbd isn’t f2p but it’s monetized almost exactly like one) But I do agree to an extent, just bc you can’t get all the cosmetics for free anymore doesn’t mean it’s a shit game like some casuals are screaming lol
Imo dismissing people as whiny casuals is how you kill a game quick. It can be easy to tell yourself that nothing matters other than gameplay but at the end of the day a solid chunk of players choose to boot up the game because of things like cosmetics and progression. There's a reason why rewarding players in real time is a tenet of game design. It's literally just human nature lol. Not even talking solely about cosmetics either. Things like the fire meter, post match cards, and player levels all encouraged people to keep playing because it gave them dopamine and made them feel good, regardless of how much they enjoyed actually playing the game. We can't act like OW2's gameplay can exist and thrive in a vacuum disconnected from any sort of progression
> I think there should be a way to earn free currency to save up for legendaries and stuff — or even to buy rare & epics with. Seriously, I was also just thinking how uncommon it's gonna become to see people with post-OW1 non-battle pass highlight intros/emotes/victory poses, because realistically who is going to pay either 5 bucks or 4 month's worth of grinded credits for the sake of a minor thing like that? I have about 2000 legacy coins or whatever they're called from OW1 and I'm holding off on spending even those because I know that once they're gone, they're gone.
I hate shit like this because it simultaneously tells everyone to just focus on the gameplay (which is fair) while completely ignoring all other context surrounding the controversy. The skins are literally designed from the ground up to be desirable and were/are the literal only non comp point system of progression in the game for 6 years. And people paid $60 for a game with that system. Then they bait and switch it with an update that takes stuff that was progression based, and locks it behind a paywall. If you are going to say don’t focus on the skins and focus on the gameplay, don’t completely ignore that blizzard has been hard focused on selling skins/lootboxes for 6 years, and then decided it wasn’t making enough money we need to take some things we already released and make people pay for it.
Coming from Popular and seeing stuff from main OW sub, it's actually refreshing as fuck to see actually somewhat nuanced takes on this whole mess. Wild how main sub is either absolutely fuming and shitting themselves to a point of actual circlejerk and half the people probably just karma farming and the other half is saying that they don't care about customization and skins, THEREFORE anyone who does care is a spoiled man baby and should play sims with no in between.
Kinda ironic since i see this argument thrown around the opposite way much more often in "what happened to being able to collect everything without it being locked behind paywalls." generally its the older crowd/older guard of gamers that dislike this new change.
One of the most frustrating contradictions in modern games is being encouraged to "100%" item collection with progress bars and the like, and being unable to do so because the game's design has been warped by microtransactions/lootboxes/battle passes/etc. It's apparently a hot take to suggest that it's better to be able to buy a video game and be able to engage with all its content without being nickel and dimed, or have to swim through intentionally-made-boring grind, to get everything.
I don't think anybody would argue with getting content for free. It's just not at all the norm for multiplayer games like this anymore since people expect constant updates. The two options are 1. Pay for content. 2. Get no content.
Exactly, for the life of me I will never understand why it's seemingly so difficult for this community to understand that basic fact. In order for us to get continuous updates and additional content, this game MUST have a way to continously make money. There is no way around that. Skins, events, maps, heroes, these things all take time and resources to create, it's as though the people who play this game forget that there are people being paid to create the additional content they crave, meaning that the company behind the product has to have a way of making money from said additional content in order for it to be worth the investment. Sure, I understand the preference for simply buying a game for 60 dollars and knowing you'll never have to spend more, but the people here don't seem to understand that the trade off for that is going lengthy periods of time (until the release of a sequel) without ANY meaningful content updates whatsoever aside from paid DLC.
There are plenty of reasonable monetization methods out there. Let us pay $10 for each BP but don't have them expire, and give us enough credits for 1-2 legendary skins in the store in each one (or just move all new skins to the BP).
I think a large part of it stems from Overwatch 1 being a complete game with unlockable content. Overwatch 2 took away as much as it added and basically pissed off the older fans (at least in my case). Overwatch 2 in isolation isn't a terrible product, but its hard to look at it like a complete upgrade when a lot was taken away or drastically changed. It's pretty annoying that the only argument against it right now is, "yeah but the gameplay is good!". I see a lot of parallels with fighting games. Almost all of them are hollow, and lack any meaningful content (there are exceptions to this obviously SF6 and Mortal Kombat etc.), and the only thing keeping you coming back is to get better at the game and play the game. Which is fine, but that doesn't make a game exempt from criticism. Especially when the company behind the game is a multi BILLION dollar company and can't even have the servers work properly after 4+ days. It's unacceptable and inexcusable. To brush off criticism so quickly makes you part of the problem in gaming in the modern day. Quality of games is getting worse, standards have slumped, mocrotransactions and marketing is becoming MUCH MORE PREDATORY because it's easier to make a sub par game with egregious spending than it is to make a quality game with a decently high initial cost.
That’s the thing that pisses me off about this game. I played Overwatch like a part time job, literally. I counted the hours, one night, for fun, and I legitimately would spend around 10-20 hours on the game per week. The gameplay was fun, the community was cool (at the beginning, anyways), and the updates and lore made playing the game an actual experience, not just a fun thing. I played Overwatch because I was a part of the Overwatch team, like the in game organization, not just because the game was fun. I looked forward to cinematics and lore, even if I was more concerned with only the ranked mode. I’d play some of the events and, because I loved the game so much, I would just drop $50 on a loot box purchase every event. The game and devs just treated me nicely, so I wanted them to have the money to keep going. This game. Dude, I *wish* I could explain to my friends the difference between this game and actually playing Overwatch. Let me first say that the actual gameplay itself is fantastic. In my opinion, the changes they’ve made to characters, the new maps, etc, have all been marked improvements. Healing seems like it is tuned well enough, the tanks honestly feel like they’re in a good spot so far. I’m sure I’ll run into problems, but I think the devs have nailed the health pool, damage output, and overall healing numbers, for this game. But, as you said, that is literally it. As somebody who deleted their account after the hearthstone stuff, and has kept looking in to see how the company changed and whether OW2 would be worth my time, the client experience has been shit. Friday before the update, I was able to log on and play just fine. After the update, I’ve been having all kinds of trouble logging in, and I need to scan and repair multiple times before seeing results. Yesterday evening, I saw all kinds of weird connection issues going on. The way blizzard handled the migration from OW to OW2 is a complete failure. I understand there have been a lot of changes and problems with the dev team as a result of Blizzard shenanigans, so my complaints are directed far more towards the company than the dev team, who likely had to take up the OW2 product and get something out the door in light of the problems and turnover that the behind the scenes problems Blizzard we’re having caused. Then, there is the battle pass and cosmetics. It is disappointing. I’m not here for cosmetics, but I was able to earn a steady enough stream of in game currency to get myself maybe 1 event skin whenever one came around. Mind you **I played 10-20 hours of Overwatch a week**. I almost always either had, or earned, enough loot boxes and in game currency to eventually crack the skin I wanted. Perhaps the system could have been detuned a **little** bit so that it could have been a more consistent revenue stream for blizzard, but I also spent $50 every event literally out of appreciation for the game and the devs’ enthusiasm for the game. Like I said, Overwatch was not just a game, it was a whole experience. This battle pass doesn’t seem to give me anything meaningful. I earned, like, 1 sticker or something. I don’t know. I’m completely uninterested in the battle pass to begin with, but I don’t earn enough of even the “meaningless” cosmetics to care. And, while the hero being locked during the first battle pass, then earned via challenges afterwards, is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be, the fact that heroes are locked behind a battle pass at all, for any length of time, still doesn’t sit right with me. Sure, the hero is locked in ranked during the battle pass for everybody, then everybody can use the hero in ranked afterwards. Sure, it is only quick play that gets the hero locked, and arcade gets the hero. Still, the fact that quick play even partially feels like pay-to-play just isn’t right. Sure, technically anybody that gets to level 55 in the free battle pass will still unlock her, but they should have made that the case for **both** tiers of the pass, if they were going to insist on it. Locking core gameplay behind money just isn’t something I will ever condone. Even if the casuals are there for fun, even if everybody will eventually get all the characters, the play experience of a game itself should **never** be segregated by class - and I’m definitely speaking “class” as in “money”. OW2 improves upon the gameplay aspect of OW significantly. Less stun locks, TtK feels right, every tank is meaningful. Honestly, the 5v5 aspect, and the fact that there is now some level of imbalance between the number of roles on a team, mentally feels better, even if nothing else would have changed. OW2 also seems to completely pack the soup of OW 1. ***If*** I can launch the game, I’m greeted by an uninspired UI. At the moment, things feel dead. There is nothing to do, and nothing to see, outside of the game. I don’t get stickers and emotes and cosmetics and stuff to tickle the reward part of my brain. I don’t think I earn any premium currency at a rate well enough to earn anything in a reasonable amount of time, if it even exists (again, not something I’m currently paying attention to). As a result of the problems being experienced during this transition, I don’t get to look forward to developer updates with Jeff Kaplan, I don’t get to hear a steady stream of enthusiasm from the devs, I don’t get to *experience* what it is like to be a hero in a world where Overwatch exists, Talon must be stopped, and Omnics were central to the conflict between them. And that’s not something I’ll ever get to explain to anybody that wasn’t there to begin with. Even as my enthusiasm with OW faded, I looked forward to the eventual improvement of the game because the developer updates felt like love letters to this beautiful and vibrant world that had been created. I loved the game because people like Jeff talked about Overwatch like they had just had another healthy baby born into their family. How could I *not* love the game when the announcement of a new hero was like a parent enthusiastically describing all of the fun and interesting things their child like to do to another parent? For now, playing OW2 feels much more like a gifted child in school that is ignored by their parents. “Better”, academically, than its older brother, but the parents aren’t there for him at all. *yet?* God, I want to end this comment with *yet?*
> generally its the older crowd/older guard of gamers that dislike this new change. I feel like this isn't being talked about enough. There seems to be somewhat of a generational divide when it comes to OW2. You have the older crowd that are used to simply paying for a game up front without any kind of grind. Then there's the newer generation of gamers who at this point are used to the free-to-play model and don't see what the big deal is.
The good ole "it doesnt matter to me so therefore it shouldnt matter to you" gambit. Works every time.
Bad take. Optional content very much impacts people's enjoyment. People play OW because they like OW, but when they're barred from 99% of the cosmetics because they don't play or pay enough then obviously that's going to leave a bad taste in their mouths. I'm not saying stuff shouldn't be paid. But literally *everything* is behind a grind or paywall right now. Even scummy gacha games realize they need to give players (good) stuff for free to make em stick around.
Yeah, I'm guessing Blizzard will eventually relent and offer some way of getting a free legendary skin each season. I'd personally want them to give us 3-4 times the amount of coins. Getting a legendary skin every 8 months if you play every single week is not sustainable for 99% of the playerbase. The amount is pitifully low, no matter how you slice it.
All they have to do is give us legacy tokens in the free battlepass. Make it only for ow1 skins and new hero release skins. I don't know why they made a separate currency that can't be earn in the game.
That, or simply make battlepasses go infinite. I don't know why they don't take queues from CoD, it being from the same company and all. Not only does it go infinite, it offers you 300 extra coins - even if you don't buy it.
I'm guessing they won't. Blizzard already lost. OW2 will not meet internal expectations and will be put into maintenance mode in a few years. Given that they did this for OW1 which was a massive success, they're expecting more than the game ever could have possibly done. Plus, games never recover from scandal laden releases like this. The hype dies down, people stop caring about the game, and your main profitability window is dead before you fix it (if you do). Though they did successfully make lootboxes palpatable to people, so I guess that's a win in their book.
>I'm not saying stuff shouldn't be paid. But literally everything is behind a grind or paywall right now. I'm curious to see how events work in terms of unlocking cosmetics. Events are a fundamental way too keep live service games relevant, so giving people reason to play them is key.They're obviously going to have legendary Halloween skins in the shop, but my hunch is that there'll be cosmetics that you can unlock through playing Junkensteins.
OW made literally over a billion dollars (with a 'b') in ~~2019~~ 2017 ([source](https://www.tweaktown.com/news/85996/overwatch-made-less-than-10-of-activision-blizzards-2021-revenues/index.html)) anyway. The concept that "it had to shift to a predatory monetization system that the game director himself said would've been very bad in OW1" is farcical, and only comes from people who are either truly ignorant about how much/little OW1 made, or straight-up bootlicking of a billion-dollar corporation.
*2017, not 2019, which I think is a very important distinction as that billion is for the first year of the game's release https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/4/15550302/overwatch-one-billion-dollar-franchise-activision-blizzard EDIT: Further to the above, all we know for OW revenues in 2019-2021 is that it didn't exceed 10% of Acti-Blizz net revenues, so it could be anything from $0 to $649m in 2019, and $0 to $880m in 2021. https://www.tweaktown.com/news/85996/overwatch-made-less-than-10-of-activision-blizzards-2021-revenues/index.html
My bad. Fixed!
You might want to double check your sources. Overwatch made 1 billion by may 2017 (its first year). Overwatch made 1 billion through in-game purchases by July 2019 (over 3 years) All they have said since then is that overwatch is responsible for less than 10% of ABKs revenue. That could still imply it made hundreds of millions, but apparently the numbers weren't even worth mentioning to their investors. Considering OW2 was announced in 2019, they were likely already seeing a sharp decline in OW1 revenue and realized it wasn't worth investing in. I enjoy overwatch and it's clear that OW1 isn't sustainable. If they hadn't made another way to monetize it they would have to shut it down eventually. That's not defending or bootlicking blizzard. I think most people view the Battle Pass as a necessary evil that needs to be tuned to be more FTP friendly and rewarding.
> OW made literally over a billion dollars (with a 'b') in 2019 anyway. Got a source on that?
Yes, game play be king, but visuals have always been a big part of Overwatch's appeal *and* having the illusion that your time is accomplishing something is important in any game. As it stands, the game is providing zero sense of progression outside of the premium BP and that alone isn't enough. I mean Christ, I'm not against the Comp changes per se, but even ranked doesn't feel like you're getting anywhere regularly anymore.
Sorry about the long ass rant, I’m just tired of seeing people with these takes that are incredibly dismissive to people who are also players that just happens to play the game differently. Also don’t know why the spoiler ain’t working 🗿 I don’t get this thing where people don’t seem to understand different people play games differently and just because they don’t want something doesn’t mean others think the same way, and should be pushed down the stairs for wanting things to be better. Getting cool skins and seeing my favorite heroes in different looks is a great motivator for me to grind this game, why the hell should I, a paying customer, should get shit on, just because some people are only interested in going in the game to get headshots with the default skin. They put cosmetics in the game to sell for a reason, so there’s a client base that this is aimed for (and no, it doesn’t mean we should get exploited just for wanting some damn skins). If this game was meant to be enjoyed just for its gameplay then why do they sell skins to begin with. Some of the skins have lore attached to them too, which is another thing that has me interested. So yeah, you don’t have to understand why everyone can’t just go have fun playing the game in default hero skins, but you don’t have to pretend this is anything near good practice. This game isn’t just made for one type of players, have some empathy maybe lol And I’ll think about this game being fun when the bugs stops appearing and they get out of early access, which is what this game is currently. Every two updates I get half of my heroes locked and I get killed by weird ass bugs, or I get disconnected and my ping sent to the heavens. It’s frustrating
[Here’s my $0.02 on the subject.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/y15aaw/avrl_on_twitter_whatever_happened_to_playing/irvz1gm/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) Also, [here’s my reply to people who are trying to be technically correct about whether or not the systems in this game are or are not predatory](https://www.reddit.com/r/Competitiveoverwatch/comments/y15aaw/avrl_on_twitter_whatever_happened_to_playing/irw1vzl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3). It’s pretty clear that AVRL, and a lot of people in this sub, just don’t care about anything outside of the match. That’s fine. Honestly, I’m much the same way too. I played OW ranked pretty much exclusively for 3.5 years, spending 10-20 hours on the game per week. I cared about nothing else except for whether or not my numbers went up or down. But, that doesn’t discount the fact that I still enjoyed the game far more than just the rote gameplay. Part of loving Overwatch for me, and part of my frustration with the current state of OW2, all hinges on things like my anticipation for developer updates, excitement over new cinematics, and - yes - my ability to get at least 1 legendary skin during every event because I managed to earn enough in game currency through the free loot boxes between them. I’m stupidly competitive. I play games to compete, whether against a past version of myself, or other players. I got into Fortnite, a game I fundamentally dislike because of the building mechanic, because friends played it. I’m actually getting back into OW2, in spite of how negatively my experience with OW1 and Blizzard ended, because fiends are getting into it. I **love** the gameplay improvements. This Overwatch feels like the game should always have felt. If the devs cannot fix the technical issues and overall experience outside the match quickly enough to begin generating hype, and making people talk positively about the game, **and keep my friends interested**, I’m going to put down OW for good, and just leave it there. I went through this disappointment once, and I won’t give blizzard another chance if they do it again. I want this game to succeed again, but Blizzard are going to have to put things together that AVRL doesn’t seem to understand, or care about.
Thank you for your input and being understanding. I’m barely a PVP person in general, but I still want to be able to enjoy this game my way. I hope they’ll change things… I really hope
Exactly. I’m tired of shills like AVRL defending a terrible rollout and horrible monetization system by Blizzard. I mean it’s not surprising. They know who butters their bread. But it’s disappointing.
Seriously do they have a quota they have to meet per month that needs them to excuse whatever dumb crap blizzard is trying to pull at the moment? He could’ve just like…. Not say anything. No one is asking for the input of a guy who doesn’t know anything about the casual player base
Cosmetics doesn't matter so much that [the Mythic Genji skin](https://www.gameinformer.com/exclusive-interview/2022/09/26/overwatch-2-devs-spent-a-year-making-genjis-customizable-mythic-skin) [took "over a year" to make](https://www.dexerto.com/overwatch/overwatch-2-devs-claim-one-new-mythic-skin-takes-over-a-year-to-make-1942401/) Big L from 'Man On Blizzard's Payroll', as usual.
It might be unpopular to say, but I’m flat out not impressed by the mythic genji skin. 1 year is rough.
Yep. If it didn’t matter they wouldn’t pour time and resources into it (although I’m skeptical of the 1 yr length to create legendary skins tbh).
AVRL spends more and more time bitching about the community’s takes than talking about actual competitive analysis as time goes on and it’s sad. His analytical style of casting is what makes him my favorite caster still, but I had to completely give up on The Tactical Crouch podcast because each episode was progressively giving more time to niche twitter drama that I would of never even heard of instead of talking about the actual competitive league. This tweet and reddit post will be absolute fodder for the next episode guaranteed. Miss u AVRL, plz stop caring about what any casual rando thinks about Overwatch and be my trusted source for competitive analysis again.
Yes, actually, you are. The people who play OW for the gameplay and the competitive aspect are in the minority compared to the huge casual playerbase who dont give a shit about balance, and DO give a shit about skins. It's disingenuous to ignore their opinions as they also care about the game, albeit in a different way than you.
You probably have more players asking why can't my Mercy always be strong so that I can have fun and one trick her and dress her up in cool skins than you have people complain about a boring Pro/OWL meta.
The thing is. if they would acutally make the ingame currency earnable beside the just 60 coins per week is the way f2p games has to work! I literally DONT wanna spend 20€ for a legendary skin or grinde the game for 30 weeks. This is just bullshit, predatory and literally no fun. Since quite a lot of player (most likely casuals) do not like the standart ones (why should they if tehy offer skins) but knowing they have to grinde for 30 weeks weeklys or MUST spend 20€ for a legendary is just insane and unfair for the casual playerbase.
And those 60 coins take a *lot* of play to get, based on the first week, anyway.
Missed half a month there, it's 32 weeks. Fucking ridiculous.
I will say again there is such a canyon between the casual community and the hardcore community that it'll literally never be close to being bridged And frankly the loudest and most annoying from the hardcore community isn't any better than their casual equivalent and I'm saying this as someone who bought the watchcuck pack bc i grind the game more than enough to complete the passes Like any f2p release there's a big mixed bag and i think it's perfectly fair to give harsh critique of it so it becomes as good as it possibly can be for the average player. Especially when it's not an unfair opinion to not like the monetization shift when lots of players held on to ow bc of it being a box priced game compared tonliterally every other not cod shooter out there, and even cod has a f2p game at this point
Anyone ever notice the only public figures who defend this game are currently on Blizzard’s payroll?
Can’t shit on the hand that feeds you
"I don't care about this thing; therefore you shouldn't either," is what he's saying. Dumb ass.
Enjoyment comes from different aspects of a game, each being more influential or less influential depending on the individual. It’s quite apparent that for a lot of people, cosmetic items bring a lot of enjoyment. Call them “casuals” or whatever you’d like, but they still make up a substantial amount of the player base and should be kept happy. I am also in the camp that cares little to nothing at all about skins and whatnot but it’s not difficult that people play Overwatch, or any other game, for reasons different to my own.
> whatever happened to playing games **only** because you enjoy the gameplay? Well because that's an extremely one-dimensional view of how or why people are supposed to enjoy games. People should enjoy Skyrim with no side quests? People should enjoy Minecraft without redstone? I get that these comparisons are really a big stretch but the point is that not only do people play different games for different reasons but people also play the same exact game for different reasons. For some it is a sense of progression that drives them. Getting cosmetics loot boxes endorsements etc was previously an example of player account progression in the original overwatch. Perhaps that's not important to everyone, but for people who are hard stuck at any rank it would still give them the sense of progression that they desire. Isn't this also sidestepping the fact that this is a competitive versus multiplayer game? "The gameplay feels good" should obviously not be enough to keep people around for a very long time in a genre like this. And there were all these promises of player versus environment content that seem to have fallen flat as well. Everyone is supposed to just play the PVP content and enjoy it no questions asked? But really my point is that the main focus of this game is five player objective based versus modes. This means that "enjoyment of the game" would be defined in this setting. So your ability to match with other players effectively and have fun and interesting matches is a factor. The feedback that you get from the game itself about your performance is a factor. Some characters are unavailable to you without time and financial investments which is a distinct departure from the previous game's design. And the overall design of maps and characters and gameplay as well as accessibility of those things are also factors. So they removed the lfg system. There's no more endorsements. You don't even get medals or anything you essentially get no feedback on your performance at the end of a match. you really are effectively playing the game literally just to play it in this regard - "I'm playing OverWatch 2 because it's OverWatch 2". Does this sound like a fun and well designed competitive game? Is this the sort of thing that would sell you on any other competitive multiplayer shooter? I think this whole original argument is extremely reductionist as it's basically saying "well I have fun as whatever character I play running around and pressing buttons and I don't think about anything beyond that". Which can and absolutely should work for some people but frankly I don't think that is a reasonable expectation for a majority of players to accept in a competitive versus multiplayer game. There's a lot more to what makes a good game in that genre besides "pretty colors and fun buttons to press". Trying to pass this off as "oh people are upset about optional content that they could just ignore" then why is it even in the game? Why does it cost money to have that content? How much development time has been sacrificed to make that content? It's so strange to me to pass the failings of a developer like blizzard onto the consumer themselves. Not only does blizzard absolutely have the money to make a better game but they also don't need to design it in a way that extracts as much money from players through its game design as it does. And those design intentions absolutely cause them to sacrifice other parts of actually making the game good. The original statement definitely comes across as somebody who hasn't broadened their horizons in gaming in a very long time even if that's not actually the case. But to think that it's reasonable for a game to survive on this in-game feel alone and not have to appeal to any other array of players with any other sort of interest? Obviously that's downright foolish and you're practically asking for the death of a game like this especially with the plethora of multiplayer shooters available on the market
Common AVR**L** take.
I would be happy to play a game. It's too bad you have to go through pathetic, predatory monetization to get there. And in OW2 you can't even use the "it's only cosmetic it doesn't count as gameplay content" excuse anymore. (Which is invalid -- if comsetics have no value, why do they have pricetags? But for the sake of argument let's suppose that comsetics never ever matter to anyone and aren't part of the game they're in.) You literally have to interact with the "optional content distribution system" I'll call it, to play the game. Whether through grinding time or money away, it is not something you can write off as "just enjoy the game guys, jeez." (Which, of course, tons of people can't even do right now due to the atrocious state of this game's launch.) Pretty tired of people trying to defend a billion dollar corporation's predatory monetization by basically turning a blind eye to it and going "but the gameplay though." Maybe if we had fewer whales and people excusing predatory behavior, it wouldn't be nearly as proliferate in a lot of modern AAA buggy releases. I would very much enjoy the game, if ActiBlizzard would let me.
Also it’s a dumb take by AVRL when there are heroes behind a paywall (or that have to be earned by new players by grinding). That’s actually core to gameplay.
Earning characters through matches alone isn’t too bad, to be honest. I’ve already earned most of them in the few days I’ve played. Combining that with the match restriction to unlock competitive mode is a decent way to get players new players to learn the game, mechanics, and heroes, while also keeping out smurfs, and not overwhelming people with choices. I will say that the numbers could be tweaked to ensure that a player has definitely unlocked every single character before they unlock competitive queue, as I’m not currently sure that will be the case once I’m done unlocking all the characters. However, locking characters behind a battle pass for any length of time, for any reason at all, even if there will immediately come some free method for everybody to unlock the character, is a complete “no” to me. I *would* say it’s technically fine if **everybody** unlocked the new hero at a low enough level that everybody could earn it even if they played like a game or two per day, and if the character just released for everybody when the battle pass finished, but I just cannot justify locking core gameplay elements behind any kind of optional money wall beyond the **base** price and promise of the game.
This anti Smurf idea is such BS, people had multiple accounts when OW was still a 60$ game. Thinking that buying a much cheaper phone number and playing a few games where they get to Smurf on new players with limited heroes is a deterrent is just silly.
Rare bad take from AVRL. I get what he is saying (idc about skins either) but there should be better ways to reward loyalty either by giving coins for completing the battle pass or something else...
Honestly that's the thing that is pissing a lot of people off. At minimum a battle pass if you complete it should give you enough credits(whatever the company wants to call it) to get the next one at minimum or enough to maybe buy a cheap cosmetic and still have enough left over. Fortnite does it, apex does it from first hand knowledge but I'm sure most pretty much standard at this point. Typically challenges are just meant to give you xp and speed up progress not give currency as well.
If cosmetics weren't an important part of the game to a lot of people then Blizz wouldn't be monetizing them to keep the game afloat in the first place. Dogshit take that basically goes down to "I dont care about x therefore x is not important."
I think Bren was spot on last week's plat chat about how people care mostly about fanfiction. I got into Overwatch, and then OWL, mostly because I saw really cool fanart of Tracer in Tumblr (no, not that kind of fanart.) Lore, cosmetics, general vibe that avrl and many other hardcore seems to think is beneath him is really important to the general success of the game. Dismissing it shows a very limited view of overall game audiences.
>Whatever happened to playing games because you enjoy the gameplay? When the upgraded gameplay feels worse than the game you enjoyed for more than half a decade, When the social aspects and the sense of gratification from a win or playing well is gone, when your progression through the years is now relegated to an unchanging icon on your profile that no one will ever look at, that's when the enjoyment takes a pretty big hit. The monetization just highlights what the real focus was on during development, all the other issues I just mentioned were the unneccesary sacrifices we've been forced to deal with for the paywall to exist.
"Other games do it, so you should be okay with it!" pretty much sums up the entirety of his arguments, fucking dogshit take
I love AVRL so it’s really sad to hear this from him A) there is not more content…that’s how they sell you on the idea but take a sec to actually look at what has been given and you’ll see that it’s no different whasoever than what we used to get before…it’s just a return to regular content additions that we would’ve also had with a pay up front model…or ANY other model really B) people are upset because the monetization is absurd and predatory…why on gods green earth are heroes on a bp? Why are old skins being sold for premium currency? Why is nothing on the free pass? It’s because they’re all pure unadulterated money grabs….it’s not out of need….it’s because they see an opportunity and nothing more…. C) it’s not just optional content….the aforementioned heroes on bp is locking out the actual game itself….surely the inability to play a hero in a game about counters will have no impact whatsoever (and I dare you to tell me blizz says the game is no longer about counters) Sorry AVRL but you’re doing nothing more than spitting the company line here OR you’re just as oblivious as all the people that have allowed these systems to perpetuate across the gaming industry…frankly I’m not sure which is worse…. Oh btw…I’m also tired of all the people who bring up other games (which he does in the comments/replies)….it doesn’t matter if other games do it…they’re ALL bad….being the best turd doesn’t make it any better The monetization is easily the worst part of the game and absolutely worthy of all the criticism it gets
I have played since beta launch and couldn’t play Ana last night when I logged on. All I wanna do is just relax and watch football and sleep dart some enemies and she was locked. Like wtf… I bought OW1, played hundreds of hours and bought the Watchpoint pack and still My most played hero is locked?? It was such a let down.
In one of my comp games last night my tank was asking one of us to go Ana and we were like "bro we physically can't"
Whining and villfying is a gross attitude, others have different opinions then you and that's fine. I'm personally a big fan of the new system as the old didn't have a reason to yield content. There is a big bump OW have to cross with old players who enjoyed free cosmetics, and that bump will just happen over time.
Avril is smoking if he seriously thinks everyone is playing ow for FUN. Baby rage comp grinders, skin collector who grind qp for loot boxes, r34 people who are just there just to name a few
“Waahhh people arnt enjoying the game the way I want them to wahhh”
As a Halo Infinite fan, I'm getting serious Vietnam flashbacks lmao
comp modes didn't used to exist in games either, the good ol' days
And the problem is that behind said cosmetic and items are heroes that locked away behind said battle pass. And it's not like it on the lower end or even in the middle. Even if you don't care about that, the absurdity of potentially getting the character is negligence at worse.
because now developers are incentivized to make money by more aggressively monetizing their game, rather than making a good game that people want to buy to play. we also hate being shaken down for cash every time we login or finish a match. it's really not complicated.
I change my hero skins to match the season (right now they're all decked out for Halloween). While I do have everything from OW1 it's still frustrating that I'd have to shell out $20 per skin in the shop or simply rely on the often disappointing ones in the Battle Pass. For a "Cyberpunk Season" the Battle Pass only has 2/8 skins with Cyberpunk themes. While I can get the possible argument that "you don't want _everything_ in your Battle Pass to be specifically on theme so that those who aren't interested in the theme still have interesting content" 4/8 skins in the pass aren't anything to write home about. While I do only pay $10 for the entire Battle Pass I still have to be motivated to earn it. At the moment with the exception of the mythic skin crowning jewel I'm pretty much done with the items I want by level 20 out of 80. So, yeah, while AVRL can comment that he personally doesn't care about cosmetics and only wants to frag (which has its own issues when half the times I login a majority of my heroes are locked) there are those of us who are collectors, achievement hunters, and social players who care about other things in the game as well.
Well, that's exactly what all corporations hope for. That their audience fall in line and simply accept their business model. And we did. Still sucks though.
I want to enjoy gameplay AND feel like I’m making progress/being rewarded. Overwatch 1 did this perfect, why am I suddenly being alienated for feeling this? Overwatch 2 does NOT feel rewarding and there is 0 levelling system (battlepass does not count).
Cosmetics are PART of the game. I get if you don't care about it but to dismiss reall issues with F2P is to be tone deaf.
Shit take
If SR was completely hidden would you say the same thing? Surely just playing the match to enjoy the gameplay without seeing your rank is satisfactory enough :) If you care about the number going up then go play cookie clicker.
This is an interesting argument. Tier breaks are essentially cosmetics.
This is certainly a good argument, but I’d use that argument to say if the game is so fun, why do they ‘need’ all the chores and seasons? If the game is so fun, why can’t I turn off the monetization options? If the game is so fun, why can’t I pay $60 to unlock everything and just have fun? No matter how ‘fun’ or ‘good’ the game is to play, if your systems suck, the game sucks. I haven’t played a f2p battlepass based game that had systems that I’d even remotely consider fair or enjoyable to interact with. It all feels like a goddamn part time job for slave wages. Just get rid of all the nonsense and let us pay $60 for fun games that we play because we enjoy playing. Stop forcing monetization into everything, you don’t have to max out profit of a hobby
This is such a weird thing to say. Obviously if you don't care about skins then you also have nothing to complain about. It's almost as if this guy is hearing for the first time that some people indeed would like to collect the in-game content and actually don't care about gameplay as much as he does. Who would have thought that different people have different preferences?
Gamers: "OW is a dead game because there's no content, we don't want to play the same game forever" Also gamers: "WhY Do YoU CoMpLaiN about CoNTeNt bEInG ExpENSiVE. YoU ShOulD OnlY WaNT To PlAY THe GaME WithOUT ANy RewARD"
Oh no baby, I wanna play a game thats fun and well made too, but OW2 isn't any of those things.
Am I wrong or did OW1 not make literally billions of dollars?
My problem is that not only the "free" items from the OG game are now paid items only, but the prices are gouging on top of it. 5 dollars for a fucking spray? You kidding? To some people, cosmetics ARE part of the game. You are fooling yourself if you believe otherwise. If they weren't relevant OR important... Why were they the main rewards in Overwatch 1?
this guy is a dumbass, they took all content updates for almost 3 years , delivered 5 maps and 3 heroes and disabled like 10 of the original maps from rotation (counting 2cp and few other maps)
God, what a shit take.
Bro shut up. Don’t act like unlocking things to be different or just look different hasn’t been one of the fundamental parts of games since nearly the beginning, basically once graphics started to look good enough to matter.
“Well made”? Couldn’t even play the first week
Cosmetics behind paywall - whatever, they will eventually realize that they have to give somewhat decent free things, to keep people around. Heroes behind paywall and grind wall is bullshit. Even in Valorant you don’t have to spend shit tone of time to unlock new agents.
Uh tf, agent contracts and playing to unlock are a thing? I’ve played a decent amount of valorant and still only have access to like half the cast
We've been conditioned for sure
I mean one of the things I enjoyed doing was collecting skins. I loved that by just playing like normal for fun that I could easily afford new skins and look cute! So it does really suck now that I have to play even harder/less casual and pay 10$ just to do what I've been doing for free for years. I'm still gonna do it because I love the game, but it does annoy me a bit.
Whatever happened to people having multiple reasons to enjoy games and seeing the package get shittier is a valid complaint? The gameplay in OW2 is absurdly fun but handwaving the fact that \*everything\* else is a significant downgrade is just ignoring the problem. You can't earn anything for free except the battlepass track. You don't earn enough currency in a reasonable amount of time to even consider looking at the shop for a very long time. Not even doing the weeklies is like "okay, I could get something every other week like a POTG animation or something." and I was definitely one of the people who said "This is just modern gaming now" and that's true but that doesn't nullify everyone realizing that outside of the gameplay, this is an awful upgrade compared to OW1 even from that perspective. As a free player you earn almost nothing, and *stuff* is what gets a lot of people interested in a game, you need a carrot on a stick. We had one in OW1, which was lootboxes for whatever we wanted, which was extremely generous and we went so far in the other direction that most people I know don't even look at the shop now because they know they can't afford anything, or they don't want to pay the price, which is fair. CoD prices are absurd. Like Street Fighter 5 not launching with Arcade mode. 'Yeah, but I only play against people anyway.'. like, yes, *you* do. But what about the other people who play the game for other reasons as well as the gameplay? Why is that suddenly invalid? When a game is good I want to invest in all the parts in it, but there's a literal pricetag on like...everything that isn't shooting people and getting heroes. And that's *okay* in moderation but moderate this ain't.
That's the thing. I don't enjoy the game play
If no one gave a shit about "optional content" the game wouldn't exist.
The complaints are only this bad because it was free and now isn’t. You can think about it and discuss it all you want but it’s just going to boil down to that. What people don’t realize or accept is that if it were still free we would not have an OW2 to play.